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Things were going well until the crockpots of nacho cheese began showing up next to the knock-off purses in 2013. Once that happened, Bakersfield’s ArtWalk, part of its monthly downtown art night, First Friday, went downhill and fast.
ArtWalk and First Friday were the brainchildren of Don Martin, who opened Metro Galleries in 2007. To encourage people to come downtown after work, he organized businesses …

The French have always loved Oscar Wilde, just as he always loved them. Long before Britain sent him to jail for enjoying sex with other males in 1895, he made Paris his spiritual home. He wrote the erotic tragedy Salomé (1892) in French, but the Examiner of Plays in London banned it after deeming it “half Biblical, half pornographic.” Much later, when he left prison …

Of the 10 children in my family, I was the only one who was obese. I didn’t know it at the time, but my family mirrored obesity trends in Holtville, the small town in California where I grew up. In Imperial County, which borders Arizona and Mexico, 1 in 10 people were considered obese in the 1970s and ’80s. I hated being obese. I was …

I’m sitting here in Maine having a snow day. I can only see about 30 feet in front of my cabin; everything beyond is obscured by white frosty particles, which weather reports tell me are falling at the rate of two to four inches an hour. It’s quiet outside, except for the wind.
There are 985 closings in the state of Maine today, and the …

Multiculturalism has become a loaded word, with cities like Paris and Brussels becoming emblematic of the failure of the ideal of different cultures and religions living together. Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor started working on the issues of diversity and multiculturalism in the 1980s and published an influential essay called “The Politics of Recognition” in 1992, which said that recognition is a “vital human need.” In …

I first met Charles Taylor when I was a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal in 1984.
His classes were like nothing I had encountered as an undergraduate at Oxford University, where old yellowing lecture notes found themselves on the lectern year after year, and questions were rare—if not seen as aberrant behavior. Taylor would stride in dressed in jeans and immediately ask the class, …

Twenty years after it began changing lives in other countries, the internet isn’t even a concept for the average North Korean—so much so that most people in the country of 25 million literally don’t know what they are missing.
And that’s by design.
One of the pillars of Kim Jong Un’s vise-grip on the lives of his people is propaganda: All news originates from the same government …

Marqueece Harris-Dawson was sworn into office on the Los Angeles City Council in 2015 to represent South Los Angeles, where he was a longtime community organizer. Before participating in the Zócalo/The California Wellness Foundation event, “How Do You Fix a ‘Bad’ Neighborhood?” he revealed in the Zócalo green room his favorite neighborhood haunt and talked about what he likes most about his job.
 
Q: What’s the …

Adrienne N. Newsom is president and chief operating officer of the Gang Reduction & Youth Development Foundation, the GRYD Foundation, whose programs include the Summer Night Lights series. Before participating in the Zócalo/The California Wellness Foundation event, “How Do You Fix a ‘Bad’ Neighborhood?”, she talked in the green room about her guilty pleasure, what surprises her most about her life right now, and what …

A small bridge leads to the sea,
but you do not cross it.
No field guide, no bottle, no bible, no gun.
Just the softest of wars
between wind &
some kind of sister poppy—
Ant in the golden
forest of your hair, finds the good place
to die, at last.
And the light does not exhaust
admiring him.
 
Louise Mathias is author of two books of poems, most recently The Traps (Four Way Books). She …