Kqeds Forum

"I don't want to die anywhere else," writes José Vadi in "Inter State," his new essay collection about California. Vadi explores what he calls our "disjointed mosaic of a state" from his vantage point as a poet, skateboarder, laid-off tech worker and grandson of a Central Valley farmworker. We talk to Vadi about California and the variegated experiences of its inhabitants.

“In the United States, it’s very stark that the past is not yet past. Problems that we think of as historical in fact continue to impact our lives on a daily basis,” says Princeton historian and writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Last week Taylor received a 2021 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship for her scholarship on how past and present political and economic policies sustain chronic racial inequality, and how social movements, like Black Lives Matter, can transform that narrative. We’ll talk to Taylor about her work and her most recent book “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Home Ownership” which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer prize.

For decades, organizations, doctors and parents focused on treating autism as a disease and steered millions of dollars in funding to find a “cure” instead of to provide services to autistic people. Political journalist Eric Garcia chronicles that history in his new book “We’re not Broken: Changing The Autism Conversation,” and draws on his own experience as an autistic person to lay out the ongoing challenges and misperceptions they face. Garcia points out that autistic people are often portrayed as white male children or engineers, when in fact autistic people come in every gender and ethnic background. We talk with Garcia about why autism is so misunderstood and how to change the narrative.

Has all the pandemic time in your home kitchen perfected your souffli? Or maybe you've realized it's possible to survive on just condiments. For a lot of us our cooking habits vacillated during this time between unrealistically high culinary expectations and dispiritingly low ones. But hopefully you've found at least a few just right, joy bringing, doable dishes that have brought comfort to your day. We want to hear about those meals.

Governor Gavin Newsom has until October 10th to sign or veto the bills on his desk. We'll talk with KQED's politics team's Katie Orr and Marisa Lagos about some of the bills he's signed into law, including drug sentencing reform and the nation's first ban on nonconsensual removal of a condom during sex. And we'll look at some of the closely watched bills still waiting on a decision.

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 a sense of empowerment. And we want to hear from you: Did you decide to grow out your gray hair during the pandemic? Or are you on the fence about whether to forgo the dye? What does gray hair mean to you?

Hispanic Heritage Month ends Oct. 15, and in a recent column for the Los Angeles Times, staff writer Daniel Hernandez explores the meaning behind the plethora of ironic memes that have popped up to celebrate and poke fun at the occasion. Some of the memes offer ironic takes on popular songs, characters such as Mama Coco from the movie “Coco,” and customs such as eating a tortilla slathered with butter or using ovens to store pots and pans. Hernandez joins us to discuss the memes and the deeper themes they reveal about, as he writes, “the state of ambivalence that we have about ourselves, and that non-Latino Americans continue to have about us.” 

Two California scientists, David Julius from UCSF and Ardem Patapoutian from San Diego's Scripps Research, have won the 2021 Nobel Prize for medicine. In their work, which focuses on the biology of our senses, Julius and Patapoutian identified receptors that allow the cells in your body to sense touch and temperature. Their findings hold potential medical applications for better treatment of chronic pain. We talk with the prize-winning researchers about their work.

Not many people get a backstage pass to history, but Ben Fong-Torres has. As a writer and music editor for Rolling Stone magazine, Fong-Torres stood at the center of an era of rock and roll from which acts like Bob Dylan, The Doors, the Grateful Dead and Elton John emerged, and his writing was so revered by musicians that Fong-Torres was often the only journalist bands would talk to. A new documentary by Suzanne Joe Kai taps into Fong-Torres’ personal archives and includes interviews with him as well as some of his famous subjects to tell the story of how Fong-Torres, the Bay Area-born son of Chinese immigrants, found himself in the middle of the cultural zeitgeist. We’ll talk to Fong-Torres about the film, which will be shown at the upcoming Mill Valley Film Festival. 

During a recent Los Angeles Dodgers game, three people sprinted across the field waving banners with the names of former neighborhoods -- Bishop, La Loma and Palo Verde -- that were razed on the land that is now home to the team’s stadium. The protest was an attempt to call attention to a piece of L.A. history known as the Battle of Chavez Ravine, when in the 1950s city officials displaced roughly 1,800 mostly Mexican American families from the area. Officials promised to build a new public housing complex where the families could live, but instead sold the land to the Dodgers to build a stadium. We talk about that history and Mexican Americans’ deep and complicated relationship with the team.

