Zócalo Public Square (Audio)

World-renowned game designer Jane McGonigal sits with Ze Frank to discuss the positive stress associated with games, and how to harness humanity’s creative potential for global improvement. Her new book is called Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press, 2011).

“The same idea in your head can be represented along with its contradiction.” At least that’s what Robert Kurzban, author of Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, believes. Kurzban is professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He joins Zocalo to explore the psychological causes of hypocricy, focusing on the specialized mind and the evolutionary benefits of ignorance.

As the Superintendent of Finance for the rebel American government, Robert Morris instituted debt financing as the best means to pay for the costs of fighting the Revolution. But he was challenged by the refusal of many Americans to pay taxes. How can the U.S. pay for its policies without losing the support of Americans? Charles Rappleye, author of Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution, visits Zócalo to explore the life of a man who shaped the financial system during the Revolution, and the significance of his work in our current economic climate.

An Evening with Guillermo del Toro

For every commissioned piece of public art there are countless unlawful works — scrawled spray-painted initials, cheeky visual pranks, massive murals soaring up buildings and across rail cars, shrines tucked into unused corners. Street artists have become figures of global recognition, even acceptance. Artist collectives in Berlin take over buildings; London-based Banksy puts on pop-up exhibits around the world and debuted a film at Sundance; Shepard Fairey papered the U.S. with his Andre the Giant sticker campaign and went on to create a much-copied campaign poster for Barack Obama. But street artists also remain the subject of controversy, forcing cities to consider what art is acceptable, who should be allowed to create it, and where. In conjunction with the Fowler Museum's exhibition of Larry Yust’s photographs of street art in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Paris, Zócalo invited arts writer Jori Finkel, Fowler Museum curator Patrick Polk, Aaron Rose, co-curator of MOCA’s forthcoming street art exhibit, street artist Retna, and artist and curator Man One to ask how street art humanizes cities.

From a Persian queen’s brutal mastectomy in the fifth century BC to the 19th century recipients of primitive chemotherapy, humans have long tried to beat cancer. But even as we routed other scourges like cholera and tuberculosis, launched ambitious public health campaigns, exposed the dangers of chemicals like nicotine, and survived ever more rigorous treatment regimens, cancer remained as deadly and mysterious as ever. Cancer physician and researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, visited Zócalo to tell stories of a disease we’ve lived with, died from, and tried to conquer for thousands of years—and what it was like to write about it.

Teachers are among the biggest influences on a student’s education. Most parents and educators would say teacher performance should be evaluated. Yet no one agrees on how to do it. From a teacher’s method in the classroom to his or her willingness to spend extra hours with individual students, attaching a number to teacher performance isn’t easy. Some favor a “value-added” teacher ranking system, which measures instructors by whether or not their students beat expectations, while others argue the system is unfair. Does it work, and can a teacher’s effectiveness truly be measured? Zócalo and the California Community Foundation invited a panel of education specialists including education reporter Louis Freedberg, Los Angeles Unified School District Deputy Superintendent John Deasy, UCLA Center X Director of Research Karen Hunter Quartz and Families in Schools Vice President Oscar E. Cruz to ask whether teacher rankings work, how we should create them, and whether they make for better schools.

California’s rate of births to teenage mothers has hit a historic low. For years, rates were on the decline around the country, throughout the sex-obsessed 1990s — when parents rallied around the V-chip, fretted about Internet obscenity, and shielded impressionable eyes from strutting pop starlets. Credit went to many factors, from increased access to contraceptives and improved sex education to teens simply waiting longer to have sex. But in recent years, as the pregnancies of political daughters and TV stars have brought broad attention to the subject once more, teen pregnancy rates have started rising everywhere except California, which has pursued robust state-supported teen pregnancy prevention efforts. What changed around the country, and what is California doing right? Zócalo invited a panel including moderator Emily Bazar, sociologist Mark Regnerus, author of the forthcoming Premarital Sex in America, Connie Kruzan, director of Adolescent Services at North Hollywood's Valley Community Clinic, and Francisca Angulo-Olaiz, a research scientist at the Center for Research on Adolescent Health and Development, to discuss what the country can learn from California’s progress on teen pregnancy.

British writer Christopher Isherwood arrived in Los Angeles after a long, slow bus ride from New York, where he had emigrated with his friend W.H. Auden. After unforgettably chronicling the underworld of interwar Berlin, Isherwood settled into L.A. and its circle of European émigrés, writers, painters, and spiritual seekers — Aldous Huxley, Truman Capote, David Hockney, and Don Bachardy, who would become Isherwood’s longtime partner after a chance meeting on Valentine’s Day on the beach. Isherwood wrote for Hollywood — and unlike so many novelists, enjoyed it — translated Hindu scripture, hung out at Musso and Frank’s, and captured L.A. in some of his most acclaimed works, like A Single Man. To celebrate the release of Christopher Isherwood’s The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969, Zócalo hosted a panel with Don Bachardy, artist Peter Alexander, and Huntington Library curator of manuscripts Sara Hodson to consider the life, work, and legacy of Christopher Isherwood in Los Angeles.

Humans have long struggled to explain the trait that makes us human: self awareness. Ancient Greeks and Christian theologians posited a soul separate from a body. A long line of philosophers have argued that we’re defined by our thinking human minds, distinct and higher than our physical selves. Scientists today see evidence of something like minds and cultures in social animals, but they still seek to explain why human consciousness rises to become knowledge of a self, why we have been able to create such complex identities and cultures. How did we come to be our selves? Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, director of the USC Brain and Creativity Institute and author of Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, visited Zócalo to argue against the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting compelling new scientific evidence that consciousness is in fact a biological process created by living organisms.