Matt Sumpter.

This year, 417 poets submitted a total of 979 poems, transporting us to the San Gabriel Valley, the Blue Ridge, and the Salton Sea to granite mountain ranges near Yosemite, Mexican deserts, and unnamed cities of the mind.

Ultimately, Zócalo poetry editor Colette LaBouff and the editorial staff chose to honor a poem that takes us on a journey, mediated by memory and technology, to an Ohio urban winter-scape from which events ripple out to touch people living many miles away. We’re thrilled to award the $500 Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize to Matt Sumpter, a native Ohioan who now makes his home in New York City with his wife and young daughter.

But he told us he still considers himself a Midwesterner “by sentiment and heart as well as birth.” Sumpter also lived in Missouri, Montana, and Oregon while working as an AmeriCorps service member, and earned a masters of fine arts at Ohio State University and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at SUNY Binghamton, before relocating to Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood.

His winning poem ranges over a terrain that’s both physical and conceptual, sensory and imaginary:

No World

There is no world without end, no morning
except this one in Ohio where ice
smoothes itself over ice, and neighborhood cats

hunch on hoods of idling cars. They live
outside by choice, warmed by the kindness
of wasted gas. My neighbor cracks his upstairs door,

inviting them to survive, but they ignore it,
shying from anything human skin has touched.
My neighbor, too old to go beyond the Walgreens

or the CVS, bikes each day for groceries
and wobbles home with plastic bags
hanging from the handlebars like streamers.

Sometimes he just circles around the lot,
whistling to the cats every couple passes.
No world exists without him

greeting them and saying goodbye
with one small sound. Inside, I watch footage
from a traffic cam in Cleveland:

a city park, gazebo, benches, a boy and girl
who blurrily glide past. Then they return
as a police car runs into the grass.

There is no world in which they both
walk home alive, hang up their coats,
and rush to the kitchen at the smell

of soup, forgetting to wipe their shoes.
There is no world where this is the final winter,
where every poem finally says I’m here with you.

There is no world without Verona,
Shakespeare wrote, meaning
no world exists outside Verona,

meaning, sometimes, there is no other place
than this. We wake up early. We dress,
trying to believe there is no word for exile.

We spoke by phone with Sumpter about the inspiration for ‘No World’ and about why he became a poet.

Q: The speaker in your poem makes several references to Ohio, but seems to be physically somewhere else.

A: I grew up in Cincinnati, but I wrote this in Binghamton, in upstate New York. It was the middle of winter and there was like a foot of snow on the ground, when the sun is just this kind of urban legend that people vaguely refer to. So mood-wise, that’s a time for some sad nostalgia, maybe, or some reminiscence about other places and other times that are also a little lonely.

Q: The poem speaks about the idea of different, self-contained worlds. There’s the self-enclosed world of the television; the world of the TV cam; the world of Ohio; the world of wherever the poem’s speaker is; the world of winter, both as a landscape and as a state of mind; the world of possibility vs. the world of what actually happens; and the world of words—the world of the poem itself. What’s missing from this list?

A: You could include the Shakespearean world that’s mentioned in the poem, if you wanted to, I suppose. In the poem there’s basically two main scenes: There’s the neighbor, and there’s the lightly veiled recounting of the Tamir Rice shooting. And both of those incidents are worlds unto themselves, worlds that are perhaps more isolated from the speaker than some of the other worlds. Isolation is certainly a big theme within this poem. It’s not necessarily one that I set out to write about, but it’s certainly something that ended up being there by the time I was done with it. The things that the speaker is thinking about and interacting with are certainly more isolated conceptually, but at the same time, the speaker is reaching out to them and trying to make some connection with them. And that was something I wanted to keep in the poem, that within these moments of isolation there’s still this way in which they affect us and we can connect them, or they reach out and connect to us. We can’t really hide from them. The poem’s speaker is trying to navigate that boundary where he’s mediating between these worlds.

Q: Then there’s the word that ends your poem, “exile.” Did you feel you were in a kind of exile from your native state when you wrote this poem?

A: My wife and I were in different cities and we were commuting a lot. I think the isolation I felt at that time is an echo of exile, though it’s not as extreme. And I think that holds true for the poem as well. The exiles the speaker is witnessing are things that have happened to, or befallen, other people. But while isolation and exile certainly don’t feel good on a personal level, distance in general is useful for me as a writer. I think that being close to something is really useful in terms of experiencing it. But when you’re writing, a bit of distance sometimes is necessary. It may be a little reminiscent of the Wordsworth quote, “emotion recollected in tranquility.”

Q: How did you conceive the form of the poem?

