My first instinct when my grandma died was to purchase and draw flowers for her. A traditional gesture of sympathy, the flowers seemed fitting—but the circumstances were unprecedented.

It was April 2020. My grandma was exposed to COVID in the memory unit of her nursing home and died within the week. Like so many families, we would not be able to gather to mourn her or to say goodbye in person.

I continued to buy flowers in the weeks that followed to enliven that cavernous spring. Time, or what I had understood of it, lifted away. The days blended together as I grieved my grandmother and the world that the pandemic had, at least temporarily, taken from us.

Gradually, the flowers and the act of drawing them proposed an alternative to this sensation of suspended or absent time: The time of cut flowers.

Two deaths punctuate this time. The first is swift and takes place when the flowers are clipped from the earth. The second death unfolds in the vase over the course of a week or so as the flowers shrivel, rot, and dry to a crisp.

The word “death” doesn’t fully capture this trajectory. What I’m describing, more precisely, is the process of losing life. At the same time, the opposite is true: Flowers are a sign of springtime, of renewal and rebirth.

In between these two deaths is a period of intense intimacy. Trapped together in the vase, the flowers’ stems, petals, and leaves intertwine so that observers can’t always distinguish one from another. Of course, in this case, intimacy with one or several implies isolation and exclusion from others.

The flowers’ predicament seemed to echo our own in a moment so marked by literal and figurative deaths, suspended time, and enforced intimacy or isolation. My flowers coped with what was happening to them in different ways.

Two ranunculus I picked up at the farmers market ended up locked in a passionate—but doomed—affair. Their knotted stems and tightly bound petals encircled each other in a tragic embrace.

The peonies came next. Their petals unfurled with exuberance, without caution. They got too close to their neighbors, spilled their drinks, and fell out of their chairs.

I painted the tulips too late. They were already wilting, tips turning yellow. Unable to hold their weight, the heads of the languishing flowers fell to the table.

Was it really the very end? One particularly dreary week, a dear friend read me a poem called “The Joy” (“La Dicha”) by Jorge Luis Borges. “Everything happens for the first time,” Borges explains.

I fetched roses that Saturday.

If mourning is a time-bound process whereby the mourner assimilates their loss and eventually returns, perhaps somewhat transformed, to a state of “normalcy,” what happens when one wreckage piles on another?

The collective moment the pandemic summed has passed. The ritual of drawing cut flowers was part of that moment, when a quiet violence seized loved ones in the stifling privacy—rather, enforced isolation—of the home or hospital. The drawings aspired to mold a slow, shapeless, or even absent time into a coherent form.

Today, a global polycrisis consumes our attention. Time accelerates and seems to run out as each day brings more death and the failure to end indiscriminate killing.

In a moment of war and mass violence, watched from afar or experienced first-hand, we might imagine that the time of cut flowers plays over and over. This time, its repetition of loss and renewal happens loudly, in public, and with such speed that the boundary between the two seem to dissolve. Renewal, when it occurs, is experienced at the same time as mounting losses.

From this perspective, mourning loses its coherence: It does not take place after but during and always.

The time of cut flowers reminds us that the world, cherished or despised, never ends just once.

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It spiraled from there, an easy escape from what was becoming an increasingly rough year.

Ever since the sitcom emerged in the late 1940s, the format has offered a bulwark against reality.

The first sitcom, short for “situation comedy,” featured real-life married couple Mary Kay and Johnny Stearns. The domestic comedy, characterized by its screwball sensibilities, drew from the couple’s own experiences as newlyweds. (As Stearns later explained, “If Mary Kay got stuck in an elevator, it would give me an inspiration for us getting stuck in an elevator.”) By the time Mary Kay and Johnny wrapped in 1950, the early sitcom ecosystem was flourishing as adaptations of American radio comedy programs began making the leap from the airwaves to television, with shows like I Love Lucy and The Goldbergs establishing the familiar lexicon of the genre we know today.

From the beginning, there was a reassuring sameness to the narrative structure. Turn on an episode, and you knew what to expect; should you have to step out for a moment, you could trust that when you returned, you’d find the same familiar faces interacting together on screen, like no time at all had passed.

Most importantly in sitcoms, there’s an implicit understanding: nothing will ever go that wrong. That’s because the sitcom is an episodic fantasy of life. Sure, the real world peeks and prods at the edges of the sitcom universe, but you know that here a resolution will always be forthcoming in 30 minutes or less.

It’s what makes the sitcom such an ideal comfort watch. Or at least that’s what it’s been for me the past few months, after some unexpected health issues led me to spend a good chunk of it in bed.

It was when I found myself rewatching the same episode of Frasier for the third time in as many months that I started to realize just how swept up in sitcoms I had become.

The season four episode is classic Frasier, with a stream of jokes, including a set up where Frasier’s brother, Niles Crane, takes out a magazine advertisement in hopes of expanding his private psychiatry practice. The script was intended to read: Jung specialist servicing individuals, couples… groups… Satisfaction guaranteed… Tell me where it hurts.

Niles is played by David Hyde Pierce, whose comic instincts verge on poetic, and the punchline comes when he learns that the magazine got the copy wrong. Flustered, he storms into the room to tell Frasier what happened. Rather than Jung specialist, they’d printed “hung specialist.”

Without missing a beat, Frasier asks, drolly, “Any calls?”

A white-faced Niles responds, “It’s a telethon.”

I could probably watch his delivery 100 times, and it would still make me smile.

Maybe, I told myself, this is me coping. Research does suggest that repeated exposure to positive distractions and familiar fiction can have beneficial health effects.

But it also felt a little too easy to get lost in this rosy glow of syndication—a gleam you can now live in perpetuity, thanks to streaming.

It made me think about the late French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. Toward the end of the 20th century, he argued that society was losing the distinction between the cultural products we consume and the real-life things that they are based on. He didn’t point to the sitcom, but surely, it’s an example of this—a simulacrum of American life. We’re watching a writers’ room’s idea of a make-believe U.S., drawing comfort from a false nostalgia of a world that was never really there in the first place.

The sitcom’s departure from reality is only becoming more pronounced with time. The genre has traditionally centered on the lives of “middle class” characters, but while the signifiers of class on television have always been aspirational, as the financial gulf widens between these characters and their real-life counterparts off screen, it has made sitcoms feel increasingly fantastical. For a point of comparison, at the start of the ’70s—the decade that brought us The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Jeffersons, Laverne & Shirley, and the list goes on—61% of American adults were considered middle class, according to Pew Research Center data; by 2015, amid rising inequality, only half of the population fit the definition.

