KQED's Forum

Summer months bring longer hours to enjoy everything our region has to offer from music festivals, movie nights in a park, and picturesque hikes. What are you most excited about doing this summer in the Bay? Is there a free concert series in a city park, a bike ride through wine country, a favorite swap meet or beach that you’re looking forward to? We’ll talk about some of the great concerts, fest...

Over the last nine years, five nonprofits with names like American Veterans Honor Fund and American Police Officers Alliance — which purport to raise funds to build political support for police, firefighters and veterans — have become some of the nation’s biggest sources of robocalls. That’s according to a new New York Times investigation which found that of the $89 million the nonprofits received...

Earlier this month the Oakland City Council unanimously voted to rename a section of MacArthur Avenue, Tupac Shakur Way, as a reminder, the resolution reads, of rap icon’s contributions “as an awakening tool towards changes in society.” But the Shakur family’s radical legacy far predates Tupac. In his new book, “Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created” Santi Elijah Holley’s detail...

Only two Black women have ever been elected to the U.S. Senate. The most recent, Kamala Harris, left to become Vice President and the Senate now has no Black women again. Oakland’s Barbara Lee, who is running for Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat, could be the third in American history. But she faces the same obstacles as the other Black female candidates before her, including fundraising and being tak...

It’s just about summer and time to dig out the red-and-white checkered blanket for a picnic. From banh mi sandwiches at the beach or pork buns at a city park, the Bay Area has no shortage of picnic spots and foods. As part of our All You Can East series, we’ll talk with chef and picnic enthusiast Samin Nosrat and KQED food editor Luke Tsai about how to plan the perfect picnic. Whether you’re heade...

“A multi-billion-dollar debacle three years in the making” is how CalMatters investigative reporter Lauren Hepler describes the current state of California’s unemployment benefit system. During the Covid pandemic, the already fraying system reached a backlog that affected more than 5 million workers while up to $31 billion was paid to scammers, according to the state’s Employment Development Depar...

In its nearly 35 years in operation, San Francisco’s Homeless Prenatal Program, has worked with the aim of breaking the cycle of extreme poverty by helping pregnant women with health care, housing, parenting classes and other needed services for themselves and their children. It’s a testament to that mission that the non-profit’s new executive director, Shellena Eskridge, is the child of a woman h...

The U.S. Supreme Court is known for its public docket of consequential cases, with scheduled oral arguments and lengthy decisions often released in the month of June. But the Court’s conservative majority has been making more use of the so-called “shadow docket” for controversial cases, issuing perfunctory unsigned orders with little to no legal analysis. University of Texas law professor Stephen...

San Francisco’s Union Square is known for a lot of things: department stores and high-end boutiques, a massive and ornate Christmas tree and a Cheesecake Factory with an amazing view of the city. It’s now also known for swaths of empty storefronts. Close to a quarter of the neighborhood’s 3.2 million square feet of retail space is available for lease, according to brokerage firm Avison Young. Foot...

The children’s classic Frog & Toad has been made into a new animated series for AppleTV+. The gentle and enduring friendship between those two characters allowed its author, Arnold Lobel, to, according to his daughter, explore and embrace his own sexuality as a gay man. Characters in children’s books allow readers to imagine a different world for themselves. Whether it is the Lorax, Iggy Peck (Arc...

Gay stand-up comedian Zach Zimmerman grew up in Virginia with Evangelical parents and attended a school that taught the Bible instead of history and expelled any student found to have watched an R-rated movie. Zimmerman has journeyed far from their roots, having transformed from a “straight, meat-eating Christian conservative to a queer, vegetarian, atheist socialist.” We talk to Zimmerman about r...

Gas and oil production in California has been on a slow decline for decades, and more than a third of unplugged onshore oil wells are sitting idle. Those unplugged wells can leak methane, brine and carcinogenic chemicals — and are vulnerable to geological risks like earthquakes and landslides. A first-of-its-kind study, published by think tank Carbon Tracker, looks at the massive costs of decommis...

