KQED's Forum
Forum tells remarkable and true stories about who we are and where we live. In the first hour, Alexis Madrigal convenes the diverse voices of the Bay Area, before turning to Mina Kim for the second hour to chronicle and center Californians’ experience. In an increasingly divided world, Mina and Alexis host conversations that inform, challenge and unify listeners with big ideas and different viewpoints. Want to call/submit your comments during our live Forum program Mon-Fri, 9am-11am? We'd love to hear from you! Please dial 866.SF.FORUM or (866) 733-6786 or email forum@kqed.org, tweet, or post on Facebook.
Episodes
October 29, 2025 • 54 mins
Next week, California voters will decide whether to approve Proposition 50, which would temporarily redraw Congressional district maps to favor Democrats in the 2026 midterm elections. This comes after Republican lawmakers in Texas have redrawn districts to favor their party – with Republican leaders in Indiana, North Carolina and Missouri looking to follow suit. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court appears poised to further weaken the Vot...
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October 29, 2025 • 54 mins
As the federal government shutdown extends to its fifth week, its impacts have become more widespread. Over one million federal workers are either on furlough or working unpaid. Most federal parks remain closed. Head Start programs are at risk of closure. And the USDA has announced it would suspend funding for SNAP, a food program that serves over 40 million Americans, including 5.38 million Californians. We’ll talk about the impac...
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October 28, 2025 • 54 mins
Joyce Vance was a federal prosecutor for 25 years, resigning on the eve of Donald Trump’s first inauguration. Now, she’s a law professor, a legal analyst for NBC and MSNBC and author of the popular Substack “Civil Discourse,” signing off every post with the four words: “We’re in this together.” In a new book she encourages readers to not despair at the erosion of democratic norms, but to fight back. As she writes, “Progress may not...
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October 28, 2025 • 54 mins
One of the main drivers of homelessness in the Bay Area is simply a lack of affordable housing for people with the very lowest incomes. In Part 4 of our series “In Search of Home: Solutions for the Homelessness Crisis” we’ll take a look at some innovative strategies developers and cities are exploring to fund projects and lower the cost of construction. We bring together housing developers, housing experts and Bay Area residents to...
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October 27, 2025 • 54 mins
Have you watched a movie review on YouTube or an album takedown on TikTok? Cultural criticism is available for free everywhere which might explain why publications like the New York Times and Vanity Fair are trimming their staffs of professional reviewers. We talk to pop culture critic Angelica Jade Bastién and music critic Kelefa Sanneh about why traditional criticism should endure, even when everyone has a platform. Where do you ...
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The Pentagon announced Friday that the military is sending an aircraft carrier to South America. It’s the latest in the escalating show of force against Venezuela, including strikes on ten boats that the Trump administration says were involved in drug smuggling, which killed 43 people. We talk about the legality of the actions and what the administration hopes to achieve. Then, we turn to the mighty California condor. Once nearly e...
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October 24, 2025 • 54 mins
There’s the picture book you wanted your parent or caregiver to read to you over and over. There’s the one with musical rhymes you love performing for your kids. The editors at the Atlantic’s books desk chose 65 “essential” children’s books, spanning the 1936 classic “The Story of Ferdinand” to 2024’s “I’m Sorry You Got Mad.” The list includes bedtime stories, books that teach counting and tales that make big emotions comprehensibl...
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October 24, 2025 • 54 mins
While indulging in online retail therapy, you’ve probably seen an option at checkout to buy now, pay later. Companies like Afterpay, Affirm, and Klarna let consumers pay in four installments for nearly anything, including clothes, concert tickets, or even a burrito. For some consumers, it’s a tech-assisted layaway plan that helps when cash is tight. For others, it’s a chance to splurge on otherwise unattainable goods. On social med...
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October 23, 2025 • 54 mins
The Trump administration’s constant flouting of court orders, its conversion of ICE into a massive paramilitary organization, its extortion of universities and corporations. It’s all prompted political commentator David Brooks to pose what he calls the question of the decade: “why hasn’t a resistance movement materialized here?” A self-described moderate, Brooks says we’re naive to think Trumpism will end in three years; rather, if...
