Kqeds Forum

From the undocumented immigrants who work in industrial slaughterhouses to the guards charged with keeping order in the most notorious U.S. prisons: they're the hidden workers journalist Eyal Press writes about in his latest book, "Dirty Work." Press explores the psychic and emotional toll borne by poor people and people of color who are disproportionately trapped in jobs that the public at large sees as morally tainted, but essential to maintaining our prevailing social order. We'll talk with Press about what he uncovered.

The Forum Book Club pick for August 2021 is Nawaaz Ahmed’s debut novel “Radiant Fugitives.” Set in San Francisco in and around 2010, it tells the story of Seema, a lesbian and political organizer with doubts about the efficacy of politics even as she works on the campaigns of President Obama, District Attorney Kamala Harris and California’s 2008 proposition on gay marriage. Over the course of the final five days of her pregnancy, she tries to reconnect with her estranged, terminally ill mother who has travelled from India for the birth, and her devout Muslim sister, in from Texas. Narrated by Seema’s newborn son, the novel weaves together three generations’ stories, drawing inspiration from the Quran and the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats.

Japanese baseball player Shohei Ohtani is having the season of his career. Last week the Los Angeles Angels pitcher hit his 40th home run of the season, setting a franchise record for the fastest player to reach the figure. Ohtani’s performance both on the mound and at the plate is drawing comparisons to another top pitcher with a big swing: baseball legend Babe Ruth. Amidst all the fanfare, though, Ohtani’s rising stardom is revealing long-standing biases in baseball and sports media after two commentators made ignorant and offensive remarks regarding his race and nationality. We’ll talk about the excitement surrounding Ohtani and his impact on baseball.

In a story for the Los Angeles Times, journalist Tyrone Beason shines a light on the experience and history of Black Americans living in Palm Springs. While few in numbers, Black residents are part of a history that reaches back to the first half of the 20th century when, Beason writes, "hundreds of Black people from the South, and from Los Angeles and the Bay Area, settled in desert communities like Palm Springs." Beason interviews a number of current residents, some whose families have been in Palm Springs for generations, about the homes they've made in predominantly Black neighborhoods and the discrimination they've faced. Beason joins us to discuss how the U.S.'s legacy of segregated housing is reflected in Palm Springs and why Black Americans in California's desert assert they are "here to stay."

When visitors now walk into the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, they’ll face a mural outlining the earth’s strata designed by the late feminist artist Luchita Hurtado, part of BAMPFA’s newest exhibit “New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century.” The exhibit examines the feminist practice of more than 67 contemporary artists through pieces spanning the past two decades of feminist art. With sections dedicated to examining gender expansivity, the “male gaze” and women’s labor, the exhibit is part of a larger BAMPFA effort to bring together more than 100 arts organizations dedicated to social justice known as the Feminist Art Coalition. We’ll speak with the exhibit’s curator to discuss what it means to center feminism in 21st century art.

In her debut memoir, "Don’t Let it Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body," Savala Nolan’s 12 deeply personal essays probe unsettled territory in her own life. Nolan tackles motherhood, sex, and feelings of otherness from the perspective of a self-described big-bodied mixed-race woman. One essay recounts her persistent prenatal pain that was ignored by her white physicians despite multiple emergency room visits. The author and director of the Center for Social Justice at the University of California, Berkeley, joins us to share her observations about the way our culture treats Black women.

Nearly half of California is mired in exceptional drought, including vast swaths of the Central Valley, which produces roughly 40% of the nation's fruits, vegetables and nuts. Water shortages in the region are having profound effects on growers, who are uprooting crops, letting fields lie fallow and turning their lands into solar farms and other uses. We'll hear from farmers about how the drought is affecting their operations and the steps they're taking to mitigate the worst impacts.

Michael Morgan, conductor of the Oakland Symphony Orchestra died last week at 63. Morgan was known as a virtuosic conductor and a passionate advocate for making classical music accessible to an Oakland community he was deeply invested in. He embraced a melding of musical genres, even bringing in comedian W. Kamau Bell and activist Dolores Huerta to curate playlists for his orchestra to perform. “Being a classical musician, being a conductor, being Black, being gay — all of these things put you on the outside,” Michael Morgan, said in 2013. “So you get accustomed to constructing your own world because there are not a lot of clear paths to follow and not a lot of people that are just like you.” We remember Michael Morgan with some of the musicians and performers he worked with.

The Citizen app, which, like Nextdoor, has been blamed for inciting vigilantism, recently launched a private service of on-call safety experts that users can contact 24/7 for help. Called “Protect,” this service monitors a user’s location, connecting them with a Citizen employee who can decide to bump the situation up to a 911 call.  We’ll hear about the new frontier of safety apps and why critics say these crime and safety-reporting apps promote harassment, racial bias and over-surveillance.

“The ‘zero COVID’ dream of fully stamping out the virus is a fantasy,” writes the Atlantic’s Ed Yong in his most recent piece, “How the Pandemic Now Ends.” Yong, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on COVID-19, updates his seminal March 2020 article “How the Pandemic Will End” in wake of the delta variant. Vaccines alone will not end the pandemic, he writes — the pandemic will now never fully end, it will mutate into an endemic. But how long it takes for that to happen depends on mitigation efforts — many of which have been eschewed by state and local governments in an attempt to return to “normalcy.” He joins us to discuss this stage of the pandemic’s estimated impacts on hospitals and vulnerable populations as well as how we’ll reach the light at the end of the tunnel.

