KQED's Forum

When the Sony Walkman arrived in 1979 it not only changed the way we experience audio, it also changed the way we experience the world. Suddenly listening was a private experience and everyone with headphones on was experiencing their surroundings with a different soundtrack. Radiolab senior producer Simon Adler created a five part series for the podcast and a new live performance about the transf...

“I’ve lived nearly all my life with two incompatible ideas in my head,” writes philosophy professor Clancy Martin. “I wish I were dead and I’m glad my suicides failed.” Martin’s new book, “How Not To Kill Yourself,” combines memoir with research to take readers into the mind of a suicidal person. We talk to Martin about what to do if you or a loved one are considering suicide and why it’s importan...

For 26 years, the Open Library of the San Francisco-based Internet Archive has been preserving millions of books and lending them out freely online. Last month, a federal judge sided with a group of book publishing giants – Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley – that sued the nonprofit archive for “mass copyright infringement.” Publishers argued, and the court agreed, that the...

“Twitter isn’t dead. But it’s getting there,” writes Vox tech reporter Shirin Ghaffary in her new piece describing the chaotic six months since tech billionaire Elon Musk took over the social media platform. NPR and PBS left Twitter last week after Musk misleadingly labeled it “government-funded media,” and more public news organizations, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, followed s...

The ethics scandal surrounding Justice Clarence Thomas continues to deepen. According to Pro Publica, in the last 20 years, Thomas and his wife have enjoyed numerous luxury vacations and gifts paid for by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow. And it now appears that Thomas has been reporting rental income from a defunct company. Thomas’ ethics issues are not limited to the acceptance of gifts;...

Did you know that bees have thoughts, memories and personalities? They can count to four, play soccer and feel pain, according to Stephen Buchmann, a pollination ecologist who has studied bees for more than four decades, ever since he was a high school student in Placentia, California. We talk to Buchmann about the internal lives of bees and why the stress they feel may be one reason they’re dying...

Salmon need cold water to hatch and grow strong enough to embark on migrations that stretch hundreds of miles from their places of birth. In California, dams constructed along various rivers have disrupted traditional salmon runs and are one reason the species has been in decline for decades. And, as climate change makes everything hotter, including the rivers, salmon spawning sites are at risk. T...

When Katie Porter ran for Congress in 2018 she was “acutely aware” of her shortcomings – that she was a Democrat in Republican Orange County, that she’d never parachuted into combat and even that she hated apple pie. But above all, as she explains in her new memoir, she was far from rich, which came to set her apart from her colleagues in the House where “the privilege of wealth divides ruthlessly...

California’s energy future is going to require electricity – a lot more of it. With the push to electrify transportation like cars and trucks and a climate characterized by hotter summers and colder winters, experts say California needs to triple the capacity of the grid by 2050. For the next 10 years alone, California will require 40 billion watts of energy, and to power this new future, the stat...

This weekend, the NBA Playoffs begin — and this year, for the first time, all four of California’s teams will be playing. The frenzy starts in Northern California on Saturday night, when the Sacramento Kings and the Golden State Warriors start their series. And come Sunday, eyes are on Los Angeles as the Lakers face the Memphis Grizzlies and the Clippers go up against the Phoenix Suns. We’ll talk...

Until recently, a persistent narrative about women in hip-hop was that only one can succeed at any given time. But, that wasn’t how the Bay Area rolled, especially in the 1990s as the region’s hip-hop scene flourished. In the early decades of Bay Area rap, artists including Conscious Daughters, Suga T and Mystic established themselves as legends. They also built what they call a sisterhood: They r...

Jury selection begins on Thursday in Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News, more than two years after Dominion filed its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit arguing that Fox knowingly broadcast false information about its voting machines and software. In a pretrial ruling, the Delaware Superior Court judge overseeing the case determined that it was “crystal clear” that Fox’s statements about Dominion we...

Jeanne Manford was an elementary school teacher and hardly an activist. But she had a gay son, Morty, who she loved fiercely. In 1972, the two of them walked together in a New York City gay pride parade, and Manford held a sign that read “Parents of Gays: Unite In Support for Our Children.” It was a revolutionary act. At that time same-sex attraction was classified as a mental illness, and “homose...

