Zócalo Public Square

We’ve all heard the dismal facts about the American healthcare system: high spending, low-quality treatment, poor delivery, and spotty access. But biomedical innovator, businessman, and physician Patrick Soon-Shiong—who is also the richest man in Los Angeles and a Lakers part-owner—says the problems aren’t intractable. Far from it. Instead, we’re on the cusp of a more personalized, more accurate, and less error-prone era in American medicine. He talked with Arizona State University President Michael Crow about what the future of molecular and wireless medicine holds for us all.

Californians and their leaders need to move beyond longstanding battles over minor policy changes and begin new, broad debates about how to transform the state’s economy and educational system, argued Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom during an interview with NBC4 Los Angeles' Conan Nolan.

What if there were a drug out there that cost nothing to produce, required no prescription, and made people live longer, feel happier and less stressed, and sleep better? There’d be a run on the pharmacies. But this wonder drug isn’t a drug. It’s altruism and compassion, a team of experts in the benefits of helping others--bioethicist Stephen G. Post, neurosurgeon James Doty, and Big Sunday founder David Levinson--told a crowd at an event co-presented by Kaiser Permanente and moderated by KQED's Lisa Aliferis.

For much of American history, newspapers held an exclusive role as democracy’s watchdog, sounding the alarm at any sign of corruption and abuse from those in power. But today there are fewer journalists than ever before, which means fewer people keeping watch. What does the death of newspapers mean for holding powerful institutions accountable? Voice of San Diego CEO Scott Lewis, Reportero director Bernardo Ruiz, and investigative journalist Carrie Lozano talk with Zócalo's Joe Mathews about who will become the guardian of democracy.

In California, the end-of-life care you receive may have more to do with where you live than what you want. Shannon Brownlee, acting director of the New America Foundation Health Policy Program, discusses what’s behind this variation, and what can be done to make sure all patients get the care they want and need - rather than the care dictated by where they live.

We tend to think that both democracy and diversity are good things; many of us even say that diversity is a strength. But others have argued that our polyglot nation is too big, too complex - simply too diverse - to boast a healthy and vibrant democracy. The Almanac of American Politics author Michael Barone, University of California Irvine sociologist Jennifer Lee, and City University of New York scholar Richard Alba examined America's divisions in a Zócalo/Cal Humanities event moderated by Zócalo California editor Joe Mathews.

Sang Yoon, chef and owner of the Father’s Office and Lukshon restaurants, sat down with KCRW Good Foodhost Evan Kleiman to talk about entrepreneurship, inspiration, burgers, and, of course, ketchup (or rather the lack thereof at his Santa Monica and Culver City gastropubs) at a Grand Park event in partnership with the Music Center.

Can the next U.S. president make public universities more affordable - and can the federal government do anything to support crucial research that takes place in these institutions? Yes, said UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman, and Carnegie Corporation President Vartan Gregorian, in a panel co-presented by UCLA at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. that was moderated by David Leonhardt, Washington Bureau Chief of The New York Times.

Will downtown L.A. ever work? It’s already working, said a four-person panel of architects, planners, and designers who’ve been closely involved with downtown over the past decade. At an event in L.A.'s Grand Park, landscape architect Tony Paradowski, urban designer Melani Smith, SCI-Arc's Hernan Diaz Alonso, and architect Alice Kimm spoke with moderator Christopher Hawthorne, the Los Angeles Times architecture critic, about why they feel downtown has at last arrived and what the future might hold.

According to UCLA legal scholar Kal Raustiala, coauthor of The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation, copycats and imitators—legal and illegal—not only fail to hurt creative industries but sometimes help drive them. In a talk at the Goethe Institut Los Angeles, Raustiala explains why a lot of what we think we know about intellectual property is wrong, and how certain industries—like fashion and food—still manage to thrive despite a lack of copyright protection.

We all know we’re going to die, but we don’t want to talk about it—or plan for it. As a result, we take—and ask our healthcare providers to take—extraordinary measures to prolong our lives and those of our loved ones. Doctors, however, don’t take these same measures. Because they encounter death more often than most people, and because they know the quality of life that follows CPR, ventilators, and feeding tubes, physicians are better prepared than the rest of us to die in peace without a pointless fight. City of Hope Senior Research Specialist Shirley Otis-Green, Coalition for Compassionate Care of California Executive Director Judy Citko, and Dr. Ken Murray, author of “How Doctors Die” talk with San Jose Mercury News reporter Lisa Krieger about what doctors can teach us about a good death.

