KPFA - UpFront

Discussed in this episode:

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Podcast music credit:  Now Son by Podington Bear, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

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UpFront delivers a mix of local, state, and international coverage through challenging interviews, civil debates, breaking updates, and in-depth discussions with authors.

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00:08 Malcolm Harris, author of several books; the newest is What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis.

This is a rebroadcast from 2025.

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00:08 Emily M. Bender is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington, Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR); they’ve co-authored the book The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want. 

This is a rebroadcast from summer of 2025.

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00:08 — Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, filmmaker, champion powwow dancer and student of Salish art and history. His debut book is “We Survived the Night.” This interview was originally recorded earlier in December 2025.

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00:08 – Mariah Blake, investigative journalist just out with the book They Poisoned the World: Life and death in the age of forever chemicals.

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00:08 Robert Reich, political economist who worked in the administrations of three presidents (most prominently as Secretary of Labor for Bill Clinton) now emeritus Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. His latest book is Coming Up Short: a memoir of my America. This is a rebroadcast of our original interview in summer of 2025.

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00:08 From Bruce Lee’s San Francisco origins during the segregationist era of the Chinese Exclusion Act and family’s immigration story, to his role in the lives and minds of young Asian Americans, a new book traces Lee’s story. We talk with Jeff Chang, cultural historian, about Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America.

“He was a marker of culture, a sign, a signifier that put us in the pop culture conversation,” Chang says. “Folks want to whitewash his story… as if to separate him from other immigrants. No. Bruce was part of a class of people that was completely shunned and looked down upon… He’s dealing with racism every day. Part of the story here is to recover that, so people really understand what that means.”

Jeff Chang won the American Book Award for Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, his history of the early years of hip hop.

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0:08 – A rebroadcast of our powerful October 2025 interview with Rebecca Solnit, author of two dozen books, and a profound storyteller of grassroots movements and the climate and environmental crisis on this planet. Most recently, she published No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain.

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00:08 – Betty Reid Soskin has been a homefront warriors worker, a singer-songwriter and a performer, co-founder of the legendary Reid’s Records in South Berkeley, a writer and legislative aid and, until she turned 100, the oldest working National Park Service ranger. She died last weekend at the age of 104. This interview is from 2018, when she came to KPFA’s studios to discuss her book, Sign My Name to Freedom: A Memoir of a Pioneering Life

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