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October 23, 2025 • 54 mins
The Trump administration has fired dozens of immigration judges in California seemingly without cause and despite growing backlogs of cases. Judges who lost their jobs say these firings will impede due process for millions of immigrants facing deportation. This comes at a time when federal authorities want to deport millions of people as quickly as possible. We talk with two local immigration judges who have been terminated by the ...
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October 22, 2025 • 54 mins
Reports are rising of addiction, overdose and death tied to 7-OH, a potent new synthetic drug. The painkiller is a lab-made offshoot of the herbal drug kratom. 7-OH is more than 10 times stronger than morphine and has been dubbed “gas station heroin” because it’s sold openly in gas stations and vape shops, including here in California. At least six people in Los Angeles have died from overdoses related to the drug since this spring...
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October 22, 2025 • 54 mins
How exactly does the mind work? How do we learn and make decisions? And how does that compare to the way AI thinks? In their new book, “The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines,” San Francisco State psychologist Gaurav Suri and Stanford’s Jay McClelland examine how neural networks work in our brains, and in AI.
Guests:
Gaurav Suri, computational neuroscientist and professor, San Francisco State Universi...
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October 21, 2025 • 54 mins
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl leads the largest synagogue in New York City. But she says she’s never been so afraid to talk about Israel. That’s because she thinks that compassion for people suffering on either side of the war in Gaza has come to be seen as disloyal and even threatening – a zero sum empathy calculus that also applies to ideological battles fought in our country every day. Buchdahl is the first Asian American to be ordained...
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October 21, 2025 • 54 mins
The cost of healthcare insurance is at the core of the government shutdown. Democrats and Republicans are at a stalemate over the extension of subsidies that decrease the price of insurance purchased under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Without the extension, experts predict a sharp increase in premiums for the 44 million Americans who rely on this health insurance. And hundreds of thousands of Californians may b...
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October 20, 2025 • 54 mins
Unions for federal employees say the White House is planning thousands more layoffs, even though a federal judge in San Francisco has blocked it. This is taking place as the Trump administration has left the National Labor Relations Board paralyzed after firing Biden-appointed members upon taking office. We talk with William Gould IV, the former National Labor Relations Board Chairman, about the rights of workers during a shutdown,...
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October 20, 2025 • 54 mins
Cory Doctorow coined a word to describe how what we once loved about the internet, and relied on, has become exploitative, corrosive, and anti-user. And now he’s written a book about it, “Enshittification: Why Everything Got Worse and What to Do About It.” He analyzes how TikTok, Google Search, email, music streaming and other services and platforms – technology that we expect to always improve – have declined so fast. But the tec...
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October 17, 2025 • 54 mins
Why do we leave our homelands? That is the central question which animates the newest work of San Francisco poet laureate Genny Lim and the Bay Area-based Del Sol Quartet. Together, Lim and the musicians explore the implications of migration and the search for a new home in their work, “Facing the Moon: Songs of the Diaspora.” They join us live in the studio for a performance and conversation.
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October 17, 2025 • 54 mins
Glynn Washington, host of KQED and Snap Judgment’s “Spooked,” joins us to talk about the podcast’s new season called The Crossroads. It takes stories about encounters with the unknown to new levels by exploring what happens when desperation drives us to bargain with dark forces. As “Spooked” tours the West Coast — with shows on Oct. 23 in Los Angeles and Oct. 25 in Oakland – we’ll talk about why we crave frights, scares and ghosts ...
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October 16, 2025 • 54 mins
Millions of people are expected to take part in "No Kings" protests this Saturday in over 2000 cities across the country. The demonstrations are being coordinated as frustration mounts over the president’s military crackdown in cities and federal funding cuts. We talk about what to expect and how this movement compares to previous mass demonstrations in American history. Later in the hour, we talk about the value of having a best f...
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October 16, 2025 • 54 mins
In a news conference Wednesday, President Trump said he will be “strongly recommending” his administration look into sending troops to the city, which he called “a mess.” The comments come after Elon Musk and Mark Benioff said they’d like to see the National Guard in San Francisco. We discuss what may come next, but first we talk with the new host of “Reading Rainbow.” Almost 20 years since it went off air, the beloved kids’ litera...
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