KQED's Forum

“Food was a life raft that connected our families to where we came from, “ writes Judy Leung in the new cookbook, “The Woks of Life.” Her daughters, Sarah and Kaitlin grew up loving their parents’ Chinese cooking but when they moved out of the house, they realized that they had no idea how to cook their family favorites. There were no written recipes or helpful YouTube videos. So the women started...

Being a teenager has always been hard, writes clinical psychologist and adolescent mental health expert Lisa Damour. But coming of age amid a global pandemic, intense political division and a national reckoning with police violence "makes the work of a teenager -- or raising one -- that much more difficult." We talk to Damour about how to help the teens in our lives navigate the powerful emotions...

“Palo Alto is nice,” begins Malcolm Harris in his new book, aptly named “Palo Alto.” But according to Harris, Palo Alto, where he grew up, is also a microcosm for much of what is wrong with capitalism and the California Dream. Charting the history of the town from its founding to the present day, Harris looks at the impact Stanford University, Republican politics, unions and the tech industry have...

More than half of all abortions in the United States are performed with medication, according to the Guttmacher Institute. But a federal court case in Texas could block access to mifepristone, a key abortion drug, nationally. “Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA” contests the FDA’s approval of mifepristone in 2000 and regulation since. If federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk sides with the anti-ab...

The public discourse about undocumented immigrants often lacks humanity and complexity according to writers Reyna Grande and Rafael Agustin, who have written acclaimed memoirs about their immigrant experiences. They and many others bring nuanced narratives to the burgeoning genre of undocumented literature. Grande co-edited “Somewhere We Are Human,” an anthology released last year that features wo...

The Supreme Court this week held oral arguments in a pair of cases that have tech companies, First Amendment advocates and digital rights-watchers on edge. On Tuesday it heard arguments in Gonzalez v. Google, a case that could redefine a decades-old law that protects online platforms from liability for third-party content they host. And on Wednesday it debated Twitter v. Taamneh, which asks whethe...

Relaxing might not seem like a radical act, but it is for Black women, according to the curators of “Resting Our Eyes,” a new exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art in San Francisco. Pulling together artists from a variety of mediums, the exhibit celebrates how Black women find liberation through rest, leisure, and adornment. Photographs, video, and mixed media works create a visual vocabula...

On February 24, 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, setting in motion a brutal, bloody war that has left tens of thousands of people dead and millions forcibly displaced. A year later, Ukraine is still standing, defying expectations that it would quickly fall to a more powerful Russian military and reclaiming key portions of territory it lost at the outset of the invasion. But as the war wears on, resolu...

Scientists have warned for decades that due to climate change water levels are rising throughout the Bay Area. The first place excess water will show up is underground. As we saw from recent storms, shallow groundwater can cause flooding in streets and low-lying areas and can overwhelm wastewater systems. Local planners and policy makers are analyzing how the region should adapt to the problem of...

Trucks are by far the largest source of air pollution from vehicles in California, generating about 80% of carcinogenic diesel soot and 70% of smog-causing pollution, according to the Air Resources Board. And their impacts are unequal: communities of color and low-income communities situated near ports, distribution centers and warehouses -- particularly in the Inland Empire -- are more likely to...

In the 1970s, two female professors at Oberlin College coined the phrase “imposter phenomenon” to capture that feeling of intense self doubt and fear of being discovered as a fraud in the workplace. Their published paper on the topic has since spawned an industry of seminars, self-help, and empowerment. And while today, it feels like everyone suffers from “imposter syndrome,” some experts argue th...

Dianne Feinstein, the longest-serving woman in the U.S. Senate, has announced she's not seeking re-election in 2024. Many Californians hail her accomplishments in gun safety, environmental protection and her trailblazing role for women in public office. Yet at a time when her approval rating has hit an all-time low, some say the announcement is coming far too late. We'll hear your reflections on F...

Long before the pandemic, hospitals and their services were under strain. But throughout the state, some hospitals are now at risk of closing for good, which would leave thousands of Californians without basic access to healthcare. In many rural counties, local community hospitals are the only option for both primary care and life-saving emergency services. The abrupt closure of Madera County’s on...