The Centers for Disease Control published a study on Tuesday that found that while vaccine efficacy against the delta variant of covid-19 is moderately decreased, vaccines still lower infection risk for the SARS-CoV-2 virus by two-thirds. The study reported the efficacy of Pfizer and Moderna's vaccines against the virus dropped from about 90 percent to 66 percent once the delta variant became the dominant strain. This study comes one day after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced its full approval of Pfizer’s covid-19 vaccine on Monday. The announcement is expected to improve vaccination rates and push into effect private and public employer vaccine mandates, which had been contingent on FDA’s action. We’ll discuss the study and the effects of the first covid-19 vaccine FDA authorization and take your questions.

After wildfires destroyed more than 30 wine properties in the last year alone, Napa County’s wine industry is asking for more firefighting resources and is even proposing that the county investigate forming its own fire department. Unlike other rural counties with few resources, Napa can afford additional firefighting helicopters and used fire trucks. We’ll hear how a community scarred by years of wildfire devastation wants to change how it fights wildfire and what that means for ensuring access to high-stakes emergency resources for all.

More than 42,000 California residents have been told to evacuate their homes as nine major wildfires continue to burn. More than one and a half million acres have burned this year, that’s more than burned this time last year, in what was a record breaking fire season. We’ll get an update on the fires and evacuations, and we’ll check in on the effectiveness of the state’s response.

Larry Elder, the diehard Trump champion who opposes the minimum wage and said that climate change is a "crock," is the frontrunner to replace Governor Gavin Newsom, should Californians vote to recall him next month. Elder, an attorney who grew up in South Central Los Angeles, forged a decades-long career as a libertarian talk radio host, at one point nurturing the aspirations of Trump advisor Stephen Miller. We'll talk about Elder's political views and the controversies that surround him.

Rita Dove, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the nation’s first Black poet laureate, has returned with a new volume of poems titled “Playlist for the Apocalypse.” It’s Dove’s first book in 12 years -- in part due to a health battle with multiple sclerosis that she reveals and poignantly reflects on in a sequence called “Little Book of Woe.” Both personal and political, Dove’s poems also meditate on American life today, in all its strife, uncertainty, complexity and beauty. Dove joins us to talk about the book and her return to writing.

Toyota will produce about 140,000 fewer cars and trucks next month, a 40 percent cut to its September production, as a result of the lack of microchips necessary for its electric vehicles. It’s just one of many recent effects from the global semiconductor shortage, which is slowing the delivery of cars, computers, medical technologies and many other products. This crisis in the semiconductor supply chain has widespread impacts on the global economy, as well as on our economy here in the U.S. We’ll analyze why this is such a major problem, what it means for Bay Area companies and what the U.S. could do to once again become a leader in semiconductor production.

The use of the kind of chokehold that killed George Floyd last year should, according to constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, be a clear-cut violation of the Fourth Amendment's ban on excessive police force. But as Chemerinsky explains in his new book "Presumed Guilty," chokeholds remain in use in most of the United States because of a decades-old Supreme Court decision that tightly restricts federal lawsuits challenging police misconduct. We'll talk about the judicial doctrines that enable illegal police behavior and how to reform them.

Russ Ellis is a man for all seasons. He was a track star at UCLA, the first black professor to teach at Claremont and a UC Berkeley vice chancellor for student affairs and architecture professor. When Ellis retired in 1994, he threw himself into new pursuits. Painting classes. Sculpture. A men’s group. His latest venture is his first album, “Songs from the Garden,” which includes 11 tracks he wrote and recorded and is available on local label Berkeley Cat Records. In his words, he’s “kissing the joy as it flies.” We’ll talk with Ellis about his music and how this age has given him the gift of being “too old to get nervous.”

Documentary filmmaker Peter Nicks began filming at Oakland High School in fall 2019 to capture its seniors’ final year. He ended up capturing the specifically local experiences of a global turning point. From a student-led campaign to remove police officers from their school that begins months before George Floyd’s murder and resultant protests, to uncertain conversations around a new virus and an eventual Zoom graduation, the documentary “Homeroom” provides insight into the 2020 graduating class, depicting the students of Oakland High as the vanguard of national conversations on inequity and social justice. Nicks, whose previous Oakland-set documentaries depicted a public hospital and the city’s police force, joins us to discuss “Homeroom” and what it means to tell Oakland’s stories.

Many parents and kids are feeling relief as the state's 6 million K-12 school children head back into the classroom for full time, in-person classes after more than a year of mostly distance learning. But fears over the spread of the highly contagious delta coronavirus variant have other parents signing their children up for independent study and demanding online zoom classes. Experts and state officials continue to back a full reopening, pointing to rising absenteeism, depression and anxiety among many children, as well as devastating loss of learning for students in predominantly low-income school districts. We'll talk about what California's schools are doing to keep students safe and address parents' concerns.