The Unsung Heroes of the Boxing World
Mismatched Fighters Help Up-and-Coming Champs Bolster Their Records in a Winner-Takes-All Industry
In the name of beer sales and taco Tuesday nights, Cinco de Mayo has morphed from a symbol of …
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Will the Supreme Court Give the President More Immunity Than a Roman Emperor?
Two Centuries of Ancient Legal Scholarship Applied the Same Laws to Leaders as Everyone Else
I have been studying and writing about Roman emperors for more than 30 years. I never imagined …
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Could My Chilean Childhood Combat Plastic Waste?
In the 1980s, We Recycled Our Bottles in Big Red Crates. Returning to Returnables Can Curb Pollution Today
When I was growing up in the ’80s in Santiago, Chile, during the Pinochet dictatorship …
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Huell Howser Lives!
One Chronicler of Our State Offers His Take on Another
“Do you know Huell Howser?” I got that question recently while chatting with a counter guy at …
Who Is Shakespeare For?
I Asked My Students to Take the Bard Off His Pedestal—It Let Us Reconsider His Place in Our World
“What do we do with Shakespeare?” “Who is Shakespeare for?” “What would it look like to reject Shakespeare?”
These were questions I put at the center of the Pop Culture Shakespeare class I taught in the summer of 2020, and which I’ll return to this fall. Four hundred and sixty years after the Bard’s birth (nearly to the day, we like to imagine), people have answered these questions many times over. But working with my students taught me that one powerful way to understand Shakespeare today is as a transmedia narrative—a story that plays out across many modes of expression, from historical documents, printed plays, and performances …
How Do We Disagree in the Public Square?
Those Who Study and Work to Keep Civil Discourse Civil Share the ‘Secret Sauce’ for Productive Debate
The public square is the meeting ground where people make society happen. In these spaces, physical or metaphorical or digital, we work through our shared dramas and map our collective hopes. Ideally, the public square provides room to solve the problems we face. It is also where new, thorny issues often arise.
This “Up for Discussion” is part of Zócalo’s editorial and events series spotlighting the ideas, places, and questions that have shaped the public square that Zócalo has created over the past 20 years.
For this fifth and final installment, we pulled in people working to understand our …
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A Movie That Might Be Worse Than Civil War
‘Civil War’ Offers A Vision of California Fighting the U.S. That Matches Foreign Propaganda—and Misses the Point
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The Losing A’s Found a Winning City to Host Them
West Sacramento Is on a Hot Streak. Other California Cities Should Watch
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I’m Proud to Be Un-American
A New Poll Shows the Rest of the Country Hates the Golden State—And That’s a Good Thing
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What the Wonkapocalypse Can Teach Us
An Immersive Experience Gone Wrong Shows Us the Perennial Emptiness of Carefully Curated Escapes from Reality
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Cowboy Boots Were Made for Everyone
For Over a Century and Half, the Footwear Has Carried the Story of a Nation
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Why We Hunger for the Holiday Special
Every December, an Age-Old Format Warms the Winter Night
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Why Shouldn't Phillis Wheatley's Poems Show Up at an NFL Game?
At Last Night’s Event—”Can a Football Stadium Be a Black History Museum?”—Panelists Argued to Democratize Culture
On the rarified second level of SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, amid premium owner suites and premium beer sales, there’s an Angela Davis quote plastered on a wall.
“Our histories never unfold in isolation,” reads the excerpt from the scholar and activist’s 2015 book, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle. “We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories …
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Artist Maurice Harris
‘I Am Deliberate and Afraid of Nothing’
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Poet aja monet
The Energy You Bring to a Word Can Heal or Harm
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Agent and Former NFL Player Jacques McClendon
There’s Nothing Like ‘Rocky Top’
