KQED's Forum

The World Health Organization today warned that the global risk from the new COVID-19 variant, Omicron, is “very high”. The variant, first discovered in South Africa, has now been detected in more than a dozen countries. We’ll talk about what we know so far about how contagious the variant is and how effective vaccines are likely to be against it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone....

Albert Samaha is the son of immigrants from the Philippines, a country molded by centuries of Spanish and American colonization and imperialism. His new book “Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes” is part memoir, part family history. Samaha reflects on his Filipino American identity and his family’s immigration experience, comparing the America he grew up in to the America that shaped his an...

The pandemic forced many of us to rethink cultural norms — one being the expectation that people, especially women and younger folks, should color or hide their roots. Amid salon closures and cancelled social events, many people chose to grow out their gray hair, and some are sticking with the look. We’ll talk about why for some the choice to go gray can feel fraught, and why for others it brings...

Airports are often the first, last, and sometimes only impression a traveler has of a city. Singapore's Changi airport dazzles; Newark Airport in New Jersey offers less delight. SFO leads the way in design with its newly opened Harvey Milk Terminal which boasts Heath tiles in the restrooms, lighting that makes you look less tired, and improved acoustic design. But the airport industry has been cha...

Last December, Forum spoke to four nurses and doctors on the frontlines of COVID care in California. At the time, cases were surging statewide, and no vaccines were available. They described heartbreaking patient deaths, overflowing ICUs and the heavy emotional toll of their work. The same healthcare workers join us again, nine months later, to share what has improved and the profound challenges t...

In his latest book “Our Country Friends,” novelist Gary Shteyngart tackles the pandemic novel. In the book, the protagonist, Sasha Senderovsky, a writer whose star is slowly flaming out, gathers his family and high school friends in a pod at his country home to ride out the early days of the pandemic. Lauded by the New York Times as the “perfect novel for these times and all times,” “Our Country F...

In a new cover story for The Atlantic, writer Hannah Giorgis looks critically at Hollywood’s writers’ rooms and how most of them look nothing like America. Documenting the history of Black writers who have navigated predominantly white writers’ rooms — often confronting implicit and explicit biases — Giorgis reveals the renaissance of onscreen representation they helped bring to television. Still,...

Bay Area-based chef and food justice activist Bryant Terry is back with another cookbook — but this time it’s not just his recipes. He’s created “a communal shrine to the shared culinary histories of the African diaspora,” as he writes in the introduction to “Black Food.” Bringing together a number of contributors who share recipes, stories and artwork — plus Terry’s signature playlists to go with...

Earlier this year, the National Institutes of Health announced funding of more than $1 billion for research into the prolonged health consequences of COVID-19 infections. Since then, reports of what’s called long covid have only risen. Symptoms range from fatigue to coughing to chest pain and even to nerve pain. We’ll get the latest science on long covid, hear how often it occurs and what are its...

Thanksgiving might be our most traditional meal, but what do we really know about all the processes that suck up raw ingredients and spit out turkeys, potato flakes, and jellied cranberry sauce into the modern supermarket? This hour on Forum, we’ll discuss the science and engineering behind some of America’s most iconic foods. We’ll talk Thanksgiving favorites, new flavors and beyond. Learn more a...

You’ve heard it all before: Boomers have all the money, millennials are the unluckiest generation, gen z are changing the nature of work (and scaring their bosses). But a lot of generational analysis is really just fake science, argues social researcher Bobby Duffy in his new book “The Generation Myth: Why When You’re Born Matters Less Than You Think.” Duffy joins us to debunk stereotypes around g...

The documentary "Moving San Francisco" guides viewers through a history of public transit in a region rife with innovation. From the iconic cable cars that climb the city's hills to the fleet of ferries on the bay to ride-hailing services, how people traverse the Bay Area has evolved with the times. And transit systems are still evolving - navigating issues of equity and affordability are as much...

Overcoming adversity has been the hallmark of Michael Tubb’s eventful life. When he was six, his father was sentenced to a near-life term in prison. At 22, Tubbs was elected to Stockton’s city council while still a student at Stanford. At 26, he became the city’s youngest and first black mayor. Along the way he founded programs to help underserved youth get to college, taught in high school, and i...

