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.

To knock on a door and talk politics with a neighbor. To crack open a book and hear a new voice. To canvass a side street, zig-zagging between houses. To turn from one line to the next until you reach the poem’s improbable end.

How are poetry and campaigning alike? It’s a question I’ve asked myself in the lulls that accompany both: while listening to the dial tone that defines a phone bank and while mulling an image or rhyme. Whatever answers I’ve imagined—about hope or the power of words—stem from November weekends I’ve spent splitting my time between the two.

Let’s begin then with the obvious: Both benefit from a clipboard. I’ve revised many a poem on a canvassing clipboard that I forgot to return. I pace around my office, repeating the same lines of verse. This, of course, is a lot like canvassing a precinct. A good campaigner sets out in search of conversation; they often find tedium in its place. But that tedium can give way to insights, which flare up like fireworks or startle like horns.

I once spoke about a possible Black president to a white guy on a sit mower; I watched his cigarette burn down to his knuckle. Years later, I met an immigrant family, all first-time voters. They wanted to talk and talk. Moments like these offer nourishment across any campaign’s march—a journey that includes resignation and a bit of revilement. If you’re lucky, it ends in reward. That too is like writing a poem.

Doesn’t this speak to a mutual vulnerability and courting of rejection? A willingness to expose some soft-bellied self to the world? The canvasser can expect a fair share of slurs and curses, slammed doors and snarling dogs. It can get personal. (One resident threatened to get his gun.) The contemporary poet often wears the first person like a thin mask. She submits her work; she waits for a “yes.” If or when it comes, its affirmation is limited—an editor here, a comment there. Most poets will encounter just a fraction of their readers. Campaigners shake hands and watch election night tallies—Walt Whitman called this “the final ballot-shower”—but can’t follow their voters into the booth.

The late New York politician Mario Cuomo once quipped, “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.” Poetry here is a metaphor. For the flourish and the promise. Prose is the achievable—it’s plain. But can’t poetry itself campaign? Every nature poem I write campaigns for climate justice. In doing so, I’m consciously working as a latter-day Romantic. To quote Percy Shelley: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

His legacy proved him right. The Romanticism of Shelley and his peers, who saw themselves as political actors, influenced Henry David Thoreau, who influenced John Muir, who influenced Teddy Roosevelt. And it was Roosevelt who, in 1906, established the first national monuments—like Devils Tower in Wyoming—that would form the core of the National Park System. So poets are campaigners, even legislators, just working at widely varying speeds. Poetry can take generations to sink in.

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry,” William Butler Yeats wrote, dividing wordsmithing into two insoluble halves: persuasion on one side, poetry the other. It’s a division that many activist-poets resist. Like Adrienne Rich and Allen Ginsberg. Like June Jordan who, in the short poem, “Calling on All Silent Minorities,” reasserts her voice with the first word:

HEY

C’MON
COME OUT

WHEREVER YOU ARE

WE NEED TO HAVE THIS MEETING
AT THIS TREE
AIN’ EVEN BEEN
PLANTED
YET

Jordan’s all-caps orthography sets an example: forget silence, go loud! Her colloquial diction invites everyone who can hear. It’s all a game, she implies early: the disenfranchised hide, the powerful pretend to seek. Better for this new majority to construct its own apparatus of resistance, an act that starts with imagination and work. There’s no tree here yet, but there will be. Let’s plant it.

I suppose it should shock no one that poets as different as Robert Lowell, a Boston Brahmin, and Eileen Myles, a puckish avant-gardist, made political endorsements. Lowell stumped for Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 Democratic presidential primary. Myles, who made her own bid for president in 1992, joined “Artists for Hillary,” a candidate-sponsored collective, in 2016. Other poets—from Robert Frost to Richard Blanco, Maya Angelou to Amanda Gorman—arrive when it all ends in balloons. Both the electioneering poet and the inaugural poet add prestige.

