Zócalo Public Square

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.

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.