Four years ago, we started publishing smart, fun, free articles to turn our events into a bigger conversation.

Last year, we brought on four accomplished editors to expand our web presence and take us to the next level.

Today, we’re throwing it all together and reinventing ourselves as an Ideas Exchange, a seamless and innovative blend of live events and digital humanities journalism.

Our mission hasn’t changed—we are still committed to building community by humanizing and sharing ideas, and to bringing together the broadest possible audiences.

What is new is our carefully curated, integrated approach to events and journalism, and a beautiful new website that allows us to better highlight our many features.

Our new format should signal to everyone that after nearly 10 years of existence we here at Zócalo are doubling down and investing in our future.

By the end of December, we will have presented 70 events in 11 cities and published over 600 articles in 2012. Outside of Los Angeles, we have hosted programs in Phoenix, Fresno, Bakersfield, Tucson, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Diego, Riverside, and Washington, D.C. Here in L.A., we are proud to call many of the city’s finest cultural institutions our partners.

Our goal is to create—day after day—an eclectic, serendipitous, accessible, generous, civilized refuge for ideas, where you can escape the suffocating, which-side-are-you-on narrowness of so much of contemporary political and intellectual life.

All of us here at Zócalo are committed to asking fundamental, visceral questions about the complicated issues facing our world. We’re not trying to be clever, hip, or seductively oblique and exclusive. What we’re after is that rare combination of intellectual clarity and human touch. We’re looking for the connection between head and heart, big ideas and real-life experience.

We invite you to check out our new website. If you like what you see, we invite you to come back tomorrow and the next day.

The post Check Out the New Zócalo appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Second Annual Zócalo Public Square Book Prize is made possible by the generous support of Southern California Gas Company.

Twenty years ago, Rodney King asked, “Can we all get along?” The phrase is a punch line today-and yet this year King’s question was on the minds of economists and digital game designers, lawyers and cognitive scientists, literary theorists and even a king.

These were among the authors nominated for the Second Annual Zócalo Public Square Book Prize. The prize will go to the author of the nonfiction book published in the past year that our judges deemed to be the most effective in deepening our understanding of community. The broad range of books we considered (an initial list of 100, narrowed down to a longlist of 11) demonstrates that Zócalo isn’t alone in exploring ideas about community and citizenship-and that community means much more than the neighborhoods we live in.

In the end, our judges emerged with three outstanding contenders. We’ll announce our winner on Thursday, March 15.

The author of the winning book will receive $5,000 and deliver a lecture at the ceremony on April 13, 2012:

Second Annual Zócalo Public Square Book Prize Award Ceremony, sponsored by Southern California Gas Company
Friday, April 13, 2012, 7:30 p.m.
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)
250 South Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, CA

Here is an introduction to our finalists, and what our judges had to say about their favorites (shown here in alphabetical order by author):

Is That a Fish In Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything
by David Bellos

In an ever-smaller world of thousands of languages, we rely on translation to communicate with one another. But translation is never free of interpretation or values or preferences. Even if we speak the same language, we may be talking past one another, with immense gaps between what one person says and another person hears. In short, translation is so much more than what they do at the United Nations. It’s what we all do-or ought to do-in daily life. Author David Bellos, director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University, offers a lively and provocative reflection on translation in all its facets. “It is translation, more than speech itself, that provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and communicate thought,” Bellos writes. “We should do more of it.”

One of our judges calls Bellos’ book “witty and erudite,” and another says the book “taught me so much more about the beauty and power of being multi-lingual.” A third judge has a specific recommendation: “The chapter ‘How Many Words Do We Have for Coffee?’ is a gem.”

Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation
by Richard Sennett

The more diverse we become, the harder it becomes to get along. People don’t easily socialize with those of different backgrounds or habits, and our politics divide us into like-minded camps. So what can a multiracial, multicultural society do to encourage people to cooperate better with one another?

University of Cambridge sociologist Richard Sennett argues that cooperation is a craft, one that can be mastered. Modern developments, he writes, “may repress and distort our capacity to live together, but do not, cannot, erase this capacity.”

One judge lauds Sennett for providing “an impressively capacious analysis of the conflict that political philosophers since the Greeks have identified as the central conflict in human history-that between the individual and society.” Another notes that Sennett has “written several influential books, and the latest may be one of his finest.”

Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other
by Sherry Turkle

Communicating across distances has never been easier. Thanks to Facebook, a New Yorker knows instantly what his Muscovite friend ate for breakfast (and what he’s planning for lunch). Our computers connect us to one another in myriad ways. But the result isn’t an increase in connectivity; it’s an increase in loneliness. That’s why, as we enter the “robotic moment,” people old and young are starting to question what we’re losing as we gain.

Sherry Turkle, the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, argues for a reassessment of the role of devices and electronic connectivity in our modern life. “We deserve better,” Turkle writes. “When we remind ourselves that it is we who decide how to keep technology busy, we shall have better.”

Writes one judge: “In many ways this book is the technological companion to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.” Says another judge: “Turkle’s writing is particularly affecting when she relates her thinking on technology to her own relations with her daughter.”

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Our longlist was equally diverse and impressive, and included investigations of love and marriage, dignity and evil. These books, in search of community, looked backward and forward in time, as far away as across the globe and as nearby as a few city blocks.

Here is our complete longlist, in alphabetical order by author:

Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality by Elias Aboujaoude
In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea by John Armstrong
The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty by Simon Baron-Cohen
Is That A Fish In Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos
Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses & Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules by Pamela Haag
Dignity: The Essential Role It Plays in Resolving Conflict by Donna Hicks
Homesickness: An American History by Susan J. Matt
Love: A History by Simon May
Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation by Richard Sennett
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle
The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time by David Sloan Wilson

The post Can We All Get Along? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The poetry prize joins our existing book prize and high school essay competitions, all sponsored by the Southern California Gas Company.

