Twenty years ago, I published Taking Back the Vote: Getting American Youth Involved in Our Democracy. The book grew out of a personal passion: Once my oldest child was able to cast a ballot, I became fascinated with the potential and obstacles facing our youngest voters. I delved into the lengthy and messy midcentury struggle to pass the 26th Amendment, extending the franchise to 18-year-olds. The first bill to lower the voting age was introduced in Congress during World War II—why should young...
I began to notice Animal Farm references proliferating in Zimbabwe in 2008. That was the year hyperinflation nosedived the economy, and long-time leader Robert Mugabe felt threatened enough by a newly formed opposition party that he silenced its supporters. In the years since, writers and independent media have repeatedly turned to Animal Farm as a way to illuminate our political reality—even after Mugabe’s 2017 ousting. Last year, a group of Zimbabwean writers published the first-ever Shona...
The Oakland A’s are baseball’s biggest losers. But their new temporary home—West Sacramento—is one of California’s greatest winners. No California city has had a better 21st century than West Sacramento. The municipality of 54,000 people has grown in population and prosperity with striking speed, even as California has stagnated on both fronts. The A’s will spend three years, 2025 through 2027, in West Sacramento’s minor league ballpark as the team waits for a new stadium to be built in their...
The public square is the meeting ground where people make society happen. In these spaces, physical or metaphorical or digital, we work through our shared dramas and map our collective hopes. Ideally, the public square provides room to solve the problems we face. It is also where new, thorny issues often arise. This “Up for Discussion” is part of Zócalo’s editorial and events series spotlighting the ideas, places, and questions that have shaped the public square Zócalo has created over the past...
I like to wash wool blankets in a rubber tub, stomping as if I live on a vineyard, the detritus of a year squelching and puffing between my feet. I remember my great aunt who crocheted them, the darkly churning water of the creek behind her house, here viscous, here hissing, streaked with tannins, slipping forward, doubling back on itself. I go to her creek mentally sometimes, before morning when I can’t sleep. I wake up too free. Phantom pain in phantom limbs. Awake with nothing to tend to, I...
The public square is the meeting ground where people make society happen. In these spaces, physical or metaphorical or digital, we work through our shared dramas and map our collective hopes. Ideally, the public square provides room to solve the problems we face. It is also where new, thorny issues often arise. This “Up for Discussion” is part of Zócalo’s editorial and events series spotlighting the ideas, places, and questions that have shaped the public square Zócalo has created over the past...
Matt Wood is an illustrator and the co-founder of the cooperative animation team Bad Idea Motion Studios. Wood’s Zócalo Sketchbook imagines “what nature might look like if it insisted on innovating itself to extinction.” The series was inspired by OpenAI’s release of Sora, a way to generate photorealistic video sequences based on text prompts, earlier this year. “As a creative, it chilled me to my core,” Wood says. “When I saw where we are headed, I thought, Why are we so addicted to...
Californians vote on many ballot measures, but we almost never participate in significant public debates and discussions about the measures’ contents and impacts. This isn’t simply a result of apathy or poor civic education. Rather, it’s an example of “rational ignorance,” a term coined by the late Stanford-educated economist Anthony Downs in his 1957 book, An Economic Theory of Democracy. The term defines this democratic reality: since you have just one vote out of millions, your individual...
There is only one person more obsessed than I when it comes to the memory of Don Andrés Bermúdez: his son, Andrés Junior. Junior lives with his family in the place where he came of age, a spacious ranch home his father acquired in 1993, on the outskirts of Winters, California, in the western Sacramento Valley. In a nod to his Catholic upbringing, Junior crosses himself when he passes the town cemetery, where his father is buried. He bought the burial plot adjacent to his father’s, so that he can...