Kqeds Forum

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday in lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of SB 8, the controversial Texas law that bans abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy and deputizes private citizens to enforce it. We’ll analyze what the justices’ responses may signal about the fate of the law, and we’ll look ahead to other cases on the Court’s docket bearing on the regulation of guns, greenhouse gas emissions and immigration.

Día de los Muertos or Day of the Dead, is an ancient tradition that started with indigenous people in the Americas, morphed when Catholics arrived, and has seen a resurgence in recent decades in California. This year, the Los Angeles Times set up a virtual Día de Los Muertos altar this year to create a community space to honor loved ones who have passed. The virtual altar reflects the pandemic, which pushed many traditions online, and an example of how the Latin American tradition of honoring the dead has evolved over time. We discuss the practice of honoring the dead as well as cultural and personal connections to Dia de los Muertos. 

Across California, cities are reckoning with their historical legacies of racism towards the Chinese community. In May, Antioch became the first city to issue a formal apology for its anti-Chinese policies and the mob-led destruction of its Chinatown in 1876. This month, San Jose followed with a similar apology for enforcing anti-Chinese policies and fomenting racial hatred that resulted in the obliteration by fire of its Chinatown, once one of the largest in California, in 1887. For many Californians, the scope of violence towards Chinese immigrants is history they have never learned. For descendants of these settlers, the stories are not just history, but a sorrowful legacy that continues to impact their lives. We talk about why these apologies are happening now, and whether saying sorry is enough to right past wrongs.

The 2021 UN Climate Change Conference, COP26, begins Sunday, collecting world leaders and activists to discuss and negotiate ambitious climate change policies with the aim of staying below 1.5 degrees of global temperature rise. California, which has already been experiencing the effects of climate change in the forms of sea level rise, record-breaking wildfires and extensive droughts, will be represented by a 22-member delegation of state lawmakers and a number of activists. We’ll talk about the goals of California’s delegation and what’s at stake for the state.

Activist and former sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer famously said “you are not free, whether you are Black or white, until I am free.” Hamer and her bold, radical honesty are the subject of a new biography by historian Keisha Blain, who sheds light on Hamer’s life and the ideas and political strategies that were central to the Civil Rights movement. In “Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America,” Blain documents key moments in Hamer’s activism, including her pivotal role in co-founding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. As voting rights remain a battleground in the U.S., Blain joins us to talk about Hamer’s legacy and the lessons we can learn from her activism.

This week, a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel recommended a dosage for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for kids ages 5 and up and California state officials say they’re preparing to offer them by the end of next week. The vaccines would be authorized under emergency use with full FDA approval expected sometime in 2022. While some parents say they are eager to vaccinate their elementary-school-age children, many remain hesitant. Meanwhile school districts in California including in Los Angeles, Oakland and Sacramento have already set up vaccine mandates for students starting as early as January. Public health and education officials now face the challenge of getting as many of the state’s eligible 3.5 million children vaccinated as possible. We dig into the latest news and answer your questions about pediatric vaccines and school mandates.

In time for Halloween frights, horror podcast hosts share their picks for the best films of the genre. From zombie apocalypses to tales of the demon-possessed, we'll hear what makes for a satisfying cinematic descent into terror. And we'll explore why some of us avoid the scary stuff, and why others can't get enough of the dark side.

McSweeney’s, the idiosyncratic San Francisco publishing company, releases a literary journal, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, with no fixed format. The quarterly has been published in a variety of artistic, unusual forms from an oblong edition to a bundle of mail delivered to the wrong address. Its new “Audio Issue” may be the most elaborate yet. It’s a box of booklets, a scroll, a keychain, a fictional toy company catalog and other objects that, in a collaboration with Radiotopia producers, all have audio components. The issue experiments with ways audio and text work together in storytelling, and it seeks to expand our understanding of what it means to make art accessible to those with impaired hearing, or sight, by expanding content across the senses.

For the first time since the start of the pandemic, San Francisco's Museum of the African Diaspora reopened its doors to the public last week. Featured in the museum's newly renovated space are the first solo exhibitions of two of Africa's most critically-acclaimed contemporary artists: Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo and Malawi-born, Johannesburg-based Billie Zangewa. We'll talk with the curators about the shows, which both center and celebrate the Black gaze.

Top oil and gas executives from Chevron, ExxonMobile, BP America and Shell will testify Thursday before a house committee examining the fossil fuel industry’s role in promoting climate disinformation. The probe, which House Democrats plan to model on the Big Tobacco hearings of the 1990s, will examine whether Big Oil has misled Americans about how fossil fuels have contributed to climate change and whether those companies can be held accountable. We’ll preview the hearing and also hear about efforts to hold responsible parties in the oil spill in Southern CA earlier this month.