During the past decade, widespread optimism for what technology could accomplish turned into a backlash against Silicon Valley and what it has spawned. Social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter hold enormous power over our economies and lives, but nobody is quite sure how to rein in the companies. In their new book, “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot,” three Stanford University professors from different fields spell out exactly what has gone wrong and offer ideas to hold the powerful accountable in meaningful ways.  

It's been 30 years since Anita Hill testified before an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee during Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearing, describing how he sexually harassed her in the workplace. Anita Hill joins us to reflect on that experience, which she says laid bare the systemic faults in a confirmation process that still casts doubt on the credibility of women, and to talk about her new book "Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence."

A pipeline leak first reported on Saturday has spilled at least 126,000 gallons of crude oil into the Pacific, washing up on the shores of Huntington Beach and contaminating the area's environmentally sensitive wetlands and marshes. While the leak has been stopped, clean-up efforts are just getting underway. We'll talk about the effects of the oil spill and its impacts on the Huntington Beach community and environment.

What do a bicycle, a living room sofa, spools of copper wire, and a six-pack of Cherry Vanilla Coke Zero have in common? All of them may soon be or currently are in short supply as the global economy experiences a supply chain in disarray that has left few consumer goods and commodities untouched. Ships backed up and waiting to dock in California ports, containers that wait for trucks or trains to deliver them, and warehouses that lack enough labor to unpack those containers – all contribute to the bottlenecks in the supply chain that threaten to leave store shelves empty. With the holidays around the corner, some retailers, like Costco, are hiring their own ships to help deliver goods. We’ll look into what is causing these supply chain issues and how they might be resolved in the near- and long-term future.

Join us for a roundup of political news in California. Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed numerous bills into laws in the past few weeks including a slew of laws aimed at increasing affordable housing, a new requirement for disclosing policy misconduct records, and changes to the state’s conservatorship law known as the #FreeBritney bill. We’ll take a look at what legislation is moving forward and other political news.

The San Francisco Giants have clinched a spot in the playoffs for the first time since 2016. With 105 wins under their belt, the 2021 team is among the best in the franchise’s history, and have a serious shot at beating the Los Angeles Dodgers for the division title. With the end of the season in sight, the team could soon be reliving the glory days of their championship victories in the 2010s. We’ll talk about what has contributed to the Giants’ successful run and what to expect from the playoffs.

Drug company Merck is applying for emergency use authorization in the U.S. for a new oral treatment for COVID-19 that trials suggest cuts the risk of hospitalization or death by half. We'll talk with UCSF's Dr. Monica Gandhi about the promising new treatment, get the latest coronavirus numbers for the Bay Area, and hear what to expect now that flu season is around the corner.

Residents of the small Northern California town of Willows suffered from smoke-filled air four out of twelve months in 2020. That makes it the smokiest place in the Western United States. That’s according to a recent analysis by NPR’s California Newsroom that looked at air quality across the state--and the country--between 2016 and 2020. We’ll hear about the investigation and catch up on the newest science on how smoke affects health. Then at 10:40, we’ll dive deep in on how to read and interpret air quality maps, and which ones are best.

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 challenged by the pandemic, which dropped traveller numbers and put new stresses on airports already grappling with issues like aging infrastructure. We'll talk about airports you love, airports you never want to see again, and hear from experts about airports of the future.

The new film “The Many Saints of Newark” brings Sopranos fans a prequel to the revered HBO series about mobsters in New Jersey. Director Alan Taylor, who won an Emmy for his work on the show, joins us to talk about the movie set during Tony Soprano’s adolescence against a backdrop of the 1967 Newark race riots. The series, which ran for six seasons between 1999 and 2007 followed the story of Tony Soprano, a mafia boss who sought help for anxiety and mental health issues. We discuss the new film, which comes out Friday in theaters and on HBO, and the legacy of “The Sopranos.”