KQED's Forum

Spotify was originally marketed as a democratic, anti-establishment music streaming platform. But according to journalist Liz Pelly, it has become a system favoring major labels and its own algorithmic playlists featuring “ghost artists,” all while underpaying independent artists. Pelly draws on interviews with former employees, music industry veterans and artists to pull back the curtain on the m...

Oakland based art-pop band Tune-Yards is widely loved for their complex and funky rhythms, layers of sound, thrillingly dynamic vocals, and thought provoking lyrics. The duo, Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner, have just released a new album, “Better Dreaming,” praised by critics as highly danceable and jubilant while, as always, grappling with the state of the world. Merrill Garbus joins us in the s...

Have you ever felt so creatively connected to someone that it’s like you share the same brain? That’s how acclaimed writers Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar describe their relationship. They’re best friends who wrote their recent novels “Wandering Stars” and “Martyr” by sending each other “cheernotes” in which they “waved [their] pom poms with genuine excitement at what the other’d just wrought from t...

Hercules native August Lee Stevens dropped her debut album “Better Places” last year earning her a following and praise for her indie soul sound. The 25-year-old singer and songwriter started classical piano when she was in elementary school and continued her study at the Oakland School of the Arts. In her senior year, she picked up singing – a decision that changed her life. She is now part of a...

NPR’s Rhaina Cohen has taken a close look at friend-powered parenting, joining shared households to see how neighbor-and-friend alliances can break the isolation of modern parenthood. We’ll talk about the challenges of communal living and what parents gain—emotionally, practically, even financially—when they raise their kids with their friends. Cohen’s recent piece for the Atlantic is “A Grand Exp...

Singer Sid Sriram was born in southern India, but his family moved to Fremont when he was just a year old. His voice and his sound are the product of his family’s legacy as carnatic traditional signers and of  a childhood in the Bay Area suburbs, listening to jazz and hip hop. Sriram has already achieved fame in India, his career expanded globally after singing for Grammy-Award winning composer A....

We remember George Floyd, five years after his murder by a Minneapolis police officer. In the days and months after Floyd’s death, millions of Americans took to the streets to protest racism and police violence, ushering in a new era of racial reckoning. Robert Samuels, co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “His Name is George Floyd,” wonders however if “the backlash feels more endurin...

Bay Area Latin jazz legend John Santos joins us with a full band for a live in-studio performance. The San Francisco native is a Grammy nominated percussionist and composer influenced by classic rhythms and traditions of the Caribbean. He founded his own label, Machete Records, 40 years ago to avoid mainstream platforms and maintain his creative freedom. Santos joins us to talk about his San Franc...

A record high 7 million U.S. children have received an ADHD diagnosis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But journalist Paul Tough wonders if we’re thinking about pediatric ADHD all wrong. For a recent New York Times Magazine feature, Tough spent a year talking to leading researchers who now say that standard treatments like Ritalin only help children behave better, not...

A warm summer day sitting beneath the shade of a tree or a beach umbrella with a tall cold drink at the ready and a juicy book waiting to be read — what could be better? We’ll talk to booksellers from Booksmith and Green Apple Books as well as Oakland-based novelist Jasmine Guillory about what they are reading this summer, and we’ll hear from you: When you’re not doom scrolling, what’s on your mus...

So far this term the Supreme Court has allowed states to ban gender transition care for youth, made it easier for white people and other “majority” group members to prove workplace discrimination and temporarily cleared the way for the Trump administration to deport people to countries they’re not from. We talk about the impact of these rulings and other cases still to be decided. Guests: Rory Lit...

Author and veteran journalist Sara Kehaulani Goo grew up in Southern California making frequent visits to Hawaii, where her extended family owned a vast and rugged stretch of Maui. The land was granted to an ancestor by King Kamehameha III in 1848 before the U.S.overthrew the island nation’s monarchy. Goo’s family held on to a small section for more than a century, but when their property taxes sk...

