But before we bid 2014 adieu,
Here’s a gift from the Zócalo crew—
We’re remembering 12 months in verse,
The great, the strange, the very worst.

An Ebola epidemic became a crisis; our media erupted in fear.
Thousands died in West Africa; two people died here.
Boko Haram militants kidnapped girls in Nigeria.
Protests wracked Ukraine, so Russia annexed Crimea.

Shots were exchanged, lives were taken, world war appeared imminent,
Instead Putin got himself into a serious financial predicament.
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, George Clooney and Amal Alamuddin,
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt—celeb weddings were brewing.

Sony’s servers were hacked, North Korea issued a denial;
Hollywood execs were shamed by emails that went viral.
In Colorado and Washington, it’s finally legal to be a stoner,
Not to mention super profitable to be a dispensary owner.

Protests raged in Hong Kong and in Venezuela, too.
Change came to Thailand by way of military coup.
The Ali Baba IPO was massive, Bitcoin’s value sank.
Uber and Airbnb kept putting money in the bank.

Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Deaths: two. Indictments: none.
“I can’t breathe” and “black lives matter” on the nation’s tongue.
Protests swept from state to state, but the violence didn’t end.
Justice system, law enforcement—are they foe or friend?

World Cup soccer delivered a month of thrills,
Glory came to Germany (the pain was all Brazil’s).
L.A.’s Kings were crowned by Lord Stanley.
The victors of the MLS Cup were the L.A. Galaxy.

A lack of snow and a ring malfunction couldn’t stop Sochi,
Russia’s Winter Olympics were a great success, declared the IOC.
Donald Sterling’s racism was revealed in all its tawdry detail.
In the end he did OK thanks to the Clippers’ $2 billion retail.

The Republicans took Congress; in L.A., no one voted.
The Senate’s Southern Democrats are now completely eroded.
Immigration reform finally arrived through an Obama decree,
After thousands crossed the border as child refugees.

From South Carolina to Wyoming, same-sex marriage won in court.
The CIA’s secrets were revealed in a torture report.
Gwyneth Paltrow uncoupled, Bill Cosby allegations were big news.
College campuses around the country dealt with sexual abuse.

Angelenos said goodbye to plastic bags and The Tonight Show.
You couldn’t find an American kid who wasn’t singing “Let It Go.”
ISIS, ISIL, the Islamic State—the name kept on changing.
What stayed the same in Syria—a civil war kept raging.

Pope Francis brokered a deal between Obama and Castro.
Forty-three student deaths brought outrage to Mexico.
A shooting in Isla Vista. Drought in the American West.
More of Israel and Palestine’s never-ending unrest.

Between Ray Rice and concussions, the NFL fumbled.
Obamacare went into effect after having stumbled.
Goodbyes to Gabriel García Márquez and Maya Angelou,
Robin Williams, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Joan Rivers, too.

Malaysia Airlines lost two planes, over Ukraine and the South China Sea.
India got a new prime minister in Narendra Modi.
Malala won the Nobel Peace Prize—the youngest person ever.
NASA scored success with its Orion capsule endeavor.

Zócalo announced two big partnerships and our syndication.
We’re not too shy to say it out loud: We’re expanding across the nation.
We started two columns, hosted Susan Orlean and Craig Venter.
We tried to figure out why L.A.’s so tough on renters.

We launched My Favorite Movie with Roy Choi, the food truck king.
Alain de Botton talked news junkies; we heard Randy Newman sing.
Ethan Zuckerman won our book prize; we tried to speed up traffic.
Joshua Wolf Shenk told us why the number two is so fantastic.

2014 began with a personal loss, an absence that’s persisted:
Charita Law was a wonderful colleague—both spirited and gifted.
Looking back isn’t always easy, but it’s sometimes necessary,
To dig up the past, both good and bad, then move on with the memories.

So here’s to the last 365, and the days just around the bend,
To beginning new beginnings and celebrating at the end.

The post It’s About Time for Your Zócalo Rhyme appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The elevator at Santa Monica Place has a dedicated button for the Redwood Grille, and I am deposited directly into the restaurant foyer. It’s no food court. I’m surrounded by sleek wood and glass, big brown leather banquettes, and windows that stream in light through palm trees. Stephen Francis Jones is sitting at a table inside, but we head to the back patio, which has a nautical vibe, thanks to dark blue cushions and sail-shaped awnings that provide both shade and drama.