It is surprise, however—or, better yet, astonishment—that the campaigner and the poet truly share. At whom they’ll meet. At what they’ll learn. At the outcome born from long hours of work. I found just that last November when I volunteered for Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a first-time congressional candidate in southwestern Washington state. One pundit-pollster put her chances at 2%. Her noxious, anti-democratic opponent seemed poised to prevail.

So when the AP called the race in her favor, I felt as I do when I finish reading a remarkable poem: stunned at the sudden beauty of the world. And then I felt my body do what it reflexively does when poetry astounds: I sat down and wept.

The post How Is a Poem Like a Political Campaign? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the proposition posed by democracy vouchers, an idea with Seattle origins that has reached the Golden State.

This fall, voters in the city of Oakland will decide whether to distribute four vouchers, worth $25 each, to city residents ahead of future elections. Oaklanders would be free to give those vouchers to local candidates for mayor, city council, city attorney, city auditor, or school board. People could split up their vouchers among different campaigns, or give all four—the full $100—to just one candidate.

Not all campaigns could accept the vouchers. To qualify to receive the money, candidates would have to receive a certain number of traditional cash contributions. They’d also have to agree to spending limits on their campaigns. That’s something a wealthy self-funded politician (think developer and Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso) would be unlikely to do.

But those campaigns that did participate could redeem the vouchers for real money to spend on campaign activities, from polling to lawn signs. The money would come from the city’s general fund—at an estimated cost of $4 million per election.

Democracy vouchers—or “democracy dollars,” as they’re called in Oakland—may not win on this November’s ballot. But the idea is gaining traction across California and the country because of its pragmatic “if you can’t beat them, join them” logic.

Generally, a very small number of mostly rich people—less than 1 percent of the population—donate to local political campaigns. This is the case in Oakland, too, where backers of “democracy dollars” have found that most election donations from Oakland residents come from a few wealthy neighborhoods. About half of the money doesn’t come from Oakland at all, but from people or business interests who want something from the city, but are located elsewhere. Candidates spend most of their time talking with wealthy and far-flung donors, and responding to their concerns. That doesn’t benefit most Oaklanders.

Democracy vouchers don’t challenge the dominance of money in local politics; in 2020, Oakland elections saw $5 million in donations, between candidate campaigns and independent expenditures. But they do allow regular people to get in the game, creating incentives for candidates and campaigns to go out and talk to all of us. If vouchers take off, might the concerns of everyday Californians receive more attention in our politics?

Democracy vouchers make sense in an era in which Americans are concerned—or at least pretend to be concerned—about racial equity and justice. Since Seattle pioneered democracy vouchers back in 2015, the concept has made the population of donors more representative of the city as a whole by race, income, and neighborhood. Studies also suggest it has boosted voter turnout, since voters who give vouchers are more likely to cast ballots.

Vouchers also have proven their worth in court. Attempts to reduce the influence of money in elections have run afoul of judges who rule that limits on campaign money are unconstitutional. The voucher approach—inviting the public to put money into politics—has survived legal attacks.

All of these reasons are why Oakland’s “democracy dollars” plan has drawn support from a coalition of race-oriented advocacy groups like Asian Americans Advancing Justice, civil liberties groups (such as the ACLU), and old-line good government organizations including California Common Cause and the League of Women Voters.

The next step is to build more support for the vouchers among voters and elected officials. The idea has a mixed record at the polls. In recent years, a ballot measure to establish a statewide democracy voucher system narrowly failed in Washington state. A similar measure in South Dakota won among voters, but was repealed by the Republican state legislature.

Still, the attention that those campaigns generated, along with the success in Seattle, has raised the idea’s profile, and inspired movements to enact democracy vouchers not just in Oakland but also in L.A. and San Diego.

And that’s just a start. If such vouchers work in candidate races, perhaps their uses could be expanded. Imagine if citizens could use democracy vouchers to fund signature-gathering campaigns to qualify their ideas for laws or policies as local or statewide ballot initiatives.

