Zocalo Public Square

Recently I had the misfortune to be in a Days Inn, and, on CNN, which I’d turned on for the sake of companionship, was non-stop coverage of the horrible things Ariel Castro had done to his captives in Ohio. When I turned to online news sources, I read updates on a limo fire that killed a Bay Area newlywed and four of her friends, …

The L.A. mayor’s race is entering the final-stretch run, with Monday being the final day to register  to vote in the May 21 election. In today’s mixer: union money, endorsements, and the dangers of texting.
Our panelists: Hillel Aron, a contributing writer to the LA Weekly, and Kate Linthicum from the Los Angeles Times.
So what happened this week? Candidates Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti, are …

There’s consensus that California needs a big new deal to govern water. There’s no consensus on what should be in it. Habitat restoration? Rebuilt levees to withstand earthquakes? Or new tunnels to divert water from the Sacramento River to farmers and cities in Southern California?
These are all possibilities for the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a water source for 25 million of California’s 38 million …

Algebra was responsible for the first F I ever got.
While I was never a straight-A student, I wasn’t a screw-up either. But tell that to Mexican-immigrant parents who dropped out of school after first grade and took pride in seeing their offspring get the education they never had. I’ll never forget that dreadful parent-teacher conference after that seventh grade F, or the silence in …

Who will be the next LA mayor? Do you have questions you still want answered?
With just a few weeks left until Election Day, it’s time to get beyond the campaign rhetoric and 30-second commercials in the race for mayor of Los Angeles. Candidates Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti visit Zócalo for a live debate. They’ll take questions—and follow-ups—from Warren Olney, host of KCRW’s “Which Way, L.A.?”
It’s a chance to demand specifics …

 
We lived in a white, wood frame house a half-block east of 61st and Main Streets in South Los Angeles. It was a pleasant and quiet neighborhood. Our street was lined with houses that looked much like ours. Well-tended front lawns doubled as playgrounds for the children. Backyards gave us even more room to play in. I was seven years old; brother Raul was …

On test day for my Behavioral Ecology class at UCLA, I walked into the classroom bearing an impossibly difficult exam. Rather than being neatly arranged in alternate rows with pen or pencil in hand, my students sat in one tight group, with notes and books and laptops open and available. They were poised to share each other’s thoughts and to copy the best answers.  …

Brooklyn earns a special place in the Jackie Robinson story. The borough’s mix of immigrants and progressive politics made for congenial fans when Robinson brought down the color bar in baseball.
But UCLA deserves a chapter, too.
Jackie Robinson, born in the segregated south, was just a few months old in 1920, when his family settled in Pasadena, California.  By his teenage years, Robinson was, by …

No one is going to stop me from speaking the truth to power, and here’s a truth about power that a lot of people can’t handle: the attorney general of California is hot. Very hot.
But when the most powerful man in the world spoke the same truth last week about Kamala Harris—our “best-looking attorney general,” he called her—critics called him sexist, inappropriate, and wolfish.
Predictably, …

The “Renaissance Faire” as we know it began in 1963—in California. It couldn’t have come from anyplace else.
Contemporary Renaissance faires like The Original Renaissance Pleasure Faire, which begins in Irwindale this weekend, aim to portray aspects of 14th to 17th century Europe, and many visitors and workers have told me what they relish most about the experience is being taken out of the time …

A rally in the Sports Arena Changed Me From Picketer to Freedom Rider
In the mid-1950s, when I was a teenager, I moved with my family from Buffalo, New York to Los Angeles. I’d spent my early years on the Lower East Side of New York and had lived all my life in apartments. In Los Angeles, we lived in a house in Highland Park …

A few years ago, I moved to Westlake, a ridiculously high-density, low-income neighborhood just west of downtown Los Angeles. It’s home to one of the city’s largest Central American communities (when you’re broke here, you eat pupusas, not tacos), and a quick look at an L.A. Times crime map will tell you it’s also one of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in the city. Still, the grittiness of the area …

As summer vacation wanes, I begin printing out blank calendar pages, August through June—one set for my sophomore English honors classes, another set for my print and broadcast journalism classes. I fill in the squares with cryptic reminder notes: “grading policy,” “writing a thesis,” “reading log,” “public speaking,” etc. But I no longer need to write up detailed daily lesson plans. With 23 years …

Los Angeles has become an epicenter of the art world, thanks in large part to the museums founded here in the post-war decades. These new museums have received global acclaim, but have had to grow and change quickly under intense public scrutiny. They have worked to balance popularity, critical success, and fiscal responsibility—as well as the question of which constituencies to put first. How …

Warren moderated a Zócalo Public Square panel last year, during which John Singleton and Wim Wenders addressed the issue of violence and cinema. From the Zócalo website:
The tragic shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, has opened up a larger conversation about how violence translates from film to real life. When directors Wim Wenders and John Singleton visited Zócalo at the Getty Center …

This post comes via Zócalo Public Square:
The Chlorinated Water and Scantily Clad Bodies of Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography 1945-1982
No dream of Southern California is complete without a swimming pool. What started as a totem of status and privacy became, in the postwar years, an affordable luxury for middle-class families who wanted a taste of the celebrity lifestyle. Even the empty pool …

Prosecutors have placed the Los Angeles County Assessor’s Office under scrutiny after accusations surfaced that the assessor and his top aides lowered property taxes for top campaign contributors.  There was a time, however, before the standardization of property taxes, when California’s assessors used their own discretion to make assessments on homes and businesses. And, as Mark Paul writes in an article on Zócalo, they …

The prospect of a Persian Spring has Angelenos talking. If protests for reform erupt in Iran, Los Angeles, home to a large population of Iranians (many of whom are exiles), may play a role. So what would an Iranian protest movement mean for Los Angeles? That’s what a panel (sponsored by KCRW) will explore tonight at 7:30 P.M. in a discussion with Zócalo at …