KQED's Forum

The city of Sunnyvale is at war with thousands of crows that have invaded downtown. To try and drive the birds away, city employees have been armed with $20 green laser pointers. Ideas for other solutions abound: hang effigies of dead crows off of buildings, blast crow distress sounds from boomboxes, light up the sky with pyrotechnics. What is it with all the crows? And what will it take to shoo t...

You may not know who Bruno is, but you do probably know that we don’t talk about him thanks to a song from the animated film “Encanto.” The movie, about a magical Colombian family struggling to maintain their special powers, hit movie theaters in late November and has since infiltrated households across the country with its catchy songs – six of which have landed on the Billboard Hot 100 list this...

President Biden called his first year in office one of "enormous progress" in a press conference Wednesday, citing a successful vaccine rollout, record job creation and the enactment of his bipartisan infrastructure law. But his voting rights and "Build Back Better" plans remain stalled in a bitterly divided Congress, and ongoing supply chain issues and fears of inflation threaten economic recover...

Writer Kathryn Schulz says her father’s death at 74, surrounded by people he loved, was “not a tragedy.” But it was still cataclysmic. “Popular wisdom will tell you that it comes in stages,” she writes about grief, “denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — and that may be true. But the Paleozoic Era also came in stages … and it lasted 290 million years.” In the midst of despair, Schulz...

Raising children is a daunting task, but when you are an immigrant, there can be so many more obstacles and opportunities to navigate: Should you raise your child to speak your native language? How much of your culture do you want to celebrate and what might you want to leave behind? How should you react when your child rejects your lovingly made bento or tiffin filled with homemade delicacies for...

When patients with severe depression don’t respond to medication, psychiatrists sometimes turn to a treatment known as repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). The non-invasive therapy uses pulses of magnetic activity to stimulate the brain, and about half of patients see their symptoms improve. Now, researchers at Stanford say they have developed a new and improved version of rTMS, ta...

“Many historians have been seduced by the desire to manage the story of our founding, protecting our identity as an exceptional, fundamentally just nation,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones in the preface to “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.” The project, created by Hannah-Jones, reframes our popular understanding of U.S. history and considers “a new origin story”...

The fast-spreading omicron variant has snarled schools and made this return from the holidays particularly difficult. As record numbers of California children have tested positive for COVID and even been hospitalized, many students and teachers are reluctant to return to the classroom, especially without adequate protection and safety protocols. We’ll check in with an Oakland student organizer abo...

The highly transmissible omicron variant has resulted in a surge in COVID-19 cases across the United States, filling hospitals and contributing to worker shortages across industries. The good news is that vaccines appear to dramatically decrease the risk of serious illness. But doctors and public health experts say that even the vaccinated should continue to mask and practice social distancing – a...

When Stanley Nelson was growing up in 1950s New York, the award-winning documentary filmmaker had no idea he wanted to enter the profession because, he recalls, film wasn't a career option for African Americans at all. Nelson has gone on to direct and produce scores of documentaries over a decades-long career, shedding light on both familiar and underappreciated corners of the American experience....

The U.S. Mint has issued a new quarter featuring writer Maya Angelou with her arms aloft, in front of a rising sun. It’s the first time a Black woman has been featured on a U.S. quarter. In light of the honor, we look back at a remarkable television series that Maya Angelou created for KQED in 1968. The groundbreaking series, ‘Blacks, Blues, Black!’ celebrated the culture and history of Africa and...

Dorothy Lazard, who retired as head librarian of the Oakland History Center last month, has her own fan club, composed of grateful readers, patrons, journalists, professors, and writers. Her devoted following is the result of 21 years spent at the Oakland Public Library, the last dozen at the History Center where she meticulously and thoughtfully shed light on the untold stories of Oakland, its pe...

Conversations about the history of slavery are often confined to the North and the South, with the West viewed as a free “promised land.” But California passed laws, like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1852, that reinforced the institution of slavery, and otherwise allowed coerced, unpaid labor in the state. And the laws impacted more than just Black people, too. Historian Stacey L. Smith writes in her...

