KQED's Forum

Though it was expected, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has sent shock waves throughout the country. Legislatures in more than two dozen states have already or are preparing to severely restrict or eliminate abortion access. Some providers immediately halted services as soon as the Court’s decision came out while other providers are now scrambling to care for an influx of peop...

From celebrities like Harry Styles and the members of boy band BTS to social media beauty influencers like Patrick Starrr and Kenneth Senegal, more and more men and nonbinary folk are publicly embracing makeup in their daily lives. And as author and journalist David Yi argues in their new book, the male beauty influencers of today have ancient cultural precedents. “Pretty Boys” traces male beauty...

Judging from the recent Supreme Court decisions allowing prayer during high school sports, the use of public funds for religious schools and the overturning of the federal right to an abortion, one might conclude that practicing religion is on the rise in the U.S. But, nearly 30% of Americans are not affiliated with a religious institution, a rapid decline in recent decades. People are now questio...

Pain is a "hallmark of consciousness among all beings," writes physician Haider Warraich in his new book "The Song of Our Scars." Pain, he explains, is also gendered, racial and above all so personal that it's the one thing truly our own. Like an estimated 1.5 billion people worldwide, Warraich himself lives with chronic pain, brought on by a devastating back injury. We'll talk to Warraich about t...

Chores are well… a chore. And for many households, the lockdown only intensified domestic tension over tasks like cooking, cleaning, and grocery shopping. We’ll talk to experts about how to make chores more manageable and equitable, how to share the load with children, roommates and spouses, and how to make the drudgery of keeping everything in order feel more like a delight. Guests: Eve Rodsky, a...

“There’s nothing wrong with me because of the color of my skin.” Award-winning scholar and author Ibram X. Kendi wants us to imagine a world where all kids of color could be taught to internalize that antiracist idea and develop their sense of self through it. We'll talk to Kendi about how we as caregivers can help them do that and why we need to work to build an antiracist society that can protec...

Fireworks may be in your future this holiday, but there are other reasons to gaze skyward in July. We’ll talk about meteor showers and other celestial events you can catch, hear about the Mars Perseverance rover’s latest adventures and get updates on the James Hubble telescope, expected to release its first images this month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

America's national anthem “The Star Spangled Banner” was written by a white lawyer who owned slaves but fought for Black freedom in court. That contradiction captures the controversy embedded in the song. It is a song that can inspire patriotic fervor and ignite passionate protest. It is also notoriously hard to sing. We talk to Mark Clague about the anthem and his new book about it, "O Say Can Yo...

This year’s ground shifting Supreme Court term comes to a close on Thursday. This term, the Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, expanded religious rights and struck down gun regulation. In the process, it has positioned its jurisprudence to rely heavily on historical precedents from colonial times to guide its decisions. With confidence in the Supreme Court at an all-time low, many Americans believe...

In some parts of the country, barbecue is a fighting word. It launches hot debates on vinegar versus tomato-based sauce and the right ways to rub, spice and smoke. KQED Food editor Luke Tsai has a different take. His new series, BBQ in the Bay, highlights the region’s unique barbecue cultures from various traditions of cooking food outdoors over an open flame and how it brings communities together...

The Food and Drug Administration’s vaccines advisory committee decided Tuesday to recommend that covid vaccines be reformulated to better protect against the highly transmissible omicron variant. The vote comes as reported coronavirus cases top 10 million in California – a figure widely considered an undercount. We’ll discuss what the vote means, as well as the latest on covid subvariants, booster...

Former President Donald Trump tried to wrestle control of a vehicle so he could join the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2020. That was just one of several major revelations from Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former chief of staff Mark Meadows, during Tuesday’s testimony before the House committee investigating the attack. Hutchinson also testified that Trump called to lift security duri...

A recent Los Angeles Times report examined seven affordable housing projects in Northern California in which the cost of development surpassed $1 million per unit. Part of the reason for the exorbitant cost of building is skyrocketing construction prices with rising material and labor costs exacerbated by the pandemic and supply chain shortages. But, as the L.A. Times points out, local and state r...

Former President Trump repeatedly tried to persuade top Justice Department officials to act on baseless fraud allegations in the days after the 2020 election, former acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue testified on Thursday. As the January 6 committee hearings pause before resuming in July, we'll analyze the information presented so far and talk about what's next for the DOJ's investig...

Author Ben Tarnoff thinks the internet is broken:It is rife with misinformation and vitriolic hate speech. It potentially invades privacy rights. In the United States, it costs way too much to access compared with prices in other countries. And, it’s no surprise that it doesn’t work for consumers, Tarnoff says, because the internet was built by companies focused on power and profit. In his new boo...

Roe v. Wade is overturned. Just short of 50 years after the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion, the Court ruled Friday in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that states may ban the procedure as early as conception. The ruling is expected to set in motion a cascade of highly restrictive abortion laws in half of the states. We analyze...

"Painful" is how many reproductive rights advocates are describing their reactions to the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe vs. Wade that was officially released Friday. A leaked draft decision in May warned of the impending opinion's ruling. In dissent, the Court's three liberal justices warned that the opinion's approach  "places in jeopardy other rights, from contraception to same-sex in...

California allocated a record $1.5 billion for wildfire prevention and forest health in 2021. Yet Cal Fire, the agency largely in charge of prevention efforts, is struggling to track and implement projects and took years to authorize to establish a prescribed-burn workforce certification program, as required by state law. At the same time, its firefighting staff has increased substantially — demon...

“I really wanted to depict the ways that young Black girls are made adults by a culture that sees us that way,” says Leila Mottley of her debut novel “Nightcrawling." The 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate started writing the book when she was 17 and three years later, has received glowing reviews and a spot in the Oprah Book Club. Set in Oakland, “Nightcrawling” tells the story of Kiara, a characte...

Bumblebees can’t see red, but they can detect the ultraviolet hue, invisible to humans, at the center of a sunflower. A fly can taste an apple just by landing on it, and a rattlesnake can perceive the infrared radiation emanating from warm-blooded prey. Those are just some of the extraordinary animal senses that science journalist Ed Yong celebrates in his new book “An Immense World.” We’ll talk t...

There’s the family that you’re born with, and then there’s the family that you choose. The concept of chosen family took hold several decades ago in the LGBTQ+ community often out of necessity when people were rejected by their biological families and developed familial relationships with new loved ones. Experts define chosen family as people who you are not tied to by blood or law, but who you tr...

Learning a new language is easier said than done, and English in particular is a tricky one to master. It is a language that has absorbed influences from other languages and is still constantly evolving, with rules that seem like they’re never followed. On the internet, resources abound, but English language learners, particularly those who immigrate as adults, still face barriers to fluency. We t...

Thursday’s hearing on the Jan. 6 insurrection highlighted the effort to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to stop the certification of the 2020 election. The committee presented evidence of the potential criminal liability of lawyer John Eastman, the architect of that plan, who asked Rudy Giuliani for a presidential pardon following the insurrection. We’ll analyze that and other takeaways fr...

As the United States observes its second Juneteenth as a federal holiday, we’ll look to its history here in California and the role the Bay Area played in the movement that led to its federal recognition. We’ll talk about what this recognition means in the push for Black American reparations and policy changes and hear about the growth of Bay Area Juneteenth festivals and celebrations in recent ye...

Unlikely. That’s what Golden State Warriors Coach Steve Kerr called this championship. After two years of battling injuries and tough losses, the Dubs won their fourth NBA title in eight years Thursday, beating the Celtics in Boston. We hear your reactions to Golden State’s victory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices