KQED's Forum

After seven farm workers were killed Monday in a mass shooting in Half Moon Bay, the city’s vice-mayor Joaquin Jimenez said in a press conference, “Many of you come to our community for the pumpkins, and ignore the farm workers. Not today.” Forum discusses the work, lives and struggles of farmworkers on California's central coast, and we get the latest on the investigation and fallout from the mas...

On Saturday night it was Monterey Park, where 11 people died and nine more were injured after a gunman opened fire in a popular ballroom, on the eve of the Lunar New Year. On Monday it was Half Moon Bay, where a gunman claimed the lives of at least seven in the vicinity of a mushroom farm. We'll talk about how the impacts of the shootings are being felt in communities across California. Guests: Cy...

The Bay Area’s fascination with technology didn’t start with Silicon Valley. In the late 19th century, San Franciscan Eadweard Muybridge, an eccentric, misanthropic murderer became the first person to capture motion on film. At the time, Muybridge was a well-known photographer whose moody images of Yosemite Valley stood out from the conventional landscape photographs of the time. Because Muybridge...

After enjoying a few booze-infused holiday weeks last month, many of us are drying out in January, reducing or completely eliminating alcohol from our diets. Have you been cutting back? Or maybe you’ve developed a mindful practice with alcohol or a casual way of telling friends you’re opting out when going out? We’ll hear how your dry January is going and learn about emerging research finding that...

This month, the Biden Administration began allowing migrants from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela to seek “parole” to enter the United States and stay temporarily. The move is seen as a way to alleviate the numbers of people showing up at the nation’s southern border hoping to seek asylum. Immigration rights advocates have been disappointed by Biden’s lack of sweeping reforms or policy change...

Gabrielle Zevin’s most recent novel “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” draws its title from what Zevin calls one of the bleakest speeches in all of Shakespeare, as Macbeth contemplates life’s monotony and meaninglessness. But to one of her characters, the soliloquy is hopeful, and it expresses the essence of a video game: “the idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, b...

Comedy duo Cheech & Chong started doing improv theater together about 55 years ago, in an act they’ve called “hippie burlesque,” at a Vancouver strip club. Ten years later they invented the stoner buddy movie genre with Up In Smoke, introducing mainstream America to a lot of weed jokes and also a friendlier 70’s Chicano culture than had been portrayed on screen. We talk with Cheech Marin and Tommy...

Veteran journalist Judy Woodruff stepped down as the anchor of PBS NewsHour at the end of last month. Widely considered one of the most trusted figures in the media, Woodruff’s laureled career includes an Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award and the inaugural Peabody Award for Journalistic Integrity. Though no longer anchor, she plans to next report on America’s political divides — how we got here, how...

San Francisco has just 815,000 residents. But its annual budget is nearly $14 billion. The budget covers the operations of both the city and county of San Francisco, and half of that is money earmarked for the airport, port, Muni, and public utilities, among other enterprise agencies. But that leaves nearly $7 billion in General Fund money for a city with less than a million people. And, the city...

“[T]o Kevin McCarthy, the Intelligence Committee is just a political plaything.” That was how Los Angeles Congressman Adam Schiff last week characterized McCarthy’s stated intention to remove him from the committee he chaired in order to please MAGA Republicans. We talk to Rep. Schiff about how House Democrats will operate under McCarthy’s leadership, how he sees lawmakers resolve an upcoming debt...

California has experienced extreme weather whiplash during the past year from bone dry summer days to a flooding wet January. This is our state’s new climate system fueled by global warming. The state is also going through one of the most severe droughts in history. We’ll talk about how the weather we’ve experienced in the past year has factored into our wildfire, drought and flooding issues as pa...

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...

The U.S. continues to grapple with poverty, economic inequality, and racial inequity more than 50 years after the death of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. In some lesser known speeches, King advocated for revolutionary ideas to eradicate poverty and provide economic justice such as a guaranteed basic income. We’ll look at King’s proposals for combating inequality, the evolution of those ideas over th...

