Crosscurrents

Online scams have proliferated and are even trickier to detect now… thanks to the use of new AI tools. These scams have become so widespread that this month, San Francisco became the first city in the country to launch a coordinated response to AI-enhanced scams. 

This action includes multilingual scam alerts, and financial counseling for people who’ve been defrauded as a result. KALW's NeEddra James reports on AI and while she’s seen an acceleration of these scams, she’s here to offer some helpful tips for how to protect yourself. 

Earlier this month, we lost a Bay Area storytelling icon — Oakland’s Diane Ferlatte. She was an award winning, grammy nominated teller of African American stories. For Crosscurrents host Hana Baba, Ms. Diane was than a storyteller. She became a friend, and a mentor. Ms. Diane advised Hana when she was thinking about telling her own cultural tales. What now the podcast Folktales from Sudan.

In 2023, before Hana launched it, she was struggling with questions about folktale storytelling. So Ms. Diane invited Hana to come talk them out with her. And she did that, in an episode of The Stoop podcast that Hana cohosts with Leila Day. Today, we're brining you an excerpt of that conversation.

The way we raise our children is once again changing. Today, the latest science and understanding behind fatherhood. Then, we tag along on the thousand mile journey one musician took to help butterflies migrate. And we are jumping back into Women’s Sports with a new season of Bounce.

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about why it is so difficult to raise families in this country. And the question of starting families is one of the unique and few spaces where the experience of women has been studied more than men. And while motherhood has attracted well-deserved attention, fatherhood has been relatively overlooked and often misunderstood.

One of the researchers that has been changing this dynamic is Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Southern California. She has studied families and fathers for over two decades and just published a book, “Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men's Lives.”

So KALW invited her to our live event space to talk about what we’ve learned in the last decade about the transformative power of fatherhood. She spoke to KALW Executive Producer and proud father Ben Trefny. He begins by talking about what it was like to become a dad.

Right now the butterflies are north of us and inland for the summer, but in a month, they’ll begin heading west to make it back to the California coast before winter. Millions of these butterflies used to make the thousand mile trek. But climate change, industrialized agriculture, and ever-expanding suburbs have made this migration harder. Because the monarch caterpillars only eat one thing: milkweed. And it’s not around like it once was. 

Without plentiful milkweed along their migration path, monarchs have nowhere to lay their eggs. Now, only thousands butterflies make it back to the coast every year. When one musician heard about the plight of the monarchs, he decided to take a radical step to help them along their journey by taking the trip with them. Reporter Lusen Mendel has the story, first reported in 2024.

Last year, our podcast Bounce followed the first season of San Francisco’s newest WNBA team, the Valkyries. They did not disappoint, and gave the fans a historic run to the play-offs. And this season they haven’t backed down, currently holding one of the best team records in the WNBA.

So we decided, we wouldn’t back down either. We are bringing back Bounce for a third season. Here’s Bounce host Erin Lim, with a snippet of what we got in store. 

A legendary venue in Oakland reopens after two decades of closure. Then we go into KALW's live event venue to hear from the artists that transformed it into a living gallery.

A legendary venue in Oakland reopens after two decades of closure. 

We hear from the artists that transformed KALW's live event space into a living gallery.

Today, Berkeley poet Beth Patote brings us back to the water with her poem.