In 2018, six children — Ciera, Abigail, Jeremiah, Devonte, Hannah and Markis — were murdered by their adoptive parents, Jennifer and Sarah Hart, who also committed suicide when they drove their family off of a cliff in Mendocino. The Harts were white; their adopted children were Black and mixed race. Much of the news coverage focused on the Harts, their motivations and history. But a new book by j...

Ramen shops have popped up all over the Bay Area dishing out bowls of the classic Japanese comfort food. But members of the Japanese diaspora have long been disappointed by the offerings here. The broth is a little thin. The noodles can be a bit meh. Many wonder why their favorite dish to cure a hangover isn’t as good as what they can get standing at the bar of a ramen shop located on the platform...

“I experience your wounds as if they were my own,” reads the last line of Clint Smith’s poem “Nociception.” Directed to a child, it explains that just as a sea creature that loses an appendage feels discomfort across its entire body, so does a parent whose child is in pain. The poem is part of Smith’s new collection “Above Ground,” which also celebrates the joy, wonder and even occasional absurdit...

Life expectancy rates in the United States have been falling for some time even though the country has one of the highest standards of living on the planet. According to a recent column in the Financial Times, what’s really mind blowing is how those declines compare with other industrialized nations like Britain. The average American can expect to live to age 65 – a life expectancy similar to the...

Mobility is “the harmonious convergence of all the elements that allow you to move freely and effortlessly through space and life,” write San Francisco CrossFit cofounders Juliet and Kelly Starrett. But our desk-bound, screen-dominated modern life constrains mobility, leaving our joints stiff, our muscles achy and our minds on edge. Being able to move the way we want, how and when we want, can’t b...

California has been pummeled by storms in recent months, but the benefit of that never-ending rain cloud is all the makings for a beautiful Bay Area spring. Rivers are gushing, wildflowers are blooming, mushrooms are sprouting and waterfalls are tumbling in places they haven’t been seen in years, We’ll talk to a panel of nature-lovers about what to look for and the best places to see the glories o...

The 2024 presidential election is more than 18 months away. Yet it started months ago: not with Donald Trump’s announcement that he’s running again, but behind the scenes with the leaderships of the Republican and Democratic National Committees fighting it out amongst themselves for power and primacy. That’s the focus of the newest season of the New York Times’ podcast, “The Run-Up.” Host Astead H...

For as long as rock climbing has existed, women have been pushing the limits on the wall. And they’ve done so without being properly recognized. But in the last decades, female climbing spaces have become more commonplace, helping climbers reach their full potential and demonstrating that climbing, unlike most popular sports, allows both women and men to perform at the same levels. Forum talks wit...

About 16 million Americans – or about 1 in 20 U.S. adults – own at least one AR-15, making it the best-selling rifle in the United States. It’s also among the most lethal: ten of the 17 deadliest U.S. mass shootings in the last decade have involved AR-15s, according to “American Icon,” a new investigation by the Washington Post. We talk about why the AR-15, originally designed as a lightweight com...

With rising inflation, downtowns that are yet to fully reopen and regional bank failures, it may seem that there is not a lot of good economic news to report right now. But according to Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S. Jacobs, the authors of a new book, “Moving the Needle,” there is a major economic success story in the tight labor markets of recent years which helped bring the truly disadvant...

Once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, spanning what is now Kings, Tulare and Kern Counties before it was drained a century ago, Tulare Lake is on the verge of returning. Swelled by recent storms, it has inundated farmland, threatened cities, forced evacuations, disrupted livelihoods and reignited long-standing water wars. With record snow in the Sierra Nevada yet to run off, th...

Residents of Martinez woke up the morning after Thanksgiving last year to find a white powder coating their neighborhoods. About a week later, county health officials announced it was a toxic release from Martinez Refining Co. and, after another several weeks, residents were told not to eat any food grown in their soil. Now, on Wednesday, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District will present t...