Zócalo Public Square

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.

Mayim Bialik is at the very least a triple threat. She’s an actress who stars on CBS’s The Big Bang Theory; she’s a neuroscientist who received her Ph.D. from UCLA, where she wrote her dissertation on the genetic disorder Prader-Willi syndrome; and she’s the author of a book on parenting, Beyond the Sling: A Real-Life Guide to Raising Confident, Loving Children the Attachment Parenting Way. At an event co-presented by UCLA, Bialik talked with Huffington Post science correspondent Cara Santa Maria about how she weaves the many threads of her busy life together—and how they sometimes come into conflict.

Mayim Bialik is at the very least a triple threat. She’s an actress who stars on CBS’s The Big Bang Theory; she’s a neuroscientist who received her Ph.D. from UCLA, where she wrote her dissertation on the genetic disorder Prader-Willi syndrome; and she’s the author of a book on parenting, Beyond the Sling: A Real-Life Guide to Raising Confident, Loving Children the Attachment Parenting Way. At an event co-presented by UCLA, Bialik talked with Huffington Post science correspondent Cara Santa Maria about how she weaves the many threads of her busy life together—and how they sometimes come into conflict.

L.A. has the largest population of Iranians of any city outside Iran. If reform were to come to Iran, would life change for the hundreds of thousands of Iranian-Angelenos who call Southern California home? Writer and activist Amir Soltani, entrepreneur and philanthropist Sharon S. Nazarian, and acting director of Iranian Studies at UCLA M. Rahim Shayegan joined moderator Shiva Falsafi, UCLA lecturer in women's studies, to discuss what reform in Iran could mean for the city known as Tehrangeles.

U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine joined Sacramento Bee editorial page editor Stuart Leavenworth in Fresno to discuss whether social isolation is a threat to democracy. In a wide-ranging conversation they discussed poetry, Levine's youth in Detroit, the community he came to love in Fresno, and the future of American democracy.

LAPD Chief Charle Beck, Pepperdine University economist Angela Hawken, and UCLA political scientist Mark Peterson joined moderator Mark Kleiman, a UCLA public policy analyst, to discuss the legacy of the late political scientist and long-time Southern California resident James Q. Wilson. How did Wilson's broken windows theories change our cities? Where did his greatest influence lie? And what made him special?

Black Swan choreographer Benjamin Millepied--Natalie Portman's husband and a recently retired New York City Ballet principal dancer--talks with Amanda Fortini, a contributing writer to The New Yorker, about why he loves L.A., his plans for his new L.A. Dance Project, and the making of Black Swan. Millepied plans to take advantage of the city's vibrant arts culture to collaborate with many different kinds of artists, and to incorporate his own background--his classical ballet training as well as the African and modern dance he performed in his youth--into the company's work.

Cardiologist Eric Topol, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine, believes that digital technology has the potential to change healthcare as we know it--but only if consumers demand change from doctors and the medical establishment. Healthcare is currently population-based, and thus wasteful, expensive, and inefficient. Wireless technology and genomics can build a new, individualized paradigm for healthcare that can help patients and save the nation billions of dollars.

KCRW "Good Food" host Evan Kleiman talks with journalist Tracie McMillan, author of The American Way of Eating, about McMillan's journey from farm fields to Wal-Mart to Applebee's--doing some of the most menial jobs in the American food system to find out what it would take for everyone to eat well. Is it possible to eat well on minimum wage? Not really. For all of us to eat well, said McMillan, change needs to come not just on our plates and in our shopping carts but in getting everyone easy access to good food.

Actor Adrian Grenier sees the paparazzi as storytellers. Us Weekly editor Carolyn Davis publishes their photos to entertain. And celebrity photographer Galo Ramirez is just trying to make a living. But why do the rest of us crave photographs of Brad and Angelina’s wedding, or Jennifer Aniston’s baby bump—the two hottest “dream shots” of the moment—and what makes a great paparazzi photo? Grenier, Davis, and Ramirez joined the Los Angeles Times' Carla Hall and curator Carolyn Squiers to discuss the art and allure of the work of the paparazzi at the Getty Museum.