Zócalo Public Square (Audio)

Sang Yoon, chef and owner of the Father’s Office and Lukshon restaurants, sat down with KCRW Good Foodhost Evan Kleiman to talk about entrepreneurship, inspiration, burgers, and, of course, ketchup (or rather the lack thereof at his Santa Monica and Culver City gastropubs) at a Grand Park event in partnership with the Music Center.

Can the next U.S. president make public universities more affordable - and can the federal government do anything to support crucial research that takes place in these institutions? Yes, said UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman, and Carnegie Corporation President Vartan Gregorian, in a panel co-presented by UCLA at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. that was moderated by David Leonhardt, Washington Bureau Chief of The New York Times.

Will downtown L.A. ever work? It’s already working, said a four-person panel of architects, planners, and designers who’ve been closely involved with downtown over the past decade. At an event in L.A.'s Grand Park, landscape architect Tony Paradowski, urban designer Melani Smith, SCI-Arc's Hernan Diaz Alonso, and architect Alice Kimm spoke with moderator Christopher Hawthorne, the Los Angeles Times architecture critic, about why they feel downtown has at last arrived and what the future might hold.

According to UCLA legal scholar Kal Raustiala, coauthor of The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation, copycats and imitators—legal and illegal—not only fail to hurt creative industries but sometimes help drive them. In a talk at the Goethe Institut Los Angeles, Raustiala explains why a lot of what we think we know about intellectual property is wrong, and how certain industries—like fashion and food—still manage to thrive despite a lack of copyright protection.

The directors of three Los Angeles art museums--Ann Philbin of the Hammer, Michael Govan of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Timothy Potts, the new director of the Getty--discussed with Los Angeles Times arts reporter Jori Finkel the state of the city's museums and their hopes for the future. It's an exciting time for the L.A. art world, but although the museums have a great deal of potential they also face obstacles in cultivating a larger donor base, bringing in diverse audiences, and satisfying their many different constituencies.

We’ve all heard the dismal facts about the American healthcare system: high spending, low-quality treatment, poor delivery, and spotty access. But biomedical innovator, businessman, and physician Patrick Soon-Shiong—who is also the richest man in Los Angeles and a Lakers part-owner—says the problems aren’t intractable. Far from it. Instead, we’re on the cusp of a more personalized, more accurate, and less error-prone era in American medicine. He talked with Arizona State University President Michael Crow about what the future of molecular and wireless medicine holds for us all.

We all know we’re going to die, but we don’t want to talk about it—or plan for it. As a result, we take—and ask our healthcare providers to take—extraordinary measures to prolong our lives and those of our loved ones. Doctors, however, don’t take these same measures. Because they encounter death more often than most people, and because they know the quality of life that follows CPR, ventilators, and feeding tubes, physicians are better prepared than the rest of us to die in peace without a pointless fight. City of Hope Senior Research Specialist Shirley Otis-Green, Coalition for Compassionate Care of California Executive Director Judy Citko, and Dr. Ken Murray, author of “How Doctors Die” talk with San Jose Mercury News reporter Lisa Krieger about what doctors can teach us about a good death.

Where’s heaven? What’s it like? Who gets in? And what tortures await those of us who land in the alternative destination? In a panel moderated by documentary filmmaker Jody Hassett Sanchez, UCLA Buddhism expert Robert Buswell, religion historian Jeffrey Burton Russell, UCLA anthropologist and expert in Pueblo Indian beliefs Peter Nabokov, and Martin Schwarz, curator of the exhibition "Heaven, Hell, and Dying Well: Images of Death in the Middle Ages" at the Getty Museum explore the ways different societies have imagined and depicted the afterlife and what the images we create of heaven and hell say about life on earth.

At a Zócalo/Cal Humanities "Searching for Democracy" event, Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley Henry Brady, the Institute for Civility in Government's Cassandra Dahnke, Arizona State University communications and performance scholar Jennifer Linde, and economist and anthropologist Meenakshi Chakraverti, who leads the Public Conversations Project in San Diego, discussed whether the lack of civility in American politics is a problem--or if civility is indeed overrated.

According to New Republic editor Timothy Noah, author of The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, America is in the midst of two significant divergences that are causing increasing wealth disparity. The first is between people with college or graduate degrees and people with lower levels of education. The second is between the 1 percent (people in the financial industry and leaders of corporations) and the 99 percent (everyone else). He explains how both divergences have their roots in the late 1970s, and what we can do to stop the gap between rich and poor from growing.