People present many objections to democracy vouchers, most focused on the money. Why inject more money into political campaigns, critics say—doesn’t that only produce more conflict, more polarization, more propaganda and misinformation? And why devote scarce local dollars to turning residents into campaign donors, instead of paying for essential services? Can’t systems of public finance for campaigns prop up candidates with extremist views?

These are valid questions. You might say vouchers fight fire with fire—money with money—because that’s the system we have. Democracy vouchers can’t fix the campaign systems in California or the U.S. Real fixes will require major changes to our constitutional structure.

In the meantime, what democracy vouchers can do is make those campaigns fairer, and give everyday people, and especially low-income people, a voice in our democracy that they don’t currently have.

Welcome to the donor class, everyone.

The post Can Fighting Money with Money Create Fairer Elections? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Half a century later, we live in the world of negative political advertising that Daisy Girl pioneered, but there are some curious aspects to the story. First, though it is a famous ad, Daisy Girl, as the ad is known, only ran once. Secondly, it didn’t even mention Goldwater’s name. And finally, by the time the ad ran, Goldwater’s chances against LBJ were slim, even though the ad is often falsely credited with assuring the win. And there were two dozen other ads from LBJ’s camp—humorous, informative, dark, and neurotic. Daisy became the iconic spot of its era not because it was the first Johnson ran in 1964; we remember it primarily because of its brilliant, innovative approach to negative advertising.

Daisy and the other ads were made by Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), an eclectic group of ad men at a medium-sized Madison Avenue firm with a stellar reputation for groundbreaking campaigns for Volkswagen and Avis. They didn’t set out to revolutionize political advertising; what they wanted to do was to break the established rules of political ads—then dominated by stodgy 30-minute speeches mixed with shorter policy-focused spots—by injecting creativity and emotion.

Bill Bernbach, the firm’s principal founder, had long maintained advertising was an art, not a science. He favored intuition. He often reminded his employees, “Playing it safe can be the most dangerous thing in the world, because you’re presenting people with an idea they’ve seen before, and you won’t have an impact.”

Famously dismissive of advertising driven purely by research, Bernbach had written a revolutionary memo in 1947 that laid out the philosophy that would eventually characterize his firm’s work. “Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art,” he brashly told his then-employer, Grey Advertising. “It’s that creative spark that I’m so jealous of for our agency and that I am so desperately fearful of losing. I don’t want academicians. I don’t want scientists. I don’t want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.”

Inspired by Bernbach’s philosophy of relying upon instinct as much or more than research, DDB produced an extraordinary and memorable series of spots for Johnson. The firm capitalized upon Goldwater’s reckless statements by providing viewers with indelible images. DDB mocked Goldwater’s vote against the nuclear test ban treaty with a spot showing nothing but a girl licking an ice cream cone as a female announcer spoke ominously about the fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing and how it might enter the food supply.

Goldwater had once bragged that the nation might be “better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.” So, DBB served up a humorous 60-second spot of a saw slicing the East Coast from a Styrofoam model of the United States. In another spot, DDB mocked Goldwater’s statement about privatizing Social Security by showing a pair of hands ripping up a Social Security card.

Viewers had never seen anything like this. It’s not that previous presidential campaigns had only been polite affairs. Dwight Eisenhower ran negative TV spots against his Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson, in 1952, subtly tying him to alleged corruption in Truman administration officials. Stevenson’s spots attacked Eisenhower in 1956. John F. Kennedy attacked Richard Nixon’s record as vice president in the 1960 campaign. Goldwater’s attacks against Johnson in 1964 were unrelenting. In almost every case, however, the attacks were rational, fact-based arguments. DDB’s innovation was not negative advertising, per se. It was, rather, to help make emotions (primarily, fear) a staple of political spots. By 1968, political ads—by other agencies—were also transformed.

