Kqeds Forum

California – and specifically Lincoln Park in San Francisco – is at least in theory the ultimate destination for the band of travelers and seekers that populate Amor Towles’s latest novel, “The Lincoln Highway.” But their journey becomes defined by detours, reversals and recalibrations – in much the same way that Towles describes how he composes his novels. “While I’m writing chapters,” he says, “I’m also adapting to surprises that surface from the work.” We’ll talk to Towles about the themes that unite his novels and his own odyssey as a writer.

Tens of millions of Mexicans immigrated to the U.S. to give their children better lives, but now some of those children are choosing to pack up and make their own lives in Mexico. The pandemic has fueled a major uptick in Americans looking to move abroad including a growing number of people moving to countries where their families originated from, especially Mexico. Many of those expatriates desire not just to live abroad, but also to reconnect with their ancestral homeland and heritage. But it’s a move that’s often fraught with challenges and complex questions about identity. We talk with Americans of Mexican descent now living in Mexico and why they decided to migrate in reverse.

California voters head to the polls Tuesday to narrow the candidate fields in multiple state and local elections, from mayors’ races in San Jose and Los Angeles to statewide contests for governor, attorney general and state controller. In what some political observers consider to be referendums on pandemic crime rates, voters will also weigh in on candidates for Los Angeles sheriff and decide whether to recall San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. We’ll hear about the potential repercussions for November, the biggest races, and your thoughts and questions ahead of election day.

The Golden State Warriors are back in the NBA finals this year, facing serious competition from a tough Boston Celtics squad. We’ll talk about their season, the return of key players to the court, the future of the franchise and how they’re looking in the finals with reporters who’ve been following the Warriors all season long.

Oklahoma last week became the first state to ban almost all abortions from the moment of conception, and at least 20 more are poised to outlaw or severely restrict the procedure if, as widely expected, the Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade this month. How did we get to this point? That’s the question legal historian Mary Ziegler seeks to untangle in her new book “Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment.” We’ll talk to Ziegler about the ebb and flow of U.S. popular sentiment about abortion and the ways extremist abortion foes joined forces with -- and ultimately co-opted -- the GOP.

Fantastic Negrito is one of the most original and successful performers to emerge from the Bay Area over the last decade. A musician, a storyteller and a carrier of our region’s Black musical traditions, he began performing on the streets of Oakland. Now he’s won 3 Grammys and he’s got a new album coming out today. Alexis, Mina Kim and some lucky KQED Live fans, got to hear a preview of that album a few months back, and we’re excited to finally be able to share Fantastic Negrito’s electric performance with you.

As teachers process the horror of the Uvalde shootings, they’re also managing concerns about safety in their own workplaces and supporting and protecting students worried about gun violence. And that’s all on top of two years working under the stresses of the pandemic. We’ll talk to teachers across California about how they’re coping in the wake of Uvalde — inside the classroom and out.

Summer is the perfect time to hop in the car for a day trip, and while there’s nothing wrong with stopping at In-N-Out on 580, with a little planning, you can find something unexpected and delightful as you hit the road. As part of our regular segment on Bay Area food cultures, KQED food editor Luke Tsai joins us with his suggestions for how to plan your excursion to include delicious stops along the way. What’s your favorite roadside stop or dining destination?

An infectious disease arrives in San Francisco and is immediately associated with residents of Chinatown. Scientists and public health officials try to stop the spread. White residents believe they are immune. Politicians and the business class say the disease is not real because they worry about hurting commerce. Vulnerable people die in droves. A new PBS documentary, “Plague at the Golden Gate,” takes viewers back to 1900 when the bubonic plague hit San Francisco in a manner eerily similar to the way the COVID-19 pandemic has played out the past three years. The film examines how racism, discrimination, and misinformation contributed to the spread of the disease. We’ll talk about the film and how history is repeating itself.

With the possibility of rolling blackouts looming for the summer, Governor Gavin Newsom said last week that he would consider delaying the 2025 shutdown of Diablo Canyon, California's last remaining nuclear power plant. As the world seeks to wean itself off of fossil fuels, some climate change activists have argued for a pivot to nuclear energy. But while nuclear energy technology has improved, concerns persist about nuclear power, the waste it generates and the possibility of disasters like Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. We’ll talk about the future of nuclear energy and whether it can be a viable way to combat climate change.