Jones explains that the restaurant’s Canadian owners didn’t want diners to feel that they were on the third floor of the mall (though I personally like the view of the Third Street Promenade from up here). He tells me that once the sun goes down, the birds of paradise in planters around the patio cast shadows on the sails above us. The sails wink at the proximity of the ocean, and Jones adds that the design is also inspired by the contoured, curved ceilings at the new Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX.

The post Stephen Francis Jones appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the two months we worked with Charita Law, we learned a lot about her. How deeply she cared about her family and how happy she was to be back in California. How she loved hash browns and tofu and cranberry pita crisps (though she was always willing to share them). How the mere prospect of meeting Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was enough to make her squeal. How working so close to the beach and seeing palm trees out the window made her smile. How she was a night owl, but she was still in a reliably good mood in the mornings (and the afternoons, for that matter). How fantastic she was on social media, how she’d laugh at most of our jokes, how dependable and trustworthy she was, and how lucky we were to have her.

She grew up in the Los Angeles suburb of Cerritos, graduated from UC Berkeley, and moved to Washington, D.C. to work at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This summer, she returned home to Southern California to be closer to her family.

In October, she applied to become Zócalo’s communications manager. Her resume was impressive, but even more so was her spirit and her instant understanding of our mission to connect broader audiences to ideas and each other. “I know how it feels to attend an event, look around, and realize I’m one of the few non-white (and non-balding) people in the room,” she wrote in her cover letter.

How could we not bring her in for an interview? And—after our conversations with her, in which she confessed that she lacked a filter, laughed easily and often, and said she was game for just about any task—how could we not bring her onboard?

In her first weeks on the job, to our collective delight, Charita proved to be an extraordinary young woman. She was someone with what one of my colleagues called chispa—a spark. She was brilliant and unpretentious, but there was also a gravity, even a solemnity, about her. She was wide-eyed but not naïve: curious, open, cheerful. She worked with joy, she paid attention to detail, and she caught on quickly to the fast pace of our work and to the zaniness and unpredictability of our motley, tight-knit crew. Like the rest of us, she was geeky and quirky and a little bit unconventional.

I sat about five feet away from Charita every day, but only for a few weeks, so the word “love” feels strong. But I can say unreservedly that I—we—loved her unselfish goofiness, her broad smile, and simply having her around. And I can say that because she worked with me at Zócalo. Because she was an unusual person at an unusual place.

Charita died last week, after a fall on New Year’s Eve. She was going to turn 26 later this month.

When someone young dies, one of the countless tragedies is the loss of potential. We feel it acutely at Zócalo right now because, for all we came to love about Charita, what we loved most was all that was next. Next year, she wasn’t going to get lost on the way to the office holiday party. Next month, she was going to come up with an awesome new feature for the site. Next week, she was going to say something totally off-the-wall (again), and we were all going to laugh (again).

People talk a lot about how balancing your life and your work keeps you sane, makes you human. But I’ve found that melding the two—if you work at a place with a mission you believe in and people you come to love—can also make you human. Charita taught me how to write a better tweet. She taught me about how unbridled enthusiasm can change the people around us. She taught me that putting a drop of vanilla extract into your yogurt makes it taste a little like ice cream. She also taught me that it’s OK to say you loved someone, even if you only worked with her, and it was only for a few weeks.

The post When Life (and Death) and Work Collide appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This was the year of the e-cigarette, the golden age of twerking,
When “lean in” was the mantra for every woman working.
Edward Snowden blew the whistle, the NSA came under fire,
Spying on Americans was pretty bad, but things just got more dire:

Angela Merkel of Germany, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil,
Mexico and France plus Ehud Olmert of Israel—
Our allies we rewarded by listening to their phones,
Our enemies by targeting with our secret drones.

