I sat down with my own, John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, and quickly found myself unusually immersed. Somehow, it was easier to read among other readers. After about half an hour, some kind soul passed around snacks.

There’s no shortage of people saying that it’s rare, nowadays, to find people who read. The Atlantic, the Guardian, and the New Yorker have raised concerns about declining readership among 9-year-olds and college students alike. Researchers often attribute the phenomenon to how smartphones, and particularly applications such as Instagram, wreaking havoc on our attention span. At the same time, others decry the loss of public spaces, a process that rapidly increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. People are picking streaming platforms over cinema halls; even parks are increasingly privatized.

But amid these twin crises, a new phenomenon has taken root in New Delhi: weekly reading clubs.

Perhaps ironically, I first learned about these communities on Instagram. I saw an account named “Lodhi Reads,” which had pictures of weekly meet-ups and information about future dates. The group met every Sunday in Lodhi Garden.

It was not the first reading club I had stumbled upon. During the pandemic, I was part of an online reading circle that would discuss socio-political texts on caste, capitalism, feminism, and surveillance. I participated enthusiastically—often volunteering to make posters to promote the sessions—but something seemed amiss. It wasn’t the material being discussed or the people; both were more than adequate in keeping the circle interesting. It was the fact that we were “meeting” online. Though I appreciated the effort to create a sense of community among readers, the Google Meet format was not for me.

So, with an interest in finding a real-life community among readers, I ventured out to Lodhi Gardens and spent three hours immersed in my book on a Sunday evening in June. I found the group easily, having seen the photos and description on Instagram.

Ankush Pal shares how he found a community of readers at Lodhi Reads. Courtesy of Lodhi Reads.

Afterward, I reached out to the curator, Ritika, on Instagram. She informed me that the group was inspired by Bangalore-based “Cubbon Reads,” which got its start in December 2022. Two friends, Harsh Snehanshu and Shruti Sah, would cycle to Cubbon Park to read and post pictures on their social media accounts. The posts attracted their friends to join them, and eventually more and more people started showing up. Cubbon Reads’ success started a flurry of similar groups popping up across the country—the second of which was Lodhi Reads. Today, there are a few other reading clubs in Delhi and neighboring regions—and the trend has even “gone global.”

A parallel experiment called Delhi Reads also got its start in December 2022. Two women, Molina and Paridhi, both graduates of the University of Delhi, met at a coffee shop after becoming friends through the social media platform Twitter (now X). Realizing there were few spaces in the city for young people that weren’t divided by education and social class—especially in the post-COVID era—they decided to do something about it.

While other reading circles get together in a particular spot to read silently, members of Delhi Reads meet once or twice a month to discuss whatever they have been reading and thinking about. Though it started as a book club, the group now focuses more on creating a sense of community; lately, the organizers have been experimenting with other activities, such as organizing film screenings and a local bookstore tour.

As my evening at Lodhi Reads came to a close, I realized that I’d gotten halfway through a book that I had been putting off picking back up for about a year, without even noticing that it was getting dark. All the participants gathered and organized their books in a pile so that someone could click a picture for Lodhi Reads’ Instagram account. On my way out of Lodhi Gardens, a fellow attendee struck up a conversation with me about the book I’d been carrying. They were interested in what the author had to say about the Russian Revolution and noticed that my copy had been published prior to the fall of the Soviet Union. Before we had formally met one another, our books had already struck up a dialogue. I went home filled with a unique sensation: having spoken few words yet being silently sure that I belonged.

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South Africans got it right when they made “kuning,” the isiZulu word that roughly translates to “it’s a lot,” one of the defining words of 2023.

It was a lot this year.

2023 seemed an epoch of crises: the highest number of global conflicts in three decades, myriad climate disasters that claimed more than 12,000 lives, and the erosion of democracies worldwide.

Amid all of it, Zócalo was here—sifting through the pressing stories and providing context, perspective, and humanity.

Our favorite 15 essays of the year, selected by the Zócalo staff and you, our readers, remind us that even in overwhelming times, people forge ahead. They think deeply. They ask questions. They create. They build community. And they even have some fun.

May you enjoy revisiting these writings as much as we did, as we ready to ring in a new year.

