To you, we now say: have you lost your sense of humor?
That George Clooney break-up is still just a rumor.
And besides, this past year wasn’t really so terrible.
Zócalo rhyming just might make it bearable.

This year, after all, the Cubs took the Series,
Gravitational wave detection proved Einstein’s Theory.
But, yes, the U.K. left the E.U. in the dust,
California, meanwhile, voted In Pot We Trust.

Once again #BlackLivesMatter put “post-race” to the lie,
Obama saw Cuba. Castro—finally—died.
Zika—dread virus—wreaked despair ’cross a continent,
Whilst ’round the world, populism was dominant.

The Olympics took Rio, Simone Biles charmed the nation,
Russian dopers were banned, Lochte trashed a gas station.
Civil War destroyed Syria and thousands lost lives,
The world followed on Twitter—with those who’d survived.

Peyton Manning claimed a Super Bowl, the Rams moved to L.A.
But sports’ biggest triumph was won by Beyoncé.
“Formation”—last-minute—stole the halftime show,
Then in dropped Lemonade, and the rest? Well, you know.

Justice Scalia’s death meant SCOTUS purgatory,
Sequels won the box office—Captain America and Finding Dory.
Fake headlines in newsfeeds, fake accounts at Wells Fargo.
The Mexican marines recaptured El Chapo.

Attackers flayed Brussels; Belgium was in mourning.
A Bastille Day assault forced France back to high warning.
Pulse nightclub, Orlando—an American tragedy.
Death and destruction all across Turkey.

Violence hit Germany at a Berlin Christmas market.
An ambassador in Ankara was an assassination target.
Oakland’s Ghost Ship fire left 36 killed.
Dakota pipeline protests kept oil from being drilled.

The Philippines picked Duterte and got a bloody drug war.
The refugee crisis worsened; countries didn’t open doors.
In October, Hurricane Matthew hit the Atlantic region,
Then earthquakes rocked Italy; fall was disaster season.

LeBron James redeemed himself and his hometown,
Leicester City won an unlikely Premier League crown.
Hamilton crushed the Tonys but the Oscars stayed so white,
Bob Dylan got a Nobel but declined Sweden’s invite.

All across America the fight for $15 was raged,
California led the way in passing a new minimum wage.
The state banned plastic bags and slapped a tax on cigarettes,
Kamala Harris went to Washington to rep CA Democrats.

Brangelina called it quits, Kim Kardashian was robbed in Paris.
About that Damn Daniel video … we’re all a little embarrassed.
After one too many rants, Kanye was hospitalized.
Roger Ailes was dumped by Fox News, then by the guy he advised.

Harambe was killed but lived on as a meme.
OJ Simpson again invaded TV screens.
Vin Scully retired; Dodger fans took it hard.
Exploding Samsung phones left their owners slightly charred.

RIP to Gwen Ifill, Merle Haggard, and Ali,
Gene Wilder, Janet Reno, novelist Harper Lee.
Deepest mourning went to beloved musicians
A handful of stars to whom we still listen:

The ballads of Juan Gabriel, the lungs of Sharon Jones,
The enigmatic verse that was Leonard Cohen’s alone.
The virtuosity of Prince that electrified us to the end,
That ineffable, inimitable David Bowie blend.

The year wasn’t all bad; Zócalo had moments great:
In London and Berlin—and the Aloha State,
With stops in Spain, Riverside, and downtown Fresno,
We pondered movies, demagogues, and even GMOs.

We dug into the depths of pothole covers and dictators,
The secret of an “Indian” star, and Minnesota’s love of taters.
A philosopher’s wisdom and a rising South L.A.,
Russia in the imagination and California neighborhoods today.

Did you read to the end? Did we miss a big story?
(Though by now you’re full up on sadness and glory.)
That’s it, for Zócalo rhymes and reviewing,
There’s more ahead next year: events and more brewing.

Leonard Cohen’s where we leave you, as the new year begins:
“There are cracks in everything / that’s how the light gets in.”

The post At Last! 2016 Is in the Past appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Picking favorites among the hundreds of essays we publish each year is hard—and dangerous, because you don’t want to leave anything delicious out. But after quite a bit of thought and re-reading, the 12 essays below stood out because they felt even fresher and more powerful today than when we first published them weeks or months ago.

How the Politics of Resentment Corrupted Wisconsin’s Culture of Nice
Way back in April, Katherine Cramer, a University of Wisconsin political scientist and author of The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, saw where the American elections were going through the lens of her home state, long before the rest of the country did. She shared her research, based on years of conversations with people in smaller towns and rural areas, about their anger at being left behind in an increasingly urban America. If you’d read Cramer’s essay in the spring, you wouldn’t have been surprised by the results in fall—especially in Wisconsin.