San Jose’s food scene has long flown under the radar. It’s overshadowed by the established culinary reputations of its San Francisco and Oakland neighbors and the city suffers from its association with frequently derided tech culture. But KQED food editor Luke Tsai says he’d rather eat in San Jose than almost anywhere else in the Bay Area. Tsai says San Jose’s robust immigrant communities have formed a thriving and diverse dining experience that deserves more time in the spotlight. Tsai joins us to talk more about the San Jose food scene and some of his favorite restaurants in the city.

Sonoma County has seen a 100-year flood, a historic drought and six major wildfires that have left death and destruction in their wake, and subjected residents to months of bad air days and routine power shut-offs -- just in the last four years. What does living with chronic catastrophes like these do to people? How does it affect their minds, bodies and spirits? The four-part podcast, “Chronic Catastrophe,” led by journalism students at Santa Rosa Junior College, takes up that question, interviewing experts and local residents about the real impacts of climate change on people’s lives. We’ll talk with the podcast’s producers about the series and their own personal experiences coping through “chronic catastrophe.”

"Judging is not for the faint of heart," writes Judge LaDoris Cordell in her new memoir "Her Honor." Over two decades, as the first Black female jurist to sit on a superior court in Northern California, Cordell oversaw thousands of civil and criminal cases, many of which laid bare for her the racial biases and other structural flaws that infect the legal system. We'll talk about her experiences on the bench and her proposals to reform how justice is administered in U.S. courts.

After a flood of criticism from parents, three members of the San Francisco Board of Education are facing recall in a special election set for Feb. 15. Recall supporters accused the board members of mismanaging school re-openings during the pandemic, misplacing energy on renaming schools and changing the admissions process for Lowell High School, the elite magnet school, and being ill-prepared to steward the district’s finances amid a looming $116 million budget deficit. We’ll discuss what’s next for the school board.

It's hard to talk about death. And the COVID-19 pandemic has made those conversations even harder, as families have grappled with the sudden illness of loved ones and hospital protocols have shifted those freighted interactions to Zoom. We’ll talk about how to start conversations about end-of-life care, post-mortem wishes and estate planning. And we want to hear from you: Has the pandemic inspired you to make an end-of-life plan? What advice do you need to have an effective conversation about death with your loved ones?

When he founded the Internet Archive 25 years ago, Brewster Kahle ambitiously set out to create a modern-day library that would “create a permanent memory for the Web that can be leveraged to make a new Global Mind.” Housed in a former church on Funston Street in San Francisco, the archive has amassed 70 million gigabytes of data that includes 65 million books, texts, movies, audio files, and images. Its Wayback Machine has saved more than 653 billion web pages and counting. While Kahle’s ideals have stayed steady, the internet has radically changed. We’ll talk with Kahle and a panel of experts about what the internet is, could be and should be.  

The Bay Area was hit with historic levels of rain on Sunday, causing massive flooding in Marin and power outages for close to 150,000 households. We'll get an update on the damage caused and talk about whether this extreme weather may be the new normal.

Every year about 500,000 Americans who give birth experience anxiety, guilt and insomnia after their baby is born -- and some are even suicidal. The postpartum mental health care they receive varies greatly. Mother and Baby Units are considered the gold standard of inpatient psychiatric care for new mothers in England and several other countries, but none exist in the U.S., despite mental health issues being one of the leading causes of maternal death. We’ll look at the differences in postpartum mental health care in the U.S. and the U.K, and learn about California’s first inpatient perinatal psychiatry unit.

Hundreds of thousands of workers in industries ranging from health care to coal mining are on strike, in a massive wave of labor actions being dubbed “Striketober”. But even off the picket lines there may be quieter indicators of worker rebellion. Employees are quitting at record rates and employers are struggling to find workers, even after hiking up wages. To former Labor Secretary and UC Berkeley Professor Robert Reich, these are signs that American workers may finally have the bargaining power to push back against low wages, long hours and bad working conditions. “You might say workers have declared a national general strike until they get better pay and improved working conditions” he wrote in an opinion piece for The Guardian.  We’ll talk to Robert Reich about this moment and the future of labor. 

Earlier this month, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation that makes California the first state in the nation to require health care facilities to offer screening for hepatitis B and C, which if left untreated can lead to fatal liver disease and cancer. Almost 90% of people with chronic hepatitis B in California are members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. Black Americans have the second highest rate of chronic infection. We'll talk about how the law will work and take your questions.