This could be one of the reasons why, today, there’s such a demand out there for classic sitcoms. We can’t live these lives in the real world, so we can at least live them second-hand on screen.

The escape into sitcoms increased in the pandemic, with Nielson reporting an audible uptick in viewership during COVID’s height, noting that “when audiences needed a break from reality, they traveled back in time to tried-and-true picks like Friends, Family Matters, The Golden Girls, and Two and a Half Men.”

In an unprecedented moment that wiped away so many of the things that sitcoms promise—connection, community, stability—is it any surprise that more people sought the comfort of these fables of what life could look like?

It’s certainly what’s drawn me to them now.

I’ve come to think of this year as my year of sitcoms, to crib off the title of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the Ottessa Moshfeghi novel that’s neither restful nor relaxing.

Like Moshfeghi’s heavily medicated narrator who tries to escape her life through sleep, I know on some level, I’m hiding away in the well-worn grooves of these characters’ healthy, happy fictions.

But the pull of the sitcom is seductive. Watching them can feel like living in a day dream. You’re staring across the screen at lives that, on the surface, seem like they could resemble your own, except here, everything is shaped around human connection, and the worst thing that can happen to you is that you’ll learn a life lesson. 

I know life is not a sitcom. But the more of them I watch, the more I wish we could take inspiration from the worlds they’ve imagined and bring the best of them into our own. Because all I know is that I’m not ready to wake up yet.

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It is early August 2022 and I am in San Francisco for a few days. In urban areas with large gay populations such as Los Angeles, where I’m from, and here, monkeypox is on the mind of all my gay friends, and a topic of great interest among my straight ones. As with the first days of COVID-19, this consciousness seems to have come out of nowhere. Only weeks ago monkeypox seemed like a minor issue. Now there are more and more stories of friends of friends who have contracted it—experiences of the worst pain ever, like broken glass scraping on skin, and of the horror when the lesions travel to the genitals and anal canal, where the pain is constant and agonizing.

For those of us who are sexually active gay men, the timing seems particularly cruel. It was only recently that the shadow of COVID lifted a bit, giving something of a return to normalcy in regards to sexual practices. Monkeypox spreads through close contact, particularly sexual contact, and many gay men have contracted it. Sex and physical intimacy are dangerous again. It’s time to once again limit sexual contact—to heave another sigh, accept the new reality, and try and find a way to get the vaccine.

It isn’t easy. I had registered for the vaccine in Los Angeles and in nearby Long Beach, but had been unable to obtain it. Now, in San Francisco, at a little after 8 in the morning on a Tuesday, a friend texts me that he’d gotten out of bed at 4:30 a.m. to get in line at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Rumor was, they had a batch of monkeypox vaccine—maybe 600 doses, no one knows for sure—which they were going to start giving out at 8 a.m.

When my friend arrived at 5:30 a.m. there was already a two-block line, and he was lucky number 125—assured he would get the vaccine that day. His text urges me to get down to SF General ASAP. I pull on some clothes, call a Lyft, and rush out the door. I haven’t had my coffee yet, and I have a work Zoom scheduled later, but this may be my only chance.

When I get there, the line is down to one block long, and there is a moment of joy and relief when a smiling health outreach worker hands me a paper slip: number 531. I will get my first monkeypox vaccine dose that day! She also gives me a questionnaire to fill out and a small, bright yellow pencil, as if I were about to commence a round of miniature golf. I try to remember the last time I have used or even held a pencil. Filling out the form in faint graphite feels somehow inadequate to the importance of the moment.

The vaccine line snakes along slowly but constantly. It is a warm day in the city, and it’s nice to be in the sun. I look around at my companions in line. We are all of us gay men, most alone, some in pairs. I have flashbacks to the early days of the AIDS crisis. The desperate waiting for initial treatments, taking an early HIV test and waiting an unnerving two weeks for the result, struggling to get the first doses of combination therapies. We were stigmatized in those early days, and we fear we could be stigmatized anew.

And of course there are more recent flashbacks, to COVID-19—the confusion and anxiety for everyone seeking to get vaccinated and the glorious memory of getting that first dose, and the sense of liberation and newfound safety that came with it.

About halfway through the line, an earnest young activist hands each of us a card urging us to sign a petition demanding the government take more urgent steps to fight monkeypox, including making more vaccine doses available immediately. Later, near the vaccine site entrance, I come across a huge pile of petition cards discarded on a bench. Political apathy will always exist to some degree, but I wonder how much this castoff mound may also speak to the number of gay men who feel exhausted and overwhelmed in the face of a seemingly endless barrage of political and health threats.

Getting the vaccine goes amazingly smoothly. I walk to a numbered table where an intern in scrubs greets me warmly and transcribes the information on my penciled questionnaire into a database. I go upstairs to receive my vaccine. An older, jovial male nurse smiles broadly at me, offers me a seat, and asks: Which arm? The injection is painless, and I do not at first realize it is over. I see the nurse toss my used syringe into a gigantic red sharps box, on top of hundreds of other spent doses. There we are, thrown together, as we were in line.

I think of all the death and suffering among gay men that the organized, friendly health professionals at San Francisco General Hospital must have seen since the first days of the AIDS epidemic. In some ways this is just another response to a health crisis, offered generously and efficiently, without judgment, and mustering the greatest resources they are capable of providing.

I walk out of the vaccine facility with a lightness in my step, knowing that I am one of the lucky ones. There are still vaccines available today, just as there had been when my friend texted me a few hours earlier. I text other friends to tell them to come down here, and see other men doing the same. We are in this together—men who are still in many ways outsiders to mainstream American sexual culture, who have achieved a certain level of liberation in our celebration of the joy and intimacy of sex, and who, if we are lucky, have good friends who reach out in a time of crisis and tell us to get our ass down here right away.

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The study of epidemics has routinely centered around what medical historian Charles Rosenberg calls a “dramaturgic structure”: a story of infection that builds to a climax of widespread illness and woe, and then comes to a definitive end. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has defied this structure, failing to come to a complete stop. But this is not the first time in history that the social and cultural impacts of an epidemic have continued past the time that the state and much of society declare that it is over. Epidemics often live far beyond their supposed ends. My research into 19th-century cholera epidemics in Argentina’s northwestern province of Tucumán shows that epidemics don’t have a single, definitive end, but instead two incomplete ones: the celebrated end when an authority declares the outbreak over, and the muted end brought about by gradual loss of interest.

Three cholera epidemics befell Tucumán in the 19th century, in 1867-68, in 1886-87, and in 1894-95. Each time, the bacterium vibrio cholerae, which causes the disease, arrived in the province through trade and migration. During the 19th century, new railroad lines connected the populous coast with the nation’s interior, radically transforming Tucumán, a place where social, economic, and political life was dictated by sugarcane cultivation and refining. The new train lines allowed the sugar industry to import improved machinery and to attract workers for the yearly harvest. They also brought new diseases to the province, where endemic malaria and occasional bouts of measles and smallpox had already taken hold. Cholera was one of these new illnesses. The gastrointestinal disease benefited from the lack of plumbing in the 19th century that moved human waste in a sanitary and efficient manner. As a result, urban and confined spaces were prime areas for outbreaks.

In Argentina, cholera first landed at the bustling ports of Buenos Aires aboard many of the ships that arrived daily to transport people and goods. Global trade routes facilitated cholera’s transit from the waters of the Indian Ocean, its point of origin, to Argentina. Once there, it moved over the country’s new rail lines to the interior provinces.

Cholera spread through trade and migration routes. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection.

The first two cholera epidemics paralyzed Tucumán’s economy and society—especially the sugar industry that dominated all areas of the social fabric, and that provided elites with the foundation for their political and economic power. As news reached Tucumán of a possible outbreak, officials mustered resources to prepare. They transformed two rail stations into sanitary stations to inspect and fumigate goods and travelers arriving in the province. Doctors prepared labs to inspect bodily fluids for vibrio cholerae, to confirm disease and enforce isolation practices. Cholera particularly impacted the popular classes, who lived in makeshift homes built from found materials, with multiple families sharing the space. Many businesses closed, either from their own decision or because workers were staying home out of fears of contracting the disease. The affluent retreated to their private homes in the mountains, both as a form of social distancing and under the belief that higher altitude was salubrious.

The epidemics also created national political turmoil. In 1887, a mob in the southern countryside rose up against and killed volunteer Spanish Red Cross workers from Buenos Aires, believing free medications were laced with poison. From there, the mob moved throughout the countryside in search of other Red Cross workers. The event became national news, with sectors of the press considering the attack an act of xenophobia. The national government used the attack—and the supposed general mishandling of the epidemic in Tucumán—as a pretext to remove the local government.

On November 6, 1894, as summer approached in Argentina, the Tucumán newspaper El Orden reported that the province was “entering the season of the year in which the warm temperature is ideal for epidemics.” The editors urged the local government to enforce preventative measures, calling for street cleaning, for draining the pools of stagnant water that collected during the rainy summer, and for the province’s small cadre of health officials to monitor the living conditions of the popular classes.

The paper reported on the situation throughout the summer. Suspected cases of cholera appeared by the end of November, but through February of 1895 there was nothing concrete. Then, in March, cases erupted. El Orden reported, for instance, that one man abandoned his sick wife, María Gutiérrez, in front of the sole hospital in the provincial capital, San Miguel. Gutiérrez is one of the few cholera victims recorded by name; in other instances, the newspaper simply wrote about illnesses of “a man on the 1000 block of San Juan Avenue” or “20 cases in the town of San Felipe.”

Despite the newspaper’s careful record of the epidemic, however, official government documents reported no cholera epidemic in Tucumán in 1894-95. The province’s governor gave an annual address declaring early preventative measures a resounding success. He applauded the provincial Hygiene Commission for coming in under budget on a program to disinfect all people, goods, and things entering Tucumán along railway lines, and even went so far as to suggest that public health conditions in Tucumán had improved.

Authorities and local journalists had completely different interpretations of the epidemic. Perhaps fearing a repeat of 1887, the government rushed to declare the 1894 outbreak over before it had even begun.

In my research, I used El Orden, one of the only sources documenting the 1894-95 epidemic, to track how the muted end of the epidemic—the flipside of the provincial government’s declaration that the outbreak had never even begun—unfolded. I searched the papers for articles reporting deaths. While the newspaper at first vigilantly documented the epidemic, with cholera dominating its front pages, after a few weeks, its reporting on new cases and deaths became less frequent. Eventually, new cases and deaths were relegated to the back pages, alongside business advertisements and classifieds.

The last cases reported by the newspaper noted 10 peons dying at the mill of industrialist-politician Wenceslao Posse, three at the General Hospital of San Miguel, and many more cases in the immediate countryside of San Miguel. From there, discussions of the epidemic evolved into more general concerns about the continued growth of the province’s population and worries over a proliferation of shantytowns, few paved streets, limited potable water access, and having one of the nation’s highest infant mortality rates. The public slowly lost interest in cholera, even as deaths continued, evidenced by sporadic mentions buried in the pages of El Orden.

The epidemic’s slow fade-out came from simple fatigue: Actors across the social spectrum were tired of working to prevent the disease, and balked when preventative measures created economic costs. Put another way, for both the celebrated and muted ends, the epidemic ended when the market and public health could not work in sync. The points of reckoning just came at different times for different sectors of society.

Much of the same is seen in the current pandemic, whose endpoint has been anything but clear. As the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and municipalities relax guidelines regarding quarantine and masking, arguing that COVID has reached a state of endemicity, others reject the idea of ending public health interventions and resigning ourselves to a future of regular outbreaks. Still others argue that the end of the epidemic does not come from lifting restrictions, but from reinforcing measures that protect the vulnerable sections of society, like the immunocompromised, those with vulnerable conditions, and the elderly.

The process of calling an end to the current pandemic is difficult and uncertain. One lesson from Tucumán is that it is likely not up to us to declare the end of COVID, but to future generations who will look back and see through the contradictions we leave in our historical material.

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Growing up, few things loomed quite as large as a trip to the buffet. I say the buffet because the chafing dishes all blur together—part and parcel of one great, endless table; a physical manifestation of the infinite scroll before the infinite scroll had even been invented. To call it a meal would feel disingenuous; nothing short of “trip” captured the feeling of the experience, which stretched time and space and stomachs.