“Frivolous” Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive Communist Romania
Irina Dumitrescu, who teaches medieval literature at the University of Bonn, offers a beautiful personal essay about how her own path in life, starting as a Romanian immigrant to Canada, and how her translation of Romanian memoirs of the gulag taught her the value of the humanities. As Dumitrescu observes in the piece, “if the study of literature or history were really that pointless, a government trying to control the minds of its subjects would not go to the trouble of putting humanities students and professors in jail.”

From “America’s First ‘Indian’ TV Star Was a Black Man from Missouri” by John Turner

America’s First “Indian” TV Star Was a Black Man from Missouri
John Turner, a biographer and documentarian, tells the remarkable story of Korla Pandit, who, stymied by Hollywood racism, reinvented himself as a mystical Brahmin pianist. “The way he came to fame,” Turner writes, “is one of those only-in-America fables where the audience and the performer are both invested in the illusion.”

Witty Mosaics Offer a Beautiful Solution to the Pothole Problem
Mosaics, made of small bits of stone and glass fixed with mortar, are as durable as any asphalt. So why not use them to fix broken streets? Our Glimpses photo essay, accompanied by a short essay from Zócalo’s own Siobhan Phillips, shows the whimsical—and sturdy—mosaics that Chicago artist Jim Bachor created to fill some of the city’s many potholes.

Why It’s OK to Laugh About ISIS
Shazia Mirza, a British comedian of Pakistani Muslim descent, describes how she stands up to terrorists—and to right-wing critics—by joking about the absurdities of ISIS. “Now it’s time for Muslims to be funny,” she writes. “Let us fight our own war on terror with laughter—it may work even better than the bombs.”

Tater Tot Hotdish, Minnesota Soul Food
Ah, the comfort of the casserole. As a Minnesotan expat, novelist, and author Lori Ostlund pens an essay that hits home—perceptively picking up on her home state’s odd formality, emotional restraint, practicality, and the (hot) dish that captures it all. “I spent several years working toward a career in academia,” Ostlund writes, “engaged in the sort of critical analysis and textual parsing that would have had me discussing hotdish as a metaphor of community mingling, ingredients coming together to create a pragmatic citizenry where individual differences are buried beneath a blanket of cream of mushroom soup.”

From “Witty Mosaics Offer a Beautiful Solution to the Pothole Problem” by Siobhan Phillips

Winning Freedom From Guantánamo With Forbearance and Trust
Anne Richardson, director of the Consumer Law Project at Public Counsel, tells the tangled tale of successfully representing Obaidullah, a detainee at Guantánamo, which started with winning his trust. “During our regular phone conversations, which I took from home as they were scheduled very early West Coast time,” Richardson writes, “he loved it when my dog barked: It was a small but vivid reminder of the real world.”

The Heroin Epidemic Is Turning My Soup Kitchen Into an Emergency Room
Bill Burns is coordinator of the Preble Street Resource Center, a social service agency in Portland, Maine and has also worked with homeless people in San Antonio, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia. Burns describes—in wrenching detail—the work he and his colleagues do every day as first responders for clients suffering the effects of heroin and opiate addiction. He writes: “Scandalously, the cause of our current problem is not a virus but a series of deliberate policies that combined into disaster.”

The Little Dry Cleaning Shop Around the Corner
Vivian Bowers, who owns her family’s dry cleaning store on S. Central Avenue in Los Angeles, tells the difficult if romantic tale of the work that went into reviving her block—and so much of South L.A. She describes how, in 1994, as a single mom and against the wishes of her children, she took over the family dry cleaning business. Her kids worried that the business would go under and leave them with no income, but as Bowers observes, “it’s a timeless truth that people will always need to get their clothes cleaned.”

From “An All-Volunteer Clinic With Muslim Roots Brings the Community Together to Save Lives” by Muhammad Safwatullah

Film Noir’s Enduring Sympathy for the Devil
Author Michael Shelden, biographer of Graham Greene, explains why Greene’s film “The Third Man,” the noir classic about an unapologetic anti-hero, may resonate more powerfully in 2016 that it did when it was first made. “Why does film noir still have a large following today?” Sheldon asks. “Because we love moral ambiguity even more than audiences did in the middle of the last century, when everyone desperately needed an escape from wars and depressions. “

An All-Volunteer Clinic With Muslim Roots Brings the Community Together to Save Lives
Muhammad Safwatullah tells the very Californian story of Al-Shifa, the health clinic he manages near San Bernardino that serves a low-income, largely Latino clientele. “Without a clinic like ours close by,” he writes, “checkups would not happen and chronic conditions like diabetes, obesity, and heart disease would be left untreated.”