Traveling can be a slog across the board, especially around the holidays. But for plus-size travelers it can also be a dehumanizing experience — navigating stares and glares and accommodations not built for their bodies and comfort. According to the CDC, about 74 percent of adults in the U.S. are overweight, yet this isn’t reflected in travel amenities. From airplane seat sizes to hotel towels and...

The California School for the Deaf, Riverside’s football team is having a Hollywood-worthy season. They are the top team in their league and are on their way to clinching the title, not just by winning, but by dominating their opponents. Not too long ago, they suffered through seven straight losing seasons, and worse than that were the sneers and low expectations of rivals who assumed a team of de...

Cosmic rewards await very early risers on Friday: the full moon will glow reddish-brown in the longest partial lunar eclipse in almost six centuries. We’ll hear how, when and where to view it. We’ll also talk about the Mars Perseverance Rover’s latest discoveries, the just-scheduled December launch of the James Webb Space Telescope and all of your astronomy-related questions. Learn more about your...

Longtime Santa Clara Sheriff Laurie Smith is facing calls to step down from the County Board of Supervisors and San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo for her handling of the county jail and its treatment of mentally ill inmates. In 2015, three Santa Clara County correctional officers beat a mentally ill man to death in a jail cell. In 2018, another group of county officers failed to intervene when 24-year-o...

Amid the isolation of shelter-in-place restrictions last year, three artists --Erika Chong Shuch, Rowena Richie and Ryan Tacata --responded by creating “Artists & Elders,” a project connecting artists with senior citizens to create and exchange art. Informed by Richie’s work with people with dementia, a disease which counts isolation as a risk factor, "Artists & Elders" sought to be a source of cr...

Western monarch butterflies all but disappeared from coastal California last fall but there are now promising signs of an uptick in numbers. The Pacific Grove Monarch Sanctuary, which didn’t see a single monarch last winter, recently counted over 13,000 butterflies. As citizen scientists begin this year’s Thanksgiving monarch butterfly count, we talk with experts about why we’re seeing an unexpect...

The Transgender community holds a particular place in San Francisco history; the city by the Bay is the first to have a cultural district dedicated to that history and community. Compton’s Transgender Cultural District was named after the cafeteria that was the site of a riot in 1966, a response to police harassment of transgender people, several years before the more well known Stonewall riots in...

Punching flight attendants, hurling racial slurs at the crew, throwing luggage at staff. These are just a few of the over 5,000 complaints of unruly passenger behavior that the FAA has received this year. Airlines have banned some passengers for life, flight attendants have demanded more protection, and the FAA has announced a zero tolerance policy for this behavior and levied over $1 million in f...

Last winter, flu infections in the United States plummeted by more than 99 percent to about 2,000 from about 38 million the year before. The dramatic drop in flu cases led to far fewer deaths as well -- in most years, flu ranks in the top 10 leading causes of death in the U.S. Experts say that last year’s steep decline stems from behaviors meant to suppress the spread of the coronavirus: social di...

The Bay Area’s harsh system of penalties for late payments on bridge tolls disproportionately hurts low income residents, people of color and non English speakers, according to a new report by the Bay Area public policy group, SPUR. The report found residents struggling to pay tens of thousands of dollars in late fees, as high as 12 times the original toll, leading to deepening debt and a block on...

Megan Mylan's new documentary "Simple As Water" begins dreamily, as four small children laugh, jump rope and chase balloons while their mother looks on. Then tents and clotheslines come into view, and we understand that the family lives in a makeshift encampment in Greece, home to thousands of migrants fleeing the Syrian civil war. Mylan follows groups of Syrian refugees as they try to carve out l...

Beer bottles, reading glasses, tires, and fishing line. What do these things have in common? All of them have been found by divers who are dedicated to cleaning up Lake Tahoe. Since it was founded three years ago, the nonprofit Clean Up the Lake and volunteer divers have pulled out over 18,000 pounds of trash from the lake. The trash that is pulled isn’t just carted away; it is catalogued and weig...