Zócalo Public Square (Audio)

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.

n his most recent novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Geoff Dyer creates the character Jeff Atman. Much like Dyer, he’s a writer charged with attending and covering the 2003 Venice Biennale. Jeff ignores various masterpieces, stumbles upon one particularly moving piece only by accident, takes in a major light installation while hung over, and participates in a toast to the Bellini—the cocktail—as the best art at the festival. Though Dyer’s views on art and experiencing art don’t exactly match Jeff’s, he uses his character to examine art and place. Geoff Dyer visited Zócalo to discuss his experience of a particular piece of art.

From the invention of the suburb to the birth of Home and Garden Television, homeownership has long been a central part of the American dream. Americans build ballooning mansions, hunt for hidden architectural gems, drop thousands of dollars per square foot of urban condo or seaside shack, endlessly renovate fixer-uppers, and carefully outfit interiors. Why are we so desperate to own? Meghan Daum, author ofLife Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, visits Zócalo to recount her search for a place to call home and to explain the pleasures and perils of believing that only a house can make you whole.

As college degrees become an ever more essential qualification for earning a living, students are going further than ever before to get them — and creating a new and rapidly changing worldwide marketplace for higher ed. Nearly three million students leave their home countries to pursue college degrees, a 40 percent increase since 1999. American institutions have set up shop in over 40 countries and are accepting more international students than ever before — with USC leading the pack in matriculating foreigners. College rankings are internationalizing, which could mean American universities won’t stay at the top of the heap. How will worldwide competition for the best minds transform education as we know it, and does it mean the end of American leadership in the field? Education expert Ben Wildavsky, author of The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping Our World, visited Zócalo to explain what globalized education means for students, the U.S., and the world.  

Before travel shifted to the highways and the skies, the railroad connected Americans and developed the country. Trains built the Eastern seaboard cities, connected the distant coasts, populated and glamorized the West, determined the outcomes of wars, and, when regulated and subsidized, shaped our ideas of government and economy. Today, barring some commuter rails and urban subways, trains are underutilized across the country, particularly in California, where discount airlines are cheaper and faster, and cars run everywhere on any schedule. But with the promise of high-speed train technology to connect California, buzz about L.A.’s subway to the sea, ever-more crowded roads, and federal and state governments ready to fund job-generating infrastructure projects, rail seems ready for a comeback. Is rail the future of transit, or is it a waste of resources? Zócalo invites a panel of experts — including KCET’s Val Zavala, L.A. County Metropolitan Transit Authority Board Member Richard Katz, Gloria Ohland of Reconnecting America and Adrian Moore of the Reason Foundation — to consider the rise, fall, and potential return of rail.

John A. Pérez, a former labor leader and the first openly gay Speaker of the Assembly in California, ascends to the seat at a particularly challenging time for the state, and with only a year's experience. Not only has California been struggling with a devastating budget crisis, but federal policies expected to assist the state might fail. Transportation and education dollars slated for California haven't been able to blunt layoffs and service cutbacks; and national healthcare reform, whatever its merits, could hurt the state budget. How should Pérez and the legislature address California's problems? Pérez, who represents Los Angeles and is a cousin of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, visited Zócalo to discuss his plans for the state.  

Internet commerce has boomed in the last decade. Americans alone spend over $150 billion in online transactions, and over 50 million U.S. households bank on the web. But how safe are the sites computer users around the world trust with their most sensitive information, and how precarious is the system? Isolated cases of identity theft and computer viruses fail to capture the vast risk crime poses to the way we use the Internet, and a real public debate has yet to begin. Exploiting systemic security holes and a Wild-West-style lack of governance, supported by governments bent on cyber-espionage and cyber-warfare, and rarely thwarted by law enforcement agencies, organized crime has made the web its main operation, compromising more than half the world’s computers. Journalist Joseph Menn, Technology Correspondent for the Financial Times and author of Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet, visited Zócalo to explain why organized crime threatens the Internet as we know it.

One hundred sixty years ago, California, newly independent from Mexico, chose statehood. Since then, California has spurred change around the country. Its progressive policies inspired other states to follow suit, and the innovations sparked in Silicon Valley and fueled by venture capital — more of which is invested in California than in the other 49 states combined — have transformed the way we live. But the rest of the country often gives the Golden State the cold shoulder. Californians are considered flaky, superficial latte-drinkers. The state receives only about 80 cents in return for every federal tax dollar it pays, and its requests for aid during the current fiscal and political crisis have gone mostly ignored by the Obama administration. Would California be better off as its own country? Zócalo invites the New America Foundation’s Joe Mathews, PoliPoint Press editor Peter Richardson, political consultant Darry A. Sragow, writer and blogger David Dayen, and Global California author Abraham Lowenthal to explore whether the state would have done better on its own, and how more control over its foreign, trade, and immigration policies may be help. 

