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Why We’re Still Reckoning With Japanese American Internment
This is a Zócalo Inquiry, Why We’re Still Reckoning With Japanese American Internment.
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How the Positive Side of Psychedelic Drugs Got Lost in the Mayhem of the 1960s
In the fall of 1965, a 33-year-old father of three named Arthur King—a patient on the alcoholics ward at Baltimore’s Spring Grove Hospital—swallowed an LSD pill and lay back on his bed in a special unit called “Cottage Thirteen.” Sanford Unger, the chief of psychosocial research at the Maryland State Psychiatric Research Center, knelt beside King’s bed, holding his hand and reassuring the patient as …
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How I Became the Voice of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
A Biblical passage, Luke 12:48, states, to whom much is given much is required. That is the attitude I have taken since I learned that I was given the gift of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s voice.
It was not a skill that I developed. I woke up one day and realized I could speak in the same rich voice, with the same baritone and …
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Good Food Host Evan Kleiman Doesn’t Go to Super Fancy Restaurants
Culinarian Evan Kleiman is the host of KCRW’s Good Food and a veteran of the Los Angeles food scene with a keen interest in food policy. In the green room before helming the panel at the Zócalo/UCLA event “What’s So Bad About GMOs?” Kleiman confessed that she isn’t all that interested in fancy meals—and that she ate a cold burrito for breakfast.
Q: What salad …
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Food Editor Russ Parsons Talks Citrus Season and Breakfast Foods
In more than 25 years as an award-winning food editor and columnist at the Los Angeles Times, Russ Parsons wrote about the ins and outs of food and farming. Before taking the stage at the Zócalo/UCLA event “What’s So Bad About GMOs?” Parsons sat in the green room and explained why he’s like a Green Goddess.
Q: What salad dressing best describes you?
A: I’m going …
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Last one out turns out the lights #poem
Turn the bottle not the cork.
I want a draft on my desk by morning.
Knuckles to the blade. A quick punch
to its bottom flaps opens an empty box.
On top of the stack, a bottle twisted flowers the napkins.
Alternating the direction of the wood at its ends
keeps the pile from falling. Pat your palm
on the metal to gauge the heat.
Marry the bottles. Count the till. Spray the …
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Why America Should Be Running With the Bulls on Wall Street
You should be celebrating the fact that the stock market is soaring.
Yes, I’m talking to you, even if you are not a trust fund baby—make that especially if you are not a trust fund baby.
I fear that with all the politicized talk of “Wall Street” and the images that shorthand conjures up in our minds of rapacious bankers and hedge fund managers, we’ve lost track …
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Helipads Never Made L.A.’s Skyscrapers Much Safer
For 40 years, Los Angeles’ building code has required all buildings 75 feet and taller to have a rooftop emergency helicopter landing facility in a location approved by the fire chief. The idea in 1974, when the law was passed, was to make skyscrapers safer, in part as a reaction to a catastrophic fire in Brazil. But we know now there are better ways to …
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How Homesteaders Turned Fragile Arizona Savannas Into a Bare-Earth Desert
In the Santa Cruz Flats in southern Arizona, the beige of sandy plains, dunes, and clay-filled basins alternate with green swaths of irrigated cotton fields. Save for a rare jackrabbit, the only mammals are underground. Bird-watchers come to see migrating hawks perched on power poles waiting for rodents to venture forth into one of the remaining cultivated maize fields or sod farms.
To call the Santa …
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Self-Cloning Salamanders Can Tell Us a Thing or Two About Climate Change
Birds do it, bees do it, and so the song goes, even educated fleas do it. But unisexual salamanders don’t.
These all-female amphibians clone themselves to make eggs—all girls—and they’ve survived this way for five million years. A real-life lineage of Amazonian amphibians, they achieve the seemingly impossible, generation after generation. Whatever your deepest beliefs about what is natural, normal, or even conceivable with sex …