In January 2020, Atlantic senior editor John Hendrickson wrote an article about Joe Biden’s stutter. Like Biden, Hendrickson has a stutter. And while stuttering wasn’t something that Hendrickson hid, it wasn’t something he liked to talk about either. But the viral response to his piece led Hendrickson to reconsider how to talk and think about his stutter. His relationship with stuttering and its i...

Singer and songwriter Valerie June defies genre – she can be a little country and a little rock and roll and there’s also folk, blues, soul, Appalachian and a sound that’s downright ethereal. But her music is all her own, she’s called it, "organic moonshine roots music," and it’s beautiful. She joins us to play a few songs on her banjolele and to talk about her latest album "The Moon and Stars: Pr...

Every Californian knows that the Big One, that catastrophic magnitude earthquake, is coming. Earthquakes like those in Turkey and Syria, and Mexico City before that, and Haiti even before that, have all offered experts lessons in how to build better. But have we taken those lessons to heart? What more could we be doing in California to strengthen our infrastructure, and if we haven’t done it yet,...

Many of life’s very biggest decisions – should I quit my job? Should we move in together? Is it time to get pregnant? Divorce? Retire? – are at the crossroads of money and love. We don’t learn how to navigate either in school. Unless you happened to take labor economist Myra Strober’s class on work and family at Stanford. Now she and one of her former students, Abby Davisson, have written a book a...

“Black history,” writes award-winning artist and graphic designer George McCalman, “tends to mean the ten people who are lauded every Black History Month of every Black History Year.” McCalman upends that constricted notion in his most recent book, “Illustrated Black History,” a tribute to 140 pioneering – but sometimes unseen – Black artists, advocates and thinkers who have “sacrificed their live...

Empty storefronts have peppered neighborhoods across San Francisco and the Bay for decades. One stretch of Mission Street, from 19th to 30th streets, has more than 70 commercial vacancies. In the last few years, the pandemic exacerbated the problem as hundreds of small businesses have closed up shop for good. Cities and business owners are grappling with how to bring back foot traffic to support s...

California is one of only 10 states that don’t require public elementary schools to screen for dyslexia. But research shows that detection of dylexia's early warning signs can lessen reading challenges for kids down the line. We’ll hear why California has been an outlier and about the renewed push for legislation to mandate early screening. And, with a collective $28.7 million of the past two annu...

When Soleil Ho started at the San Francisco Chronicle as restaurant critic in 2019, they were widely hailed as exemplifying the “next generation” of criticism. Ho 86'd the star system, shifted away from breathless coverage of the glitziest restaurants and brought a social justice lens to their reviews. But a year into Ho’s ambitious overhaul, the COVID pandemic hit and the future of the entire res...

China's foreign ministry accused the U.S. on Monday of flying at least 10 high-altitude surveillance balloons in its airspace during the past year. The charge, which the White House denies, comes a little more than a week after the U.S. shot down a large balloon it says China was using to spy on American military sites. We'll look at what the mutual reprisals say about the state of U.S.-China rela...

A new class of weight loss drugs is changing the way doctors, researchers and patients think about obesity. Medications such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro dampen appetite and their effectiveness has challenged the perception that people who are obese simply lack willpower to make better choices. It’s also raising questions among those who have worked hard to embrace their bodies at any weight....

With its still-vibrant animation and unforgettable earworms, “SchoolHouse Rock!” turned 50 this year, having taught Generation X and subsequent youth math, history and grammar. Today, the series’ 1973 debut also serves as a lesson in nostalgia, “a reminder of a time when network TV gave us a common culture, language and lyrics,” writes The New York Times’ chief television critic James Poniewozik....

Annalee Newitz’s new book “The Terraformers” is a multigenerational science fiction drama set thousands of years in a future where corporations own entire planets and moose can fly. But even in a time when humans have speciated and trains have gained sentience, the urgent ethical and societal issues, like gentrification and water rights, persist. We’ll talk with Newitz about “The Terraformers,” wh...