KQED's Forum

Brian Merchant is the technology columnist for the L.A. Times. He’s also a self-professed Luddite. In his new book “Blood in the Machine” Merchant explains that Luddites, most known for destroying machinery in the 19th century, didn’t hate technology. Rather, they railed against the Big Tech elites of the day whose automated machines threatened to erase livelihoods and the government that was deaf...

The longest strike by TV and film actors against studios in history concluded Thursday when SAG-AFTRA leadership agreed to a new contract with major studios. The deal, which will go into effect once union members approve it, includes higher wages, better streaming residuals and safeguards for AI. As actors go back to work and studios scramble to finish the season’s productions, we’ll talk about wh...

Two of the biggest songs to come out of the Bay Area’s hip hop scene – Too Short’s “Blow The Whistle” and E-40’s “Tell Me When To Go” – dropped in 2006. That year turned out to be a pivotal one as hyphy captured audiences nationwide with its uptempo beats, flashy fashion and distinctive dance styles. But in its place of origin, the Bay Area, people were dealing with the turmoil of displacement, ec...

California’s Employment Development Department paid out up to $30 billion in fraudulent claims during the Covid pandemic. Meanwhile, some six million Californians with legitimate claims saw their unemployment benefits delayed or improperly denied. That’s according to a new investigation by CalMatters, which found that state agencies and lawmakers were aware of red flags and security holes for year...

Starting on November 11, leaders from around the Pacific Rim descend on San Francisco for APEC, and one of the most anticipated meetings is a conversation between President Biden and China’s leader, Xi Jinping. On the heels of recent economic and diplomatic tensions, analysts believe this could be a chance to stabilize relations between two of the world’s economic superpowers. With important elect...

The week's most compelling interviews in 30 minutes or less! Get a historical perspective on the news with history professor and author of "Democracy Awakening," Heather Cox Richardson, then dive into a range of criminal justice issues with California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many of us are familiar with the biases baked into modern technology, but these are heightened with AI, warns Dr. Joy Buolamwini, who has been called the “conscience of the A-I revolution.” A computer scientist and digital activist who holds a PhD from MIT, Dr. Buolamwini exposed how facial recognition technology failed to recognize darker skin color across a range of commonly used apps. We talk t...

Lowriders defy convention: they lean, they hop, they bounce. Their paint jobs are works of art, sometimes with museum-worthy images or a melding of colors that gleam with a lustrous sheen. Lowriding, the drivers will tell you, is not just about the car, it’s about convening with the community and celebrating art and culture. But for decades, restrictive bans in California prohibited where lowrider...

You might know The Cure’s song “A Strange Day,” defined by its spooky guitar licks, eerie drone loops and funeral march drum beats. But Lol Tolhurst, the band’s co-founder, former drummer and keyboardist, says the song is not all doom and death. Rather, it’s a shining example of Goth, which Tolhurst calls the “last true alternative outsider subculture.” Goth music inherited the anarchy of punk but...

The de Young museum has opened its doors and cleared walls to feature the work of Bay Area artists. On exhibit through January, the 2023 de Young Open features 883 artworks across genre and subject matter — the only submission requirement being that the creator lives in one of the nine Bay Area counties. We’ll talk with the lead curator of the exhibit, along with other independent curators and art...

Since 2014, inmates inside California’s womens’ prisons have filed hundreds of complaints of sexual abuse carried out by guards, yet just four officers have been fired, and only four have been prosecuted. In a new investigation for The Guardian, reporter Sam Levin outlines the culture of silence and intimidation inside of California’s prison system, and why it’s often the victims who get punished....

Friendsgiving can take many forms. Sometimes it’s a replacement for a more traditional Thanksgiving when gathering with family isn’t possible. For others, it’s a bonus holiday to honor friends who feel like family. The ritual has deep roots in the queer community where it emerged in the 1980s as a way to unite chosen families and challenge restrictive family norms. For our next installment of All...