The key division in American politics and economics right now isn’t between liberals and conservatives, says Michael Lind. It’s between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians. What does this division mean now, what is its history, and how did America’s economy get into the current mess? Lind, a public intellectual, co-founder of the New America Foundation, and author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States, tries to answer these questions.

Where’s heaven? What’s it like? Who gets in? And what tortures await those of us who land in the alternative destination? In a panel moderated by documentary filmmaker Jody Hassett Sanchez, UCLA Buddhism expert Robert Buswell, religion historian Jeffrey Burton Russell, UCLA anthropologist and expert in Pueblo Indian beliefs Peter Nabokov, and Martin Schwarz, curator of the exhibition "Heaven, Hell, and Dying Well: Images of Death in the Middle Ages" at the Getty Museum explore the ways different societies have imagined and depicted the afterlife and what the images we create of heaven and hell say about life on earth.

Like the Internet, knowledge today is inclusive and overwhelming, unsettled and messy, and linked, says David Weinberger, author of Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room. The demise of the Encyclopedia Britanica and the uncertain future of the newspaper and libraries demonstrates that the Internet is destroying knowledge as we have always known it. But according to Weinberger, we shouldn't fear these changes but rather embrace them.

UCLA cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and UCLA writing lecturer Kathryn Bowers, authors of Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About the Health and Science of Healing, talk with Los Angeles Times science writer Eryn Brown about what they think is medicine's next frontier: collaboration between human and animal doctors. Animal and human diseases across the spectrum--from eating disorders and psychiatric maladies to certain types of cardiac arrest and cancers--overlap. And by working together and sharing knowledge, doctors and veterinarians might be able to better treat patients of all species. Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers share many of their discoveries, from the possibility that jaguars share the BRCA1 gene mutation that's common in Jewish women, and increases susceptibility to breast cancer, to a chlamydia epidemic in koalas in Australia.

How do you make an American poet? California’s new poet laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera, answered that question with laughter, singing, storytelling, and poetry as he recounted his life and work in a conversation with KPCC News Editor Oscar Garza. Herrera grew up all over California, and he spoke about how his itinerant childhood influenced his work. He also talked about why he believes Latino writers in the 21st century are able to write as writers--no prefix needed.

At a Zócalo/Cal Humanities "Searching for Democracy" event, Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley Henry Brady, the Institute for Civility in Government's Cassandra Dahnke, Arizona State University communications and performance scholar Jennifer Linde, and economist and anthropologist Meenakshi Chakraverti, who leads the Public Conversations Project in San Diego, discussed whether the lack of civility in American politics is a problem--or if civility is indeed overrated.

According to New Republic editor Timothy Noah, author of The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, America is in the midst of two significant divergences that are causing increasing wealth disparity. The first is between people with college or graduate degrees and people with lower levels of education. The second is between the 1 percent (people in the financial industry and leaders of corporations) and the 99 percent (everyone else). He explains how both divergences have their roots in the late 1970s, and what we can do to stop the gap between rich and poor from growing.

Mayim Bialik is at the very least a triple threat. She’s an actress who stars on CBS’s The Big Bang Theory; she’s a neuroscientist who received her Ph.D. from UCLA, where she wrote her dissertation on the genetic disorder Prader-Willi syndrome; and she’s the author of a book on parenting, Beyond the Sling: A Real-Life Guide to Raising Confident, Loving Children the Attachment Parenting Way. At an event co-presented by UCLA, Bialik talked with Huffington Post science correspondent Cara Santa Maria about how she weaves the many threads of her busy life together—and how they sometimes come into conflict.

L.A. has the largest population of Iranians of any city outside Iran. If reform were to come to Iran, would life change for the hundreds of thousands of Iranian-Angelenos who call Southern California home? Writer and activist Amir Soltani, entrepreneur and philanthropist Sharon S. Nazarian, and acting director of Iranian Studies at UCLA M. Rahim Shayegan joined moderator Shiva Falsafi, UCLA lecturer in women's studies, to discuss what reform in Iran could mean for the city known as Tehrangeles.