KQED's Forum

The Delta variant now accounts for the vast majority of new COVID-19 infections in the United States. New models suggest the variant is driving a stark increase in daily case counts. Already, hospitals in some communities in Florida have matched their peaks from the days before the vaccines. The CDC has revised its guidelines about who needs to wear a mask and why. In this hour, we talk about what...

In 2018, science journalist Lynda Mapes drew international attention for her day-by-day coverage of the female orca known as "Tahlequah," who carried her dead newborn calf more than 1000 miles through the Salish Sea before finally letting her go. That reporting formed the basis for Mapes's newest book "Orca: Shared Waters, Shared Home," which explores the sophisticated social networks that orcas f...

Not much can beat sipping a coffee or drink from the cafe as you gaze over the SF skyline heading to work — or returning home — on one of the ferries that crisscross the San Francisco Bay. But the pandemic lockdown hit the ferries hard: From one day to the next, the Golden Gate Ferry went from operating six vessels a day, to two. In this hour, we get the latest on when ferry service will be restor...

Yamiche Alcindor may be the ultimate Washington multi-tasker. She’s the White House correspondent for the PBS Newshour, a political contributor for NBC News and MSNBC, and as of this May, she is the new moderator of “Washington Week,” the current affairs program that has been on air since 1967. At “Washington Week,” Alcindor follows in the footsteps of her mentor, Gwen Ifill, who previously hosted...

To sweat is human. That’s according to science journalist Sarah Everts, whose new book “The Joy of Sweat” explores the biology of what she calls our “oddly flamboyant” way of controlling body temperature. We’ll hear why some of us are more profuse -- and smellier -- perspirers than others, what drives our cravings for sweaty workouts and hot soaks and why we still spend billions annually on produc...

There’s no better time than now to head out for a picnic. There are few weather impediments in the Bay Area — besides fog and wind — and the pandemic taught us that enjoying life outdoors is a good way to go. Whether you’re just having a sunset cocktail (or mocktail) or going full-on three-course meal, we’ll talk about how to picnic in style, which foods are best to bring and where to find that pe...

In the first retrospective of his work on the West Coast, SFMOMA’s current exhibition on electronic art pioneer Nam June Paik features more than 200 works from the artist whose five-decade career “changed the way we look at screens.” One of most acclaimed of the first generation of video artists, Paik’s early work in the 1960s changed perceptions of television, video and the boundary between art a...

For our inaugural Forum Book Club, we’ve picked Maceo Montoya’s “Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces.” The book interweaves its narrative with drawings and scholarly footnotes to tell the story of an aspiring painter with grand ambitions. This would-be artist faces several roadblocks: he is coming of age in 1940s New Mexico with no economic means to support his dreams and, instead of paintin...

Recent space flights by Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have raised the tantalizing question of whether space travel is in our near future. Space exploration has traditionally been the venture of governments, but with last November’s launch of an astronaut crew to the International Space Station by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, commercial flights to deep space seem more tangible. But is privatized sp...

PG&E announced yesterday that it will bury power lines in high wildfire risk areas of California, amounting to 10,000 miles of lines, enough to reach about halfway around the earth. The utility says the plan would also eliminate the need to order power shutdowns during high fire risk events. We’ll talk with an expert about the advantages of underground power lines and what they cost. Learn more ab...

In the first half of the 20th century, California forcibly sterilized more than 20,000 people in state hospitals and other institutions, under a 1909 eugenics law that remained on the books for seven decades. The victims, deemed by the state as "feeble-minded" or otherwise unfit to have children, were disproportionately women and racial minorities. Now, the state is set to pay reparations to hundr...

President Joe Biden lashed out at Facebook last week, saying the site was killing people by spreading coronavirus-vaccine misinformation. As New York Times reporters Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel highlight in their new book An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebooks Battle for Domination, conspiracy theories and hate speech are not just problems that plague the company, they are the inevitable byproducts o...