A: Usually I start writing about something, whether it be an image or a sound or a metaphor or an idea or a situation that really sticks with me. And I’ll just keep writing and rewording it, until the first line or two seems to resemble poetry I wouldn’t be embarrassed by! And then I extrapolate from there: Does the poem go on in this way, or is there a turn in the poem that tweaks the form in some way—does the form change? And if it changes, is it going to be continually changing? Is it going to enter this dynamic, flux-y state where it’s a looser-form poem? Or is it going to maintain the current form, and is the content going to move and shift and be fluid within that form? This poem is closer to being a formal structure, because it’s pretty consistent tercets. But tercets have more instability than most regular structures. I think it worked for this poem, because a sense of incompleteness and unevenness was something this poem was trying to evoke emotionally.

Q: The poem frequently uses a short “a” sound—“cats,” “gas,” “cracks,” “plastic bags,” “passes,” “traffic jam.” These seemed to evoke the sound of cracking ice, or other sharp noises that can break through the muffled stillness of a snowy landscape.

A: Absolutely. Those short “a’s” have an abrasive feel to them. I think maybe one, by itself, would be a sort of puncture. But in larger quantities there is an abrasive feel to them, where something is being worn away, or shaken, or a placidness is being disturbed. The poem is sonically poking or jabbing at the silence around it.

Q: When did you start writing poetry, and why?

A: Reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 11th grade really got me started. That was the first time that I was struck by poetry as being something that was immediate and felt. It reached out to me in some different way. And, I thought, No. 1, that’s really great, and No. 2, I would like to do that also!

***

Zócalo has been awarding a poetry prize in conjunction with our annual book prize since 2012. Jody Zordrager won the inaugural prize for “Coming Back, It Comes Back,” a poem about returning home to Massachusetts. Our 2013 prize went to Jia-Rui Cook—prior to her joining the Zócalo staff as editor—for “Fault,” a poem about the shifting ground on which Southern Californians live. The 2014 prize went to Amy Glynn for “Shoreline,” about a place where we can sit back and watch the tide roll out and come in. Gillian Wegener won the 2015 prize for a poem that evoked the intimacy of a diner in a small town in the midst of change. And Matt Phillips won the 2016 prize for “Crossing Coronado Bridge,” which takes us on a journey across the span that connects the city of San Diego to Coronado Island, and explores our need to venture out into cold, black water—while recognizing there’s always a depth that is beyond our reach.

The post Announcing Zócalo’s Sixth Annual Poetry Prize Winner appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The 75-year-old Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had been exiled from Iran for 14 years. His relentless critiques of Shah Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s autocratic leader, had led to the ayatollah’s expulsion, but had not silenced him. In 1977 he was living in neighboring Iraq, where he found a new way to share his message. Late in the evening, usually around 10, after the masses of pilgrims who’d come to visit the shrine of Imam Ali had left for the day, the ayatollah presented long lectures to anyone who would listen. The speeches were anti-shah diatribes, filled with conspiracy theories that tied the shah’s Westernizing reforms to “the Jews and the Cross-worshipers” who sought to humiliate and subjugate Iran.

A few Iranians—no more than 1,200 a month—were allowed to visit Iraq to worship at the shrine, and a small number of them returned home with an unusual souvenir: a cassette recording of the ayatollah’s sermons. These cassettes were copied and freely distributed in the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities. Pressured by President Jimmy Carter of the United States to live up to his promises of reform, the shah instructed his secret police, SAVAK, not to seize or destroy copies. The tapes were marked “Sokhanrani Mazhabi”—religious lecture—and sold next to tapes from the popular singers of the day. Parviz Sabeti, head of SAVAK’s “antisubversion” unit estimated that more than 100,000 sermon cassettes were sold in 1978 and that millions of Iranians might have heard Khomeini’s anti-shah invective.

Amir Taheri was editor of the pro-shah newspaper Kahyan when the tapes became popular. Two of his reporters brought him a recording they had bought in the market, and the three listened together. They quickly concluded that the voice on the tape was that of an actor, hired by SAVAK to imitate Khomeini and discredit him. After all, Khomeini was a respected scholar, if a political radical. Why would he stoop to conspiracy theories, telling listeners that the shah had commissioned a painting of the Shia leader Imam Ali with blond hair and blue eyes, signifying the shah’s hopes that American Christians would dominate Iran? If this wasn’t a joke, then it had to be an attempt to frame and discredit the cleric.

A few months later, Iran’s minister of information, Daryoush Homayoun, published an editorial in Ettela’at, the country’s oldest newspaper, titled “Black and Red Imperialism.” A wide-ranging smear of the ayatollah, the article accused Khomeini of colluding with the Soviets (the “red” to conservative Islam’s “black”), of being a British spy, and of homosexuality. But Homayoun had underestimated the popularity of the exiled scholar. On January 9, 1978, 4,000 students took to the streets and demanded retraction of the article. Iran’s powerful army quickly quelled the protest, but killed several students and wounded more in the process.

