KQED's Forum

Oakland based writer Carvell Wallace has written searchingly and compassionately about Mr. Rogers, Michael B Jordan, abortion rights, race, parenting, bicycling, basketball and so much more. Running through all of his work is the question of how to be a good person in a deeply flawed world. “I’ve long thought that the only thing that really matters is how we treat each other,” he said. “It’s why I focus my writing on our shared humanity, and the struggles we go through to find love and liberation.” Carvell Wallace has just won the American Mosaic Journalism prize and its 100,000 dollar award. He joins us in studio to talk about his work.

Guests:

Carvell Wallace, writer; 2023 recipient of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize - he's working on a memoir about childhood trauma

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Atlantic staff writer Jennifer Senior is 53 in real life, but she says that in her head she’s "suspended at 36." That was the age she was secure professionally but still full of potential, paired up with her husband “but not yet lost in the marshes of a long marriage." In "The Age in Your Head," which appears in the April issue of the magazine, Senior explores the discrepancy many of us feel between our real age and our "subjective age" and why experiences like a pandemic or trauma can freeze us in time.

Guests:

Jennifer Senior, staff writer, The Atlantic - author of the article "The Age in Your Head." Her forthcoming book is "On Grief."

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UC Berkeley plans to keep fighting to build a dorm for more than 1,000 students on People’s Park, a university-owned site that is known as a haven for unhoused people and social justice movements. A state appellate court stopped the project and called for the university to revise its environmental impact report, looking more closely at noise impacts from students. The legal saga over the dorm illustrates a predicament many of the state’s colleges and universities face: a dire need to house a growing number of students amid community opposition to new housing. We’ll talk about why it’s so hard to build student housing in California.

Guests:

Su Jin Jez, CEO, California Competes - a nonpartisan policy and research organization focused on the intersection of higher education, equity, and the economy.

Bill Fulton, urban planner, William Fulton Group; author, "Place and Prosperity: How Cities Help Us to Connect and Innovate"

Ryan Loyola, student, UC Santa Cruz

Katie Lauer, Berkeley news reporter, The Mercury News

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Americans love to talk about our generational differences. Gen Xers complain about Millennials, Millennials can’t relate to Gen Z and on and on. But those defining distinctions are mostly contrived, their boundaries mushy. Except for one generation: Baby Boomers. The postwar population explosion dramatically changed the country and the boomers have dominated culture, politics and the economy since coming of age. But things are changing. Last year those who were born in the peak of the boom turned 65. “We are living through a historic disruption of the American empire,” writes Philip Bump, in his new book, “The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America”. We’ll talk to Bump, a Washington Post columnist focused on the numbers behind politics, about the new demographic changes and what a future without America’s most powerful, influential generation might look like.

Guests:

Philip Bump, national columnist, Washington Post; author, "The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America"

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Seventy-five years ago, a plane crashed outside of Coalinga in California’s Central Valley. Twenty-eight of the 32 passengers killed were migrant workers in the Bracero Program, being deported back to Mexico. Unlike the flight’s white passengers and crew, whose bodies were sent home to their families, the Mexican citizens were buried unceremoniously in a mass grave, their names omitted from the headstone. Tim Hernandez is working to identify their names, families and stories and he joins us to talk about the importance of remembering.

Related link(s):

'All They Will Call You Will Be Deportee': 75 Years Later, Uncovering the Lives of the Braceros Who Died in a Fiery California Plane Crash, The California Report Magazine

Guests:

Tim Z. Hernandez, author, "All They Will Call You"

Mireya Loza, associate professor of history, Georgetown University; author, "Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom"

Michael Rodríguez III, ethnic studies teacher in Santa Ana and great-nephew of María Rodríguez Santana, victim of the plane crash

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It seems like actor and director Randall Park has been in everything. “Veep.” “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “WandaVision.” “Aquaman.” He played an amiable version of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in the movie “The Interview.” He starred in and co-wrote the Netflix hit movie “Always Be My Maybe” with Ali Wong. And his single scene in “The Office” playing the Asian version of lead character Jim is a viral favorite. But Park’s breakthrough role didn’t come until he was 40 when he booked the hit ABC series “Fresh Off the Boat.” And that success came after many years living at home with his parents and hustling for guest roles and small parts anywhere he could find them. We’ll talk to Park about his career, his directorial debut, “Shortcomings,” and what it means to find success in a fickle industry like show biz.

Guests:

Randall Park, actor and director. Park's debut directorial feature "Shortcomings" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Park has starred in the Netflix movie "Always Be My Maybe" and the ABC series "Fresh Off the Boat" and will next be in "Strays" with Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx

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Mexican Americans make up the majority of the labor force sustaining California’s wine industry. And, yet, they only make up about 1 percent of the roughly 4,800 wine producers in the state. A handful of Mexican-American families, including the Robledos and Cejas of Sonoma County,established their labels decades ago. Now newer brands are popping up, such as Healdsburg’s Aldina Vineyards and Seis Soles in Lodi. We’ll talk with some of the Mexican Americans reshaping California’s wine industry and bringing an old tradition to a new crop of consumers.

Guests:

Gabriela Fernandez, host, The Big Sip podcast - She also curates lifestyle and educational event experiences for Duckhorn Vineyards.

Lazaro Robledo, president of sales, Robledo Family Winery

Monica Lopez, co-founder, Aldina Vineyards

Christoper Rivera, owner and winemaker, Seis Soles Wine Co.

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Mehdi Hasan says he has been arguing all his life, and he’s made a career of it as a formidable interviewer known for challenging presidents and prime ministers on his MSNBC and Al Jazeera news programs. To him, a good-faith debate is not only the “lifeblood of democracy” but it’s also fun, and he wants us all to learn the craft. We’ll hear how to captivate and persuade an audience, use pathos and humor and handle low-information interlocutors. Hasan’s new book is “Win Every Argument.”

Guests:

Mehdi Hasan, journalist and host, "The Mehdi Hasan Show" on MSNBC and Peacock - His new book is "Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading and Public Speaking"

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The latest generation of chatbots, powered by their ingestion of huge chunks of writing from the internet, have continued to wow and frighten. ChatGPT and an experimental bot from Microsoft’s Bing are shockingly fluent in English. And being humans, we struggle to imagine anything that could master our language without tremendous intelligence. So, what, then, do we make of a machine that can output sentences in any style about any thing? Forum brings together three people – a writer, a coder and a policy expert working on ethics guidelines for AI – to help us make sense of this new generation of tools.

Guests:

Simon Willison, independent researcher and developer

Ted Chiang, science fiction writer; author, "Exhalation: Stories." His latest piece for The New Yorker is "ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web."

Claire Leibowicz, head of AI & media integrity, Partnership on AI

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Across the U.S., migrant children are employed in violation of child labor laws, in under-the-table operations and in global corporations alike, according to a new New York Times investigation. They work in dangerous conditions in construction, in factories and in slaughterhouses. They work long hours in kitchens, hotels and farm fields. They fall asleep in high school after working night shifts; some drop out of school altogether. Reporter Hannah Dreier spoke with more than 100 migrant child workers in 20 states as well as the companies employing them and the government agencies meant to protect them. She joins to talk about how this “new economy of exploitation” exploded over the past two years and how the Biden Administration has responded to her reporting.

Guests:

Hannah Dreier, reporter on the investigations team, The New York Times

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