Boxers Know the Power of an Entrance

By Rudy Mondragón

Can anyone make an entrance like a boxer? Before moderating the Zócalo panel “What Does Boxing Owe Its Champions?,” scholar Rudy Mondragón made the case that the boxing ring entrance is the most important ritual in sport. More than a mere act of bravado, he writes, a ring entrance communicates everything from pride to dignity to political protest—in just a few ephemeral, glittering, bombastic moments.

A boxer’s entrance is more than just flash. It’s how they make their mark in the sport and the world, scholar Rudy Mondragón writes. Above, William “El Gallo Negro” King wears a Mexican sarape with a rooster and a sombrero de charro, embracing his Afro-Mexican roots. Photo by Rudy Mondragón.

How Is a Poem Like a Political Campaign?

By Derek Mong

Most of us haven’t given much thought to how poetry and political campaigning might be alike. But Zócalo contributing editor Derek Mong, who won a National Arts and Entertainment Journalism award for this essay, has given it serious thought. Aside from the obvious—that “both benefit from a clipboard”—he unearths deeper threads tying the pursuits together.

My Work as an In-Home Caregiver Shouldn’t Be This Hard

By Alva Rodriguez

Alva Rodriguez is one of more than 550,000 caregivers in California’s In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) program—workers who help an estimated 650,000 disabled, blind, or elderly Californians continue living in their own homes. Writing from Fresno for our The James Irvine Foundation-funded series “What Is a Good Job Now?,” Rodriguez describes the deep precarity of the job—“one of the toughest and worst-paying you will find”— and reflects on ways to improve this essential line of work.

What Mourning Looks Like in Monterey Park

By Wendy Cheng

On January 21, 2023, a gunman opened fire and killed 11 people at Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, resulting in the deadliest mass shooting in Los Angeles County history. Wendy Cheng writes about the outpouring of community support and solidarity in the wake of the attack, and the ways a public memorial for the victims reflected the city’s unique multiethnic and multiracial history as a home for “immigrants and lost ones.”

Whose Sedona Is It, Anyway?

By Tom Zoellner

During the pandemic, Sedona, Arizona, temporarily stopped advertising in high-end travel magazines. In the place of well-heeled visitors have come day travelers and overnighters from nearby cities that some residents say are destroying “Slo-dona”—and the town finds itself stuck in a fierce debate about whether it should “yank back the welcome mat to the middle class,” writes Tom Zoellner. Published in the fall, the piece generated enough chatter that just recently the city and the chamber of commerce put out a joint statement in response.

Intellectual Snobbery is for the Birds

By Tim Birkhead

Ornithologist Tim Birkhead shares how an encounter with a hobbyist birdkeeper who breeds bullfinches (who are, if you aren’t aware, “humbly endowed”) led him down a new line of research into the phenomenon known as sperm competition, and a better understanding of reproduction in birds. While the subject of Birkhead’s essay might make a middle schooler giggle, the story itself makes a powerful point: Researchers need to listen to people outside academia’s ivory tower.

Tim Birkhead, one of the world’s leading bird biologists, shares why being open to learning from people outside of academia’s ivory tower—in this case hobbyist birdkeepers—can lead to “unexpected and exciting results.” Photo by T.R. Birkhead.

Dianne Feinstein’s Most Important Job Was an Unofficial One

By Joe Mathews

Zócalo columnist and democracy editor Joe Mathews has made some big proclamations this year. That San Diego is California’s “finest college town.” That we should call it the California, not the Colorado, River. That the Santa Cruz otter absolutely should have bitten back. But one of his most memorable takes came in the wake of Dianne Feinstein’s death. Reflecting on her long tenure in U.S. political life, Mathews makes a case that her greatest role in office was as California’s “last ambassador to the American government.”

Reckoning With Racist ‘Lynch Law’ and Rape Charges, a Century Later

By Margaret Burnham

For two years, Zócalo has worked on a project supported by the Mellon Foundation that asks: “How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?” This essay by Margaret Burnham, director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, shows how such reckonings can lead to action and change through the story of John Henry James. In 1898, James, a Black man in Virginia, was accused of raping a white woman, murdered by a lynch mob, and posthumously indicted for assault. Burnham details how, 125 years later, a judge dismissed the indictment thanks to a campaign by historians, lawyers, and community members. The decision opens a “path forward for a crucial American reckoning with a thousand-plus state executions of Black males accused of assaulting white females,” Burnham writes.

