Zócalo Public Square

Crenshaw High on 11th Avenue in Los Angeles has a bad reputation. When I told a teacher at Animo Pat Brown Charter High School in South LA that I’d be reporting on Crenshaw, he rolled his eyes. Crenshaw, he had heard, was rife with gang violence. It had even temporarily lost its state accreditation a few years back.

“I’ve never been to Crenshaw,” the young teacher said. “But kids are safe here.” He gestured to his own newly constructed social studies classroom, outfitted with seven new Dell computers donated by a philanthropist.

Exactly one year ago, I was packing my suitcases to move from my childhood home in north Texas to a three-bedroom group house in Washington, D.C. My mother, standing close by to inspect my work, hooked the shoulder of a blue dress on her index finger and raised her eyebrows. “Don’t forget,” she said, “what happened to Monica,” drawing out the name for effect.

Since 2007, California has experienced a solar boom. Photovoltaic panels rest on 107,159 rooftops, as of this writing (the numbers are updated here every Wednesday). Driven by incentives that are bankrolled by every Californian who pays a utility bill, Californians now have more than one Gigawatt of solar capacity installed over our heads That’s a lot: one Gigawatt is roughly the size of one of the state’s four nuclear power plants, although solar PV panels do not produce power at the steady, even rate that nukes do.

Last Friday morning, the second most powerful man in Mexico’s government, the cabinet member leading the war against the drug cartels, died in a helicopter crash. Mexicans were stunned: Francisco Blake Mora was President Felipe Calderón’s second interior secretary to die in an air crash in three years.

On June 8, 2005, Alejandro Dominguez, the head of the chamber of commerce in Nuevo Laredo—a busy Mexican city on the Texas border—took office as the city’s chief of police. He was an outsider to law enforcement, brought in by the mayor as an honest broker. Six hours later, he was dead, shot 40 times as he walked to his car. Five days later, Mexico’s then-president, Vicente Fox, sent in the army and national investigative police, who arrested the city police force en masse, taking all 700 of them into custody, pending investigation.

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.

For the last four years, Russia was ruled according to a careful choreography: President Dmitry Medvedev was the face of a variously tough-talking and reformist agenda that included the erection of Skolkovo, a richly financed version of Silicon Valley, and cordiality with the United States. Meanwhile, actual power was wielded by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whose will was enacted while he traveled the country exhibiting his physique and off-beat sporting abilities.

Official Washington is now in the grip of an unprecedented bipartisan consensus. For all their other differences, leaders of both parties agree that Medicare, the nation’s primary means of providing health insurance for the elderly, is unsustainable and must be cut.

My German 3 summer school instructor at Berkeley once pulled me aside after class to accuse me of having a deep-seated hatred toward all things German. Irritated, I told her, “Yeah, that’s why I’m spending my summer learning your damn language.”

More than 20 years later, my German-language skills are just as lacking as before, but my relationship to the Fatherland is as complicated as ever. I don’t hate Germany. But, apart from being fond of Berlin (whose openly gay mayor calls it “poor but sexy”), I don’t exactly love Germany either.

SpongeBob SquarePants is not the sharpest sponge in the ocean, despite his angularity. In fact it’s his amiable cluelessness that probably endears him to a large segment of American TV viewers, who appear to be sustaining a robust market for T-shirts and toddler sippy cups blaring out his bright yellow spongey self.