In her new book, "Work Pray Code," UC Berkeley professor Carolyn Chen offers up a provocative spin on what has happened among Silicon Valley professionals. Their work has become their religion. She means this literally, and she’s a religion professor, so she should know. Based on in-depth interviews with more than 100 Silicon Valley workers, she found that their work isn’t soul-crushing but rather as she writes, “Work has become a spiritual practice that inspires religious fervor. People are not ‘selling their souls’ at work. Rather, work is where they find their souls.” We’ll talk with Chen about her new book and ask our listeners: Is work where you look for belonging, identity, and transcendence?

What if some of the same public health strategies used to manage a pandemic could be marshaled to stem gun violence? As legislative solutions falter and firearm sales continue to increase, gun violence prevention advocates are looking to public health approaches that include systematic data collection, individual and community-level risk assessments and evidence-based prevention measures. We’ll look at what it means to treat gun violence as a public health emergency -- and the community organizations doing that work in California.

A recent piece in the New York Times, called the Oakland A’s “the loneliest team in baseball.” Though the Coliseum where they play can hold 57,000 fans, on average only 6,000 show up for home games. What happened to the glorious days of the A’s when manager Billy Beane was acclaimed for his savvy in managing the roster and payroll to get the most out of bench players? Has the management of the A’s turned off fans with their threats to move to Las Vegas if they don’t get a new stadium? And can Bay Area fans sustain two major league baseball teams? We’ll look at the state of the Oakland A’s, their future, and the hard economics of major league baseball.

“Modern life conspires against friendship,” says Atlantic staff writer Jennifer Senior, "even as it requires the bonds of friendship all the more." That’s one of the paradoxes at the center of Senior’s new piece “It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart” — a meditation on why friendships fade and collapse and why in midlife those losses sting particularly hard. We’ll talk to Senior about how at 52 she’s navigating what she calls a “Great Pandemic Friendship Reckoning” and what it means to overcome the heartbreak of a lost friend.

More than one million Americans have died from COVID-19. Close to 8,000 Americans have died from gun violence in 2022. Another nine thousand died of suicide. The difficult news of our time goes far beyond death. The planet is in crisis, tornados, floods and fires are ravishing whole towns, economic instability, racial injustice, and the rolling back of rights we’ve counted on for 50 years. It’s a lot. On this Memorial Day, we take time to make space for our individual and collective grief.

“War remains a large part of who we are as Americans,” writes Phil Klay, who notes that almost a sixth of our federal budget goes to defense, supporting a military that now wages counterterrorism campaigns in 85 countries. But those overseas wars are invisible to most Americans because they’re fought by so few and because of political and strategic choices that shield them from public view. We’ll talk to Klay, an award-winning fiction writer and veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, about the chasm between the military and civilian experience and what our wars say about us as Americans.

This week’s deadly shooting rampage at a Texas elementary school didn’t stop the National Rifle Association from holding its annual meeting this weekend in Houston. The latest massacre ignited another round of demands for tighter gun regulations and more criticism of the NRA and politicians who take donations from the group. But some experts say the NRA is mired in dysfunction and is no longer the force it once was. At the same time, activists and pro-gun-control lobbies are gaining more traction in the political arena. We’ll talk about the NRA’s role in gun violence and efforts to counter their influence.

The nation is mourning the 19 children and two teachers gunned down on Tuesday at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, TX, the deadliest school massacre since a gunman murdered 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT nearly a decade ago. And the horror of the shooting -- and the unspeakable grief experienced by family members, classmates and all those who loved the victims -- is agonizingly commonplace. More than 311,000 students in K-12 schools in the United States have experienced gun violence on their campuses since 1999, and tens of millions of Americans have been touched by gun violence in their communities, according to data collected by the Washington Post. We’ll talk about the profound toll borne by survivors of mass shootings.

Novelist and journalist Vanessa Hua’s new book “Forbidden City” is a historical fiction set in 1960s China. It’s the story of a 16-year-old girl who was plucked from a rural village to join a troupe of dancers formed to satisfy an aging Chairman Mao’s – historically accurate – love of ballroom dance and teenage girls. Hua writes in the author’s notes, “I believe that fiction flourishes where the official record ends”; the novel leaves the impression that even if the woman at the center of the book were real, she would have been erased from history. We’ll talk about the dynamics of gender, power and manipulation that resonate across time and geography. “The past,” Hua writes, “is never as distant as it seems.”

On May 26, 2021, a Valley Transportation Authority employee in San Jose shot and killed nine coworkers in what became the Bay Area's most deadly mass shooting. As the nation mourns the deaths of 19 students and two teachers killed in a Texas elementary school this week, we remember the victims and the tragedy in San Jose on the first anniversary of the shooting.