KQED's Forum

For decades, grassroots activists have led the way in pushing the government to regulate toxins that harm our health and wellbeing. The MAHA, or Make America Healthy Again, movement has taken up some of that activism to fight the growing prevalence of environmental toxins such as pesticides, PFAS and microplastics. Though MAHA has lobbied U.S. health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and President...

A trusted press is essential to a thriving democracy, but recent studies show that Americans’ confidence in news media has hit record lows — regardless of factors like geography and political affiliation. To blame are growing perceptions of bias and a sense that news reporting that doesn’t feel applicable to everyday life. We look at why so few people trust the media — and what could be done to ch...

When Claire Stapleton started working at Google in 2007 she was a true believer, becoming known as the “Bard of Google,” by spinning positive narratives of the company. But by 2018, she was so disillusioned by the company culture that she helped organize the company’s largest walkout to protest how Google handled sexual harassment cases.  We talk to Stapleton about her takes on the myths and...

E-bike crashes and injuries in California are increasing, a new study out of UC San Diego finds. And those injuries are not only more severe compared with conventional bikes, they’redisproportionately involving kids age 14 and younger. We’ll hear how doctors, lawmakers andbiking advocates are responding to the risks posed by e-bikes – and by what some call emotorcycles – and we’ll hear your takes...

Summer reading season is here. What belongs in your beach bag — or on your nightstand? We talk with Bay Area booksellers and authors about the books that they recommend, from light, breezy reads to delicious mysteries to the doorstopper you’ve been putting off. And we hear from you: what are you reading? Guests: Vanessa Hua, author, “Coyoteland,” “Forbidden City” and “A River of Stars” Brad J...

How can ordinary people stand up to authoritarianism? For a new book called “On Courage,” investigative journalist Julia Angwin and political strategist Ami Fields-Meyer interviewed more than 100 dissidents from around the world about how they overcome fear, protect themselves against intimidation and persuade others to join their cause. We’ll talk to the authors about the practical lessons they u...

Luis Valdez has spent his life unapologetically telling Chicano stories. Born in Delano, he found his footing in the Bay Area and went on to produce “Zoot Suit,” the first Chicano play to make it to Broadway, direct “La Bamba,” one of the most successful Latine films ever. In a new documentary, “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez,” director David Alvarado put the camera in front of Valdez...

More than 1.3 million people work as security guards in the United States, making the job one of the most commonly-held in the country and one that outnumbers police and sheriff’s patrol officers. Yet new research from the UC Berkeley Labor Center finds security guards tend to be underpaid, inadequately trained, and more likely to be hurt or injured on the job — factors that lead to a high turnove...

Kane Parsons, the 21-year-old director of this summer’s hit horror film “Backrooms,” began his career not in film school, but by making short videos on YouTube while attending middle and high school in the North Bay. He stumbled upon an online photo of creepy, yellow-tinted empty rooms being called “the backrooms,” read the accompanying internet lore and contributed to it with his own web series,...

Built in a matter of weeks on the Fort Bliss military base in Texas, Camp East Montana has become the nation’s largest immigrant detention center, housing thousands of people within its sprawling tent complex. In a recent New Yorker investigation, Jonathan Blitzer documents inadequate medical care, prolonged isolation and families suddenly separated after routine ICE appointments or traffic stops....

After recent revelations that President Trump took in more that $2.2 billion during his first year back in the White House, we talk to Democratic Senator Alex Padilla about his new anti-corruption initiative to address Trump’s alleged self-dealing and its costs to taxpayers. We’ll also ask Padilla about the historically high number of deaths in ICE detention, calls for increased oversight and tran...

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie poured almost $9 million of his personal fortune into getting elected. Now, he is finding an extraordinary amount of private money to pour into city government: His administration has secured more than $120 million in philanthropic dollars for homelessness, addiction and downtown revitalization. Meanwhile, a network of donors, many of them longtime supporters of Lu...

Reading used to be the main way Americans got information, but most of us now turn to our phones, the internet, social media or television for news and entertainment. The share of Americans reading an article daily has plunged by about 40 percent, and according to the National Endowment for the Arts, fewer than half of all adults read a book in 2022. In a new article from The Atlantic, staff...

In 2025 only 14 percent of rape cases in San Francisco were closed, according to an ongoing investigation from the SF Standard. That’s half the national rate. While the procedures for administering and processing rape kit tests has improved greatly in San Francisco over the past decade, cuts to the special victims unit and other factors have resulted in fewer investigations into alleged...

When investigative journalist Stephen Witt visited Silicon Valley’s 1X Technologies to meet a new home robot named Neo, he discovered a device full of contradictions: It was elegantly designed, but often struggled to complete even the simplest of tasks, taking longer than a minute to retrieve a bottle of water. Despite its limitations, more than 10,000 people have placed deposits for the $20,000 a...

Angelica Glass started taking long walks as a way to exercise and to relieve the stress from her decades as a social worker trying to help families struggling with poverty. She set a goal to walk every street in Santa Cruz County. While trekking the nearly three thousand miles over severalyears, she found herself gently working through the grief of her own childhood of abuse and neglect, while abs...

Americans are notoriously bad at taking time off from work. Once entering the workforce, we expect to be devoutly productive for decades on end, awarded with an extended break only upon retirement. In his new book, “Big Time Off: The Transformative Power of Sabbaticals and How to Take One,” Harvard Business School’s DJ DiDonna urges us to step away from our desks to take an extended break from wor...

Polls find growing ambivalence in young adults’ views towards marriage — even as society continues to grant greater privileges and respect to married people. This comes as the right pushes for a return to “traditional marriage” — an idea which historian Stephanie Coontz says isn’t actually based in history, as expectations of marriage, monogamy, gender roles and even the title “Mrs.” have drastica...

Federal health officials are eying iceberg lettuce distributed by California-based Taylor Farms as a potential source of the major cyclosporiasis outbreak in the United States. Health authorities tracking 4,173 confirmed and 7,400 likely cases of the infection, which can cause severe diarrhea, cramping and fatigue that lasts up to a month. We talk with food safety and health experts on what it wil...

The mandate of the Federal Emergency Management Agency has long been to help states and local governments meet the needs of communities after disaster strikes. But since the Trump Administration took office, the agency has been threatened with closure and has suffered massive budget and staff cuts, essentially crippling its ability to respond to catastrophic events. As natural disasters intensify...

More than four months after President Trump predicted a short war with Iran, the conflict is intensifying and broadening. The ceasefire agreement between the US and Iran has collapsed, leaving passage through the Strait of Hormuz restricted and the two nations on a war footing: the United States has carried out days of sustained airstrikes while Iran targets American allies in the Gulf. To many an...

There was a time when U.S. automakers dominated the global car industry  with their products and innovations. But when it comes to electric vehicles, which accounted for a quarter of global auto sales in 2025, the U.S. is barely a player.  China now builds roughly three-quarters of the world’s EVs; the United States about five percent.  We’ll talk about how the widening technology g...

During World War II, the US government asked the Japanese American citizens it interned two questions: Would you serve in the US armed forces wherever ordered? And would you swear “unqualified allegiance” to the U.S. and forswear any allegiance to Japan’s emperor? Those two so-called loyalty questions animate acclaimed novelist Karen Tei Yamashita’s latest book, which explores that historical peri...

When San Francisco police drone video surveillance was accidentally livestreamed on the internet last month, it revealed how extensively, and at what great detail, the city is watched from above. The use of surveillance technology is rapidly growing in the Bay Area, with increasing drone and AI-powered surveillance networks partnering with local law enforcement and government agencies. In 2024, th...

Burning Man turns 40 this year, and its changed dramatically since the first event in San Francisco. The first gathering drew a couple dozen people who gathered to burn an 8-foot wooden effigy at Baker Beach to celebrate the summer solstice. Four decades later, it’s a multi-million dollar operation that every August draws more than 70 thousand people to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. A new HBO d...