Archive for August, 2010

Monica Ganas on the Meaning of California

Posted By Zócalo On August 16, 2010

California road

Before Monica Ganas began teaching California, she lived it. A native of the state and a 30 year veteran of the entertainment industry and now a professor at Azusa Pacific University, Ganas explained how her personal background inspired her book, Under the Influence: California’s Intoxicating Spiritual and Cultural Impact on America. “I think I’ve been trying to make sense of my personal experience for a lot of my life,” she joked. It wasn’t until she left the state that she began to see its strangeness, and the way it impacts the country. Ganas stopped by Zocalo’s offices to explore California culture — from the glamor of movies to the ordinariness of traffic, from car obsession to spiritual diversity.

Read More

Posted By Zócalo On August 16, 2010

Cures

Coffee: Caffeine makes us function, but how well does it really work?

Read More

a creature to run from

Posted By Zócalo On August 15, 2010

medusa

by Jennifer Smith

but I wasn’t
the red bull of the setting sun,

Read More

Living Off the Grid

Posted By Zócalo On August 15, 2010

off the grid

Nick Rosen was in New York in 2003 when the lights went out for 50 million people across the northeast. “It got me wondering about the silent, invisible electricity grid — we all depend on it, but we never think about it,” he said. Going off the grid wasn’t an entirely new idea for Rosen, author of Off the Grid: Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America. He’s the owner of “an old shepherd’s hut in a beautiful part of Spain,” he explained. “So I knew you can live very comfortably without the grid.” Below, Rosen chats about who goes off the grid, why it’s an especially American thing to do, and what we can learn from their lives.

Read More

Posted By Zócalo On August 12, 2010

Words

Phones: Why texting can be better than calling.
Books: What they say matters more than how we read them.

Read More

Articles

Feuilleton
Friday, December 3, 2010
How One Family Created Chinese America
Zócalo

The Lucky Ones, by Mae Ngai The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America by Mae Ngai Hyphenated cultures seem to be a natural part of California’s landscape today, but it wasn’t always so. The Lucky Ones by Mae Ngai offers a fresh look at California history by reconstructing the lives of immigrant and second generation pioneers who lived between cultures when it was not such a common phenomenon. Ngai’s narrative brings Chinese Americans into a richer tradition of historical storytelling by humanizing an ambivalent, middle-class immigrant family, situating their lives within the more well-known histories of Chinese laborers and those who suffered from the 1882 Exclusion Act.

Poetry
This week in L.A.
From the green room
 
Connecting People to Ideas and to Each Other

Thank you to Zócalo sponsors:

 

 

Wordpress template made by HeJian