KQED's Forum

After six long years, The San Francisco Chronicle has revived its annual Top 100 Restaurants list. Critics MacKenzie Chung Fegan and Cesar Hernandez join us to share their picks, their process, and their personal food obsessions. We’ll take a tour of the restaurants that made this year’s list, and dish about what makes a restaurant truly “top” – from Michelin-worthy tasting menus to perfectly gril...

Clinicians and scientists are sounding alarms as the Trump administration slashes budgets at federal health agencies, including the NIH, which is the largest funder of cancer research in the world. We talk about the costs of the cuts, which researchers say could set back progress on treatments and cures by decades and jeopardize patients with advanced forms of cancer who rely on experimental clini...

The global economy and U.S. markets have been reeling since President Trump announced a sweeping package of tariffs on Wednesday. China retaliated late Friday with a matching tariff, further nosediving the stock market and escalating the trade war. Economists predict the expansive tariffs will raise prices and impact jobs, and potentially lead to a recession and upend the global economy. We’ll tal...

Has someone you love ever been enmeshed in online conspiracy theories? Podcast host Zach Mack’s father fell deep into a rabbit hole and wagered Mack $10,000 that 10 of his far-fetched political and apocalyptic beliefs would come true within the year. Mack created a podcast about the experience called “Alternate Realities,” which New York Magazine has already named one of the best of the year. We t...

“Oakland in ‘87 was hella wild.” So begins the new movie “Freaky Tales,” which establishes its bonafides by having rap legend Too $hort as its narrator. Told in four chapters, the film weaves together punks, rappers, Nazis, and the Warriors, with clutch cameos from local legends. We’ll talk to its director and some of the people whose wild stories inspired the movie. Prepare yourself, we’re poppin...

Willkie Farr & Gallagher, the law firm that employs former second gentleman Doug Emhoff, is among the latest to cut a deal with the Trump administration, agreeing to provide $100 million in free legal services to causes the President supports. In executive orders Trump has targeted several high profile firms he considers hostile to him, and the capitulation by some firms has constitutional law exp...

Three California poet laureates, Fresno’s Joseph Rios, El Cerrito’s Tess Taylor and San Francisco’s former poet laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin, received $50,000 from the Academy of American Poetry to fund literary projects in their cities. Their projects include new poetry curriculums, multi-generational workshops, and creating local anthologies. In addition to finding the next generation of poets, t...

A group of Silicon Valley billionaires is causing chaos in the federal government by shuttering agencies, firing workers en masse and flouting legal and political norms. According to journalist Gil Duran, the chaos is carefully orchestrated, as figures like Elon Musk, David Sacks and Peter Thiel follow a playbook conceived by far right thinkers on how to take down institutions and seize power. We...

Journalist and writer Omar El Akkad has won acclaim for his novels “American War” and “What Strange Paradise,” and he’s now published his first non-fiction book which takes a searing look at the war in Gaza. “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” is a rebuke of Western institutions including governments, universities, and the media for failing to denounce Israel’s treatment of Pal...

A Tufts University PhD student from Turkey remains in detention in Louisiana after masked, plainclothes ICE officers arrested her last week, as she was walking on the street. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says that the State Department has revoked at least 300 foreign students’ visas, in an effort that appears to be targeting students who have criticized Israel’s war in Gaza. That’s after the Tru...

Since taking office, President Trump has taken aim at the constitutional order. By conducting mass firings of civil servants, investigating and prosecuting rivals and critics and pardoning insurrectionists, Trump has plunged the country into what political scientist Steven Levitsky argues is an authoritarianism that, unlike a full dictatorship, allows for opposition but deploys “the machinery of g...

The Department of Justice announced Thursday it will investigate “illegal DEI” in admissions at UCLA, Berkeley, Stanford and UC Irvine. Meantime, the UC system is implementing a hiring freeze in response to President Trump’s threats to slash federal funding, while international students who participated in campus protests report heightened fears of deportation. We talk about the Trump administrati...