We are also excited to announce the judging panel for the second annual Zócalo Public Square Book Prize, which will be awarded to the book published this year that most enhances our understanding of community–the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion–be it locally, regionally, nationally or globally. Last year’s prize was awarded to Peter Lovenheim for his book In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time. This year’s winner, who will deliver a lecture at an award ceremony in April 2012, will be selected by our esteemed judges:

Barbara Fairchild, former editor of Bon Appétit magazine
Kimberly Freeman, director of community relations for the Southern California Gas Company
Franklin Gilliam, Jr., dean of UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs
Gregory Rodriguez, founding director of Zócalo Public Square
Thaddeus Russell, professor of history and American studies at Occidental College and author of A Renegade History of the United States
Michele Siqueiros, executive director of the Campaign for College Opportunity
D.J. Waldie, essayist and author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir
Michael Woo, dean of California Poly Pomona’s College of Environmental Design and former Los Angeles city council member

Our hope is that these three prizes will further Zócalo’s mission of connecting people to ideas and to each other.

*Photo courtesy of QuietDangst.

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When Zócalo Public Square invited Los Angeles-area high school seniors to submit essays on the most powerful way to make their communities stronger, we received entries from dozens of schools across the region. Rodney Savannah‘s winning essay, about the challenges he’s faced growing up with a single mother in a crime-ridden area of south Los Angeles, stood out for its honesty and inspiring words about overcoming obstacles. Rodney detailed a plan to improve his neighborhood through motivating younger students to go to college. A senior at Crenshaw High School, Rodney is an aspiring doctor who is the captain of the tennis team. He will receive his $1,000 scholarship from Southern California Gas Company and read his essay at the First Annual Zócalo Public Square Book Prize Award Ceremony on April 8, 2011 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Grand Avenue. For more event details and to RSVP, please click here.

Kira Sandiford, a senior at Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, won second prize and $750 for her eloquent description of the importance of getting to know one’s neighbors and listening to their stories. Wendy Castillo, a senior at Downtown Magnets High School, won third prize and $500 for her essay, about changes she would make to public school systems.

Below is Rodney’s winning essay:

It was a typical Wednesday afternoon. My mom had just picked me up from Crenshaw High School and brought me home. When we got to our apartment, I saw a note on the door. My mom got to it first and, with a look of disbelief, began to break down and cry. Confused, I took the note away from her shaking hands and read the word that made my heart drop: Eviction.

That moment was a turning point in my life. As I sat there reading the note again, I began to think about all the problems my family and I have faced. From the day my father left up until we were evicted from that one-bedroom apartment, we have endured obstacles such as unemployment, welfare, and death. That day, I took a vow to end my family’s misfortune. I realized that college was my ticket to a brighter future. However, to make it to college, I knew I had to redirect my focus on academics. Since then, I have made school my first priority. My teachers have recognized my drive and have nominated me for the National Youth Leadership Forum on Medicine and the White Coat Honors Society. Although I have many responsibilities at home, like taking care of my younger sisters, I still manage to find time to stay involved in school activities and have volunteered for organizations like The Alliance for Children’s Rights and the Urban League. I have even had the chance to intern at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, which gave me the passion to become a doctor. It is the experience of overcoming my obstacles and putting myself in the position to go to college that has provided me the strength and leadership I need for the future.

I plan to use the confidence I gained from my experiences and spread it to my community. My neighborhood in south Los Angeles, whose beauty is masked by the desolation of poverty, goes widely unnoticed. There are young men who are full of potential, but their lack of support forces them into a life of crime. There are innocent children who, just like me, live in a single-parent home because their fathers abandoned them. There are mothers whose beautiful faces have aged because of the stress of working relentlessly to support their children. My community, once a thriving area, has become a stereotypical African-American neighborhood, full of drugs and rising crime rates. It is up to us to restore it back to its past glory.

The reconstruction of our community begins with the kids. The children that live around me are potential doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs. It breaks my heart to see that potential subdued by the roaring sound of gunshots and police cars. If we provide them with the courage to overcome their obstacles and stay focused, they will ultimately grow into successful adults. The day those kids discover their true potential will be the day the terrible cycle will be broken and our community will began to shine.

I feel like I am in the perfect position to help kids find the support they need to keep going. Coming from the same background, I know firsthand what it is like to feel alone and start to lose focus. I know what responsibilities come along with living in a single-parent home and how it can make you feel as if you are at a disadvantage when compared to the living situations of your peers. I want my accomplishments and my story to speak as a testimony to the kids in my community (and communities around the world) who are in my position and feel like giving up. The children are our future, so by reaching out to them and making sure each of them are on the right track, we can change the world one kid at a time. One day I hope to start my own scholarship foundation.

When it comes down to it, my community’s progress begins with me. My actions can trigger the rebirth of my neighborhood. That is why my mind is set on college. I know it is the key to a better tomorrow. It is my chance to remove every tear that has stained my mother’s cheeks and make her proud. By going to college, I can set a good example for my sisters and the kids of my community and provide them with a desire for higher education. I am in a crucial position. My next few steps in life can not only benefit myself, but also those around me. I plan to be the kind of leader and role model people will be happy to admire. Most of all, college will allow me to finally let go of my past. I will make sure that the next time I leave home, it won’t be because of an eviction notice, but because I’ll be chasing my dreams.

*Photo courtesy of LucasTheExperience.

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