Last month, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued tech giant Meta, arguing that its Instagram and Facebook platforms use psychologically manipulative features that are harming kids’ mental health. And in September, his office sued ExxonMobil and other oil giants, alleging they misled the public about the climate effects of fossil fuels. We’ll talk to Bonta about the high profile cases he’s br...

In her daily politics newsletter, “Letters from an American,” Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson offers her two million readers a historical perspective on the news along with a dose of common sense. She launched the newsletter during the 2019 impeachment crisis, and the strains on American democracy, laid bare by the January 6 insurrection, have been a constant theme of her w...

Jesse David Fox works as Vulture’s comedy critic and hosts the podcast “Good One,” where each episode features comedians like John Mulaney and Sasheer Zamata spending up to two hours breaking down one joke and why it makes us laugh. But his new book, “Comedy Book,” questions whether comedy has to be funny at all. It takes us from the premiere of “Seinfeld” and “The Simpsons” in 1989, to the new re...

President Joe Biden is set to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping this month in San Francisco. They’ll be here during the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, the biggest international meeting the city has hosted since 1945. Nearly 30,000 visitors are expected in the city during the conference, which officials say could bring in more than $50 million to the local economy. But some l...

Forum in Focus brings you the most compelling interviews in under 30 minutes! This week, professor and novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen on his new memoir, "A Man of Two Faces. And a special performance by multi-instrumentalist and singer Kishi Bashi and a conversation about his new "songfilm" called "Omoiyari. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Acclaimed author C Pam Zhang’s latest novel, “Land of Milk and Honey,” is set after smog blocks the sun, killing 98% of commercial crops and 12% of the human population in famine. Bland mung powder is eaten by all but the very rich, who continue to eat lavishly. As the protagonist — a chef who decides to work for the rich to again taste real food — recalls, “A world was gone. Goodbye to all that,...

Roller culture in the bay area has lived many lives – from the roller discos of the 1970s, to the inline skate competitions of the 2000s and a quad-skating revival fueled by TikTok and the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s tangled up with other cultural movements, including the Bay Area’s underground music scene. And improvised roller parties – from Golden Gate Park to Panther Skate Plaza – are building on...

Manuel Muñoz is the son of immigrant farm laborers from California’s Central Valley whose four works of fiction center the lives of Mexican-American communities in the region. Patrick Makuakane is a native Hawaiian and San Francisco-based kumu hula, or master teacher, who created a unique form of hula that blends traditional movements with contemporary music. They’re among five Californians who ha...

During the height of the pandemic, the agency that handles California’s unemployment benefits had an epic meltdown. Not only could its computers not handle the thousands of additional claims, officials couldn’t even say for sure how big the backlog was. Jennifer Pahlka was one of the technology experts brought in to help, an experience she writes about in her new book Recoding America: Why Governm...

More than 21 million Americans are breathing air that’s dirtier than official records indicate. That’s according to a new investigation from the California Newsroom, MuckRock and the Guardian. An obscure rule in the Clean Air Act allows regions to strike so-called “natural” and “exceptional events,” like wildfires, from their pollution data on grounds that they are beyond the control of local air...

California’s use of forced sterilizations represents a dark chapter in the state’s history. Up until the 1970s, state hospitals and institutions implemented a eugenics program as a way to decrease specific demographic groups including Latinos, Blacks and Native Americans. In more recent decades, California prisons performed procedures—without patient consent — that left hundreds of women unable to...

Earlier this year Sonya Christian became the first woman chancellor of the California Community Colleges, the largest higher education system in the country serving 1.9 million students across 116 colleges. We’ll talk to Christian about her plans to address declining enrollment, ease transfers from community college to the UC and Cal State systems and create more community college baccalaureate de...

Kishi Bashi is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, filmmaker and Japanese-American. That identity and the liminal space between being Japanese and being American animates his documentary “Omoiyari” in which he traveled to WWII Japanese internment camps and Japan itself to better understand his own identity. Bashi improvises music on site in the film, and his taut melodic phrases, inflected with a...