Writer and director John Singleton’s 1991 debut film “Boyz N the Hood,” centered on the coming of age of a Black man in South Central Los Angeles named Tre. Played by Cuba Gooding Jr., Tre learns lessons about Black manhood, cyclical violence and gentrification from his father, played by Laurence Fishburne, and his neighbors, with standout performances by Ice Cube and Morris Chestnut. Some critics...

In Germany, searches for the missing continue in the wake of recent catastrophic flooding that destroyed villages and claimed almost 200 lives so far. That disaster, together with wildfires that rage in Canada and the western U.S. and record-breaking temperatures in Russia, led New York Times climate correspondent Somini Sengupta to conclude that “the world as a whole is neither prepared to slow d...

California’s ongoing drought and predicted heatwave is causing overly warm and low level waters and threatening to kill off the entire populations of already endangered species like the chinook salmon. Negotiations between the State Water Resources Control Board and the federal Bureau of Reclamation approved a plan for managing water levels. However, experts predict that releasing water into the i...

Fuel breaks and prescribed burns are some of the tools used by firefighters to help reduce the severity of wildfires. California Governor Gavin Newsom was recently criticized for misrepresenting his track record when it comes to wildfire prevention, clearing just a fraction of the acreage claimed. The state has now set aside an additional $500 million for wildfire prevention, but will it be enough...

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the U.S. are in limbo, after a Texas judge ruled on Friday that former President Barack Obama illegally launched the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2012. The ruling does not end legal protections for the roughly 650,000 current DACA participants who came to the United States as children and who are not residents or citizens. However the leg...

California has almost 3 million children 5 years old and under. Hundreds of thousands of these kids lack affordable childcare because of backlogs in the state’s subsidized childcare program. The pandemic --which led to the closure of 8,500 childcare facilities--only worsened the bottleneck. And lack of childcare means that in many households one--or both parents--won’t be able to work. In this hou...

Many of us spent the better part of the last pandemic year taking pains to minimize interactions with people outside our households or pods. With social venues now reopened, many vaccinated adults have the chance to meet new people and chat at length again — but do we remember how to talk to strangers? Journalist Joe Keohane joins us to remind us how and to explain why even small talk and passing...

In a major breakthrough, scientists at UC San Francisco developed technology to decode words from the brain activity of a paralyzed man who is unable to speak and translate them to text that appears on a screen. The technology, known as a “speech neuroprosthesis,” may hold promise for the thousands of people each year who lose speech owing to a stroke, accident or disease. We’ll talk to the resear...

It's summer in the Bay Area, which means it’s time to cozy up by the fire and read some books about tropical islands, deserts and other warm places. We’ll gather a panel of Bay Area booksellers and bookworms to discuss summer reading trends and the best books coming out this summer. They’ll take your questions on what to stick in your bag for that campervan trip, whether you’re looking to dive int...

Blindspotting was one of 2018’s critically acclaimed films. Penned by old friends, Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, it took on race and gentrification in Oakland. Now, they’re back with a new television show based on the movie that’s a wild love letter to the Bay Area. We’ll talk with them both about the show and honoring the place that made them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm...

Ransomware group REvil’s sites on the dark web went down Tuesday, weeks after the group attacked meat processing company JBS and information technology firm Kaseya in a breach that compromised up to 1,500 clients. And those attacks came on the heels of DarkSide’s major strike in May against the Colonial Pipeline, forcing it to temporarily cease operations. Ransomware attacks — which encrypt online...

Los Angeles County has over the last several days recorded more than 3000 new covid cases, 99 percent of which occurred among the unvaccinated, according to the county health department. The spike in cases, fueled by the rapidly spreading delta variant, mirrors that of other regions in the state and country beset by low vaccination rates. The increase also comes as California tries to adopt a caut...

Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of America’s premier thinkers on racism and systemic inequality, has taken on many roles: Atlantic staff writer, best-selling author, novelist and comic book writer. Last week, Coates made headlines for his latest move: teaching journalism at his alma mater Howard University along with Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times “1619 Project” writer Nikole Hannah-Jones. The announ...