Diane Keaton. Jane Goodall. Belva Davis. Ozzy Osbourne. Brian Wilson. Sly Stone. David Lynch. We lost cultural luminaries, larger-than-life personalities and loved ones in 2025. We’ll celebrate their legacies and hear how they changed lives and communities for the better. And we want to hear from you: Who did you mourn this year — and what did they give you?

Guests:

Chloe Veltman, correspondent, NPR's Culture Desk

Meaghan Mitchell, arts and culture journalist; her piece of KQED Arts is," Belva Davis Showed Me I Belong in Journalism"

Dave Schilling, contributing writer, LA Times Image - author, "Horror's New Wave: 15 Years of Blumhouse"

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We’ll look back at KQED’s Best Bay Area Albums of 2025 with our music writers. This year’s list of favorites includes local musicians putting out original hip-hop, punk, salsa, spiritual jazz and rock. We’ll hear live in studio performances from musicians that made the list – Oakland hip-hop artist Jamel Griot and instrumental band Arts and Crafts – and we’ll  talk about the local musicians topping your playlists.

Guests:

Nastia Voynovskaya, editor and reporter, KQED Arts

Pendarvis "Pen" Harshaw, columnist, KQED Arts

Jamel Griot, hip hop and soul artist

Jeff Klein, drummer, Arts and Crafts

Noam Teyssier, guitarist, Arts and Crafts

Nadia Aquil, bassist, Arts and Crafts

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The White House says it’s submitting plans this month for its 90,000 square-foot gold-studded ballroom which will be bigger than the White House while Democrats call for inquiries into the funding of the project. Meanwhile, the Oval Office gleams with gold adornments, and an executive order decrees classical architecture for all federal buildings. Design historians say Trump is reshaping America’s visual identity in his own image, breaking with centuries of presidential restraint. We take a look at what’s driving the makeover, and we want to hear from you: How do you interpret Trump’s visual choices?

Guests:

Naftali Bendavid, senior national political correspondent, The Washington Post

Jessica Winegar, professor, Northwestern University

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The killing of Alberto Rangel, a 51-year-old social worker at San Francisco General Hospital, has left colleagues grieving and questioning whether his death could have been prevented. Rangel was stabbed by a patient who authorities say had made multiple threats for weeks. Incidents of workplace violence in healthcare facilities have been on the rise for more than a decade nationwide, prompting hospitals and medical offices to adopt stricter safety protocols. But are they working? We’ll talk about workplace violence against health care workers and what employers are doing – and failing to do – to protect them.

Guests:

Annie Vainshtein, reporter, San Francisco Chronicle

Dani Golomb, psychiatrist; Golomb was attacked by a patient in 2020 during her medical residency at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco

Dan Russell, president, University Professional and Technical Employees

Al'ai Alvarez, clinical professor of emergency medicine, Stanford University

Cammie Chaumont Menendez, research epidemiologist, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health

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Lawmakers are demanding that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth release video of the September strike that killed two survivors of a U.S. attack on their boat in the Caribbean. That strike, which the Pentagon says targeted drug traffickers, has prompted war crime accusations. But since then, the U.S. has launched more than 20 strikes in the region, killing more than 80 people. We talk about the impact and legality of the attacks along with other controversies at the Pentagon — and the political implications for Hegseth.

Guests:

Julian Barnes, intelligence and national security reporter, New York Times

Tess Bridgeman, co-editor-in-chief, Just Security - former special assistant to the President and deputy legal adviser to the National Security Council under President Obama

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The National Institutes of Health have historically funded scientists to find cures for diseases and protect public health. NIH funding has led to the discovery of immune therapies for cancer, antiviral treatments and prevention of HIV, and ground-breaking research into memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease. After a year of funding cuts and freezes that have rocked the medical research field to its core, we catch up with leading researchers at the University of California to talk about the impact this has had on their work and our ability to fight humanity’s most puzzling illnesses.

Guests:

Monica Gandhi, infectious disease expert and professor of medicine at University of California San Francisco - she is the director of the UCSF Gladstone Center for AIDS Research and the medical director of the San Francisco General Hospital HIV Clinic, Ward 86

Pamela Munster, professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco; co-director, Center for BRCA Research, Medical Oncology; distinguished professor in Hereditary Cancer Research

Megan Molteni, science writer, STAT News

Joel Spencer, associate professor of Bioengineering, University of California Merced - his lab uses funding from NIH to study the thymus, with implications for cancer treatment and healthy aging

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Children as young as 12 can legally work on California’s farms, picking strawberries and pruning blueberry bushes along with a host of other physically demanding jobs. Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Robert J. Lopez spoke with 61 children who work in the fields of the Salinas, Santa Maria, San Joaquin and Pajaro valleys. They described unsafe and unsanitary conditions, extreme heat — and a fear of speaking up, because they can’t afford to lose their jobs. Lopez reports that in California, “enforcement of child labor laws has been inconsistent, the number of workplace safety inspections and citations issued to employers have dropped and repeat offenders were not fined for hundreds of violations of pesticide safety laws.” He joins us to share his reporting, and how the state is responding to it.

Guests:

Erica Diaz-Cervantes, senior policy advocate, Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) - an organization committed to social, economic, and environmental justice for working-class and immigrant communities in California’s Central Coast; former underage farmworker

Robert J. Lopez, Pulitzer prize-winning independent journalist, and fellow at the McGraw Center for Business Journalism; his reporting is titled “California’s child farmworkers: Exhausted, underpaid and toiling in toxic fields” and “Lax oversight, few inspections leave child farmworkers exposed to toxic pesticides”

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In California, mobile homes make up to 6% of the state’s housing stock. With as many as 300,000 homes in 5,000 mobile home parks in the state, they play a critical role in providing affordable housing. But state laws and efforts by for-profit developers to buy up mobile home communities are putting this kind of housing at risk. We talk to experts about the challenges mobile home owners face.

Guests:

Bruce Stanton, general counsel, Golden State Manufactured Home Owners League

Mary Currie, resident, Marin Valley Mobile Country Club

Randy Keller, advocacy manager, manufactured home parks acquisition, California Center for Cooperative Development

Mariah Thompson, senior litigator, California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc.

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In groundbreaking experiments with mice, Boston University neuroscientist Steve Ramirez has succeeded in turning memories on and off, even implanting new ones. He says that someday we’ll be able to do the same in humans. But should we? We talk to Ramirez about the ethical dilemma and the personal experience that caused him to consider erasing his own memory. His new book is “How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past.”

Guests:

Steve Ramirez, Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Boston University

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On the bus and in the grocery store line, more and more people are keeping their AirPods in. While we work, while we walk, while we shower, even while we fall asleep — we listen. But what does constant listening do to our attention, our relationships, and the social fabric we all share? We talk about constant audio consumption and its cognitive and cultural costs.

Guests:

Jenny Odell, artist and critic, author of "How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy" and "Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock"

Gloria Mark, Professor Emerita of Informatics, University of California, Irvine - her recent book is "Attention Span"; her Substack is called "The Future of Attention"

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