It was a stumble for Obama, but later came a chance
For our second-term president to break out his victory dance.
Unfortunately for him, the fanfare was scotched
As Obamacare’s rollout was nothing less than botched

By glitches and bugs and grumbling galore:
Health exchange enrollment was this year’s biggest chore.
Two Texans loved the filibuster—Wendy Davis and Ted Cruz.
He read Dr. Seuss aloud; she called for a woman’s right to choose.

North Korea tested missiles, purged, and made threats,
The European Union still couldn’t escape its debts.
Intervention in Syria was averted at the 11th hour,
California Edison cut San Onofre’s nuclear power.

We bid goodbye to DOMA and sayonara to Prop 8.
Same-sex marriage became legal in seven more states.
L.A. fell in love this spring, broke out champagne and confetti,
But not merely to welcome new Mayor Eric Garcetti.

Dodger fans were woeful as the team limped into June,
But just a few days later they were singing a different tune:
Yasiel Puig was the chorus and the melody, too,
This 22-year-old from Cuba would surely save Big Blue.

He didn’t take them all the way; that’s what next year’s for,
But for now his rookie season goes down in L.A. lore.
Britain got a royal baby, America got North West,
Denmark’s president got a selfie, Brazil got protests.

A telephone call gave way to a U.S.-Iran nuclear deal,
Kobe Bryant was felled for months by his Achilles heel.
The Rim Fire burned the Sierra Nevada—400 miles gone.
Everyone was listening to that one Daft Punk song.

White smoke rose above the Vatican; speculation mounted,
Would the Church at last admit the world outside Europe counted?
The pope was from Latin America; Argentinians rejoiced,
Though Francis still seemed like a pretty conventional choice.

Then he started talking—about healing and compassion,
And why the stern tone of the Church had gone out of fashion.
He refuses to judge people, he drives a crappy car,
A guy who washes poor folks’ feet has become a superstar.

Devastation came in many forms and to many places:
A typhoon in the Philippines, a bombing at Boston’s races.
A gunman at Santa Monica College, another in D.C.,
Three kidnapped women in Cleveland were finally set free.

The world lost Nelson Mandela and came together to mourn.
A coup took hold in Egypt; Cairo remained strife-torn.
Fire took lives in a Bangladesh factory and the Arizona wild,
But a dose of love and goodwill took the form of a San Francisco child.

The Batkid saved Gotham in a celebration of survival.
Was there anything better in 2013 that went quite so viral?
Amazon showed off its drones, Twitter’s IPO was huge,
L.A. celebrated its aqueduct with an anniversary deluge.

(And then there was the JFK love, 50 years later,
If you didn’t mourn on November 22 you must’ve been a hater.)
Federal employees got an unexpected vacation,
As a nonessential shutdown followed sequestration.

Jason Collins left the closet, Google Glass debuted.
The Mulholland Bridge opened at last; 405 construction continued.
Voyager 1 went interstellar, we kept up with our fracking,
At the airport USC sent Coach Lane Kiffin packing.

Paula Deen went off the air, will Duck Dynasty be next?
Anthony Weiner tried and failed to make a comeback post-sext.
L.A.’s City Hall was left with just one woman standing.
Russia’s anti-gay laws had Americans demanding

A boycott of the Sochi Olympics and of Stoli, too.
Instead we got gay athletes in our delegation crew.
Jeff Bezos bought a paper; the LAT left bankruptcy.
Will Janet Napolitano be the one to rescue the UC?

Zócalo put on some kickass events, published more than ever,
It seems to be working pretty well, this Ideas Exchange endeavor!
You found us across the country, from Miami to Chicago to Phoenix.
We got the scoop on bicycle travel and on Rupert Murdoch’s genius.

In honor of our 10th birthday, we shared our founding story.
We reveled in the Midwestern mall in all its dying glory.
We hosted Greuel and Garcetti in a mayoral debate.
We launched a fantastic column that travels around the state:

Joe Mathews connects California for us on a weekly basis—
Riding a train to Sacramento or singing Central CA’s praises.
We asked the former head of Intel to talk computer chips,
TMZ’s Charles Latibeaudiere gave us hair care tips.

Linda Greenhouse discussed SCOTUS, an NFL boycott was explained.
Jason Bentley talked pop music, the state of L.A.’s plate was ascertained.
Immigration reform and game theory—our topics stayed eclectic,
The legendary Debbie Allen was nothing less than electric.

