Archive for December, 2011

For Sale: 10,000 Panes of Glass and an Organ

Posted By Zócalo On December 20, 2011

by Richard Flory

If this year were like years past, the Crystal Cathedral, the Philip Johnson-designed Protestant megachurch in Garden Grove, would be abuzz with the “The Glory of Christmas” pageant, with angels suspended from ropes and a parade of camels, horses, sheep, and donkeys. Not so this year. Bankruptcy is dampening the holiday spirit at the institution that once embodied the megachurch movement in the United States, and the pageant is off. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange has put up the cash to take over the Crystal Cathedral. …

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How Equality Begat Inequality

Posted By Zócalo On December 19, 2011

by Thomas Borstelmann

I grew up in the South, but as part of a carpetbagger family. My Californian parents moved to Jim Crow North Carolina in 1951 for my dad to take a job as a young psychology professor. They didn’t quite know what they were getting into. Early on, my father went to see a movie at the downtown Carolina Theater in Durham, got in the ticket line, waited, and waited some more. The line didn’t move. But other people walked by occasionally and went right in the door. He looked around and realized he was the only white person in the line, and the others were studiously avoiding looking at him. He slunk up and through the door. …

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Street Vendors to the Rescue

Posted By Zócalo On December 19, 2011

In Squaring Off, Zócalo invites authors into the public square to answer five questions about the essence of their books. For this round, we pose questions to journalist Robert Neuwirth, author of Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy. …

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A Superstitious Lover of Silver-Gray Metal

Posted By Zócalo On December 19, 2011

Journalist Tom Zoellner has written five nonfiction books, including Uranium, which traces the story of a coveted and dangerous substance, and A Safeway In Arizona, which examines the shooting of the author’s longtime friend Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Before participating in a panel to discuss whether Arizona is on the front line of American politics, Zoellner took questions from Zócalo in the green room. …

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Bye Bye, Lenin

Posted By Zócalo On December 18, 2011

by Andrés Martinez

It’s hard to describe, let alone explain, my melancholic reaction to the movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy after watching it in a sold-out theater on Saturday. Sure, the film, adapted from the classic Cold War novel by John Le Carré, captures the dread of 1970s London and the wearying ambivalence of Cold War intelligence wars. But I wasn’t expecting to emerge from the theater feeling a sense of loss.

In one scene, an analyst retired from the “Circus” (as Le Carré dubs British intelligence) looks at old photos of colleagues in uniform (during World War II) and tells the protagonist, George Smiley (the mole hunter played by Gary Oldman), that those were the “good days.” …

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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.

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