Zócalo Public Square

Medical care and convenience don’t usually go together. But the retail clinic aims to change that by doing away with long waits at the doctors’ office and complicated insurance requirements and forms, all while bringing better care to the uninsured and underserved. But critics argue that retail clinics need better regulation and a stronger presence in low-income neighborhoods, and still others suggest that they could be detrimental in instances where patients need more serious attention Zócalo invited a panel of experts -- including Pro Publica’s Charlie Ornstein, Cynthia Stamper Graff, President and CEO of Lindora, Inc.; Mary Kate Scott, founder and CEO of Scott & Company and a professor of health care business and consulting at USC; and Dev Gnanadev, president of the California Medical Association and chief medical officer at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center -- to discuss the retail clinic’s unique model of care and its implications for doctors, insurance companies, and consumers.

James Ellroy, the author of the bestselling L.A. Quartet novels — The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, and White Jazz — has just concluded another high-selling set of novels: the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. Like the prior two volumes, American Tabloid and The Cold Six-Thousand, Ellroy's latest, Blood's A Rover, captures the explosive 1960s, placing Ellroy's strange characters — a Klan-raised, Yale-educated FBI agent, an ex-cop and heroin runner, and a wheelman for divorce lawyers — in the middle of that decade's fierce battles over race, sex, and crime. The great Ellroy visited Zócalo to ballyhoo, consecrate, deconstruct and ridicule his bestselling new novel, and to reflect on the nature of his historical fiction and the America it invents. He chats with his girlfriend, writer Erica Schickel.

Before the massive demographic shift prompted by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was a black and white city with an African-American majority city council. Across the country, with Latino immigrants increasing in numbers and making up a key swing population, Zócalo’s panel — including University of New Orleans professor Andre Perry, Syracuse’s Jamie Winders, Stanford’s Laura López-Sanders, and urban and population geographer Anita Drever— considers whether the nation’s newest residents upset the black-white balance and what it means for the country. This is the second panel from Zócalo’s conference on Race and Immigration in Post-Katrina America, generously sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

News media around the country have scrutinized the relationship between African Americans and Latinos, particularly hints of economic competition and racial tension and violence. Zócalo invited a panel — including journalist Oscar Garza, Duke political science and African American studies professor Paula McClain, Betina Cutaia Wilkinson of Louisiana State University, and USC Annenberg professor and immigration expert Roberto Suro — to focus on the relationship between the groups to see exactly where tensions lie, where cooperation exists, and how it’s changing race in America. This is the first panel from Zócalo’s conference on Race and Immigration in Post-Katrina America, generously sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Ned Sublette is the author of two books elucidating New Orleans, a city with a uniquely complex history of cultural intermingling. The World That Made New Orleans explores the city’s first century, and the forthcoming The Year Before the Flood takes up Sublette’s personal history with the city, along with the strange final year for the city as we knew it. Sublette discusses the character and culture of New Orleans, then and now. Sublette delivered this keynote address at Zócalo’s conference on Race and Immigration in Post-Katrina America, generously sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Jonathan Gold chats with Cedd Moses of 213 Downtown, Providence chef Michael Cimarusti, Copa D’Oro bartender Vincenzo Marianella, and the Varnish’s Eric Alperin about the uniquely American art of the cocktail.

Every unhappy oil-producing nation is unhappy in its own way. But each is touched by what’s known as the resource curse — the power of oil to harm rather than help the countries that possess it. Around the world oil vastly enriches small ruling classes, degrades the environment, and destabilizes political and economic institutions as prices fluctuate. Peter Maass, New York Times Magazine writer and author of Crude World, visits Zócalo to explore the consequences of gas-guzzling, the paradox of plenty, and how to cure our addiction to oil.

Since the 1960s, the U.S. prison population has increased fivefold. Prisons today hold one inmate for every one hundred adults — a record rate in American history, and one unmatched by any other country. But despite the high prison population, crime has stopped falling. Punishments can seem random in their severity and implementation, minorities and the poor still disproportionately become victims and inmates, and enforcement — particularly of probation and parole — is haphazard. How can crime be controlled? UCLA Public Policy professor Mark Kleiman, author of When Brute Force Fails, visited Zócalo to offer a new strategy for cutting crime, reducing the prison population, and still enacting swift, certain, and fair punishment.

Traffic can seem like a law of the universe: an ever-present, incontrovertible, inexplicable force. Back-ups simply happen, the other lanes always move faster, and nearby drivers are consistently inept. But traffic has a comprehensible logic — particular physical dynamics rule the flow of cars; psychology governs drivers’ assumptions and actions; and laws and technology underpin attempts at efficiency and safety on the road. Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do and What It Says About Us, visits Zócalo to explore how human nature, our relationship to our built urban environment, and a host of other complex physical, psychological, and social interactions create the phenomenon of traffic.

As an Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court, Carlos R. Moreno sits on one of the country’s most innovative and followed state courts. Appointed in 2001, Moreno, the court’s only Democrat and a son of immigrants, has, as The New York Times put it, carved out principled yet empathetic positions that have won him high regard on the left and the right. He has upheld the right of counties to ban gun shows on county property, the right of consumers to sue corporations, and he has confirmed sentences in most death penalty appeals. And only days after he was being considered a candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court, Moreno issued the lone dissent in the Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage. Moreno visits Zócalo to discuss with UCI School of Law professor Henry Weinstein his work on the court, his advocacy on behalf of foster children, and his rise from the Solano Avenue neighborhood to the highest court in the state.