KQED's Forum

Glynn Washington hosts the podcast Spooked, which features stories about the supernatural – told by the people who experienced them first-hand. We talk with Glynn about spirits, ghosts, and the stories that make us question what we know. Whether you’re a believer or a skeptic, we invite you to join us as we discuss stories from the Spooked archive, contemplate our relationship with spirits and the...

Solar eclipses happen roughly every six months, but they are rarely visible. This weekend, however, Bay Area residents will be able to see the moon pass in front of the sun in an annular eclipse. Another one, a total eclipse, is expected to cross our skies in April 2024. The celestial spectacles will be the last events to appear over the continental U.S. until 2045. We’ll dig into the science of s...

Leonard Leo, the powerful and well-funded leader of the Federalist Society who prevailed on the Trump Administration to nominate a slate of conservative, anti-abortion jurists to the Supreme Court, is now the subject of “We Don’t Talk About Leonard,” a new Pro Publica investigation and podcast. Now that he has created a right wing supermajority on the Supreme Court, “Leo has grander ambitions,” ac...

Political corruption. Government shutdown battles. Legislative gridlock. Sometimes, it seems like ordinary citizens picked at random might do a better job governing than elected officials. In fact, that’s exactly the kind of lottery-like political system that is now gaining traction in academia. As part of Forum’s “Doing Democracy” series, we’ll talk about “lottocracy” and other ideas that seek to...

Communities across California with connections to Israel and Gaza are bracing for more violence, death and devastation after President Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday officially declared war on Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza. On Saturday Hamas unleashed a deadly attack that Israel characterized as the “worst massacre of Israeli civilians” in history. Now almost 2,000 people are dead and...

Curating a well-stocked pantry can feel like a never-ending grocery list. Where to draw the line between different types of oil or salt? And what about recipes from countries around the world, with ingredients you may use once and never again? For our next installment of All You Can Eat, our collaboration with the KQED Food Team, we talk to chefs and recipe magicians about how to make the most of...

Every wildfire has at least two stories, according to writers Justin Angle and Nick Mott. One story is about the devastation exacted on humans, their lives and property. The other story, sometimes at odds with the first, is about fire’s positive impacts on ecosystems. Fire is “something we need to suppress and control,” they write, “yet it’s a natural force we need more of.” Angle and Mott’s new b...

In her new collection of poems, Mimi Tempestt wrestles with both intensely personal struggles and injustices across the globe. In one of the poems in “the delicacy of embracing spirals” she writes, Every day i wake up & watch my old renditions steal my heart away from my mother’s wildest dream you keep asking me to tell my story i’m too busy creating the world Tempestt, who grew up in Los Angeles...

From oat milk at coffee shops, to cashew cheese at Target, to McDonald’s McPlant burger, it’s becoming easier to consume fewer animal products. That’s a win for the environment, given a livestock sector that’s responsible for about 15 percent of global greenhouse emissions, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. But simply offering substitutes to the American diet won’t be enough t...

In September, Alameda County declared a state of emergency on homelessness to address growing numbers of unhoused people. Suburban and rural areas throughout California are seeing more homelessness, according to a recent study from UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. Homelessness outside of big cities can be less visible and requires a different approach since towns and suburbs oft...

Each week we bring you a selection of interviews we don't want you to miss - in 30 minutes or less! This week Mina Kim speaks with comedian Keegan-Michael Key and writer/director Elle Key about the couple's new book "The History of Sketch Comedy: A Journey Through the Art and Craft of Humor," and we hear Alexis Madrigal's conversation with Oakland-based graphic novelist, Daniel Clowes on his new b...

Romantic crushes: we’ve all experienced that feeling of intense yearning for someone we know we’d never end up with. But while crushes may bring heartache, they also carry benefits, according to Atlantic editor Faith Hill, author of the article “A Crush Can Teach You a Lot About Yourself.” Hill says crushes can offer a happy escape from reality, help us figure out what we like in our partners and...

