Zócalo Public Square (Audio)

Gandhi's impact on his native India is unquestioned, but Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld argues the Mahatma's biographers have not sufficiently explored how his 21 years in South Africa shaped his philosophies and strategies. Lelyvled, the former executive editor of The New York Times and author of the new book Great Soul, visits Zócalo to discuss what Gandhi learned in South Africa and how he applied it back home.

When a neighbor killed his wife and himself in 2000, Peter Lovenheim decided he needed to get to know the people living around him. He started with meetings at Starbucks and moved up to spending a night at each of their homes. The result was his book In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time, which was chosen as the winner of Zócalo Public Square's first annual book prize. Lovenheim visited Zócalo to discuss his project and what he learned about good neighbors.

Journalist and author Doug Saunders has spent years studying what he calls "arrival cities" -- the ramshackle neighborhoods on the outskirts of the world's biggest cities that are often the place new immigrants land. Arrival cities are often kept down by physical and bureaucratic barriers, he says, but their residents' drive to succeed makes the neighborhoods valuable to the urban area at large. Saunders visits Zócalo to discuss the arrival cities -- including those in Los Angeles, Istanbul, Cairo and many other urban centers and the challenges and opportunities they pose.

Less than 70 years after the official end of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned all immigration from China, Chinese American culture is all around us. Yet many of the leading examples -- from the the Charlie Chan detective novels of the 1920s to Amy Tan's bestseller The Joy Luck Club and Bruce Lee movies -- are insufficient to capture the full Chinese-American experience. Historian Mae Ngai moderates a Zócalo panel about efforts to tell those stories over the years. Panelists include University of California at Santa Barbara English professor Yunte Huang; Suellen Cheng, curator of El Pueblo Historical Monument in downtown Los Angeles; and Franklin Odo, former director of the Asian Pacific American program at the Smithsonian.

Neither hard power nor soft power will be the key to winning the race for prosperity or global influence tomorrow. Rather, says, Joseph Nye, author of The Future of Power, successful nations will deploy “smart power.” President Obama's decisions on Libya are a good example of smart power, he says. Nye joins Zócalo to discuss how power balances have changed in the global age, as new nations take their place among the most influential and non-state actors become a larger part of the conversation.

James Gleick, biographer, author and journalist, discusses his latest book on Information Theory entitled The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.

Yale Law School professor John Fabian Witt tells the hidden story of how in 1847 and 1848, on the road from Veracruz to Mexico City, the United States army invented the concept of the war crime as we know it today.

Award-winning writer, Susan Jacoby, most recently the author of Never Say Die: the Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2011), discussed the uncensored realities of growing old with an audience at The Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. As the youngest baby boomers turn 65 this year, Jacoby warned that clinging to false hope about the future of aging leaves us unprepared to deal with the financial and medical woes destined to afflict the swelling ranks of the elderly.

Evgeny Morozov is a Stanford visiting scholar, Net Effect blogger, and the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. He visited Zócalo to lecture on the ways authoritarian regimes manipulate New Media, noting trends in Iran, Egypt, China and even the United States.

Artist Shengtian Zheng, USC School of Architecture Dean Qingyun Ma and New York-Shangai-based artist Wenda Gu share a panel at the Getty Center to discuss the "New China", and the ruins of the old. Moderator Melissa Chiu, director of the Asia Society Museum in New York, set up the evening as a historical narrative, weaving together politics and artistry to approach the issue.