The death of the students opened a cycle of protest and government overreaction that rapidly destabilized the country. Shia custom requires memorial services, called Arbaeen, 40 days after a death. Protests accompanied the services for the dead students, and the shah’s troops shot more protesters; that provoked more services, more protests, and eventually general strikes. Scholars estimate that as much as 11 percent of Iran’s population participated in these protests, a higher percentage of the population than participated in Russia’s or France’s popular revolutions. By January 1979, it was the shah who had gone into exile, and a triumphant Khomeini returned to Iran, where more than 3 million Iranians took to the streets to welcome him. Four months later, a referendum with wide popular support declared Iran an Islamic republic.

Khomeini’s quick rise surprised the shah’s supporters, who had seen Iran moving away from Islam and toward a secular state, where women had the vote and Iran had strong ties to the West. Khomeini’s subsequent brutal consolidation of power surprised students who had supported him, taking seriously his promises of freedom and anti-imperialist democracy, only to see hundreds of the ayatollah’s political opponents summarily executed. And the exiled Iranian politicians who had flown from Paris to Tehran with Khomeini were certainly surprised when, two years later, many were dead or in exile again.

But perhaps no one was more surprised than Jimmy Carter. On New Year’s Eve 1977, days before students took to the streets of Qom, he had toasted the shah, declaring, “Iran, because of the great leadership of the shah, is an island of stability in a turbulent corner of the world.” Carter’s analysis was echoed by the CIA, which dismissed the protests of 1978 in August of that year, asserting, “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even ‘pre-revolutionary’ situation.”

How did the intelligence service of the world’s most powerful nation misread the Iranian revolution so badly?

In the waning years of the Cold War, the job of America’s intelligence analysts began to shift, becoming vastly more complicated. In earlier decades, analysts had known who the nation’s main adversaries were and what bits of information they needed to acquire: the number of SS-9 missiles Moscow could deploy, for example, or the number of warheads each missile could carry. They focused on discovering secrets, facts that exist but are hidden by one government from another. But by the time the Soviet Union completed its collapse in 1991, as Bruce Berkowitz and Allan Goodman observe in Best Truth: Intelligence in the Information Age, the intelligence community had a new role thrust upon it: the untangling of mysteries.

The computer security expert Susan Landau identifies the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran as one of the first signs that the intelligence community needed to shift its focus from secrets to mysteries. On its surface, Iran was a strong, stable ally of the United States in a conflict-torn region. The rapid ouster of the shah and the referendum that turned a monarchy into a theocracy under Khomeini left governments around the world shocked and baffled.

The 1979 revolution took intelligence agencies by surprise because it was born in mosques and homes, not in palaces or barracks. Even if the CIA was watching Iran closely, it was paying more attention to troop strength and weaponry than to cassette tapes sold in the marketplace. Analysts missed a subtle change in Iranian society: the nation was becoming more connected, both internally and to the outside world, through the rise of new communications technologies.

In their book analyzing the events of 1979, Small Media, Big Revolution, Annabelle Sreberny and Ali Mohammadi, who both participated in the Iranian revolution, emphasize the role of two types of technology: tools that let people access information from outside Iran, and tools that let people spread and share that information on a local scale. Connections to the outside world (direct-dial long-distance phone lines, cassettes of sermons sent through the mail, broadcasts on the BBC World Service) and tools that amplified those connections (home cassette recorders, photocopying machines) helped build a movement more potent than governments and armies had anticipated.

The ouster of autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya in the 2011 Arab Spring protests has reopened a conversation about the role of technology in enabling social change. Did cassette recorders overthrow the shah? No more than Facebook ousted Mubarak. But in both cases, the technological, political, and social fabric shifted, and old ways of anticipating what changes might occur were no longer applied. Looking for secrets—the missing information in systems we understand—we can easily glide past mysteries, events that make sense only when we understand how systems have changed.

As we enter an age of ever-increasing global connection, we are experiencing vast but subtle shifts in how people communicate, organize themselves, and make decisions. We have new opportunities to participate in conversations that are local and global, to argue with, persuade, and be persuaded by people far from our borders. And we have much to argue about, as our economies are increasingly intertwined, and our actions as individuals and nations affect one another’s climate, health, and wealth. And as these connections increase, it should be no surprise that we will also experience a concomitant rise in mystery.

