KQED's Forum

Many of the Bay Area’s industrial sites are situated on the waterfront, right next to communities of color. As climate change causes groundwater levels to rise, toxic chemicals buried there threaten to release into the neighborhoods, exacerbating a decades-long pattern of environmental and economic injustice. Now some community advocates are calling for reparations in the form of climate justice,...

Most everyone recognizes Prince's masterpiece "Purple Rain," the Grammy Award-winning album engineered by Susan Rogers. But do you know why you love this record? In her new book "This is What It Sounds Like," Rogers explains that we all have a unique "listener profile," determined by how we respond to seven musical elements, such as lyrics, melody and timbre. Rogers joins us to explain what the mu...

Two Berkeley High School students were shot and killed at an Oakland birthday party on Saturday. On Wednesday six adults were shot at an Oakland school. The week before, two men were killed near their mosque after attending services, and in a shooting outside of city hall during a city council meeting, one man was killed, one injured. Forum talks with Oakland’s mayor, chief of police, and the city...

Many small California towns that were devastated by recent wildfires are determined to rebuild, such as Greenville, which is the community at the focus of the Los Angeles Times series "Rebuild,Reburn." But as climate change intensifies wildfires -- and political extremism -- the state is facing a dilemma as resources dwindle. How long will it be sustainable to send aid to rebuild towns that face c...

Julia Morgan is best known as the architect of opulent, eccentric Hearst Castle, but she designed roughly 700 buildings in her 50-year career. From her first commission, the El Campanil bell tower at Mill’s college, to the Arts and Crafts Asilomar and the Gothic and Moorish Berkeley City Club, the Oakland-raised architect created many of California’s most distinctive and disparate buildings in a t...

Getting a good night’s sleep is important for restoring our bodies and minds after a long day. But sometimes the stress of the world follows us into dreamland. Getting lost, missing a final exam, losing teeth - these are among the many common iterations of stress dreams. We’ll talk with dream and sleep experts about why we have stressful dreams and how to deal with them. Guests: Kelly Bulkeley, dr...

Jonathan Escoffery’s debut book, “If I Survive You,” presents a series of connected stories about an immigrant family from Jamaica trying to acclimate to life in America. The characters tackle racism, belonging, natural disasters and generational divides. A native of Miami now based in Oakland, Escoffery joins us to talk about storytelling and his decades-long journey to publishing a book. Guests:...

Chief Justice of California Tani Cantil-Sakauye is stepping down in January after serving a 12-year term on the state's high court. Nominated by former republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, she was the first non-white person and the second woman to lead the court. She joins us to reflect on her time on the bench, the future of the California judiciary and her newly announced next role as pres...

It seems that everyone wants a happy ending, and nothing delivers that better than a romance novel. The Harlequin romance bodice rippers of old have evolved. Today’s romance novels feature diverse protagonists – including men. They offer more real-to-life scenarios, and often mash into other genres like science fiction. In the last five years, booksellers have seen a 740% increase in the sales of...

Sally Yates, who as acting attorney general refused to defend the travel ban on Muslim-majority countries. Reproductive rights attorney Brigitte Amiri, who represented teen migrants denied abortions. These are among the women lawyers Dahlia Lithwick profiles in her new book “Lady Justice” -- the ones who she says fought the racism, sexism, transphobia and xenophobia that took root and flourished d...

Chef and author Illyanna Maisonet, a former food columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, made a name for herself by reimagining Puerto Rican cuisine. Her debut cookbook, “Diasporican: A Puerto Rican Cookbook.” chronicles Maisonet’s experience as a Puerto Rican living in Sacramento and how this region’s cultures have informed her cooking. Maisonet joins us to talk about her book as part of our n...

Come 2027, Californians will have a new post-death option: to become human compost. A law signed by Governor Newsom this month made California the fifth state to legalize “natural organic reduction,” which lets human bodies decompose into a cubic yard of soil. While green burials — the process of wrapping the deceased in a shroud and placing them in the ground — are already legal, composting doesn...