The Struggle for a Latino Place in Chicago

By Mike Amezcua

Historian Mike Amezcua explores the parallel struggles of mid-20th century Black and Latino Chicagoans overcoming segregation and making space for their communities. “This history of Latino placemaking is far less known than the civil rights struggle led by King,” Amezcua writes. “But it remains an important context for later developments in Chicago’s urban and political history.” Readers were passionate about Amezcua’s piece, writing it in as a favorite in our audience survey.

My Mom is Out of Prison, But I’m Still Not Free

By Angel Gilbert

Most young people look forward to college as a time of independence, but when Columbia University student Angel Gilbert started school, she had already been on her own “for far too long.” In her Zócalo essay, Gilbert, one of millions of young people who have had an incarcerated parent, shares what it was like to grow up with a mother behind bars. “My emotional pain will never truly heal,” she writes. However, she adds that once she reaches her goal of becoming a lawyer, all of her experiences ensure that she will fight harder for her future marginalized clients.

Destined to Be Trans, Muslim, and Indonesian

By Amar Alfikar

Growing up in a traditional Muslim neighborhood in Java, Indonesia in the 1990s, Amar Alfikar, a trans man and activist, shares how he leaned into family and faith to understand—and embrace—his true identity. “If it was not for my family’s acceptance, I would have left my religion,” he writes. “Instead, I am pursuing an academic career in theology and religious studies and have become firm in my faith and thinking about gender diversity in Islam.”

Can Two Friends Agree to Disagree on Abortion in Post-Roe America?

By Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox

Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox found sisterhood raging about injustice—but they disagree about abortion. Read how they’ve worked to maintain their bond in post-Roe America. “Being truly pro-life or pro-choice requires us to knock down rhetorical barriers and focus on the areas where we wholeheartedly agree,” they write, “that every child has a right to be placed on a path to success and that no mother should have to sacrifice her own success to make that happen.”

Where I Go: The Candy Wrapper Museum

By Darlene Lacey

Darlene Lacey was 15 when she started collecting old candy wrappers. Eventually, she turned her hobby into an online museum. For our series “Where I Go,” she gives truth to the adage that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, and shows the power of appointing ourselves as the curators of the things that matter to us the most.

Candy Wrapper Museum curator Darlene Lacey was 15 when she started collecting for her “roadside attraction.” Building the online museum has led to all kinds of surprises—including being sent a Necco scrapbook saved from a dumpster (pictured above). Courtesy of author.

Zócalo’s Diaspora Jukebox

As part of Zócalo Public Square’s 20th birthday celebration, we’ve been sharing the sounds of the Southland with “Diaspora Jukebox,” a series of playlists that celebrate the unique communities and musical traditions that represent greater Los Angeles. Our first “drop”—which had us moving to the rhythm of the city, dancing like it was 1982, and partying like a Zacatecano—culminated in an IRL dance party we threw at the Port of L.A. 

The Human Costs of Building a World-Class City

By Ankush Pal and Anubhav Kashyap

And, drumroll please: Our first-ever audience choice award goes to authors Ankush Pal and Anubhav Kashyap! They take a clear-eyed look at New Delhi’s effort to “polish” the city ahead of this year’s G20 summit, at the expense of poor and working-class people. “Rather than improving life in the city for everyone,” they write, “the beautification projects funnel public resources into creating a cosmopolitan bubble for a few.”

The post Our Favorite Essays of 2023 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On a hot summer day in New Delhi, a young resident of the posh area of Greater Kailash looked down from the window of his air-conditioned room.

“I don’t know how people tend to drink lemonade from these carts—it’s so unhygienic,” he said, referring to nimbu paani, a popular tart salty-sweet drink often served in earthen pots. He added that the street vendors’ carts were a nuisance for him when he went out for a drive in his luxury car.

In recent decades, diverse political parties, corporations, and elite citizens have shared a common goal of remaking New Delhi into a “world-class” city. They envision skyscrapers and highways populated by residents whose consumption habits mirror those of citizens of high-income countries. Their efforts are referred to as “beautification” in popular parlance, but they ignore entire communities—entire worlds—on the ground.

Rather than improving life in the city for everyone, the beautification projects funnel public resources into creating a cosmopolitan bubble for a few.