The mysteries brought to the fore in a connected age extend well beyond the realm of political power. Bad subprime loans in the United States trigger the collapse of an investment bank, which tightens interbank lending, pushing Iceland’s heavily leveraged economy into collapse, leaving British consumers infuriated at the disappearance of their high-yield savings accounts at Icelandic banks. A family wedding in Hong Kong leaves the World Health Organization tracing a deadly epidemic from Toronto to Manila, the disease spreading as fast as individuals can travel. Not all mysteries are tragedies. Political revolutions, broadcast live from Tunisia, send students into the street in Gabon to demand lower tuition, and inspire labor activists in Wisconsin to seize the state capital. A Korean pop song mocking the materialism of a neighborhood in Seoul, PSY’s “Gangnam Style,” becomes a global dance hit in an instance of unexpected and convoluted connection.

Uncovering secrets might require counting missile silos in satellite images or debriefing double agents. In order to unwind a banking collapse or combat SARS, we need different skills. Landau suggests that “solving mysteries requires deep, often unconventional thinking, and a full picture of the world around the mystery.”

The popular embrace of the Internet means we have a wealth of new ways to learn what’s going on in other parts of the world. It’s as easy to access the front page of a newspaper from another continent as it is to read one from the next town. In fact, sometimes it’s easier. A free online encyclopedia offers background and context on events that would have been hard to obtain 10 years ago without visiting a good library. Google promises to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, and we’ve grown used to asking it and other search engines to discover secrets: just type “How many SS-9 missiles does the USSR have” and hit “I’m feeling lucky.”

These tools help us discover what we want to know, but they’re not very powerful in helping us discover what we might need to know. What we want to know is shaped by what, and who, we think is important. We follow the news in our hometowns more closely than news an ocean away, and the lives of our friends in more detail than those of distant strangers. Our media tools, ranging from our newspapers to our social networks, embody those biases; they help us find what we want, but not always what we need.

What do we need to understand a complex and interconnected world? That’s not just a question for intelligence agents. Epidemiologists and CEOs, environmentalists and bankers, political leaders and activists are all trying to tackle challenges of global scale. We all need ways to access perspectives from other parts of the world, to listen to opinions that diverge from our preconceptions, and to pay attention to the unexpected and unfamiliar.

We move from unearthing secrets to unwinding mysteries not just through the force of will. Our understanding of the world comes to us through the tools we use to learn about the world around us. Some of those tools are hundreds of years old, whereas others were invented in the past decade. And all of them can be changed to help us better understand and explore the world.

We can build new tools that help us understand whose voices we’re hearing and whom we are ignoring. We can make it easier to understand conversations in other languages, and to collaborate with people in other nations. We can take steps toward engineering serendipity, collecting insights that are unexpected and helpful. With a fraction of the brainpower that’s gone into building the Internet as we know it, we can build a network that helps us discover, understand, and embrace a wider world.

We can, and we must, rewire.

The post The Mysteries of Our Connected Age appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In Rewire, Ethan Zuckerman challenges our assumption that the Internet will inevitably create a more connected world. Since the Victorian era, utopians have believed that technology has the power to erase prejudice, enhance cooperation, and create a new global social order. Despite the ubiquity and power of the Internet, none of this has come to pass. Zuckerman shows how the Internet reinforces the human tendency to interact with those with whom we have the most in common. At the same time, he offers optimism about the many ways in which technology can do a better job of bringing people of diverse backgrounds and interests together.

He knows this subject firsthand. Zuckerman is the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and co-founder of Global Voices, an international community of bloggers working to make online political dialogues more globally inclusive.

As the winner of the Zócalo Book Prize, Zuckerman will receive $5,000—and on Friday, May 9, he’ll deliver a lecture: “Can the Internet Be Rewired to Build a Smaller, More Cooperative World?” at MOCA Grand Avenue. Please see more details on the award ceremony, sponsored by the California Community Foundation, here.

We recently got in touch with Zuckerman to ask him some questions about his work:

Q. What’s the biggest force against our becoming citizens of the universe—and connecting with people around the globe—in contemporary life? 

A. Unfortunately, it’s a 25-cent, sociological word: “homophily,” which explains the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together. If you are a liberal from New England and you go to a place where there are people from all sorts of backgrounds, you are naturally going to find the liberals from New England. There are piles of sociological literature that show that people will walk into a computer lab at a college and gravitate toward people they have something in common with. Homophily combines with the Internet and has made it really, really easy to find our tribes online and to get as much information as we can from our tribes. The temptation is to blame the Internet—Facebook is isolating all of us, it’s separating us into echo chambers. Some of this is true, but it’s the combination of this very basic tendency for us to sort ourselves by race, ethnicity, gender, political beliefs, and socioeconomic status, combined with the incredible amount of choice we have online.

Q. You challenge cyberutopianism but don’t dismiss it out of hand. How would you respond to criticism that your arguments are too moderate to effect real change? 