We teamed up with UCLA to tell the stories of the city.
A veteran explained why we’ve misplaced our pity.
We’re grateful for the support we got to get so much done.
Thanks to all who read, watched, and listened—it was always fun.

We’ll see you in 2014, big things for Zócalo are coming soon,
We can’t say anymore right now, so be sure to stay tuned!

The post A Year to Revere appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The victors of 2012 are easy to remember,
And no, not just that guy who won in November.
Gabby Douglas took gold, Usain Bolt set a new record,
Mexico’s PRI overcame a past that was checkered.

Proposition 30 gave Jerry Brown a reason to smile:
California’s schools were saved, at least for a little while.
Greece stayed in the Eurozone, hanging by a thread,
The French moved to the left and elected a socialist head.

Vladimir Putin came back with more feats that amazed:
Leading a flock of birds or a nation? The man is unfazed!
But if we had to nominate the next global leader,
It’d be a guy loved by every New York Times reader

Not to mention Obama and all of his pollsters,
As time and again, his victory you bolstered.
2012 was carried by Nate Silver’s predictions,
Though it’s true the year had its share of victims.

Lance Armstrong took a tumble worse than any from his bike,
General Petraeus trusted Gmail and was forced to take a hike.
McKayla Maroney was not impressed by taking second place,
Howard Berman fell to Sherman in our favorite rhyming race.

The binders full of women and the 47 percent
Have given Mitt Romney four years to lament.
New York and New Jersey were ravaged by Sandy,
At least Chris Christie came out looking dandy.

Violence ended American lives both near and far away,
The nation gathered together to remember and to pray,
For the people of Aurora, for the kids of Newtown, too,
For soldiers still in Afghanistan hoping to make it through.

On a lighter note, there was the song that spawned YouTube sensations,
K-Pop had its day as “Gangnam Style” spread across the nation.
Psy became a household name, the El Monte lifeguards got fired,
Though Zócalo did our best to get them rehired.

The Hunger Games came to the screen and took box office gold,
In suburban bedrooms across America Fifty Shades of Grey took hold.
Rodney King passed away; we lost Ray Bradbury too.
A Democratic supermajority got Sacramento seeing blue.

Philip Roth retired from writing but Vin Scully still announced,
In Colorado and Washington, pot became legal (under an ounce).
At the Hilton in Beverly Hills, Whitney Houston’s music came to an end,
The Mayan predictions of apocalypse 2012 had nothing to portend.

Madeleine Brand bailed on KPCC—decided to leave the station,
Public television won’t be the same since Huell Howser’s abdication.
Magic Johnson bought the Dodgers and lowered parking prices,
Will condoms in pornographic films cause a SoCal industry crisis?

L.A. ice hockey fans celebrated: the Kings took the crown!
Austin Beutner, Zev, and Rick Caruso declined a chance to run our town.
Obamacare passed muster with the nation’s highest court,
Justice Roberts surprised us all by giving his support.

An anti-Islam film caused uproar near and far,
It seemed to cost more than ever to put gas into our cars.
Trayvon Martin lost his life; will Florida stand its ground?
Terrorists attacked the Benghazi embassy compound.

Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman was our saddest celebrity breakup,
People were confused by Rihanna and Chris Brown’s make-up.
Lindsay Lohan played Liz Taylor but relied on TMZ for fame,
The Griffith Park mountain lion crossed the 405 to great acclaim.

But P-22 was nowhere near the biggest animal star in the city,
One black bear’s fame spread far and wide as he sat pretty
In Glendale, raiding refrigerators and garbage bins,
Call him Meatball or Glen Bearian, he never failed to make us grin.

We came a little closer to proving Higgs boson’s existence,
The Curiosity rover landed on Mars with NASA Mohawk Guy’s assistance.
South Los Angeles lost some trees but gained the shuttle Endeavour,
The UC system changed its logo and got no support whatsoever.

Syria stayed in the headlines as civil war raged,
Every day in Cairo a new protest was staged.
The rest of Europe begged Germany for cash,
Off the coast of Italy the Costa Concordia crashed.

