KQED's Forum
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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 Alex...
Recent Episodes
3327 episodes
We're Living Online. Our Bodies Are Paying the Price
We’re spending too much time sitting behind screens. First we’re at our desks for eight, maybe ten hours. Then, all too often, we get home and plop on...
Low-Income Adults with Disabilities Stand to Lose SSI Benefits Under Proposed Trump Administration Rule
A proposed rule change for obtaining Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits could reduce or eliminate income for some 400,000 adults with Down sy...
Could a ‘Plastic Detox’ Help With Health and Fertility?
The new Netflix documentary “The Plastic Detox” follows six couples struggling with unexplained infertility, asking them to cut plastic from their liv...
What Did Mapping The Genome Get Us?
Pioneering geneticist J. Craig Venter, who revolutionized biology with his role in sequencing the human genome, died last week in San Diego. In this h...
When Will Alternative Meats Go Mainstream?
Humans eat more than 550 metric tons of meat and seafood a year — a number that’s steadily climbing, and expected to do so until at least 2050. At the...
Mary Cain Was A Running Prodigy, Until Abuse Derailed Her Career
As a teenager Mary Cain was a running phenom. At 17, she ran the 800 in under two minutes, and broke numerous national high school records. She went p...
What Animal Caregiving Reveals About Us
A blue whale mother that fasts for months while her calf puts on close to 250 pounds a day. A male hamster who acts as a midwife while his partner giv...
Court Battle Over Abortion Access Returns to Center Stage
After a federal appeals court on Friday blocked mail-order access to the abortion pill mifepristone, the Supreme Court stepped in to pause the ruling,...
It’s Not Personal: When Rejection Gets Political
We all know the stinging pain of rejection: the exclusion from a high-school in-group or the all-too-common experience of applying for a job and recei...
Stage Diving into Sonoma County’s Early Punk Scene
When punk rock thrashed through the Bay Area in the 70s and 80s, there were some venues that became iconic hubs, like Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco...
Scammers Pretended To Be Forum's Mina Kim. Here's Why
In the last month, about a dozen authors wrote to Forum saying they’d been messaged by a fraudster claiming to be Mina Kim. In exchange for a “small f...
Trump’s War in Iran Nears Critical Deadline
When President Trump sent troops into Iran, he did so without a green light from Congress. Now he faces a deadline on May 1 to either end the war in I...
Roundup: The Controversial Weedkiller Sprayed Throughout California Forests
The Supreme Court this week heard a case about Roundup, a weedkiller widely used in agriculture — and that tens of thousands claim has caused their ca...
When Your Devices Fritz And Your Digital Life Is Lost. What Next?
What happens when your hard drive gets fried and every photo documenting your kid’s life, or that novel you didn’t back up, or that cache of old email...
Have We Learned How to Talk About GLP1s?
An estimated one in eight Americans has now tried a GLP-1 medication like Ozempic or WeGovy: to lose weight, manage diabetes or experiment with anecdo...
How ‘Muskism’ is Reshaping America
Everyone has an opinion about Elon Musk, who has carved out a uniquely powerful place for himself in the worlds of auto-making, space launch, social m...
Tucker Carlson’s Reversal on Trump Raises Questions for MAGA
Tucker Carlson, the right wing pundit and onetime Donald Trump diehard, now says he regrets supporting the President. Carlson apologized on his show f...
How Can We Better Care for Foster Youth?
The death of a San Jose toddler in foster care has Santa Clara’s child welfare system scrambling to respond and politicians asking what went wrong. Si...
What an Accent Can – and Can’t – Say About You
Everyone has an accent, even people who don’t think they do. That’s according to linguist Valerie Fridland, who studies the way American accents have...
Remembering Classical Music Icon Michael Tilson Thomas
We’ll remember legendary conductor, composer, educator and San Francisco icon Michael Tilson Thomas who died on Wednesday. He served 25 years as music...
When The World Expects Hate, A Palestinian and An Israeli Choose Peace
Aziz Abu Sarah, who is Palestinian, and Maoz Inon, who is Israeli, have both lost family to the conflict in the Middle East. They are also both peaceb...
Why Do Certain Songs and Bands Go Viral?
Some fans of the indie-rock band Geese have been feeling betrayed after learning that TikToks that looked like they were made by fans were actually cr...
M Gessen Reckons with Familial Crime and Punishment
“The Idiot,” a new podcast from Serial and New York Times opinion columnist M. Gessen, shares the story of Gessen’s own cousin, Allen, who went to pri...
The Psychological Toll of Trump’s Immigration Policies on Bay Area Latinos
The Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration has many people feeling self-conscious about speaking Spanish in public or being recognized as La...
Anthropic’s New AI Mythos Is a Cybersecurity Game-Changer
The San Francisco AI firm Anthropic has developed a new model that it says is too powerful to be released to the public. Called Mythos, Anthropic says...
Paying for Graduate School Is Going To Get Harder
Going to graduate school has never been cheap. But sweeping new changes to the federal loan system – which will now have caps on how much you can borr...
Rethinking Healing: Insights from Survivors of Extreme Trauma
Psychiatrist Suzan Song has for decades worked with people who have experienced extreme traumas, like being trafficked or recruited as child soldiers....
CA Prepares for Early Wildfire Season Amidst Slashing of US Forest Service
California’s record-setting heatwave in March caused snow to melt and vegetation to dry out earlier than normal this year. Those conditions could prov...
Celebrating the Players That Made Women's Basketball
The 2026 WNBA season tips off next month. It’s expected to see historic viewership and attendance, after last season’s record-breaking run as the most...
Bass Legend Melvin Gibbs Shows Us 'How Black Music Took Over the World'
Grammy-nominated bassist and composer Melvin Gibbs contends that all music genres popular in the U.S. — pop, country, rock, dance, hip-hop and Latin —...
Viktor Orbán’s Defeat, and the Limits of MAGA Populism
After almost two decades as Prime Minister, Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán was defeated by Péter Magyar, leader of the center-right Tisza party. In t...
What Will it Take to End the War in Iran?
An American naval blockade of Iranian ports entered its third day as the U.S. tries to open up ship traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, Presid...
Examining the Fallout From Eric Swalwell’s Sexual Misconduct Allegations
Facing sexual misconduct allegations from at least five women, including one former staffer, Bay Area Democrat Eric Swalwell resigned from Congress, w...
Will New Tax Provisions Deliver Promised Big, Beautiful Refunds?
President Trump promised that new tax provisions in his One Big Beautiful Bill would deliver a windfall to millions of Americans. No more taxes on ove...
Planet Money Answers Your Big Economic Questions
NPR’s “Planet Money” has spent years answering economic questions big and small on its flagship podcast and the daily show “The Indicator,” and now th...
Translating the World Through Literature
Books have long transported us to other worlds and lives. But in the American publishing market only a small fraction of books are works in translatio...
Amy Goodman Wants Corporate Media to ‘Steal This Story, Please!’
Thirty years ago, journalist Amy Goodman premiered the daily radio show Democracy Now. Launched on nine community radio stations in 1996, the program...
Division Grows Among U.S. Catholics Over Trump Policies
For decades, the top political issue for many U.S. Catholics has been abortion. But, a recent article in “The Atlantic” argues that the focus has shif...
AI Data Center Opponents Fight Back at Local Level
The fight over data centers is intensifying in California and nationwide as organizers develop new strategies to take on tech companies and developers...
What Can Y2K Tweens from Santa Rosa Teach Us About Childhood Creativity?
In the year 2000, four pre-teen girls in Santa Rosa — three 11-year-olds, and one 9-year-old little sister — wrote and recorded an album inspired by t...