A. The cheesy way to write a trade book is to take a sharp stab in one direction and assume someone else is going to write something counterbalancing you. It’s easier to write a book saying the Internet is stupid or the Internet is giving us superpowers than it is to write a book that says the Internet is complicated. I think there’s a case to be made that this is the best tool for international understanding. There’s also a case to be made that we’re really far from using the Internet in that way. The problem is that makes it a whole lot harder to sum up the argument.

Q. Can you recommend three simple steps anyone can follow to transform oneself into what you call a “bridge figure”—a person who connects cultures?

A. 1. Pay attention to what you’re reading and what you’re listening to. I ask my students to keep a media diary—to spend a week keeping track of what you listen to, what you read, and what you watch. Getting a sense of how you’re spending your time with media gives you a sense of your patterns. I, for instance, have a bad Reddit habit. And as much as I think of myself as cosmopolitan, during football season I’m spending time on Green Bay Packer stuff. I can look at my media diary and say, “Do I want to do this or read something else?”

2. When people start looking for international news or news from other places, they dive into something like Global Voices and read everything on the site, and it’s really, really hard. When you start learning about a different world, you have to pick up a certain amount of background. My friend, [technology writer] Clay Shirky, has a good suggestion: pick one part of the world you want to know more about.

3. Find a way into other parts of the world through what you already know and what you care about. I’m a music guy. I spend a lot of time looking for music from around the world. There are countries where all I really know is what the music there sounds like. But even that is enough context that I’m more receptive to what’s going on in those countries—I’m more open to them.

Q. How can folks who want to build a more connected society use the upcoming World Cup to our advantage?

A. I think the World Cup is a great time to look at this. For starters, the World Cup is a terrific way to take a look at Brazil and to look at Brazil’s mixed feelings about the Cup. People who are passionate soccer fans and passionate about Brazil’s rise are also deeply skeptical about whether they should be spending this much money on a soccer stadium.

It’s also a wonderful time to dive into each of the nations who end up competing: their challenges, their futures, their histories. During the 2010 World Cup, Global Voices set up watching parties online for people from each country who were involved with the matches. We expected them to be full of taunting and a little stressful. Instead, it was wonderful. It was so polite. It started with each side complimenting the other and asking who on the other team was famous, who was well-known, who was loved as a player. We expected a bar fight, and it turned into a wonderful conversation between groups. I see the World Cup and the Olympics as wonderful excuses to explore our curiosity and find out about other parts of the world.

The post Ethan Zuckerman Wins Zócalo’s Fourth Annual Book Prize appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

With this in mind, we are proud to honor the author of the book published last year that most enhances our understanding of community and connectedness with the Fourth Annual Zócalo Public Square Book Prize.

Because we take a broad view of social cohesion, we considered U.S.-published books exploring civility, poverty, love in the time of technology, and friendship since the ancient Greeks. We examined 100 entries from sociologists, biologists, lawyers, psychologists, an architect, and a gardener.

The three finalists chosen by our seven-judge panel are terrific storytellers and thinkers who view community and connection through entirely different lenses.

On Thursday, April 3 we’ll announce the winning author, who will receive $5,000 and deliver a lecture at our book prize ceremony:

Fourth Annual Zócalo Public Square Book Prize Award Ceremony, sponsored by the California Community Foundation 

Friday, May 9, 2014, 7:30 p.m.
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)
250 South Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, California

Below, in alphabetical order by author, are introductions to our top three contenders:

Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal by Abigail Carroll 

More than ever before in America, food is not just mere nourishment. We’ve been coming together around meals since the Industrial Revolution but why, asks cultural historian Carroll, do we gather for the family dinner, and why is it important? How does the way the nation eats define who we are today—and what has our food said about us since the colonial era? The meals we eat, writes Carroll, speak “to the deep, often tacit relationships we have with our families, our sustenance, our society, and ourselves.”

Carroll “argues persuasively that the adage ‘you are what you eat’ needs to be bolstered by the understanding that ‘we are how we eat’” and “looks ahead to our eating habits’ role in shaping our cultural bonds,” said one of our judges. Another applauded her “readable tour of sliced bread and Thanksgiving gluttony” for “helping to explain how we became the way we are.”

The Men Who United the States: America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible by Simon Winchester

British-born historian Winchester follows in the footsteps of the great men who transformed the disparate geographies and people of the U.S. into a country in order to figure out how American unity was created and sustained. From the explorers Lewis and Clark to the engineers who created the backbone of the Internet, American pioneers created the various ties that bind us together. These ties, write Winchester, “have proved crucial both in maintaining the union and in preventing, or at least lessening the likelihood, of its fracturing and spinning into a thousand separate parts.”

“Winchester manages,” said one of our judges, “to make the creation of infrastructure noble and even exciting, with vivid vignettes of different famous (and oddball) characters from throughout American history who in one way or another helped create the fibers that connect us.” Added another judge, “The tales he weaves were more engaging than most contemporary fiction.”

Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection by Ethan Zuckerman

We shouldn’t assume that the Internet will make the world a smaller place, writes media scholar and Internet activist Zuckerman. The Internet, as we use it today, he argues, is more likely to reinforce our biases than to challenge them, and to connect us more closely to people like us than to strangers. Zuckerman shares case studies and anecdotes of people who have succeeded in bridging cultures and continents as he calls for us to “take control of our technologies and use them to build the world we want rather than the world we fear.”

Rewire, said one of our judges, is “a book for our times” and a “smart, historically nuanced account of the impact of social media” on our world. Said another judge, “It’s rare to read the thoughts of someone who is as exuberant about face-to-face conversation as he is about the algorithms that allow us to interact instantly across continents.”

The post Come Together—Right Now appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s why we think it’s so important to bring people together, in person and online, to examine big questions. And that’s why, for the third year in a row, we are honoring the nonfiction book published in the past year that, in the view of our judges most enhances our understanding of human connectedness and social cohesion.

The books we considered for the Third Annual Zócalo Book Prize explored central topics such as how community is affected by technology and partisanship and seemingly off-beat subjects such as how social cohesion is encoded into our brain chemistry. Whatever their differences, the authors of these different books were in agreement—with one another and with Zócalo—on one thing: community matters.

The author of the winning book will receive $5,000 and deliver a lecture at the ceremony on May 3, 2013:

Third Annual Zócalo Public Square Book Prize Award Ceremony, sponsored by Southern California Gas Company
Friday, May 3, 2013, 7:30 p.m.
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)
250 South Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, CA

Our winner, to be announced on Monday, March 25, will be one of the following three finalists, presented in alphabetical order by author:

Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis by Mark Binelli

Detroit—and the images it evokes of urban apocalypse, racial strife, and post-industrial decline—has become a symbol of everything that was wrong with 20th-century America. But in the past few years, it’s also become a fashionable petri dish for experiments in urban renewal.

In order to chronicle the meeting of decay and innovation, hopelessness and dreams, Detroit-area native Mark Binelli, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal, returned to his hometown to explore “what happens to a once-great place after it has been used up and discarded.”

“To take a city like Detroit, and examine it with this kind of inventive care and attention in the way cities, and their residents, made history and were history and are now remaking history, seems like one of the highest necessities in America right now,” said one of our judges. Another judge concurred, noting that the book can be read as a “case study [that] prompts questions about the capacity of cities to permanently serve as social constructs and humans to adapt and modify them.”

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

Pundits call our contemporary political divides a product of our times and our culture, with modern technology exacerbating our disagreements. But we’re also wired to perceive our own views as right and reject the reasoning of others, particularly of those not from our own tribe.

If we can see and understand ourselves in this way, posits Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, we might just have a chance of bridging our deepest divisions. “We may spend most of our waking hours advancing our own interests,” he writes, “but we all have the capacity to transcend self-interest and become simply a part of a whole.”

The Righteous Mind is “food for thought for those of us who are in the business of trying to influence the way people see and feel the world in order to achieve more social cohesion,” wrote one of our judges. Another lauds the many applications of Haidt’s theories, which offer a “better understanding of our current deep political divides, the role of religion as a bonding and divisive force in society, and the advantage conservatism may have in modern elections.”

The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community by Miles Orvell

For most Americans, the phrase “Main Street” conjures up a specific place, even if it’s somewhere we’ve only visited in books and movies—a small town of white picket fences and independently owned shops, a community where everyone goes to the same church and greets one another by name.

But, writes Temple University professor of English and American studies Miles Orvell, this doesn’t mean that Main Street represents a single, unified American culture. Rather, it’s “an idea that has been subject to definition and redefinition, even contestation, for more than 100 years.”

One judge characterized The Death and Life of Main Street as “an evocative history of the American small town”; another credited Orvell with “inspiring me to battle with and examine … our sense of place and community.” Orvell’s book was also applauded for how it “skillfully deconstructs the myth” of American cohesion “without detracting from the importance that cohesiveness, and the idea of cohesiveness, holds for us.”

*

We are also pleased to announce our distinguished longlist. The authors of these excellent books—scientists, historians, religious scholars—explored community writ as large and long ago as the Old Testament, and as small and recently as today’s micro apartments.

Here is our complete longlist, in alphabetical order by author:

America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By by Akhil Reed Amar
Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis by Mark Binelli
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg
The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community by Miles Orvell
The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America by James T. Patterson
Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind by Mark Pagel
The American Bible: How Our Words Unite, Divide, and Define a Nation by Stephen Prothero
Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon
The Harm in Hate Speech by Jeremy Waldron

Read about our 2012 winner, Richard Sennett for his book Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation and about our 2011 winner, Peter Lovenheim for his book In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time.