I’ve been thinking about buffets lately because, if you haven’t heard, they are back. The pandemic is far from over, but the health restrictions that turned restaurants and grocery stores away from self-serve buffets and salad bars have been lifted. And rather than the death for buffets that so many predicted in 2020 and 2021, the all-you-can-eat model has returned—modified somewhat, revamped with social distancing measures, but present all the same.

What is it about the buffet that keeps us coming back for seconds (and thirds, and fourths)?

The modern American buffet owes a debt to the smorgasbord, Scandinavia’s bread-and-butter table. The spread, which emerged in the 16th century, has its roots in the more formal brännvinsbord tradition, a spirits table that was served at banquets. Scandinavian immigrants brought the “smorgy” tradition with them to the U.S. in the late 1800s (the term smorgasbord reportedly first appearing in American print in 1893), where it merged with other fledgling forms of the buffet here. Historian Jan Whitaker has mapped the concept’s early history, from the “supper clubs” of the colonial era to the “free lunches” of the 1800s—spreads of food put out by drinking taverns to boost sales of accompanying alcohol. These became “buffets or cafés,” where, for a nominal fee, businessmen could secure prepared food without hassle.

Temperance movement teetotalers tried to scuttle these early buffets, but the model re-emerged, adapting to the times. During the Great Depression, for instance, the all-you-can-eat format was used as a gimmick to get people back in restaurants. The hope was that by creating a set price for an unlimited quantity of inexpensive food, people would be more incentivized to dine out. Even etiquette maven Emily Post helped promote this style of dining, with a calculated 1933 endorsement of the newly invented buffet server, which housed boiling water in a dish’s base to ensure that food stayed hot.

But the buffet we know today wouldn’t be what it was without Las Vegas. As the story goes, El Rancho Vegas, the first casino resort on what would become the Vegas Strip, was trying to figure out how to keep visitors from leaving after the evening headliner finished their set. The answer was the Chuck Wagon (later renamed Buckaroo) buffet, which debuted in 1946 and charged $1 for “every possible variety of hot and cold entrées to appease the howling coyote in your innards.” It was a hit. Other casinos scrambled to match the midnight all-you-can-eat supper—and by the 1950s, the Vegas buffet concept wasn’t just for late-night patrons with the Dunes and the Last Frontier resorts introducing morning “hunt breakfasts,” which took the name of a brunch forerunner, often served with champagne, popular among the U.K. elite.

This rise in buffet culture ballooned beyond Vegas, in chains like Sizzler and among mom and pop Chinese restaurants (the first Chinese buffet dates at least as far back as an advert for Chang’s Restaurant posted in the 1949 Los Angeles Evening Citizen News). My dad, for one, swears by Shakey’s bunch of lunch buffet. He describes the wonderment he felt sitting down for the first time in the 1970s to unlimited quantities of pizza, garlic bread, chicken. To him, the appeal wasn’t just about the value—though the value, he emphasizes, was incredible—nor was it the quality (which was good!). It was about the freedom—almost anyone could afford to sit down in Shakey’s and eat like a king.

It was this sense of awe that he passed down to me as a kid in the ‘90s, just as buffet culture in the U.S. arguably hit its peak. Searching my memories of this moment (to date it, this is the time when the term “Super Buffet” hit the collective American vocabulary), they almost feel as if they’re pulled out of that scene in Mad Men where the Draper family picnics in the park and just leaves all of their containers behind them on the grass on the way out. Just as littering wasn’t recognized as a global problem before the 1970s, I never questioned at the time the post-Cold War exuberance and hyper-consumption that Peak Buffet exemplified. I just remember the thrill of going back for plate after plate of food. This was the cheap abundance the era seemingly promised.

But like so much of that decade, the price tag was there, even if I wasn’t willing to see it yet. The food waste the buffet engenders can be nothing short of shameful—one 2017 report found that just over half of food put out in hotel breakfast buffets is actually consumed. And then there are the health concerns (one food safety trade publication charmingly dubbed it the “all-you-can-eat illness”), which had curtailed the buffet’s ubiquity even before COVID hit.

But the buffet can evolve. Take the position of Food Unfolded, a European Union-funded platform for reconsidering the future of food. It proposes we can rethink the buffet coming out of COVID in a way that makes a path for them to serve sustainable and fairly produced food and minimize waste and germs.

The potential to recreate itself in better ways, after all, is in the buffet’s very DNA. Its earliest iteration, feasting, is a tradition that dates back centuries, in foodways around the world. Cultures have long used such all-you-can-eat affairs to promote feelings of fraternity, to repurpose leftovers, and even as a source of culinary innovation, as the need to differentiate dishes demands new ways of mixing ingredients.

I admit it: I miss the buffet. With COVID cases back on the rise, I won’t be returning to one anytime soon. But I look forward to the day I’ll be back to fill my plate once again. Because a truth about the buffet is that it keeps you wanting more.

It makes me think back to my family’s favorite buffet story, which takes place, fittingly, just a few miles off the Las Vegas Strip at Sam’s Town’s now-shuttered “Great Buffet.” As we were nearing the end of the night, a family friend opened her purse, placed a napkin over its contents, and scooped a serving of trifle—a dessert with thin layers of cake soaked in sherry or wine, fruit, and cream—straight inside. I remember the jiggle as it settled before she carefully closed the bag around it.

When she caught us, seasoned buffet veterans, staring, she looked at the purse, looked again at us, and said, “In case I get hungry later.”

The post The Buffet Is Dead. Long Live the Buffet! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Again, we find the ’90s on our minds.  We ride a wave of nostalgia, seeking solace in those pre-COVID, pre-smart phone times. People and groups often feel nostalgic for the past when current circumstances are deficient, leaving us with a sense that something valuable has been lost, an unsettling discontinuity between past and present. Nostalgia often gets a bad rap: Critics dismiss it as regressive or reactionary, a sign that our view of the past is uncritically monolithic, making it easy to adhere to a rigid ideology. However, as those of us who study nostalgia can attest, it is also a complex, ambivalent emotion that can improve our personal and social wellbeing. In times like ours, immersing in a classic ’90s movie like Reality Bites may be a sign of emotional and psychological health, and a way of moving forward.