 Oil may make more headlines, but water is the world’s most indispensable resource, and a dwindling one. Water’s scarcity spawns war, epidemic diseases and the collapse of states across parts of Africa and Asia; its faltering supplies imperil the rise of China and India. What should we do about water? Journalist Steven Solomon, author of Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, visits Zócalo to trace the history of water from ancient times to our dawning age of scarcity.

Since the devastating economic crisis of 2008, new regulations have aimed to reign in the big banks that helped bring down the world economy. But six “megabanks” still rule the financial markets. They are bigger, more profitable, and more resistant to regulation than ever before. They control assets amounting to 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. And their rise from the ashes of the Great Recession is only the latest Wall Street triumph in a long history of showdowns between American government and finance, dating back to Thomas Jefferson. How did this come to be? Simon Johnson, co-author of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, visited Zócalo to explain why big banks and the ideology of unfettered finance still endangers us today, and what we can do to avoid another meltdown.

Photographers have turned their lenses on food since the invention of their art. Early images captured simple, soft arrangements that showcased seasonal bounties — fruits and vegetables in vases and bowls, like still-life paintings. Photographed still lives — whether elaborate or bare — evoked not only taste and appetite, but the experience of a meal, the process, the drama, the company. Shots of markets captured commerce and abundance. Decades later, technological and aesthetic advances transformed the food photograph into its own art that set off all the senses. As the Getty opens its exhibit, "Tasteful Pictures,” featuring food photographs from the Getty collection, Zócalo invites a panel of experts — including KCRW’s Evan Kleiman, Artbites’ Maite Gomez-Rejón, photographer Charlie Grosso, and Gastronomica founding editor Darra Goldstein — to explore the origins of food photography and why we like to look at what we can’t eat.

Well before the rise of political evangelicalism, Americans have blurred the church-state divide, whether for spurring major social movements like women’s suffrage or civil rights or for hitting the campaign trail. But how well does democracy mix with God? As Europeans and Americans worry about radical Islam undermining Western-style liberal democratic government. Journalist and scholar Ian Buruma, author of Taming the Gods, visited Zócalo to argue that religion — and particularly the passions it inflames — must be calmed to make democracy work.

Americans celebrated the election of Barack Obama as a “triumph over race.” But in major U.S. cities today, the majority of young black men are locked behind bars or labeled felons for life. Jim Crow laws may have been wiped off the books decades ago, but an astounding number of African Americans today, much like their grandparents before them, are trapped in a permanent second-class status — unable to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. Is a new Jim Crow system emerging and thriving in the age of Obama? Scholar and activist Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow:  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, visited Zócalo to explain what she calls our new racial caste system.

Roads bind our world. The dense patchwork of an urban grid, looping and soaring city highways, long and straight country trails and narrow, curving mountain passes connect people everywhere with goods, knowledge, disease, and each other. Roads define the way we speak — our careers run in the fast lane; our integrity takes us on the high road; our fates follow paths less traveled — and underpin our stories. What tales do roads tell? Ted Conover, author of The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today, visited Zócalo after traveling through Peru, India, China, Africa, and the Middle East to explain how roads shape our cultures and our lives.

Americans have long been fascinated by Cuba. A mere 90 miles divide the two countries, and their histories have been entangled since the turn of the last century, when the U.S. occupied Cuba after the Spanish-American war. The countries’ relations only grew more complicated from there. Fidel Castro assumed power in 1959, building a one-party Communist state that controlled land, the economy, and the media. He leaned toward the Soviet Union, spurring everything from near-catastrophic confrontations to comical assassination attempts. Several surges of refugees landed on Florida’s shores, building a vocal presence and political opposition to Castro within the United States. And successive American presidents maintained strict economic and travel sanctions and couldn’t budge the stalemated diplomatic process. Barack Obama has made few concrete changes, despite proclaiming the Cuba policy a "failed” one. What do Americans need to know about Cuba, and what’s next for Cuba and the U.S.? Julia Sweig, author of Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know and a senior fellow and director for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, visited Zócalo to explain recent shifts in Cuban politics, its difficult relations with the U.S. and where both countries should go from here.