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The Second Annual Zócalo Public Square Book Prize was made possible by the generous support of Southern California Gas Company and the Shepard Broad Foundation.

Richard Sennett’s Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation is the winner of the second annual Zócalo Public Square Book Prize, presented to the author of the work of nonfiction that most effectively deepens our understanding of community. Why community? It’s not simply because we think it’s in danger, or because we’re in the business of bringing people together. It’s because we need to start thinking about community as more than the Facebook groups we belong to and the towns we grew up in. Exploring community means exploring translation and marriage, technology and collaboration. It means looking, as Sennett does, at how we can get better at living with one another.

Sennett first experienced complex cooperation when he was a young musician studying with legends like the conductor Pierre Monteux. He has since become a sociologist, novelist, and professor at the London School of Economics, among many other things. He’s been an acclaimed author ever since his early books The Uses Of Disorder, a study of identity and city life, and The Hidden Injuries Of Class, a study of how the effects of class go far beyond material things. All along, however, his interest in craftsmanship and cooperation has endured. Cooperation, he believes, is a craft that diverse societies can, and must, learn.

On Friday, April 13, Sennett will visit Zócalo to deliver a lecture: “Can Diverse Societies Cohere?” at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Grand Avenue. Admission is free. See more details on the award ceremony, sponsored by Southern California Gas Company, here.

Yesterday, Zócalo caught up with Sennett and asked him some questions about his work:

Q. What is the most cooperative setting you’ve ever experienced?

A. For me, it was being on the road as a member of a chamber music group. I had another life as a musician. And, when I was a kid, I toured for several years with different chamber music. Playing music with other people, you either cooperate or the music collapses.

Q.What was your favorite moment with Pierre Monteux?

A. It’s a purely musical story. He was a very short, very elderly man. He couldn’t wave his arms about. He never did that much anyhow. But he had this minute beat, and you focused when you were playing for him on these little flicks of the finger, or little eyebrows being raised. The eyebrows in particular, which he used for cuing, were terrifying. When they went up, you knew your moment had come or else. It was a very intense stare. You could say shaggy eyebrows and a piercing stare are key skills needed for cooperation.

Q. To what society should we who wish to cooperate look for inspiration?

A. I would say to the Scandinavian countries, to Sweden, Norway, Finland. And the reason for that is that these are societies that have made cooperation a way of life. It’s something people don’t have to debate about. They’re vigorous societies economically, all three of them. It’s not that they cooperate because they’re poor. Quite the contrary. I think, with the resources they have, that cooperation has made it possible to spread the benefits of what they’ve got. They’re a real model to me. Americans often think, “Oh that’s socialist.” They’re not in fact socialist. They’re societies that have combined market capitalism with the social ethos.

Q. Can that be credited in part to their relative homogeneity?

A. I think it’s a perceptual issue rather than a statistical issue. If you live in a society where you think that everybody, no matter their skin color or economic class, has basically some common traits that make them Finnish or that make them Italian, then it’s easier to cooperate, because you feel there’s something basic you share which is that national identity. It’s not homogeneity. It’s that there’s some kind of common thread between people. I think a good thing about the United States is we’re beginning to see that common thread in terms of race.

Q. You drop the F-bomb twice in the first sentence of your book. Do you think that might have been the secret to your victory over the competitors?

A. F-bomb?

Q. That’s the term we use, because we’re a family publication.

A. [Laughs.] You don’t sound like a reporter to me.

Q. With what, if any, criticism of Together have you particularly disagreed?

A. I find the biggest misreading of what I’m trying to say is that cooperation is something that’s a moral choice, something you do because you’re such a nice person. That, it seems to me, is really to misunderstand how human societies get constituted, how people develop as children, and so on. If you moralize cooperation, if you say, “I’m a good person, so I cooperate,” you lose the richness of the thing-everything from cooperating on a sports team, in which you’re competing against other people, to warfare, in which people cooperate in order to survive. It loses the complexity of the subject.

Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon.

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Last April, Zócalo Public Square announced the launch of an annual book prize, to be awarded to the book that most effectively-and most creatively, strikingly, or enjoyably-enhances our understanding of community. The only firm rules about the sort of entries that could be submitted were these: the book had to be non-fiction, U.S.-based, and published in 2010. The candidates that made it out of thousands into our initial round of 80 were as wide in their range of subject matter as our judges are wide in their range of interests. But eventually we emerged with three finalists that were broadly felt to be stellar.