Zócalo not only stayed afloat; it was our biggest year to date.
We reinvented ourselves as an Ideas Exchange to better integrate
Live events plus humanities journalism—everything we do.
We launched a fantastic website with a design that’s brand-spanking-new.

Seventy events in 11 cities, 600 articles in the can,
Hard to believe we did it in a 365-day span!
Politicians and poets shared our stage, as did university heads,
Elizabeth Banks and Adrian Grenier proved our Hollywood creds.

Patrick Soon-Shiong offered a solution to our healthcare woes,
Eric Liu performed “Citizen Who,” Zócalo’s first one-man show.
We were the first to get behind Jim Mora, UCLA’s new football coach,
He and Troy Aikman discussed the NFL’s L.A. approach.

Cheryl Strayed on hiking, Benjamin Millepied on dance,
Philip Levine on democracy—so glad we took that chance!
Police Chief Beck on James Q. Wilson, Mayim Bialik on Big Bang,
The praises of the encyclopedic museum Getty prez James Cuno sang.

Juan Felipe Herrera recited poetry, Richard Sennett talked cooperation,
Camille Paglia confessed to having a Real Housewives fixation.
We traveled up and down the state, Searching for Democracy,
We helped inaugurate Grand Park with L.A. museum aristocracy.

What a year 2012 was, what a year 2013 will be,
It’s fun to look back; now let’s anticipate with glee.

The post ’Tis the End of the Year, Lend Us Your Ear appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I wasn’t so sheltered that I didn’t know I was lucky to take tennis lessons and swim in an Olympic-sized pool and to have the chance to go into The City (New York, about 30 miles to the northeast) every so often to see a show. And while I knew that Jews only made up a small fraction of the population of the country and the world, there was nothing interesting about the fact that they made up about three-quarters of the people in my world.

Which is why I was so astounded to read Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, the story of a summer romance between a working-class Jewish boy from Newark (home to my grandfather’s firm, in which my dad still practices law) and an upper-middle-class Jewish girl from Short Hills. I was probably 11 or 12 when I read Roth’s 1959 novella for the first time, along with the accompanying short stories (my favorite being “The Conversion of the Jews,” which was set in a Hebrew school that shared some similarities to my own and doubtless every other Hebrew school in America). I was a voracious reader, but I had never before seen my name (well, half of it) on a book jacket, nor had I ever seen the names of towns I recognized between a book’s covers. But more incredible than my own thrill of recognition was the thrill that people—not just Jews in New Jersey, but people around the country and the world—were interested in this story. And this story could have been, if not my story, than the story of a grandparent or parent or aunt or uncle of mine.

My discovery of Roth, in the 1990s, coincided with his magnificent late-career resurgence. First I read backward (The Ghost Writer, Portnoy’s Complaint), and then I read forward: The Human Stain and The Plot Against America as soon as they came out. For years, my favorite book was American Pastoral (set in a thinly disguised version of Morristown, an older and waspier neighboring town). On a day-to-day basis, my mom’s neuroses were a source of annoyance (does the discovery of a $5-off coupon really merit a second trip to the mall in a single day?), my family’s ambivalence about our Jewishness a source of joking (my grandfather always made reservations at the fanciest restaurants in New York on Yom Kippur because you got better service when there were fewer customers), and the tensions between the more and less observant factions of our family a source of argument. But with Roth as my prism, these peccadillos could have pathos and weight and meaning, not just for me but for people outside my family circle.

My affection for Roth held steady through college despite learning that some people considered him a misogynist and a self-hating Jew—and despite realizing that not all his books were created equal (his baseball book, The Great American Novel, is a classic case of overpromising and underperforming). When it came time to write my senior thesis, the first adviser I approached—who had taught my late-20th-century American literature survey course on Roth, John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer (a decidedly narrow survey)—declined to work with me. “I’ve shot my load on Roth,” he explained. But I found another professor who still had something left in the tank, and I spent a year reading and rereading Roth’s Zuckerman novels for a project I wanted to title “Rothbard on Roth.” (I settled instead for something much more academic, boring, and appropriate, but I got to use the title in the preface.)