In a special election on April 15, Oakland voters will choose a candidate to finish the term of recalled mayor Sheng Thao. In the second of our interviews with the two frontrunners in the race, longtime East Bay Congresswoman Barbara Lee joins us to share her vision for the city and take your questions. Lee says she’s the only candidate in the Oakland Mayor’s race with the relationships and track...

Joan Didion famously chronicled California’s culture and mythology in works like “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album.” And it’s Didion’s relationship with Hollywood in particular that New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson explores in “We Tell Ourselves Stories,” her new analysis of the California writer. “The movies,” Wilkinson writes, “shaped us — shaped her — to believe life...

Cooking is a basic survival skill and yet many kids reach adulthood without knowing how to prepare even a simple meal. Meanwhile, other Bay Area kids are producing professional-level dishes on shows like “Kids Baking Championship” and “Chopped Junior.” So how can children get started in the kitchen? Seasoned instructors suggest kicking off with essential skills such as chopping – and, yes kids can...

We take a deep look at the fallout from what national security experts are calling one of the most extraordinary intelligence lapses in U.S. history. On Monday Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported that he’d been mistakenly included on an unsecured group chat with senior national security officials as they disclosed plans to attack Yemen. The Atlantic published more of the exchange on...

In a special election on April 15, Oakland voters will choose a candidate to finish the term of recalled mayor Sheng Thao. In the first of our interviews with the two frontrunners in the race, former Oakland councilmember Loren Taylor joins us to share his vision for the city and take your questions. He says he’s the only candidate in the race with the local government expertise needed to turn the...

How did MAGA come to control Congress? It’s the story New York Times reporters Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater chart in a new book exposing what they call the unparalleled dysfunction of the 118th congress, where Republicans ground federal legislation to a standstill and pushed moderates out, to the point that “the moments Congress worked felt like brief interruptions of a long fall down a rabbit...

We’ve heard the Thomas Edison quote over and over: “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” But how often does the American ideal that we can achieve anything with hard work, actually pan out? In his new book, “99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life” journalist Adam Chandler challenges our myths of meritocracy and self-reliance. As Amer...

YouTube is the site for step-by-step how-to guides, unboxing and reaction videos, and children’s songs that get stuck in your head. It has also fundamentally changed how we produce and consume online content. As YouTube marks its 20th anniversary, we look at the cultural impact of the platform and how it evolved from a simple video-sharing site to the most visited website after Google’s own homepa...

In her new book, “The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyperpersuasion,” Harvard historian of science Rebecca Lemov examines the many ways our minds can be controlled against our wills. Lemov chronicles the use of brainwashing techniques on a range of people from U.S. soldiers who were imprisoned in Korea in the 1950s – some of whom refused to come home after the conflict ende...

President Trump’s unprovoked tariffs on Canadian goods, his threats to make the sovereign nation a 51st state, his belittling of Canada’s leaders: it’s all making Canadians just a bit miffed. Or as Vox’s Canada-based correspondent Zack Beauchamp puts it, “out-of-this-world angry about what the United States is doing to them.” We’ll talk about the unraveling of relations with our once closest ally,...

During the pandemic, former Atlantic writer Ed Yong became a trusted source for news about COVID and its impact. In 2021 he won a Pulitzer Prize for that work, which often was about “the massive gulf between what you want the world to be and what you see happening around you.” As part of our series looking at the legacy of the pandemic five years on, we talk to Yong about how COVID changed our rel...

Sequoia trees. Ojai tangerines. Jasmine. Ocean spray. Weed. “Our sense of smell is often overlooked, but it’s the one thing that can bring back memories of a place faster than anything else,” writes Los Angeles Times assistant editor and olfactory artist Maxwell Williams. LA Times readers shared with Williams their most memorable L.A. smells, including the La Brea tar pits, In-N-Out fries and —of...

As the Library of Congress’s new National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Bay Area children’s author Mac Barnett wants to reframe how we think about picture books. With his platform, “Behold the Picture Book,” he’s championing the vital role picture books play in engaging readers of all ages and why we love them. What’s the picture book you love reading over and over and over? Guests: Ma...