The death of the 22-year old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, for a supposed violation of the country’s strict dress code, has sparked protests across Iran and around the world. As Iranian citizens protest in call for justice and women's rights reform, many have gotten arrested, injured and even killed. We'll talk with Iranians here in the U.S. about the reactions to Amini's death and the status...

Points, badges, progress bars and leaderboards: they’re among the games designed to make dull activities fun -- and to make us more productive at the gym, in school or at work. But to video game developer Adrian Hon, gamification has become the twenty-first century’s most advanced form of behavioral control, coercing our decisions and justifying corporate and government surveillance. We’ll talk to...

Three historic BIPOC-focused media outlets are celebrating anniversaries this fall - India Currents turns 35, Willie Ratliff, the publisher of San Francisco Bayview National Black Newspaper turns 90, and the Mission’s El Tecolote turns 52. These outlets may be small (compared to the mainstream media) but they are mighty. We’ll find out how their communities sustained their local media through the...

The California condor is not one of nature’s cutest birds, but it is probably one of its most compelling. The largest bird in North America, the condor has a wingspan measuring nine and a half feet. It can fly at speeds up to 50 miles per hour, glide at 15,000 feet in the air without flapping, and can cover 150 miles a day. The condor once flew freely across the west, but by 1982, only 23 condors...

With the goal of helping San Francisco’s under-resourced students develop their voices as writers, the nonprofit 826 Valencia — founded at that exact address in San Francisco’s Mission District — turned 20 this year. There are now nine 826 chapters nationwide, and in San Francisco more than 5,600 students are served by the program in the back of its pirate store flagship, in its Tenderloin and Mis...

In one of her undergraduate history seminars, Harvard professor Drew Gilpin Faust recently discovered that the majority of her students could not read cursive. To them, it was like a foreign language. This is not surprising as cursive was not part of the Common Core educational standards introduced in 2010, though half of the nation’s states, including California, now include cursive in their curr...

Jann Wenner started Rolling Stone magazine in San Francisco at the tender age of 21 – placing himself smack in the middle of 1967’s wild and groundbreaking music scene. We’ll talk with Wenner about San Francisco rock and roll, the legacy of Rolling Stone magazine and his new memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone”. Guests: Jann Wenner, founder, Rolling Stone Magazine; author of the memoir, "Like a Rolling...

Why do some people with mental illnesses recover while others with the same diagnosis don’t? According to New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv, the answer in part lies in the gap between people’s actual experiences and the language of contemporary psychiatry that names and defines their conditions. In her new book “Strangers to Ourselves” Aviv writes about people who she says “have come up against...

President Biden says he aims to end hunger and food insecurity in the United States by 2030. Next week the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health will consider the policy changes needed to reach that goal. The last conference on hunger and health was in 1969 during the Nixon administration, and it led to many of the nation’s major health policies like child nutrition assistance and...

Ukraine surprised both Russia and the world last week with sharp counter offensives in the northeast that have retaken land occupied by Russian troops. Ukrainian forces liberating these areas have discovered not only hastily abandoned Russian outposts, but also further signs of war crimes: outside the town of Izium, a mass grave containing over 400 bodies, primarily civilians, some bearing evidenc...

Traveling on BART allows riders to move between Oakland to San Francisco in seven minutes – a modern convenience some people take for granted. The iconic light-rail system that makes it possible turns 50 this year. BART has grown from a dozen stations in 1972 to 50 connected by 131 miles of tracks. The milestone comes at a time when ridership hovers around 40 percent of pre-pandemic levels bringin...

The tech startup Sanas transforms accented English to a white, midwestern American voice. Sanas contends that this technology can help overseas call center workers who are dealing with racist harassment. But those who have studied call centers and the "white voice" say this only puts a filter over the very problems the technology aims to remedy. We'll talk with experts about intolerance for accent...

Workers across the country keep talking about “quiet quitting” – the idea that employees should fulfill their job duties in the time they are paid to work – nothing more or less. It sounds logical, but quiet quitting has stirred a lot of feelings and debate this summer. Workplace experts can’t seem to agree on what it is or if it’s even real. In a recent article, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic arg...