Immediately after graduating, I entered the world of New York book publishing. Roth had long since retreated into near-isolation in Connecticut, so while I dreamed of running into him at a book party, I settled instead for his editor (it turned out she’d gone to high school with my aunt; I doubted she edited him much anyway) and his publicist’s assistant (I cornered the guy at a Christmas party and demanded to know if the rumors about a young girlfriend were true). I loved that I could in turn tell them the story of the literature class my dad took at the University of Pennsylvania with Roth just after Portnoy’s Complaint came out; on the first day of class, Roth slapped a piece of liver on his desk.

Every year, I’ve rooted for Roth to win the Nobel Prize and felt just a little bit crushed by the announcement that it’s gone to yet another novelist I’ve never heard of. In 2005, I delighted in his proclamation, upon the installation of a plaque by his boyhood home, that “Newark is my Stockholm.”

In 2006, Roth published Everyman, a slim, dark story about a man dying alone and full of regret. It’s the last book of his that I loved, but my mother’s father, then in his mid-80s, loved it more. For a few months, it seemed like he could talk about nothing other than Roth’s grim, cold vision of death, never mind that my grandfather was in excellent health at the time.

When I heard the news that Roth had given up writing and announced his retirement (in a French magazine; how delightfully contrarian!), I didn’t feel mournful for myself, although I hoped he might have one last big book left in him. While it may sound silly, I felt worried for my grandfather. He’s 81 years old, and he’s got a broken ankle (courtesy of a golf cart accident at the club this summer) as well as a broken heart. He hasn’t been able to get through a book since my grandmother died in May. I don’t think he’d tell you he was looking forward to reading Roth’s next book; it’s unlikely that he even bothered with Roth’s past few books (I haven’t, either, frankly). But a new book by Roth could make us all feel special for a little while. Like our stories weren’t over—and might be worth reading.

The post Letting Go of Philip Roth appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Is “love” too strong a word to use for an airport–especially for this somewhat dinky secondary (tertiary?) gateway? It’s true that the Bob Hope Airport is small and outdated; in January, American Airlines pulled out, leaving it strapped for cash. When you think of L.A., you think of LAX, even if it is an immense modernist nightmare.

Bob Hope is charmingly retro in its human scale, starting with the way you board planes by walking out onto the tarmac and up the front or rear stairs. To fly here from JFK’s state-of-the-art and cavernous Terminal 5, with its shiny sushi bar and touch-screen monitors for ordering pre-flight meals, is like flying back in time. You can walk the length of the two compact terminals in a matter of minutes. The security lines move fast, and the TSA staff seem friendlier than elsewhere (you half expect them to remember your name from the last time). So, yes, I have come to love this cozy airport named after a comedian that’s an astonishingly short drive up the 5 from Los Feliz, where Dan and I are now living.

Although the curb at the Bob Hope Airport was the site of a few teary goodbyes when I used to fly back to New York, it was also where we found each other again every time I visited. It’s hard to make a connection, or to talk about the things that really matter, even with someone you love, when you’re not face-to-face. For weeks or months, we’d conduct our relationship over the phone–between meetings for me and classes for him–in a way that felt almost desultory. Even after my flight would land, with only a few hundred yards between us, there was something that didn’t feel real about our being together. We’d talk on our cell phones as I walked through the terminal, updating each other on our progress (“Now I’m three minutes away”; “I’m circling again …”)–and then I’d be outside, and I’d see him, or he’d see me, and with one big stupid smile I’d know we were OK. What matters most at Bob Hope isn’t any hulking antiseptic infrastructure but the people.

Now that I’m living and working in L.A., trips to and from the Bob Hope Airport usually mean I’m traveling on business. I still relish the ease of it all. I’m consistently shocked by how quickly I can make it from our apartment to the airport, park, and be at the gate. Even as I’m taking off my shoes and getting out my liquids, I chat up security as I breeze through the screening; at least twice, I’ve been asked about where I got my styling cream, and how I like it. In Burbank, I am that rare, satisfied, even cheerful airport traveler.

And now, like Dan before me, I get to come to Bob Hope to pick up and reconnect with other people I love. When my two best friends flew in for a weekend in January, the traffic cop almost ticketed them for jumping into my car before I reached the loading zone. We begged forgiveness, tripping over each other to explain how long we’d spent apart, before she let me off with a warning.