As the world around us has become more chaotic, puzzles have provided a moment of respite. The 9 x 9 grid of a Sudoku, the verticals and horizontals of a crossword, the comforting circle of the New York Times’ Spelling Bee all offer solvers a beginning and an end; they are places where problems have solutions. We talk to puzzle constructors, puzzle solvers, and puzzle lovers about why puzzles of a...

Ridesharing has long been a part of farmworker communities, before companies like Uber and Lyft came along. So when faced with a lack of transportation options in his small town of Huron in the Central Valley, Mayor Rey Leon took inspiration from farmworkers to launch the Green Raiteros -- a ridesharing program that provides free transportation to residents using a fleet of all electric vehicles....

Modern prenatal blood tests that screen for a range of fetal abnormalities are billed by their Silicon Valley creators as reliable and accurate, designed to bring peace of mind to anxious parents. But a New York Times investigation has found that positive results on those tests are inaccurate roughly 85 percent of the time. We'll talk to Times investigative journalist Sarah Kliff about what she un...

Clue: She’s an Oakland engineer, the first woman to win a million dollars on Jeopardy, the first transgender contestant to qualify for the show’s Tournament of Champions, and she’s currently on a 30-game winning streak. Answer: Who is Amy Schneider? Schneider joins Forum to talk about her run on Jeopardy, the key to her success, and how going down the rabbit hole of curiosity can make you a Jeopar...

Expect a lot of construction in the coming year around the Bay Area as developers move forward on various massive real estate projects - the kind of developments that take years to plan and construct and can transform a pocket of a city with new housing, office space, retail and outdoor areas. In San Francisco alone, work could start on about 3,000 units. On Treasure Island, the first few hundred...

A growing number of Americans say they do not have a religious affiliation, according to a recent Pew survey. Today, roughly 30% of American adults are religiously unaffiliated, up from 19% in 2011. The study also found that while Christians are still in the majority, their share of the adult population declined by 12 percentage points over the same time period. We’ll talk with a Pew researcher an...

One of the smaller cruelties among the many tragedies of the COVID pandemic is that the virus’ attack on the sense of smell and taste has robbed us of one of the few pleasures of being sick: delicious comfort food. It’s a symptom that doctors say seems to be less common with omicron. So as the new variant stampedes through the Bay Area, we’ll talk with KQED food editor Luke Tsai about our favorite...

In recent months, headlines about the so-called “Great Resignation” have abounded: Americans, the story goes, are reevaluating their work lives and leaving their jobs in droves. But although quitting is at historic levels, many economists say the trend is widely misunderstood. We’ll talk with experts about what the data really say, and look at how the rest of the world sees what's wrong with the A...

On Tuesday, both President Biden and Vice President Harris plan to give remarks in Atlanta about the importance of passing voting rights legislation and combatting a slew of states’ efforts to restrict the franchise. If Republicans defeat the federal legislation, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has signaled he will push for the elimination of the filibuster in hopes of sending it to Biden’s d...

Five years ago, Nigel Poor, an artist, and Earlonne Woods, an inmate in San Quentin, created a podcast chronicling the stories and daily life of prison. “Ear Hustle” smashed prison stereotypes with humor and candor even as it revealed the human toll of mass incarceration. The podcast became an enormous hit, surpassing 40 million downloads, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and was nominated f...

In June 2018, a dozen young soccer players and their coach became trapped more than two miles inside the Tham Luang Cave in northern Thailand, as a sudden monsoon swept into the region and inundated the underground passages. The world watched transfixed for weeks as rescuers located the boys, brought them supplies and engineered a way to bring them to safety. Cave diver Rick Stanton was among thos...

As the surge of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus continues to intensify, some Bay Area schools have been closing or shifting to remote learning. In San Francisco and Oakland, hundreds of teachers and aides called in sick for in-person classes last week to protest what they say are unsafe work conditions. Meanwhile, many parents are stumped about how best to protect their children from being...