A fragile ceasefire is in effect between Israel and Iran, just days after the United States intervened in the war by striking Iranian nuclear sites. President Trump is claiming credit, but journalist and Middle East politics expert Robin Wright writes, “the outcome of this war may be shaped more by Iran’s culture and politics than by the military prowess of its opponents.” We look at Iran’s and Is...

Local media is dying according to headlines. But that is not the case in the Bay Area. Last year the New York Times reported that San Francisco alone had 27 media outlets for its 800,000 residents. And now, four new publications can join that list: Coyote, the Bay Area Current, the Oakland Review of Books and the Approach, all helmed by local writers, reporters and authors. We’ll talk to these med...

Today’s young workers are rethinking what makes a good job. A new Resume Builder survey finds that more than a third of Gen Z college grads are working in or plan to enter the trades or other skilled blue-collar jobs. Many say they’re seeking relief from rising student debt, and practical roles less affected by AI, including electrical work, plumbing, welding, veterinary care and EMT roles. We tal...

The Trump Administration has targeted Southern California for its harshest crackdown on immigrants. For the past few weeks, federal agents have raided restaurant kitchens and Home Depot parking lots and roughed up U.S. citizens, sparking anger and protests across the country. In Northern California, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have arrested immigrants who show up for immigration court...

“As much as I love my mother, I’ve often found myself regarding her with feelings that are somewhat closer to the opposite of love,” writes political analyst Molly Jong-Fast. The mother of which she writes is feminist icon Erica Jong, whose 1973 debut novel “Fear of Flying,” jetted Jong to a level of fame that she spent the rest of her life grasping on to. In 2023, her mother’s declining health an...

As the war between Israel and Iran continues, members of the Iranian diaspora in the Bay Area are closely watching as people in Iran are being asked to evacuate amidst travel bans, fuel shortages and internet blackouts. The United States is home to the largest Iranian diaspora outside of Iran, with over fifty percent of that population living in California. We talk with Iranian community members a...

Nearly a decade after the end of China’s one-child policy, families are still reeling from its traumas. In multiple cases, officials in China forcibly took children away from their families and placed them up for adoption, fulfilling a lucrative overseas demand for baby girls. In her new book “Daughters of the Bamboo Grove,” journalist Barbara Demick tells the story of one girl named Fangfang, rec...

President Trump announced on Thursday that in the next two weeks, he would make a decision about the role the U.S. will take in the escalating Israel-Iran conflict. As Israel and Iran traded fire for a seventh day, fissures emerged among Republicans about whether military action is warranted, while some Democrats are urging passage of a bill that would require Trump to get congressional approval b...

Two years after the state’s landmark report on reparations for Black residents, where does the effort stand? The California Legislative Black Caucus has put forth bills to address equity issues like unjust property seizures or to help obtain professional licenses, but few bills have cleared the legislature or made it past Governor Newsom’s desk. We look at what progress has been made since the rep...

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law on Wednesday that bans gender-affirming medical care for minors. For many transgender people, the ruling is yet another setback in a long line of attacks on their rights that stretches back through most of human history. And yet, transgender people have created a rich legacy throughout, especially in the Bay Area. Two new projects highlight their stori...

Working-class voters don’t just vote for their policy preferences — they vote for the party that feels like “their people.” Increasingly, that’s not the left. In “Outclassed,” UC Law professor emerita Joan Williams argues that America’s widening “diploma divide” is fueling the far right — and that liberals often play into the dynamic without realizing it. To protect democracy and build a durable,...

In her new book of essays, “No Straight Road Takes You There,” writer and activist Rebecca Solnit urges us to not give in to feelings of doom and complacency in threatening political times, but instead to imagine a radically better future. “The most important territory to take is in the imagination,” she writes. “Once you create a new idea of what is possible and acceptable, the seeds are planted;...

For California firefighters battling wildland flames, the work is up close, unrelenting and fueled by a climate growing hotter and drier by the year. Anthropologist and former Los Padres Hotshot Jordan Thomas pulls readers straight into this world in his new book “When it All Burns,” chronicling six months on the frontlines of California’s megafires. We talk with Thomas about what it is like to ba...