Zócalo Public Square

From translucent slivers of sushi to simple weeknight salmon dinners, seafood is a staple of the American diet, considered both healthy and luxurious. But what if there really aren’t more fish in the sea? Our craving for high-on-the-food-chain tuna and salmon bred nearly as big and thick as torpedoes is destabilizing ocean life and polluting the sea. Even as some chefs and suppliers aim to serve environmentally safe fish, others plate shark and whale. How sustainable is seafood? Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold visited Zócalo along with Providence Executive Chef Michael Cimarusti, Santa Monica Seafood’s Logan Kock, and Heal the Bay President Mark Gold to discuss how our eating habits hurt the environment, and whether there’s a way to eat what we want without doing harm.

After launching his architecture career in Los Angeles over 20 years ago, Michael Maltzan quickly distinguished himself with socially conscious buildings that depart from the hulking luxury structures of celebrity architects. His housing projects for the homeless – including the Rainbow Apartments on San Pedro, the recently completed New Carver Apartments on 17th and Hope, and the forthcoming Star Apartments at Sixth and Maple – provide protection, beauty, and services for a community more accustomed to unadorned and blocky shelter. His Inner-City Arts campus, designed inventively and built cost-effectively, provides children a place to learn in the heart of Skid Row. And he transformed the Hammer Museum’s courtyard into a more inviting and open space with the Billy Wilder Theater and café. Maltzan visited Zócalo to talk with KCRW’s Frances Anderton about his work, whether good design can be affordable, and how architecture shapes our lives. This event is made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

No matter how many Silicon Valley-bound software engineers, Texan-imitating call center operators, or Pepsi-endorsing movie stars it produces, India retains a promise of untrammeled, ancient spirituality. But how is modernity changing some of the country’s oldest traditions? Children of businessmen and engineers disobey their parents to join obscure, exacting religious orders; holy men hold work-a-day jobs; Sufi mystics struggle in Talibanizing provinces. Historian and travel writer William Dalrymple, author of Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, visited Zócalo to explore where modern meets ancient in a transforming country, and the constant human pursuit of the divine.

Iraq isn’t the first war that began with an overestimation of American power. Woodrow Wilson and the pro-war progressives believed World War I would transform the world. Lyndon Johnson and the Camelot intellectuals thought America could stop any communist movement from taking power anywhere on earth. George W. Bush and the neoconservatives imagined they could usher in their very own 1989 in the Middle East. Why does success produce hubris, and can tragedy produce wisdom? In an event sponsored by the UCLA Burkle Center, journalist Peter Beinart, author of The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, visited Zócalo to chat with The Atlantic's Ben Schwarz about why it’s so difficult — and so crucial — to acknowledge the limits of American power.

Barack Obama rose to the presidency at a critical time in American history. Propelled by a galvanized left, admired for his cool temperament and high intellect, challenged as inexperienced, and provoking fierce and often racially-tinged opposition, the young Senator from Illinois took the oath of the highest office amid celebration despite the challenges ahead. The country faced its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; troops fought seemingly unwinnable wars in two countries; tens of millions of Americans needed healthcare. How did the Obama administration survive its first year, and how did it fare? Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter, author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One, visited Zócalo to tell the inside story of the disciplined, self-aware president and the colorful team that aims to see the country and the world into a new era.

Wilbert Rideau spent 44 years in one of the country’s most infamous prisons, Louisiana’s Angola penitentiary. After killing a woman in a moment of panic following a botched bank robbery, Rideau was sentenced to death at 19, later amended to life imprisonment. From within Angola, long the sight of prison reform activism because of its brutal living and working conditions, Rideau worked to transform the criminal justice system. Though the brutality of earlier decades is largely gone, prisoners at Angola and around the country still suffer mistreatment and overcrowding due to harsh sentencing laws. Rideau, author of In the Place of Justice, visited Zócalo to reflect on his time, his work, and why lifting censorship rules is the key to prison reform.

The Hoover Dam was once thought to be a remote regional project, approved as an afterthought by a Republican president before the stock market crashed. But by the time it was completed, and in the 75 years since it was dedicated, the Dam has come to symbolize American resilience and ingenuity at one of the worst times in our history. Construction at the height of the Depression employed thousands and spurred development of urban centers in the West, transforming the political balance of the country and shifting its governing philosophy from rugged individualism toward collective enterprise and social support. What is the legacy of the Hoover Dam today, particularly as Americans face a deepening water crisis and the worst economic downturn since the Depression? Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik, author of Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century, visited Zócalo to explore the epic story of the Hoover Dam and how it transformed the country.

Zurich and Los Angeles share an intriguing political distinction: each is the largest city in the world’s two greatest centers of direct democracy. California and Switzerland use initiatives and referenda more often than any place in the world, and have for more than a century, when Los Angeles followed Zurich’s model and instituted the first municipal system of direct democracy in the U.S. But direct democracy has been challenged in both places, particularly when it seems that financing, populism, misinformation, or sheer complexity — rather than well-informed voters turning out in strong numbers — make or break initiatives. How democratic are Zurich and Los Angeles, what challenges does each city face, and how might they improve their political processes? Zócalo Public Square and the Swiss Confederation invited journalist Joe Mathews, Swiss National Parliament member Andreas Gross, Swiss journalist Bruno Kaufmann, attorney George Kieffer, who led the 1999 Los Angeles Charter revision, and California Common Cause Executive Director Kathay Feng to consider which is the most democratic city, and what each could learn from the other. The event was co-sponsored by the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, presented in collaboration with the Consulate General of Switzerland in Los Angeles, and made possible by a generous grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation.

With internationally acclaimed novels that sell millions of copies in 45 countries and 30 languages, Carlos Ruiz Zafón is a writer for a global age. Zafón, born in Barcelona and living in Los Angeles, where he first came to write screenplays, cites as his influences the 19th century British, Russian, and French giants — Dickens, Tolstoy, Balzac. But he also takes inspiration from the great American crime fiction — including the Los Angeles noir master Raymond Chandler — and Hollywood movies, which help him visualize the rich worlds he creates in his novels. Zafón, author of The Shadow of the Wind, and most recently of The Angel’s Game, visited Zócalo to chat with The Agony Column’s Rick Kleffel, to discuss his life and his art.

To the Western world, women’s rights and political Islam can appear incompatible. Deeply ingrained social norms and particular interpretations of Islamic law leave women in most Middle Eastern countries without legal protection from domestic violence or spousal rape. Women generally have fewer rights than men when it comes to education, work, divorce, and daily life — from dress to driving to being alone outside the home. But a budding grassroots reform movement has seen women begin to demand their rights within an Islamic framework, rather than against it. In the last two decades, more women have begun pursuing education — including college, advanced degrees and even religious education — and participating in politics, business, and the media. Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Isobel Coleman, author of Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East, visited Zócalo in an event co-sponsored by the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations to discuss Islamic feminism, the women behind the movement, and why their success is crucial to fighting extremism and creating progress and stability in the Islamic world.