That millennials and Gen Xers are nostalgic for the 1990s is to be expected—we are typically nostalgic for the times in which we came of age. But the current ’90s nostalgia craze is a broader cultural phenomenon. Members of Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, are nostalgic for this decade that they didn’t even live through. Such “displaced nostalgia” is easily triggered by the way particular eras are represented in popular culture. Today we are awash in ’90s nostalgia, as evidenced by the resurgence of Friends and reboots of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Wonder Years, Saved by the Bell, and Sex and the City, among others. In the world of fashion, grunge has returned—witness the prevalence of distressed jeans—along with graphic tees, platform shoes, and cropped tops. Bands from the 1990s are also making comebacks: the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls. And books are dedicated to the decade.

In the early 1990s, my dissertation advisor, Jerry Markle, and I conducted a study that asked over 200 college students the question: “If you could step into a time machine and press any year to go to—forward, or backward in time—what year would you pick and why?” The majority of students, young Gen Xers at the time, chose decades they never knew firsthand, the most popular being the 1960s. Respondents, likely reacting to the ways that decade had been mythologized in pop culture, perceived the 1960s as a time when young adults had more freedom. As one student, who chose 1969, told us, “This was a time where it was acceptable to be lost and confused and not have an understanding of where tomorrow is going. We can’t do that today.” Students’ comments showed they associated the 1960s with music, free love, and drugs. A student who selected 1968 did so because “there was love in the air, lots of good drugs and the Grateful Dead had just begun…also, there was no AIDS and everybody was having sex.”

If we were to conduct that survey today, what would we find? What explains Gen Z expressing displaced nostalgia for the 1990s? Popular culture again may give us clues but there are other factors that explain the trend. Consider the key events that have shaped Gen Z: the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001; the Great Recession of 2007-2009; gun violence (Gen Z has been called the “School Shooting Generation”); weather disasters caused by climate change; extreme political polarization; and COVID-19. Faced constantly with disaster, it’s no wonder young people seek escape beyond their times.

They also seek escape beyond their technological milieu. The 1990s were the last decade before the internet and smart phones took over people’s lives and changed the way we consume culture. We still made mixtapes for ourselves or our friends, taking great pleasure in compiling songs onto cassette tapes. There was also more excitement in chance encounters—when you heard your favorite songs play on the car radio, or when a particularly juicy, train-wrecky installment of Behind the Music aired on VH1. Today, with streaming, we can binge almost any television program over a weekend. The built-in anticipation of waiting to watch your favorite shows on a particular night of the week is gone.

Technology has transformed face-to-face interactions and relationships, too. MIT social psychologist Sherry Turkle has warned of technology’s deleterious effects on our ability to meaningfully communicate with one another and build empathy. As much as our technological devices can do, they are no substitute for authentic human relationships, which feature raw emotion, complex verbal and nonverbal cues, and genuine concern about others’ wellbeing. Our young people, the born-digital generation, experience a great deal of digital stress.

In recent years, during class discussions about technology and stress, many students in my sociology classes have expressed a desire to opt out of social media platforms, and to put away their phones for a while. They report feeling an obligation to be reachable, all the time. And the inevitable social comparisons that social media platforms facilitate has concerning implications for mental health, as well.

A big part of the appeal of Friends, and perhaps a reason for its huge resurgence, could very well be the novelty of seeing young adults navigating relationships and experiences with one another, and not through digital devices. When the characters meet at Central Perk, their local café hangout, they interact face-to-face. In real life today, coffee shops are often filled with atomized individuals tuned into their phones or laptops. Cell phones have become a ubiquitous “involvement shield”—sociologist Erving Goffman’s term for a social cue indicating that the individual is not engaged in the physical space they are occupying. Surely, the (over)use of digital devices has adversely affected the vibrancy of public spaces, the sense of shared community with others, and awareness of what is happening in one’s surroundings. Perhaps the current nostalgic turn to the ’90s can facilitate an intentional rejection of being so glued to our phones.

Social psychological research shows that nostalgia can facilitate continuity of identity, protect against loneliness, and promote healthy connections with others. In times of great uncertainty, it may be healing to put on some ripped jeans and a baggy t-shirt, invite some friends over, and play your favorite mixtape (which probably features songs by Nirvana, Boyz II Men, and R.E.M). Nostalgic reverie can give way to a future-directed nostalgia that envisions a brighter future. It may be that we can all find some inspiration in looking back.

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Today their conversation seems darkly humorous. Kavita’s recommendation to get the flu shot held up. But as we all know now, SARS-CoV-2 rapidly became the most important pathogen of concern. The friend was absolutely right to have worried about it—a lot.

After two years of evolving science and persistent uncertainty, one thing has become clear: People increasingly mistrust public health agencies and the scientists who inform these policies because our information cycles fundamentally are mismatched to the way the scientific community develops recommendations and guidance.

The virus that unleashed COVID-19 did not arrive with an instruction manual, much less GoPro cameras to let us observe exactly how it affects individuals and populations. To learn how the virus behaves, scientists need to research and evaluate it, and to synthesize their findings—and to repeat the process every time a new variant emerges. Yes, the scientific community has mobilized to share information, lifting the paywalls that limit access to scholarly journals and innovating to ensure new studies are read broadly and quickly. But a significant gap remains between early research findings and implementable, science-based recommendations.

The time it takes to bridge that gap—occasionally days but more often weeks or months—is way too long for a world in which stories go viral in minutes, and content creators race for consumers’ eyes and ears.

A recent example is unfolding still. On November 26, 2021, the World Health Organization announced the identification of Omicron as a “variant of concern.” Scientists around the globe rapidly gathered, shared, and analyzed information, then began deliberating how this variant behaved among different groups (e.g., vaccinated versus unvaccinated, children versus adults, symptomatic versus asymptomatic, immunocompromised versus immunocompetent, in places where Delta still predominated versus in places where it had abated, etc.). Then, they had to synthesize those conclusions into guidance. The general public heard and saw very little of this process, instead experiencing co-narration by a thousand voices, predicting what Omicron might mean, from “…that’s the end of the pandemic!” to “…it defeats the vaccine!”

At a White House press conference during Omicron’s peak, President Biden was asked why he hadn’t changed leadership at the CDC. The question implied that since the CDC’s advice continues to evolve, CDC leadership must be confused. “The messages, to the extent they’ve been confusing—it’s because the scientists, they’re learning more,” the President responded, underscoring our point.