As one might expect, our judges never achieved complete unanimity on a top choice. A book that was much loved by one judge was often little loved by another. In fact, even the winner of this year’s Zócalo Book Prize provoked sharp disagreements. But now we’re getting ahead of ourselves. That’s for next week, when we announce the victor, who will win the $5,000 prize. For now, we present (in alphabetical order of author) our three superb finalists for the First Annual Zócalo Book Prize, sponsored by Southern California Gas Company. Each of them deserves a wide audience.

The author of the winning book will deliver a lecture at the award ceremony on April 8, 2011.

First Annual Zócalo Public Square Book Prize Award Ceremony
Friday, April 8, 2011, 7:30pm
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) – Grand Avenue
250 South Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, CA

The Three Finalists:

Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light
by Jane Brox

Brilliant is a quirky and delightful look at the history of artificial light and how it changed everything-starting with candles, proceeding to gas lights, and ending with our present age, as we prepare to step away from Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulb. Artificial light didn’t just change how we read or how we use our eyes inside. It changed our hours of waking and sleeping, our modes of transportation, and our patterns of coming together. Every time a group of 50,000 assembles peaceably in a stadium after dark to watch a baseball game or a Rolling Stones concert, artificial light is what makes such gatherings possible. Every time we log onto a discussion group online, the illuminated pixels our screen play a similarly instrumental role. With its unexpected details and colorful stories, this book surprises in all the best ways.

Excerpt: In this new wilderness, nothing was more complicated than time. But time — though no less an obsession than cleanliness — being abstract and malleable, couldn’t be confronted in a straightforward way. Within more affluent homes in the first decades of the twentieth century, women were often thought to have too much time on their hands. Ladies’ Home Journal declared: “As a matter of fact, what a certain type of woman needs today more than anything else is some task that ‘would tie her down.’ Our whole social fabric would be better for it. Too many women are dangerously idle.” But these same women felt pressure to make the most of time. The domestic science movement had taken hold, and its proponents advocated efficiency in household chores, the same way Frederick Taylor, writing in 1911, advocated it for factories: “We can see and feel the waste of material things. Awkward, inefficient or ill-directed movements … leave nothing visible or tangible behind them.”

Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon

What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly, former executive editor of Wired, offers a provocative take on the nature of technology and its potential to give greater meaning to our lives and to improve the functioning of our communities. What Technology Wants argues that metaphors of biology are far more useful to understanding the evolution of technology than are analyses of engineering. As the title of the book suggests, technology, in Kelly’s view, has a mind-or at least a momentum-of its own. The way to make it work for us is to anticipate where it intends to go (whether we like it or not) and channel it into places where it can help us, and help humanity, the most. The author’s view is one of resolute optimism. “Technology amplifies the mind’s urge toward the unity of all thought,” writes the author, “it accelerates the connections among all people, and it will populate the world with all conceivable ways of comprehending the infinite.”

Excerpt: We have lots of choices. But those choices are no longer simple, nor obvious. As technology increases its complexity, the technium demands more complex responses. For instance, the number of technologies to choose from so far exceeds our capacity to use them all that these days we define ourselves more by the technologies we don’t use than by those we do. In the same way that a vegetarian has more of an identity than an omnivore, someone who chooses not to drive or use the internet stakes out a stronger technological stance than the ordinary consumer. Although we don’t realize it, at the global scale, we opt out of more technology than we opt in to.

Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon

In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time
by Peter Lovenheim

When Peter Lovenheim, a resident in the suburbs of Rochester, NY, learned of a husband-wife murder-suicide that had taken place on his normally quiet street, he realized how little he actually knew of his neighbors or his neighborhood. That was the inspiration for In the Neighborhood, a book that introduces the reader to all of Lovenheim’s neighbors (or at least those willing to speak to him) and takes us into their houses. So determined is Lovenheim to get to know his neighbors that he politely asks them if he might sleep over at their house for one night, and, as often as not, gets a yes. The result is a memorable portrait of atomization in modern America-of a place where community is yearned for but not so easily found. Lovenheim argues that it’s time all of us took advantage of the connections right next door. “To do so, we really don’t need to sleep over at each other’s houses,” he writes. “All we need to do is deliberately set out to know the person next door, or across the street, or down the block; to ring the bell and open the door.”

Excerpt: All these lights, and others, taken together formed a sort of constellation for me, a picture of my neighbors inside their homes, living their lives, side by side with mine. Picturing myself as one point of light within that constellation was comforting.

Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon

Our judges:

Greg Critser, Author, Eternity Soup, Generation Rx, and Fatland
William Deverell, Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
Jennifer Ferro, General Manager, KCRW
Kimberly Freeman, Director of Community Relations, Southern California Gas Company
Laurie Ochoa, Co-Editor, Slake
Josephine Ramirez, Program Director for the Arts, The James Irvine Foundation
Gregory Rodriguez, Founder and Executive Director, Zócalo Public Square
Michael Tolkin, Novelist and Filmmaker

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