KQED's Forum

When Ruth Sasaki was asked in 2018 to edit and contribute to the "Topaz Stories" that remember Japanese-American experiences during internment, she was so happy to apply her skills as a short story writer to help document and preserve a piece of history that impacted her own family. A third-generation San Franciscan, Sasaki's mother's family, the Takahashis, were interned at Topaz and Tanforan cam...

Wild pigs have been marauding through 56 out of California’s 58 counties leaving destruction in their wake. Pigs in the Bay Area have trampled vineyards, gouged out golf courses, rototilled baseball fields and wreaked havoc on farms. A new bill introduced by a Napa state senator would allow property owners to kill the pigs without getting a permit first. It’s a baby step compared to Texas where yo...

On February 16, California’s indoor mask mandate is set to expire. After that date, the state will no longer require vaccinated individuals to wear masks indoors; masks will still be required in K-12 schools, healthcare facilities and congregate settings like nursing homes. Most California counties have stated that they will follow this guidance, but in Santa Clara and Los Angeles counties, offici...

“I’ve never really liked my personality, and other people don’t like it either,” writes Atlantic writer Olga Khazan. In her latest article, “I Gave Myself Three Months to Change My Personality,” Khazan tries out meditation, a gratitude journal and improv classes among other exercises to achieve her goal of becoming more agreeable. We’ll talk to Khazan about how it went and what social science says...

The role of the comedian has been hotly debated in recent years with what seems like a new flashpoint every few months. Last fall, Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix comedy special and continued inclusion of jokes at the expense of trans people led to protests and polarizing arguments online about “punching down” and what is and isn’t considered funny. In the last few weeks, comedian and podcast host...

When journalist Florence William’s 25 year marriage ended she found herself not just emotionally shattered but physically ill. She couldn’t sleep, she lost weight and her immune system was shot, she kept getting sick. She wasn’t sure why. “Much has been written about the science of falling in love but very little about what happens on the other side,” Williams writes in her new book, “Heartbreak:...

A draft plan issued Tuesday by the California High Speed Rail Authority puts the cost of the San Francisco-to-Los Angeles bullet train at $105 billion, about $5 billion more than previous estimates. The plan, which is open for a 60-day public comment period, cites "significant progress" on the Central Valley portion of the rail system and advances in obtaining necessary right-of-way parcels, long...

Hundreds of truckers in Canada who are protesting vaccine mandates have shut down bridges and borders and brought the nation’s capital Ottawa to a near standstill. The protest began in late January when a convoy of trucks began traveling from western Canada to Ottawa. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has demanded that the protesters go home, but the truckers and their supporters show no signs of leav...

President Biden said this week that American citizens should leave Ukraine amid uncertainty over a possible Russian invasion. Russia says it has no such plans. But the country has over 100,000 troops massed near the Ukrainian border and is set to start ten days of military drills on Thursday in Belarus, Ukraine’s neighbor to the north.  We’ll talk to former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul...

“Modern life conspires against friendship,” says Atlantic staff writer Jennifer Senior, "even as it requires the bonds of friendship all the more." That’s one of the paradoxes at the center of Senior’s new piece “It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart” — a meditation on why friendships fade and collapse and why in midlife those losses sting particularly hard. We’ll talk to Senior about how at 52 s...

Vegan food has come a long way from sad side salads. Judging from the lines winding far down the block at Oakland’s Vegan Mob restaurant, vegan restaurants are surging in popularity. Some of the Bay Area’s busiest restaurants are owned and operated by people of color serving vegan versions of the food they grew up eating, like burgers, barbeque and pork-heavy burritos. We’ll talk about the new wav...

“Textiles and yarn did not have enough structure and volume, but clay I found was and is just right,” Edith Heath once said. The co-founder of Heath Ceramics is the focus of an exhibition at Oakland Museum of California, which looks at how Heath’s relocation to San Francisco informed and inspired her iconic mid-century ceramic designs. In Sausalito, Heath Ceramics revolutionized ceramic houseware,...

“The pursuit of justice creates injustice,” writes CNN Senior Legal Analyst Laura Coates in her new book, “Just Pursuit.” Coates began her career as a federal prosecutor in Washington D.C. with optimism. She had come from the Department of Justice where she had worked for both the Bush and Obama Administrations enforcing voting rights. In that role, she found herself being welcomed in Black commun...