The hushed thrum of the womb. The warble of the last living species of a now-extinct bird. The fury and thrust of a jet engine in flight. These are some of the sounds that populate filmmaker Sam Green’s immersive documentary “32 Sounds.” The movie is not just a collection of sounds, but rather a meditation on the strange power that sound has on us, whether it is voices, music, the natural world or...

What does it really mean biologically to be a woman? That’s one of the central questions Cat Bohannon explores in her new book “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.” Bohannon makes the case that until recently scientists have effectively ignored women: the majority of subjects in clinical drug trials are male, and too many researchers still mistakenly assume that se...

More than 75,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers in five states —including 22,000 in the Bay Area — went on strike Wednesday after the company and unions failed to resolve a dispute over wages and staffing levels. The union says the strike, set to last three days, is the largest in the healthcare sector in U.S. history. We’ll look at how the walkout is affecting patient care and how it fits i...

Most histories of social media focus on Big Tech: the inventors, the investors and the innovations they made. But Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz writes in her new book “Extremely Online” that “tech founders may control the source code, but users shape the product.” Providing a “social history of social media,” Lorenz looks at how influencers — the content creators, bloggers and uploaders...

In September, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors reviewed a 400-page report outlining more than 100 recommendations on how to provide reparations for the city’s African-American residents. Proposals include establishing a city office dedicated to reparations, programs to support Black-owned businesses, and cash payments to individuals, a suggestion that has stirred controversy. A city commissi...

Governor Gavin Newsom has appointed Democratic strategist Laphonza Butler to the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Dianne Feinstein, who died on Thursday. Butler is the president of Emily’s List, a political action committee that helps elect women who support abortion rights. She’s also a former labor leader, advisor to vice-president Kamala Harris, and University of California regent. When she is...

The Steinhart Aquarium in the California Academy of Sciences turned 100 this fall. It’s just eight years older than Methusaleh, the 92-year-old lungfish that arrived in 1938. The aquarium is home to 60,000 animals representing 1,000 species. Steinhart was the first public aquarium to display flashlight fish and coconut octopuses and found innovative ways to showcase the ocean’s mysterious “twiligh...

The new book “The History of Sketch Comedy,” based on Keegan-Michael Key and Elle Key’s award-winning podcast of the same name, explains how sketch comedy works and how we arrived at the sketch comedy landscape we enjoy on our phone, laptop and TV screens today. Weaving in the authors’ own history — from watching sketches to scripting jokes themselves — the book analyzes why we love the Monty Pyth...

In Daniel Gumbiner’s latest novel, “Fire in the Canyon,” wildfire acts as a plot catalyst and a character. The story follows Ben Hecht, a former pot farmer turned grape grower in California’s Gold Country, who is just getting by when wildfire sweeps through. Both the Hecht family and the land they live on exist in a “state of fragile equilibrium,” in which security is both hard-earned and precario...

Senator Dianne Feinstein died Thursday night. Her death was confirmed by family members Friday morning. The Senate’s oldest serving member, and California’s first female senator, Feinstein had announced that she would retire at the end of her term. Her long and storied political career began in San Francisco. She came to national prominence in the midst of tragedy: as the president of the Board of...

School is back in session and that means a daily struggle for many parents to figure out what to pack their kids for lunch. As palates have evolved so have school lunches. Nowadays, bento boxes are all the rage, largely replacing paper sacks as the container of choice. Kids are as likely to dine on sandwiches as they are wraps, musubi, and salads. We’ll dish on healthy and tasty options that kids...

Seven candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination take the stage on Wednesday in Simi Valley for the second debate of the 2024 campaign. They’re expected to take questions on the looming government shutdown, the economy and the war in Ukraine – and make the case to donors and supporters that they can take on Donald Trump. The former president, who’s under four indictments and leads...

“If Steve Earle weren’t a living, breathing person, he’d be a character in a blues song,” observed a reviewer. Earle is foremost a musician, one who started out in Nashville as a songwriter. Along the way, this self-proclaimed “hardcore troubadour,” has been married seven times, conquered drug addiction, did a stint in jail, and lost nearly everything as he fed that addiction. But in the end, the...