New at Zócalo

  • Interview

    Raven Chacon Makes Noise

    As Zócalo Presents His Work in ‘How Do We Hear America?,’ the Composer Shares His Liner Notes on Composition, U.S. History, and the Los Angeles Music Scene

    Interview by Eryn Brown |

    Raven Chacon has been making noise, literally and otherwise, since he was a youngster growing up in New Mexico. Fascinated by instruments of all kinds (those he’s bought and those …

  • Prizes

    Announcing the 2024 Zócalo Book Prize Shortlist

    Congratulations to Authors Greg Berman & Aubrey Fox, Myisha Cherry, Henry Grabar, Cameron McWhirter & Zusha Elinson, and Héctor Tobar

    What do incremental change, forgiveness, parking, guns, and race have in common? They are all forces that strengthen and/or undermine human connectedness, social cohesion, and community—and the subjects of the …

  • Essay

    Beyond the ‘Dark Fog of Disdain,’ San Francisco Is Still There

    How Revisiting a Children’s Book Helped Me See the City by the Bay, On and Off the Page

    by Larry Gordon |

    For a young bookworm like me in 1960s New Jersey, almost nothing was more exciting in elementary school than ordering my own paperbacks from the Scholastic Book catalog. I would …

  • Connecting California

    Come Home, Kamala

    The Vice Presidency, Under Biden, Is a Lose-Lose Proposition. And the California Governorship Is About to Be Open

    by Joe Mathews |

    Come back, Kamala. Come back.

    Back to California, where you might have a future.

    Away from Washington, D.C., where they will never give you a fair shake.

    You’re politically trapped. You’re the unpopular …