One of the major engines of this so-called beautification is international events. With each high-profile event, government at all levels suspends normal development and planning to focus energy and public money on the international visitors and local elite.

This week, New Delhi will host the G20 summit, the annual gathering of the “Group of Twenty” national leaders meeting to discuss opportunities for economic and political cooperation. It will be held at the modernist Bharat Mandapam, and its theme borrows from a Sanskrit text: “One Earth. One Family. One Future.”

In advance of the G20 summit, India’s federal and state governments have made active efforts to remove signs of “backwardness” in the city to present a “polished” image to the visitors. Their actions have ranged from relocating beggars to sites where their existence will be less visible, and therefore less of a “nuisance” for upper-class and upper-caste urban commuters. These eviction drives have targeted the city’s unhoused trans community and have demolished informal neighborhoods without prior notice or offers of alternative housing—a direct violation of Indian eviction law.

One domestic worker told us about her experience with one of the eviction drives in May 2023. She and her husband, a factory worker, had built a two-room brick house in the Tughlakabad area. When the eviction drive began, she was not at home and only learned of it from her neighbors. “I had to rush home at around 12:30 pm, but by the time I came back, it had already been razed to the ground. We would have left with our belongings had the government informed us of the date. Now, I don’t know what to do or where to go,” she said. Now, the couple and their two children are among some 2,000 people rendered homeless on that day.

These actions are repeating those taken in advance of past international events. Delhi previously hosted 1982’s Asian Games and the 2010 Commonwealth Games. While the Asian Games gave Delhi a much-needed infrastructural upheaval, it happened at the cost of the thousands of migrant workers who sold their rural lands to seek work in the nation’s capital. Similarly, though the build up to the 2010 Commonwealth Games gave Delhi its much-appreciated Metro transit system, the Games also claimed the houses of around 250,000 people through evictions on lands marked for infrastructure.

Although the figures for the G20 summit aren’t out yet, thousands of people have already lost their homes and thousands more are sure to suffer, rendered homeless in a city with a burning housing problem; women, infants, and older people alike.

In addition to the violence of eviction, the suspension of normal urban planning operations also comes at a cost for the working class. While the construction and redevelopment are justified by appeals to beautification and development, their investment is centered in the upper-middle class and elite neighborhoods to the neglect of other areas.

We asked a resident of the market complex and residential area Zakir Nagar in north Okhla, why, in his view, there has not been an effort to develop his neighborhood in the same way there has been with other market complexes in the city. He replied that there could be little to no development in the pockets of land on the banks of the Yamuna River like his because the city government has never formalized the area’s unplanned urban settlements. Because of that, Okhla, which lies around 10 kilometers from the main venue of the G20 summit, stands in stark contrast to New Delhi’s global city aspirations, greeting visitors with potholed roads and heaps of garbage—an unplanned, unsanctioned, un-beautified zone of the aspiring world-class city.

While lower-class Delhi residents are displaced, upper-class residents see the beautification processes as beneficial to the city. “I believe these development projects are good because they make the city look refined,” said the aforementioned resident of Greater Kailash. “We cannot have things both ways: development and ensuring everyone in the city gets a place.” But while he complained about how hawkers hogged space on the roads, he didn’t feel the same way about how he and his neighbors took up space parking their cars on sidewalks.

Governmental authorities condone this sense of entitlement. They often refuse to act when dealing with the elite but move quickly when it comes to the underprivileged. In both processes, they skirt legal processes. India’s Supreme Court noted in 2016 that orders that adversely affect the rich are often delayed in their implementation. Former Supreme Court Justice Madan Lokur remarked, “The Law is different for the poor and the rich.”

Famously, the red walls of Shahjahanabad, the former imperial capital of the Mughal empire, have a splash of the blood of the laborers that worked on them. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to say the same of the Delhi of today. Delhi has been built, developed, and re-developed with the blood and sweat of the very people it was supposed to serve as a home for. And there are reminders of their sacrifice everywhere.

As we beautify cities—dressing them up for a single event in vanity projects meant to attract and impress fair-weather foreigners—we need to be asking ourselves whether “world-class cities” live up to their moniker if they are not equitable and inclusive for all residents. If we are willing to let ourselves be blinded by the dazzle of shiny modifications and ignore everything that has been bulldozed in the wake of it, we are hardly engaging with the world at all.

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