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In a Strong Community, Everybody Belongs to Everyone, Says Pediatrician ChrisAnna Mink

By | December 9, 2016

ChrisAnna Mink is a pediatrician at the St. John’s Well Child and Family Center and Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, where she focuses on health care for children in underserved communities. Before participating in the Zócalo/The California Wellness Foundation event, “How Do You Fix a ‘Bad’ Neighborhood?” she talked in the Zócalo green room about what she liked most about the neighborhood she grew …

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After a Stomach-Churning Year, Feed Your Head With Zócalo’s 10 Favorite Reads of 2016

By | December 9, 2016

Looking back over the last 12 months, many see a year of horrors—from political turmoil to mass shootings in Orlando and Dallas to the deaths of pop culture giants David Bowie and Prince. But 2016 was also a year that delivered a bounty of great nonfiction, some the best of which we at Zócalo have compiled here, in our annual list of 10 favorite books. …

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Trump’s Border Wall Sidelined by Major League Sports as the NBA and NFL Woo Mexico’s Fans

By | December 8, 2016

Last week I asked Mexico’s Secretary of the Economy, Ildefonso Guajardo, whether he fears that a Trump presidency will revive the anti-Americanism that was once a staple of Mexican life but receded to negligible levels over the past two decades.
Surprisingly, his answer was all about a Monday Night Football game played less than two weeks after the election. Namely, the first-ever regular season Monday night …

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VIDEO: Is Fighting Populist Anger a Losing Battle?

By | December 8, 2016

Populist anger is shaking the world, epitomized by the U.K.’s vote to “Brexit” the EU and even the election of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. In the U.S., Donald Trump’s election has transformed populist anger into political power. Is a worldwide populist wave inevitable?
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has spent decades studying how democracies succeed and fail, in the West and elsewhere. He …

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VIDEO: What Does Philosophy Need to Do in the Future?

By | December 7, 2016

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is the 2016 recipient of the Berggruen Philosophy Prize for ideas that shape the world. His work has crossed disciplines from philosophy to political science, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, poetry, and music. We asked him what the future of philosophy should look like.
 
This video is part of an Inquiry produced by the Berggruen Institute and Zócalo Public Square, on philosopher …

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An American in Lebanon Encounters Trump Supporters Far From Home

By | December 7, 2016

A few weeks after I arrived in Lebanon to volunteer with Syrian refugees, I learned that my plan to offer an English class for both Lebanese and Syrian youth in the small town of Bqarzla was so sensitive as to require an audience with the village priest.
After Sunday mass in the village church, a fellow volunteer, Samer—Syrian, Orthodox Christian—and I were escorted to the high-ceilinged …

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VIDEO: What Does Poetry Prove About Humans?

By | December 6, 2016

In 1798, poet William Wordsworth and his sister took a walk in the Welsh countryside. The poem he wrote about that walk—“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”—moved readers deeply. Wordsworth was one of the leading poets of the Romantic era, and he called poetry “a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”
What is it about humans and our relationship to language that …

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VIDEO: How to Struggle With Big Questions

By | December 6, 2016

Charles Taylor’s 1989 book Sources of the Self is about 600 pages long, drawing on history, philosophy, poetry, music, and art to explain how the modern Western sense of self and identity came to be. Starting with Augustine, Taylor describes how people conceived of themselves from antiquity, and how a new understanding of the self started during the time of Descartes and the Enlightenment. These …

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Meet the Berkeley Artist and Gulf War Vet Who Who’s Made 18,300 Ceramic Cups Since 2001

By | December 5, 2016

Ehren Tool is a Berkeley-based artist who primarily makes ceramic cups; he’s given away over 18,300 of them since 2001. He is also a veteran of the Gulf War. Before participating in the Zócalo/MOCA panel “Is Art Our Last Safe Space?” he told us in the Zócalo green room what inspired his most recent cup, and what he’s most likely to drink out of a …

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Does Philosophy Hold Crucial Insights for the Neuroscience of Inspiration?

By | December 5, 2016

In a passage in Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert wrote one of history’s most beautiful descriptions of language: “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” As a cognitive neuroscientist, I study how we read this sentence: How we decode it, analyze it, and importantly, …

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