Paul Wennberg

Paul Wennberg, Director of the Linde Center for Global Environmental Science at the California Institute of Technology, grew up in a small agricultural community in Vermont. He visited Zócalo two days before Halloween, and noted that in his hometown, “Halloween was walking to the five houses that you could walk to.” In Los Angeles, he said, “it’s certainly a lot more fun for the kids.” Read more about Wennberg below.

Q. What is your favorite word?

A. Action.

Q. What inspires you?

A. Music and curiosity.

Q. What is your favorite way to procrastinate?

A. The …

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With Ruins

by Li-Young Lee

Choose a quiet
place, a ruins, a house no more
a house,
under whose stone archway I stood
one day to duck the rain.

The roofless floor, vertical
studs, …

Randolph Roth on American Homicide

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Wrecking

by Colette LaBouff Atkinson

We ate, maybe.  We might have seen a movie.  Later, there was a Southern
California warm breeze we’d grown up with coming through.  He showed
me a …

The Aid Trap

The Aid Trap: Hard Truths About Ending Poverty
by R. Glenn Hubbard and William Duggan

Reviewed by Angilee Shah

In 2006, Warren Buffet made a $31 billion gift to the Gates Foundation. …

The Idea

by Mark Strand

For us, too, there was a wish to possess
Something beyond the world we knew, beyond ourselves,
Beyond our power to imagine, something nevertheless
In which we might …