The public needs to remain aware that the messages we’re receiving through the media and others may reflect preliminary science. Having access to early information and competing points of view is part of being informed citizens. But what we do with such information matters. Here are a few ways we can gut check ourselves if (when) the next big sensational story happens: We can pause to acknowledge that headlines or social media posts, however definitively worded, may represent just one facet of early and incomplete findings. We can read further and seek other trusted sources—not to confirm our views, but to get more context to round out the picture. And we can try to remember that preliminary discoveries and varied interpretations are part of the process.

While it’s true that many public health agencies have struggled to communicate succinctly and clearly, their job (arguably, the most important one) is to control and prevent communicable diseases and health threats. These agencies focus on protecting current and future populations. Their successful public health efforts are not always emphasized, and are often taken for granted, remaining relatively invisible.

Consequentially, we’ve forgotten certain lessons from the past. After the 1918 and 1919 flu pandemic, public health’s pandemic and epidemic prevention efforts ramped up—only to decline in recent decades as we all settled into an optimistic sense that we would never face a years-long pandemic with over 900,000 national deaths and counting. Preventing disease has taken a back seat in the public consciousness. Instead of supporting and expanding public health infrastructure and personnel, congressional and state budgets have only temporarily increased. Our healthcare infrastructure runs really lean, forcing us to respond to dangers as they hit. We’ve faced our most dramatic healthcare staffing shortages yet during the Omicron surge, even though we’ve already experienced crisis-level shortages at least twice before in the pandemic.

Perhaps we also learned some wrong lessons from other recent, potentially pandemic-level pathogens. The rapid identification and successful control of coronaviruses SARS and MERS resulted in those epidemics going off the radar for most people in the U.S. in a matter of weeks to months. Public expectations of a quick resolution may have solidified around these successes.

They certainly affected public health officials’ expectations in late 2019 and early 2020. The successful strategies for containing SARS and MERS had relied on contract tracing and shutdowns—not masks. When SARS-CoV-2 emerged, epidemiologists applied the knowledge they had of these prior coronaviruses, while they worked to learn more. Unfortunately, this new virus turned out to be armed with an “invisibility cloak” of asymptomatic transmission, which called for different recommendations. Looking back now, we can see how expectations, early science, and public health messaging were out of sync from the start.

It is easy to point fingers at the health officials who told the public not to wear masks in March 2020. It is harder to live with today’s firehose of information, and decide to read beyond the headlines. Innovations and advancements have sped up the development of evidence-based guidance, but the process will never catch up to today’s information cycles. Perhaps one main lesson from the past 24 months is that the road goes both ways. As scientists are learning, the rest of us should be, too.

The post Public Health Experts, They’re Just Like Us! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But March 2020 was also a month of reflection. I was finishing up work on a book—and I was thinking about the people I was writing about, and the many echoes between their experiences and what we were collectively living through.

For the past 10 years, I have investigated how French classically trained musicians used their art to cope with the traumas of World War I, a conflict that killed a generation of French men, and millions of women and children. I’ve read thousands of letters and hundreds of diaries, memoirs, and autobiographical novels; I’ve looked at dozens of psychology and physiology texts, compositions, and music method books. This window into people living in wartime and interwar France made me realize that they understood music-making as an embodied therapeutic practice with tremendous potential to console. Their stories have a crucial role to play today, too, as the world reckons with the pain and traumas inflicted by the pandemic.

Like many of us coping with COVID today, people in World War I-era France experienced trauma with a lot of not-knowing and uncertainty. News coverage of the war in French newspapers was extensive, but most in France weren’t getting the whole story. People on the front lines knew what was really happening, but weren’t always permitted to talk about it; for instance, civilians whose loved ones had been killed often waited months to have deaths confirmed.

Combined with the disruption of everyday social interactions, the zone of silence surrounding wartime experiences led to intense isolation. And to make things worse, French culture looked down upon talking about trauma. “Too much” public mourning was deemed disgraceful. The salon hostess and amateur musician Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux wrote in her diary that the composer Maurice Ravel and his brother “were distraught” and “couldn’t remain upright” at the funeral of their mother: “Both were in utter turmoil, incapable of reaction or self-control. A lamentable and distressing spectacle at this time when heroism displays itself as naturally as breathing,” she sniped—and she was their friend.

French doctors, scientists, and members of the military viewed traumatic responses as moral weaknesses. Newspapers recounted contemporary debates about the harsh electrotherapy “treatments” inflicted on soldiers who reported trauma and injury but whose wounds had no visible signs. In this context, there was little room for expressing feelings. As a result, music became a vital way for people to cope with trauma.

How French musicians coped with the traumas they experienced took many forms. Public performance venues in France closed promptly at the conflict’s outset in August 1914, and as a result musicians’ “normal” ways of connecting with one another, through live performance, were brought to a screeching halt. So they found alternative venues for music performance, often in their homes or in other informal settings. When they couldn’t find instruments, they made them out of whatever materials they could find. Musicians didn’t always expressly recognize that they were using music as a coping tool, but they likely had some sense of what music could do for them. While music therapy wasn’t yet an institutionalized discipline during World War I, French psychologists understood mind and body to be intimately connected. Given these musicians’ familiarity with psychological theories of their time, many realized that the embodied nature of making music—that it requires people to move their bodies in the act of creation—gave it the power to soothe.

At the turn of the 20th century, French art music, inspired by post-Romantic composers like Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, was largely lush and dissonant with little rhythmic regularity. But during the war French musicians began to compose and perform extremely rhythmically regular “neoclassical” music that, in its predictability and repetitive patterns, soothed their bodies and distracted their minds. For example, after their husbands died in the first months of the war, the pianist Marguerite Long and the violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, previously known for performing the lush music of Claude Debussy and Gabriel Fauré, turned to repetitive music filled with ostinati—continuously repeating musical phrases—and regular rhythms that allowed them to move their bodies in a soothing groove. Much of this music was either from the 18th century or written by their friends Maurice Ravel, Jean Roger-Ducasse, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre, all of whom had either participated in or lost loved ones in the war.  According to the French journalist Raymond Escholier, Long reported that when she sat down to play the Andante movement of the Piano Concerto in G Major, written for and dedicated to her by Ravel, she was “so moved by it” that she had tears in her eyes, particularly in the part of the movement that features a great deal of rhythmic regularity provided by constant 32nd notes.