But to be honest, I wouldn’t have cared if I had been given a ticket. My friends had traveled across a continent, I was the destination, and the Bob Hope Airport had once again made it easier than one would believe it could possibly be, in this big, sprawling city, for us to find one another.

Sarah Rothbard is managing & books editor of Zócalo Public Square.

*Photo by Sarah Rothbard

The post Bob Hope Airport, Burbank appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So a year-end poem seemed apropos.
We might have gone Roger-Angell-style,
Marching the year’s guests in single file,
Rhyming Steven Brill and Brad Cloepfil, Dakin Sloss and Andrew Ross,
But what to do with Evgeny Morozov? We might be at a loss.
So we’ll simply salute the year’s passing–by no means completely–
With unmetered verse that rhymes somewhat neatly.
Here’s the news that riveted, the stories we remember,
The things we kept talking about even in December.

It was a banner year for protests but not for marriages or dictators,
Almost as unsuccessful? State and national legislators.
The uprisings in the Middle East spread like a conflagration,
“The 99 percent” became Wall Street’s occupation.
A march in London grew into days of riots and violence,
In Russia civil society may at last have broken its silence.
Like the wives of Henry the Eighth, autocrats were deleted:
Qaddafi, Kim Jong-Il, Mubarrak–killed, died, unseated.
(But not before we got the goods on Muammar’s second son,
Saif Qaddafi, who learned at LSE how government should run …)

Meanwhile in the U.S., our government was stalling,
Debt, taxes, federal funding; Congressional approval ratings were falling.
Things in California were pretty much the same–too many
Problems left unsolved, and pinching every penny.
But people still threw parties as Kate and Will headed to the altar,
While every major celebrity couple headed closer to a no-faulter.
The big shock came from Kardashian and Humphries,
And the other stars’ divorce papers seemed to come monthly:
Arnold and Maria, Kobe and Vanessa, Ashton and Demi–
The Twitter-verse kept reeling with J-Lo and Marc Anthony.

The marriage of nations on the Continent didn’t go much better,
The eurozone became a union of creditor and debtor.
Bankruptcy hit closer to home when the Dodgers went under–
And how could we forget the McCourts, another marriage torn asunder?
There was good news, too, amidst the doom and gloom,
For one weekend L.A. was traffic-free, though the worst had been assumed,
That false alarm on the 405 that we all deemed “Carmageddon”?
It wasn’t until Obamajam that the freeways truly turned leaden.
A decade-long manhunt closed with the death of Osama,
The rapture scheduled for May 21st wasn’t worth the drama.

The war in Iraq ended, to Baghdad we bid farewell,
A conclusion came at last for “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Not all endings were happy; some died too soon,
Steve Jobs and his brilliance, Amy Winehouse and her croon.
Gabrielle Giffords survived Tucson; was destruction Japan’s fate?
We couldn’t turn our eyes away from scandal at Penn State.
Los Angeles felt schadenfreude from earthquakes on the east coast,
Til the Santa Anas arrived in force to deliver a riposte.
The Republican race’s ups and downs have been well-documented
(Including by our own T.A. Frank–Herman Cain’s exit much-lamented.)

As the world spun round its axis, Zócalo was busier than ever before,
Hosting 50 events, publishing a web magazine, launching a think tank, and more.
Julian Bond came wearing seersucker; Wim Wenders in Converse,
Jane McGonigal promoted gaming; Guillermo del Toro laughed and cursed.
In Phoenix and Fresno and New York City, we made our debuts.
When Perez Hilton recommended “How Doctors Die,” we knew we’d broken through.
Jennifer Ferro took us to her neighborhood, Brenda Yancor told her Mormon story,
Constantino Diaz-Duran embarked on a mission for cross-country glory.
We teamed up with ASU, mourned the closing of Rocket Video,
Joined the Pacific Standard Time excitement, shed some light on Mexico.

Stay tuned for more to come, 2012’s looking splendid,
And thanks for looking back with us on the year that’s ended.

Sarah Rothbard is managing & books editor of Zócalo Public Square.

*Photo courtesy of irene.

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