2022 MacArthur fellow Martha Gonzalez describes herself as an ‘artivista’ – at once an artist and an activist. The frontwoman of the East Los Angeles band Quetzal, Gonzalez focuses on the ways communities of color use music and creative expression as political tools toward social justice. From community fandango workshops to recording projects between women in L.A. and Veracruz, Mexico, Gonzalez m...

Last year, poet and writer Clint Smith wrote the book, “How the World is Passed,” exploring how the US has failed to come to terms with the reality and legacy of slavery. Now, for an Atlantic cover story, “Monuments to the Unthinkable” he’s traveled to Germany to see how that country has grappled with memorializing its own ugly history. On this Martin Luther King Jr day, we talk with Smith about h...

Former content moderators for Reddit and TikTok filed class action lawsuits against the sites last month alleging they suffered trauma from the graphic and violent content they reviewed. Content moderators review everything from innocuous misreports to horrifying videos of abuse — and experts say that vacillating between the two can create an anxiety of its own. We’ll talk about what content moder...

The useful lifespan of items all over your home from clothes to kitchen gadgets to cell phones has been shrinking, according to a recent article in Vox. At the same time, manufacturers increasingly design products, especially tech devices and electronics, so that they are not easy or cost-effective to repair. “We buy, buy, buy, and we’ve been tricked — for far longer than the last decade — into be...

“If the storm had a theme, it was in the uprooted and broken trees that seemed to blanket the rain-soaked landscape,” writes California correspondent for the New York Times Shawn Hubler. All across the state, one of the most visible signs of destruction by California’s storms are uprooted trees, their curling roots violently airborne. They’ve smashed through roofs, toppled power lines and taken li...

After 119 citizens in Oakland joined a class action lawsuit against the Oakland Police Department for vicious and sadistic beatings, evidence tampering, and other abuses by a notorious group of officers known as the Riders, the department was placed under a federally mandated consent decree in 2003. Now, two decades later, Oakland is finally nearing the end of federal oversight and meeting mandate...

Fatphobia takes an enormous physical and psychological toll on fat people, writes culture critic Evette Dionne, who says it “robs us of our joy, our ability to progress in our careers, and sometimes… our lives.” Dionne contends with heart failure and a rare type of hypertension, conditions that doctors overlooked because of her size. “Weightless” is Dionne’s new collection of essays exploring fatp...

¡Hella Hungry! is a regular series from KQED food writer Alan Chazaro that profiles Bay Area foodmakers who help shape the region's culinary culture. Flor Martinez Zaragoza, a 27-year-old from San Jose, uses her Instagram account to advocate for farmworker rights and highlight how local produce makes it from the farm to the table. The Vegan Hood Chefs, a San Francisco duo, serve Southern-inspired...

“Our country has never before faced the kind of threat we documented. May it never again,” wrote Congressman Adam Schiff in the New York Times last month. His words came as the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, on which he served, released its final, 845-page report. We’ll talk to Schiff and NPR senior political editor Domenico Montanaro abo...

As another atmospheric river batters California, the state finds itself in the midst of weather whiplash: Parts of the state are flooding even while California remains in a drought emergency. As of early Monday, despite historic amounts of rain, most of the state’s reservoirs had not reached capacity and experts say this current system of rainstorms does not guarantee an end to the drought. In 202...

How can we live the good life, one enlivened by joy, meaning and community? That’s the question UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner has been exploring for the last 20 years, and he says he's found the answer: find awe. It’s the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries -- in nature, in art and even in sport. We talk to Keltner about the science of awe and we'll hear what y...

Transit agencies throughout the Bay Area are struggling with low ridership, funding shortfalls, and worker shortages. Office workers who used to pack light rail trains are still largely working from home, posing both financial and existential questions for various transit agencies. How can the region’s transit ecosystem survive in an uncertain future? And, how can the Bay Area support a robust tra...