Musicians’ private writings also suggest that music-making fostered personal relationships that helped them cope with trauma. In a letter to Nadia and Lili Boulanger, the musician-soldier Jacques de la Presle wrote in 1916 that “in a small place of rest we make music—voilà, one of our joys. You can see that for the souls submitted to such a hardship, music is the great and principal consoler.” Many other musicians, especially those serving on the front lines, concurred, including Ernest Mangeret who confided that “a few moments of leisure permitted me to become myself again” when he found a piano in a half-demolished house. “[W]e went down into the basement (you can understand why!),” he wrote, “and when the evening came, we came together, several friends, in order to make a little bit of music.”

Music-making also offered a way to remember what life had been like before the war. The cellist Maurice Maréchal, who enlisted in 1914, wrote in his letters and diary that performing with friends on the front lines and listening to phonograph recordings reminded him of his pre-war life at the Paris Conservatoire—allowing him to step out of his traumatic military life for just a moment. For others still, performing, composing, and organizing concerts brought visceral reminders of friends and family who had died. The composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger, for instance, reworked pieces written by her younger sister Lili, who died of intestinal tuberculosis in 1918, and performed them in concerts for the rest of her life.

Musicians’ experiences in 1910s and 1920s France remind us that today, as we struggle with the trauma of COVID-19, we must take into account the inextricability of mind and body. Psychologists like Bessel van der Kolk, Stephen Porges, Resmaa Menakem, and Peter Levine have recently underlined how trauma becomes, to use van der Kolk’s phrase, “lodged in the body,” and recommended body- and movement-oriented practices—such as yoga, theater, and yes, music-making—to help counter trauma’s negative effects.

Music holds incredible potential for helping people cope—and indeed, we’ve already seen it take on this role during COVID. As musicologist Emily Abrams Ansari has noted, using music as a tool for remembering past times, people, and places became commonplace during the first months of the pandemic. Similar to how French music lovers of the 1910s and 1920s embraced familiar music, many people in lockdown also turned to nostalgic music that reminded them of earlier times, evidenced by a substantial increase in Spotify playlists based on music from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

While we should embrace the benefits that music brings, we must also heed the darker lessons of the World War I-era during this pandemic and going forward. The toxic masculinity that surrounded the expression of grief and trauma back then still resounds today. In the 21st century, we must be thoughtful and ethical in how we engage with one another, as well as with music and sound. We shouldn’t expect people to “get over” trauma quickly. Rather, we need to push for cultural, societal, and policy change that prioritizes mental and emotional health. People in positions of power—government officials, police officers, teachers, school administrators—need training to deal with trauma effectively. Mental health care—including music and sound therapy—needs to be made more accessible to anyone who might benefit from it. Musicians and the music industry must reckon, too, with the ways music has been used as a weapon of control, punishment, exploitation and coercion.

If we can be mindful of how we engage with music, sound, and trauma, though, we can produce new ways of thinking about our ethical engagements with one another.

At its best, music can restore and rejuvenate the body and mind. And there’s some comfort in knowing that people who respond emotionally to music will always find a way to make music, no matter how difficult it may be. Just as World War I-era musicians made music wherever they could, often in houses and churches that had been destroyed by bombs, in the spring of 2020, I was heartened to see musicians of all stripes cultivating Zoom performances to provide themselves and others with comfort, whether through performing classical pieces like Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” or hymns in the Sacred Heart singing tradition. Even the simple act of singing can do wonders. Alone in my bungalow with my two cats, I’d sing to them their favorite songs—“You Are My Sunshine” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—and find myself suddenly feeling more alive and less alone.

The post When Music Became Therapy in Interwar France appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From a world leader retreating from an unwinnable foreign war (Emperor Hadrian, circa 117 A.D.) to the false promise of automation in the workplace (1950s America), the stories we published provided key context that headline news and hot takes missed. Our favorite essays of the year covered a great deal of territory, from climate change in California and a tragedy in Lebanon to the work of immoral artists and the literature of dentistry. But what we think they all have in common is that, in one way or another, they help us see the world and our place in it anew.

Here are the dozen essays (well, OK, 11 essays and one collection!) that Zócalo’s staff chose to highlight as 2021 comes to a close:

America’s Anti-Chinese Bigotry Has a Very Old Stench

Illustration by Be Boggs.

Almost exactly a year after the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in the U.S., The Smell of Risk author Hsuan L. Hsu explored how American scientists, doctors, and public health officials, as well as historians and novelists, stigmatized “Chinese air” beginning in the 19th century. Hsu demonstrates how these racist, damaging olfactory narratives originated to target the earliest Chinese immigrants to the U.S.—and why it’s no surprise that they remain pervasive today.

Look Away

In 1978, Adam Smyer’s junior high chorus performed “Dixie” at the annual school pageant. Of the couple of hundred people in attendance, “only my mother complained,” recalled the Knucklehead author and attorney. Drawing a parallel to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Smyer meditates on why it’s not the Nazis, but rather the “not-sees” who may be our biggest existential threat.

The 20th-Century Rise of the Confederate Soybean

Why did the varieties of soybeans grown in the American South suddenly acquire the names of Confederate generals nearly 100 years after the Civil War’s end? This story, from University of Pennsylvania historian and Magic Bean author Matthew Roth, reveals how the USDA spent decades catering to white farmers, which resulted in a more unequal agricultural landscape that persists today.

The Fires California Grieves—And Needs

It may be counterintuitive, but the hugely damaging California wildfires of the past few years prove that California needs more fire. Lenya Quinn-Davidson, a fire advisor in Northern California, reflects on the lessons the fires Native Californians set before cultural burning was criminalized can teach us about fighting today’s megafires, and why every flame holds a story of loss and renewal.

The author’s favorite hometown swimming hole, on the South Fork Trinity River in Forest Glen, California, after last year’s devastating August Complex fire. Courtesy of Lenya Quinn-Davidson.

Where I Go: The Poet Sits in the Dentist’s Chair

“Did you know there’s a rich and under-loved canon of periodontic literature?” asks poet and Wabash College English professor Derek Mong. In this entry from our “Where I Go” series, Mong investigates why he transforms his trips to the dentist’s chair into lectures on books and poetry about teeth—from Edgar Allen Poe and Elizabeth Bishop to Zadie Smith and Valeria Luiselli.

