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Since 2012, the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize has been awarded annually to the U.S. poet whose poem best evokes a connection to place. “Place” may be interpreted by the poet as a place of historical, cultural, political, or personal importance; it may be a literal, imaginary, or metaphorical landscape. We are looking for one poem that offers our readers a fresh, original, and meaningful …

Beck Krefting is a former stand-up comedian and the author of All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents. She is also a scholar at Skidmore College whose research interests include humor and laughter; she is currently working on a book about preppers/survivalists. Before participating in the Zócalo/UCLA panel “Has Political Correctness Really Killed Humor?”, she talked in the Zócalo green room about the offensive …

In the recently released film Arrival, Earth is visited by an intelligent alien race, the heptapods, and the contact forever changes humanity’s sense of place in the cosmos. The movie offers an excellent examination of how we as a species might react to information that we are not alone.
We may not have to wait long. It looks increasingly possible that our search for signs …

Ben Barron is an assistant United States attorney in Los Angeles and deputy chief of the office’s Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force. Before participating in the Zócalo/UCLA panel “Can Anything Stop America’s Opioid Addiction?”, he talked in the Zócalo green room about what Law & Order gets wrong about his work and why he wishes he’d learned French instead of German.
 
Q: What do …

Dr. Larissa Mooney is an addiction psychiatrist and associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, where she directs the UCLA Addiction Medicine Clinic. Before participating in the Zócalo/UCLA panel “Can Anything Stop America’s Opioid Addiction?”, she revealed in the Zócalo green room her own addiction, the ugliest piece of furniture in her possession, and the weirdest thing hiding in her medicine cabinet.
 
Q: What’s the weirdest …

Long rivulet of me
strikes the ram’s horn.
My name hymns
god-bright in the lungs:
Loosen me,
revenant. Your absence
caused me to crawl in
the low fields
like a woman in war.
All that labor.
I’ve made a myth of it.
Dress billow-whips
my knees. Breathe:
body arch. Breathe:
body flutter. Breathe:
we linger. At the end
of anything, a lift.
Believe or leave
a breath—
 
Carly Joy Miller‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Blackbird, Boston …

Legal scholar and health policy expert Jill Horwitz is a professor at the UCLA School of Law whose work addresses issues including the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, and the impact of hospital ownership on the delivery of medical services. Previously, she was a professor of law and co-director of the Law and Economics Program at the University of Michigan. Before participating in the Zócalo/UCLA panel …

Managing information is central to the criminal justice system, and so it’s inevitable that mistakes happen. Names get confused, files lost. When these errors occur, the police can mistakenly arrest or detain people with no legal cause.
But what happens when software is responsible for a wrongful arrest or detention?
On Aug. 1, 2016, Alameda County, California, replaced its ’70s-era case management system with new software, …

You’re game for the year ’17, so you say,
It’s time that the drear of ’16 went away.
Let’s keep the murk past, back where it belongs,
Stop dwelling on all of the things that went wrong.
To you, we now say: have you lost your sense of humor?
That George Clooney break-up is still just a rumor.
And besides, this past year wasn’t really so terrible.
Zócalo rhyming just might make …

America’s infrastructure is headed down a bumpy road, and unless the country takes drastic action to fix its ailing transport, water, and other infrastructure systems, it might well wind up with the types of struggles I’ve witnessed recently in Myanmar.
I am here in Myanmar teaching an international business class. After the gloom and doom of the rancorous U.S. election, spending winter break in …