Even the spot itself was something of a DDB innovation. Before 1964, political campaigns had used 30- and 60-second spots, but not exclusively. Instead, campaigns, including Goldwater’s, pre-empted regular programming with dry, 30-minute speeches or campaign documentaries by candidates. Under DDB’s direction, Johnson’s campaign aired nothing but 30- or 60-second spots, with the exception of two four-minute commercials, including the “Confessions of a Republican” ad (which went viral recently) purporting to show that even Republicans found Goldwater uncomfortably extreme.

DDB broke another rule by recognizing that Goldwater was such a widely known figure that voters needed no education about him. They didn’t have to remind viewers that Goldwater himself had joked about lobbing a missile into the men’s room of the Kremlin. Or that he had written that the U.S. should not fear war with the Soviets. Or that he would give NATO commanders authority to use nuclear weapons without prior presidential authorization. Or that he had declared the nuclear bomb “merely another weapon.” America knew he voted against the Civil Right Act and that, at the GOP convention in July 1964, Goldwater even branded himself an “extremist.” So DDB never once had to mention Goldwater’s name in Daisy. It only had to find viewers’ emotional trigger.

Put another way, the firm believed that viewers should not be given too much information to put their minds and emotions to work. And Daisy Girl’s DNA has continued to provide instructions for today’s political advertising: Ronald Reagan’s famous 1984 “Bear” spot used the animal to symbolize the Soviet Union without explicitly making the association. In 2004, Bush’s campaign skillfully employed the same technique with a spot that used wolves to symbolize al Qaeda.

Voting is not a purely rational act. As the late journalist Joe McGinnis observed, it’s a “psychological purchase” of a candidate. It’s often no less rational than buying a car or a house. DDB understood that arguing with voters would be a losing proposition. To persuade someone, especially in the political realm, a campaign must target emotions. Voters don’t oppose a candidate because they dislike his or her policies; they often oppose the policies because they dislike the candidate.

Reagan’s optimistic 1984 “Morning in America” spot was a good example of this kind of appeal. So was George H.W. Bush’s dark, fear-inducing “Revolving Door” spot in 1988 that exploited the controversy over a prison furlough program of his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis. Bernie Sanders’ “America” spot is a current example. They are all very different ads, but are aimed at generating a non-rational, emotional response.

DDB also believed that giving data and facts was less persuasive than telling a story. The best spots provide an experience. In addition to evoking emotions and not repeating what the viewer already knew, many of the DDB spots from 1964 had a narrative arc to them. A good example in 1964 was a Johnson spot reminding viewers of the many harsh attacks on Goldwater by his former GOP opponents. The gold standard for subsequent spots in this genre may be Bill Clinton’s 60-second “Journey” spot from 1992, in which he touted his small-town American values by recounting his childhood in Hope, Arkansas.

Early in his career Bernbach perceived that although research had its place in persuasion, there was something more—something completely unquantifiable: “The truth isn’t the truth until people believe you and they can’t believe you if they don’t know what you’re saying; and they can’t know what you’re saying if they don’t listen to you; and they won’t listen to you if you’re not interesting. And you won’t be interesting unless you say things freshly, originally, imaginatively.”

For better or worse, the Daisy ad made emotions a much more potent weapon in our political campaigns, employing techniques that had previously only been applied to selling cars and soap. The next innovation, already with us to some degree, is nano-targeted TV spots, which will resemble the ads we see on the web but will be on TV. Soon, working with cable providers, candidates will offer up messages specially crafted for certain viewers. Five different people watching the same program might each see a different spot from the same candidate.

Meanwhile, social media has injected campaigns’ storytelling into communication between friends. Without Daisy, would the Facebook flame wars of Trump and Bernie fans have the same raucous fervor? But as campaigning moves further into the virtual world of computers and algorithms, it must overcome a paradox: Now, as then, the best ad campaign has a soul—and that’s something a computer or a poll can’t create for any candidate.

The post The Mad Men Who Invented the Modern Political Attack Ad appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.