Where I Go: My Small, Queer Corner of the Internet

When he moved from Venezuela to Madrid in 2019, journalist José González Vargas thought he might be able to find the LGBTQ+ community that had eluded him. He did, but not at the bars and bookstores he expected. Rather, once the world locked down, the online platform Discord offered him a space where labels didn’t matter and he could just be himself.

The United States Didn’t Really Begin Until 1848

Gold miners in El Dorado, California, circa 1848. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Forget the hackneyed debate between the New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Trump administration’s 1776 report on when American history begins. “Much like a party that only truly starts when the coolest kid saunters in, today’s United States—antically ambitious, deliriously diverse, violently war-mongering, maniacally money-grubbing, and kaleidoscopically cruel—did not really get rolling until California arrived in 1848,” argues Connecting California columnist Joe Mathews.

Lebanon’s Other Explosion

In August 2020, the world’s attention turned to Lebanon in the wake of the horrific Beirut port explosion. Almost a year later, Beirut-based editor Abby Sewell found herself covering another deadly explosion; this time, the world didn’t pay attention, leaving Sewell wondering what it means to try to tell stories that make a difference when you’re writing for an indifferent audience.

After 150 Years, Is L.A. Ready to Remember the Chinese Massacre?

For most of his life, former L.A. City Council member Michael Woo had never heard of the largest massacre of Chinese in California history, which took place on October 24, 1871. In the first essay of Zócalo’s new Mellon Foundation-supported inquiry, “How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?,” Woo asked why this chapter of history wasn’t widely spoken about, and how a public memorial might help the city finally start to reckon with its racist past.

Can We Still Bump n’ Grind to R. Kelly?

Wellesley College philosopher and Drawing the Line author Erich Hatala Matthes suggests an alternative to “cancel culture”: engaging with the work of immoral artists as a way of clarifying our emotions. “The artwork,” writes Matthes, “provides a lens for reflecting on our feelings, and perhaps the promise of sorting them out.”

What Can We Learn From the Failings of William Mulholland?

“When I read about the crimes of history, I rail against the wrongness of the thinking, the backwards, shortsighted cruelty,” writes author Kendra Atleework, who lives and writes in the part of California William Mulholland drained dry. Her meditation on Mulholland’s crimes exonerates nobody: “I, too, exist within the sticky sap of an era. The things I hold to be self-evident and undeniable may, in time, be proven false and denied.”

How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?

In January 2021, on the same day as President Biden’s inauguration, Zócalo began publishing a group of essays about why, from Japan and Germany to the American South, societies around the world struggle to acknowledge the crimes they committed—and persist in repeating them all over again. We published too many wonderful pieces to single any out, and we’re looking forward to turning to this question throughout 2022 and into 2023, now with the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Illustration by Mary Kirkpatrick.

The post Our Favorite Essays of 2021 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

COVID only accelerated this work, moving our events to a livestream in spring 2020 and, this year, once public health restrictions allowed, pushing us to introduce a new hybrid event format. Now, audience members can once again join us in-person or tune in from anywhere in the world. It’s turned out to be an advantageous mix for a roving organization that’s both global and local.

In 2021, Zócalo made it to South Central L.A., Culver City, and to our new home at the ASU California Center at the Herald Examiner. Our move to this historic building in downtown Los Angeles means, among other things, that we can offer an even bigger stage (quite literally) to further foster community and connection among Angelenos and beyond.

In a year that saw both changes and a return to a new kind of normal, it was fitting that our very first Zócalo speaker returned as well. We welcomed back The Economist’s Adrian Wooldridge (whom we probably owe a Zócalo members-only jacket for all the times he’s shared our stage) for one of the events that Zócalo staffers voted among their favorites.

Selecting just five events to spotlight proved to be a nearly impossible task. We owe a warm debt of gratitude to our audience members, speakers, and partners for joining us in making the public square such a dynamic place. See you there next year!

 Can Boyle Heights Save America?

In short: “yes.” USC historian George J. Sánchez—whose new book, Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy, inspired the conversation—Josefina López, author of Real Women Have Curves and founding artistic director of CASA 0101 Theater, and Los Angeles Times city editor Hector Becerra, a Boyle Heights native, came together in May to make a strong case for why Americans should look to this “magical and multiracial neighborhood” to understand the true meaning of citizenship and belonging. Bonus—our chat room was packed with people from Boyle Heights who shared their memories, restaurant recommendations, and more.

Is South L.A. Forging a New American Identity?

Zócalo’s first-ever hybrid event explored how place-based identity can forge new bonds across racial and ethnic lines. Held at the Mercado La Paloma, in partnership with Esperanza Community Housing, the event was part of the South Central Innervisions: An AfroLatinx-Futurism multidisciplinary arts festival. Fittingly our panelists, Community Coalition’s Corey Matthews and USC sociologists and South Central Dreams co-authors Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Manuel Pastor used much of the conversation to look ahead at South L.A.’s future.

Is There Still Merit in a Merit-Based System?

New Yorker staff writer Nicholas Lemann, as moderator, asked Wooldridge, whose latest book is The Aristocracy of Talent, and the other panelists to define meritocracy and evaluate whether it has any currency left in today’s deeply unequal society. Among the event’s trenchant observations: “We need to look for better ways, the best ways possible, of finding promise, wherever it is in society,” said Wooldridge.

Can California Help Reduce Gun Violence?

Too often a dialogue around gun violence in the U.S. derails into a reductive “pro-gun” versus “anti-gun” stalemate. This was not that conversation.  Instead, this Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation event brought together a group of people who fundamentally agree that gun legislation can save lives, and asked them to discuss the difficulties and occasional victories of their work. Their solution-centric talk focused on the policies, research, and everyday action coming out of the Golden State that might have a ripple effect on the nation as a whole.

What Will It Take to End Homelessness in L.A.?

A graduate of Yale University who had worked on Wall Street, Shawn Pleasants shared his journey into and out of homelessness during this powerful panel put on in partnership with United Way and the Committee for Greater Los Angeles. Pleasants, who is now an advocate for the unhoused, and fellow speakers from a variety of local organizations and perspectives called for more innovation, collaboration, and simple human relationship-building to address what might be L.A.’s most pressing crisis.

The post Our Favorite Events of 2021 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.