The Hetch Hetchy reservoir was created a century ago to supply fresh water for millions of people in the Bay Area. It was created by damming the Tuolumne River, flooding a former mountain valley in the Sierras and forming a reservoir that can hold up to 117 billion gallons of water. Hetch Hetchy embodies a feat of modern engineering, but as the globe warms up and demand for water shifts, the reser...

With the end of Title 42, a law enacted during the pandemic to slow the flow of migrants seeking asylum in the U.S., the Biden Administration finds itself caught between policymakers who say the President is too tough on immigration or not tough enough. Immigration is also an issue that Republican presidential hopefuls are keeping at the center of their primary campaigns: Nikki Haley, Donald Trump...

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s novel ‘Chain-Gang All-Stars’ portrays an American prison system with corporate-sponsored gladiators whose fights to the death, and most every waking moment, are followed, reality TV style, by the nation. It’s a searing satire of an exploitative prison system and the society that supports it that is uncomfortably recognizable. We talk with Adjei-Brenyah about the speculat...

Remember the Jordan Peele deepfake of President Obama from 2018? Since then, deepfake technology and other forms of AI-generated text, photos, voices and videos have become far more sophisticated and realistic — and more accessible to the general public. With political organizations and pranksters alike using these tools, we’ll discuss what has experts in AI and misinformation most worried. And we...

Millions of families in the U.S. depend on welfare to get by, but it’s far from an efficient system. The bureaucratic mechanisms designed to help people find jobs, a requirement for receiving aid, often don’t work, even as they funnel millions of dollars into private companies with government contracts. In the latest season of Marketplace’s “The Uncertain Hour” podcast, host and producer Krissy Cl...

Governor Newsom released on Friday his May revision of the state budget, which shows a $31.5 billion deficit, nearly $10 billion higher than forecast in January. Newsom has declined to raise taxes or meaningfully dip into rainy day funds to address the deficit, opting instead to limit funding increases for transportation, climate and social service programs. At the same time, the revised budget wo...

Dorothy Lazard has held the history of Oakland in her hands for years as the legendary historian and archivist at the Oakland public library. She’s now retired and telling her own story of growing up in Oakland and San Francisco in the late 60’s and early 70’s, which she writes was “the first best time to be a Black kid in America.” We talk to her about coming of age in the 1970’s Bay Area, the bo...

Eurovision, the song contest that brought the world ABBA’s “Waterloo,” concludes with its big finale this Saturday. It’s been dismissed as kitschy and camp. But it’s also considered the Olympics of pop music, and last year, 161 million viewers turned in to watch the finale. This year’s competition includes an Austrian homage to Edgar Allen Poe, Finland’s metal rap entry, “Cha Cha Cha,” and bookie...

Are we destined to parent the way our parents parented even if we strongly object to some of the things they did? Sure, we can probably keep ourselves from dropping cigarette ashes in our toddler’s cereal, but when things get chaotic do we snap the same way our parents did? In her article “The Parent Prophecy” in The Atlantic, Faith Hill says there are elements of Greek tragedy in it all, “parents...

Australia, Chile and China are the top three sources of the world’s lithium – the element essential to build the batteries that power electric vehicles. But that could change as mining operations progress in California’s Imperial Valley. “Lithium Valley,” a vast underground reserve near the Salton Sea, contains enough lithium to meet all of U.S. future demand and more than one-third of global dema...

California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a civil rights investigation Wednesday into the Antioch Police Department after dozens of officers were caught sending and receiving racist, homophobic, and violent text messages in which they brag about using force against the city’s residents. Bonta also cited longstanding complaints about the Antioch police department, saying data shows spikes of...

This Thursday, the federal Covid Public Health Emergency expires, and with its end comes the cessation of federal benefits like additional hospital reimbursements for Covid patient care and free at-home tests. It also marks a moment in which doctors, scientists, politicians and experts are asking themselves: What did we get right during this pandemic? While Covid has fallen out of the headlines, i...

Did you know that Rocky Road ice cream originated in Oakland? Or that Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were once married in San Francisco City Hall? Or that a disaster in Concord helped desegregate our nation’s military? Our region is full of fascinating history that even some lifelong residents don’t know about. Uncovering forgotten history and solving local mysteries is what KQED’s Bay Curious podca...