The Most Overlooked Resource in Fighting Violent Extremism: Moms
Counterterrorism efforts often fail to engage the families of aspiring jihadists, despite their ability and eagerness to help. Daniel Koehler, of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-radicalization Studies, tells the story of how he tried to change that. “In almost all previous attacks by lone actors or members of small terror cells, someone in the attackers’ close social environment recognized a disturbing change in their behavior,” Koehler writes. “Sometimes, this close relative or friend even knew about the attack plans.”

The post The Zócalo Dozen Soothe, Agitate, and Enlighten appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy seems scarily prescient today. Writing well before the twin shocks of the Brexit and the U.S. elections, the Georgetown political scientist makes a powerful case that popular democracy can be dangerous—and, provocatively, that irrational and incompetent voters should be excluded from democratic decision-making. The case for elitism in governance never read so well.

Mei Fong’s One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment digs into the history and politics of China’s famous one-child policy, digging into the social, economic and personal ramifications of limiting family size writ large. What makes it truly fascinating, however, is Fong’s attempt to address bigger questions. What does it mean to be a parent? What happens when the state puts limits on that most human desire? Fong released a Mandarin translation of the book too, which, because of censorship in China, she decided to circulate for free.

Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us takes the reader on a friendly romp through microbiology—a seemingly unlikely journey. Yong, who has an advanced degree in biology and writes about science for The Atlantic, tags along to a zoo with one researcher as he samples microbes from a pangolin. Later, he sits beside another microbiologist on a London park bench, as her son draws pictures of cells. It’s a trip into one of the most important scientific revolutions of the last decade: scholars’ new understanding of and appreciation for the microbiome, the vast universe of microbes that live within and around us, and which may be as important to our biology as our own cells.

Sean Kelley’s The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare performs a feat of historical forensics, unearthing unconventional and hard-to-find records in an attempt to individualize and re-humanize a group of Africans who were taken from Sierra Leone and delivered into slavery in South Carolina during 1754 and 1755. Kelley tells the story of their voyage on the Hare and recovers their identities as people, not just slaves. His work is now being incorporated into a larger digital database of similar efforts.

Witold Rybczynski’s Now I Sit Me Down is a book about chairs that’s so good it’ll be hard for you to stay seated: you’ll want to stand up and shout about the surprising details it offers. Chair sitting originated in China, it turns out, while pharaohs first thought of the folding stool. (A reasonable alternate title might have been Everything You Wanted to Know About Chairs But Were Afraid to Ask.) Rybczynski has created an interdisciplinary masterpiece, connecting the seated experience to art, design, engineering, social history, geography, religion, and war. Whether you’re a chaise longue or a Barcalounger kind of person, you’ll love it.

Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, an unlikely bestseller when it was published in Germany in 2015, gives voice to Earth’s most majestic flora. Wohlleben, a former forester, writes that trees form their own communities and friendships, talk to one another, even protect one another—and he asserts that we humans must do a better job of understanding them and protecting them in turn. Wohlleben’s knowledge of trees is both authoritative and whimsical, but always deeply underpinned with urgency. His book was released in English translation this fall.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War is a meditation on wars everywhere: Is there an ethical way for winners and losers to remember–and in some cases, forget—brutal conflict? Taking the reader on a journey from the war cemeteries of Vietnam to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington D.C. and beyond, novelist and USC professor Nguyen, born in wartime Vietnam but emigrated to California as a child, examines how the arts (including visual arts, literature, and film) impact and enrich our memories of war. A finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction for 2016, the book complements Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year.

Louisa Thomas’s Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams reminds us that Melania Trump won’t be the only First Lady born in a foreign land; she’ll share the distinction with Louisa Adams, the wife of president John Quincy Adams. Born in London in 1775, and 26 years old when she first arrived in the U.S., Adams participated actively in her husband’s political career, writing extensively about her public and private lives. Thomas mines Adams’ work to reveal the 6th First Lady’s interior world, including her struggles with her identity as an American woman.

Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog, a new memoir, recounts how the legendary Nike creator borrowed $50 from his father to strike out on his own and sell shoes—and how his vision evolved over 50 years into one of the most recognizable brands in the world. Personal, candid, accessible, and entirely devoid of jargon, the book could—indeed, should—be a huge influence on business memoirs in the future.

Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness combines the author’s uncanny underwater experiences interacting with octopi, squid and cuttlefish near Australia with some heady (or perhaps limb-y) thoughts about brains and consciousness. A philosopher of science, Godfrey-Smith ponders the significance of creatures whose neural systems lie not only in their heads, but also in their appendages. These beasts think, at some level, with their arms. You can think about that while you hold this book in your hands.

The post After a Stomach-Churning Year, Feed Your Head With Terrific Nonfiction appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.