How Can Short Docs Make a Big Difference?
Documentary film can bear witness, challenge assumptions, and give voice to communities too often unheard. Where Hollywood and fictional fil...
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Zócalo Public Square
An innovative blend of ideas journalism and live events.
Episodes
20 of 507 episodesWhat Is the New World Order?
The United States has had an epic run on the world stage. Two hundred fifty years of independence and imperial aspirations. Eighty years of...
Can We Squash Food Deserts?
There are 150 food deserts in Los Angeles County, areas where affordable, nutritious food is out of reach. Some frontline efforts to combat...
How Will California Educate Its Future Workforce?
With the largest population of public school students in the country, and an even larger workforce, California has a lot riding on educating...
Can The Energy Crisis Finally Unite Us?
Climate debates are going nowhere. Highly ideological, they end in gridlock more often than solutions. And younger generations, long worried...
The 2026 Zócalo Book Prize: America, Can We Take Down the Walls Between Us?
The 2026 Zócalo Book and Poetry Prizes are co-presented with The Jar, and generously sponsored by Tim Disney. Americans love building walls,...
How Does The Central Valley Harness Its Power?
As an economic powerhouse, California charges forward. The benefits, though, are distributed and felt unequally, especially in places like t...
How Do We Dance With Legacy?
Amid great technological, political, and cultural shifts, who choreographs the great dance of America? Which tales have we inherited, which...
How Do Museums Resist Censorship?
Museums tell America’s story. Exhibit by exhibit, they acquire, study, preserve, and interpret art and artifacts for the public, offering pr...
How Will AI Reshape Our Elections?
With the national midterm elections alongside high-profile contests such as the Los Angeles mayoral and California gubernatorial races, vote...
Where Does Deportation Come From?
Deportation has impacted communities across California and the country, and has become the face of U.S. immigration policy today. At the cul...
Is Hip-Hop America's Biggest Success Story?
Is hip-hop the driving force behind Black business and economic mobility? What can we glean from its innovative strategies and enterprising...
What Is the Language of Taste?
A panel featuring Stanford IAJS faculty co-director Brian Lowery, James Beard Award-winning cookbook author and Jewish cuisine expert Joan N...
Will California's Future Be Exceptional?
Zócalo Public Square presents two back-to-back panels moderated by Zócalo’s California columnist Joe Mathews to ask: How exceptional do we w...
Can Music Change Minds?
It used to be that Spanish-language artists had to perform in English to succeed in the U.S. Today, they can sing in their native tongue and...
How Is Migration Woven Into America?
This program is inspired by "So, I told her I was half-Indian" (2025) by Chicanx and Punjabi American weaver Kira Dominguez Hultgren. The pi...
Can Hip-Hop Be the Soundtrack for Change?
Medusa, the “Godmother of West Coast Hip-Hop,” and reparations advocate and business manager to the stars Khansa T. Jones-Muhammad aka Frida...
2025 Zócalo Book Prize: Can We Reimagine How We Feed Ourselves?
Jean-Martin Bauer is the author of “The New Breadline: Hunger and Hope in the Twenty-First Century” and the winner of the 2025 Zócalo Public...
How Do We See Ourselves In Each Other?
This program is inspired by "Coatlicue & Las Meninas: The Stanford Edition" (2007/2025) by Mexican American artist Pedro Lasch, commissioned...
2023 Zócalo Book Prize: How Does a Community Save Itself? With Michelle Wilde Anderson
America’s high-poverty cities and counties have suffered for decades, enduring skyrocketing inequality, the opioid epidemic, rising housing...