The San Francisco Art Institute and the University of San Francisco announced this month that they’re planning to merge. Under the agreement, USF will acquire the cash-strapped 151-year old arts college and offer a program called SFAI@USF in the fall. The move is reminiscent of Northeastern University’s acquisition of Mills College in September 2021 as small colleges and arts schools deal with fin...

Oakland’s school board is set to vote Tuesday on a highly controversial plan to permanently close or merge up to 15 schools over the next two years due to declining enrollment and lack of funding. “OUSD simply has too many schools and ... keeping these schools open negatively impacts all students and staff within OUSD,” district officials wrote in a statement. Students, staff, and parents have bee...

Russia is planning to release a video of a fake Ukrainian attack that it would use to justify an invasion, U.S. officials said on Thursday. The Kremlin has denied the charge. But according to Stanford intelligence expert Amy Zegart, so-called deepfake videos and photographs are among the biggest challenges facing U.S. spy agencies. We are living in an era when bad actors can cause “massive disrupt...

In a victory for the extreme right, Shasta voters have apparently chosen to recall Leonard Moty, a longtime Republican county supervisor and former Redding police chief. Moty and other moderate board members had faced a backlash from militia groups over COVID-19 and gun policies. We’ll talk to KQED’s Scott Shafer about the vote and what it means for right-wing movements, the GOP and politics in th...

Sam Liccardo is in his final year as San Jose’s mayor and he has passed a first-in-the-country ordinance on an issue he cares fervently about – gun control. The ordinance, which requires gun owners to carry liability insurance, comes a year after nine people were killed in a mass shooting at a Valley Transportation Authority rail yard in San Jose. Mayor Liccardo joins Forum to talk about the new o...

“We are all weird about money,” writes Paco de Leon in her new book, “Finance for the People.” Getting a grip on your finances often means learning how to deal with an unequal system, she writes. And, according to her, having money means having power — and that means it’s vital for all people to understand how to save, pay off loans and invest. This all begins with asserting your worth — something...

The city of Santa Rosa is saying farewell to its bard. Santa Rosa Press Democrat columnist Gaye Lebaron has retired after a 65-year career at the paper and an estimated 8,500 columns. “Few newspaper columnists have ever been so closely associated with one city for so long,” writes the Press Democrat’s editorial board, “Herb Caen and San Francisco, Mike Royko and Chicago, Gaye LeBaron and Santa Ros...

Jay Dee, J Dilla, Dilla — Detroit-born hip-hop producer James Dewitt Yancey went by many names, but his rhythmic brilliance was always the same, whether he was producing for artists like The Pharcyde, Busta Rhymes, A Tribe Called Quest or his own group Slum Village, to name a few. Today, 16 years after his untimely death at age 32 from a rare blood disease, the impact of his industry-changing soun...

This year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing, set to kick off on Friday, have been called “the most complex Games ever” by the Wall Street Journal. The Los Angeles Times dubs them “the feel guilty Games.” The event is opening amid intense Covid-19 restrictions and concerns over Chinese human rights violations, like the persecution of the Uyghur Muslims and jailing of activists. Those have prompted Presi...

Early on in the award-winning documentary "Writing with Fire," a reporter named Meera Devi sits patiently before a police officer, demanding to know why he hasn't acted on a local villager's multiple reports of rape. Similar scenes follow, as Devi and her colleagues, journalists with India's only all-female, Dalit-run news network,  seek to hold officials to account for caste and gender-based viol...

The Kitchen Sisters, the audio project of Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, has been collecting stories from “the B-side of history” since 1979. These stories dive into worlds hidden from the headlines, immersing listeners into the music, sounds and atmospheres of American culture, populated by famous and underrecognized figures alike. The Library of Congress announced in January that it will acquire...

A Tennessee school board last week voted to remove the Pulitzer-prize winning graphic novel Maus from an 8th grade course on the Holocaust. And that’s just one of many examples of recent bans instituted by parents, activists, school boards and lawmakers. According to the American Library Association, it has seen an “unprecedented” number of book bans in the last year. But unlike previous waves of...