KQED's Forum

In the race to be California’s next governor, Democrat and former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra has maintained a sizable lead despite keeping a low public profile. Meanwhile, Republican Steve Hilton has been pressing his case as an outsider who will cut taxes and support the working class. Ahead of their debate on CNN on Wednesday evening, we’ll look at why enthusiasm for the...

Extreme academic workloads and relentless achievement culture are driving a youth mental health crisis in classrooms nationwide — especially among students trying to get into top colleges. That’s according to Stuart Slavin, a pediatrician who researches how to improve student mental health and the author of “The Success Trap.” We’ll hear from Slavin, a former school administrator and a high school...

Oakland-based comedian, filmmaker, author and activist W. Kamau Bell is best known for his award-winning series “United Shades of America,” “1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed,” and “We Need To Talk About Cosby.” His touring stand-up set — coming to Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium on Oct. 1 — as well as his Substack and new podcast are all titled with the same question: “Who’s with Me?” Bell says the quest...

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked tens of thousands of pages of internal documents that were published in a 2021 Wall Street Journal exposé, now the basis of the forthcoming film “The Social Reckoning.” The documents revealed that the tech giant knew its engagement-driven algorithms accelerated political polarization, increased teenage mental health issues and incited ethnic violence ab...

Diesel prices are now well above $8 a gallon in California –  higher than they’ve ever been and 63 percent more than a year ago. While most consumers don’t purchase diesel, most of the goods we buy rely on it for transportation.  Diesel powers tractors that work farms, trucks that transport the food to a manufacturing facility and trains that distribute products across the country. ...

Why did President Biden stay the course in Gaza even as some of his own advisers pushed for change? In his new book, “Crossing the Red Line,” journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed reconstructs the decisions behind U.S. support for Israel’s war in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas. We talk to him about President Biden’s reluctance to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his abandoned “...

Tasha Malan describes herself as a “chill bay area guy.” The musician and content creator posts hyper-niche San Francisco TikToks and Instagram reels: showing off her Mission district lifestyle, impersonating Mayor Lurie and reading poetry dedicated to Redwood City. Malan soundtracks many of these videos with her own songs, which recall early aughts pop and R&B. She joins us to perform acoustic ve...

From the White House ballroom to the Kennedy Center to a proposed triumphal arch along the Potomac, President Trump has taken a special interest in creating physical markers of his legacy. We’ll look at how he’s largely escaped oversight, including by designating these projects as central to national security. Why are monuments such a priority for Trump, and what does this tell us about the growin...

Years after the pandemic emptied trains and buses, Bay Area transit agencies still face anemic ridership and rising costs. A new regional transit measure that voters put on the November ballot aims to shift the tides. It would add a 0.5% sales tax in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties and 1% in San Francisco, to raise an estimated $14 billion over 14 years. Supporters hope...

Rep. Nancy Pelosi will retire following the 2026 midterm elections, bringing to end her almost 40-year career in Congress. In a new five-part podcast series, “The Speaker,” KQED’s Scott Shafer embarked on an ambitious reporting project to capture the story of the first woman Speaker of the House. Shafer traces how Pelosi rose from unlikely Congressional candidate to one of the most powerful women...

When the San Francisco Chronicle last published its list of the Bay Area’s 200 largest public companies 17 years ago, oil behemoth Chevron ranked no. 1. The company has since left for Houston and now Apple Inc. has seized the top spot. Tech companies now make up 21 of the top 25 companies, with AI and social media companies like Nvidia and Meta joining veterans like Intel and Hewlett Packard...

Actor Ke Huy Quan’s family fled post-war Vietnam and lived in a Hong Kong refugee camp before his unlikely turn as an iconic 1980s child star. He stumbled into a casting call for “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” at 12 years old, then rolled right into “The Goonies.” But as he transitioned into adulthood, roles started drying up. After decades of rejection, Quan made an Oscar-winning comeback...

Authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor say that not only is fascism here, but this 21st century version wants apocalyptic collapse. In their new book “End Times Fascism,” Klein and Taylor examine how politicians, religious prophets and Silicon Valley billionaires are trying to wipe out flora and fauna, undermine human solidarity and block our ability to imagine a future on Earth. But...

When animal advocates in Humboldt County unearthed dog carcasses on the property of Miranda’s Rescue, they exposed an alleged cruelty and fraud operation that has shocked animal welfare groups across the state. A sprawling multi-agency investigation has since revealed mass graves, dozens of canine skulls and records for hundreds of unaccounted-for dogs transferred from municipal shelters to a sanc...

In Tomas Moniz’s new novel “The King of Aloe Vera,” seventy-five-year-old Rey has one month left in his longtime Mission District home when he befriends Q, a young woman on probation who is about to lose her housing. The novel unspools as a love letter to the Mission District of San Francisco and its longtime residents—housed and unhoused alike— as they find themselves in a neighborhood that’s cha...

In the Massachusetts trial of Lindsay Clancy, one detail was not disputed in court: Clancy admitted to killing her three young children before attempting suicide in January 2023. But over the multi-week trial, Clancy’s defense argued she could not be held criminally responsible by reason of insanity, attributing her actions to postpartum psychosis. This case left a jury split and the public divide...

Last month, Ethel Caterham turned 117 in England making her the world’s oldest person. In his new documentary “The Oldest Person In the World,” director Sam Green takes viewers through his decade-long journey across the globe to meet people like Caterham as they were bestowed with the “oldest living person” title. As humans are living longer and longer, the film explores our fascination with the “...

Since returning to office, President Trump has moved to restrict gender-affirming care, bar transgender and nonbinary people from the military and roll back other LGBTQ nondiscrimination policies. It’s a sweeping attack that pioneering transgender historian Susan Stryker says the trans rights movement was not prepared for. We talk to Stryker about what this moment means for transgender people and...

What if you could create a color, one that no one had ever seen before? That’s what a team of UC Berkeley scientists set out to do, and in the process they found a new green — one so intense a camera could not capture it and a printer could not replicate it. How they did it and how their discovery may change what we know about color science and how the eye works are the subjects of a New Yorker ar...

Tech leaders, including the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI, are calling for a slowdown of the development of generative artificial intelligence. This comes after an Anthropic researcher resigned over concerns that AI’s rapid development threatened human existence, and nearly 1,400 AI workers signed an open letter calling for government oversight of their industry. We’ll talk about where this tech —...

A 16-year-old boy from San Francisco died in April from the city’s first confirmed overdose involving cychlorphine . The synthetic opioid is considered much more potent than fentanyl, which is already more potent than heroin and other opiates. It has killed dozens of people across the country since 2024. This week, San Francisco police announced they had arrested four suspects accused of supplying...

Some marriages don’t end with a blowup or betrayal. Instead, partners slowly become emotionally disconnected – more like roommates than lovers. It’s a phenomenon that’s been dubbed a “quiet divorce.” We talk with psychologists Thema Bryant and Eli Finkel about why relationships quietly come undone, how to rebuild connection and when it may be time to let go. Guests: Eli Finkel, professor of p...

In his new book, “Natural Intelligence and the Logic of Consciousness,” pioneering neuroscientist Antonio Damasio synthesizes his decades of research in neurobiology and philosophy of mind into a central idea: we are  conscious because we feel. “It is traditionally said that we are able to feel our feelings because we are conscious,” he writes, but instead, “we must be able to feel in order t...

In 1991, China scholar and journalist Orville Schell teamed up with CBS News’ 60 Minutes for a perilous undercover investigation into China’s laogai—a vast network of forced labor camps secretly exporting goods into American markets. Fearing severe retaliation against his family and friends in China, Schell shelved his written account for three decades. In his new book, “Inside China’s Secret...

California voters will decide this fall whether the state should impose a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires, with much of the revenue going toward health care amid federal funding cuts. Supporters say Proposition 40 could raise tens of billions of dollars while also helping to address the growing wealth inequality in the state. Opponents argue the tax could drive billionaires out of Californi...