KQED's Forum

Reem Assil, owner of San Francisco and Oakland’s Reem’s Kitchen, began her career as a chef with a thirst for activism, often advocating for social justice and sustainability at work. As the opening chef of Dyafa, an Arab fine-dining restaurant in Oakland, Assil began to reimagine power dynamics in the kitchen which she boldly reflected on in her Eater article, “Don’t Call Me Chef.” Assil joins Forum to talk about her new book, “Arabiyya: Recipes from the Life of an Arab in Diaspora,” in which she weaves personal essays on food, family, identity, hospitality, activism and political struggles amid recipes influenced by Arab flavors.

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“If we don’t want to live in a nepotistic society, we have to stop practicing nepotism,” Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard V. Reeves writes in a recent Atlantic piece titled, “Why the U.S. Needs to End Legacy Admissions.” Legacy admissions — when preference is given to college applicants who are related to an alum — is facing heightened scrutiny in the U.S. Some schools are abandoning the practice, and some state and federal lawmakers are seeking to curtail it. In California, a 2019 law requires four-year colleges that consider legacy status in admissions – such as Stanford and the University of Southern California – to disclose their practices. We’ll take a look at the nationwide pressures mounting against legacy admissions and hear your views.

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In the fall of 1967 Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther party, was charged with shooting and killing a police officer on the streets of West Oakland. The trial that followed came to revolutionize the jury selection process in criminal proceedings and put the then relatively unknown Panther Party into the national spotlight. The film “American Justice on Trial” premiering Friday at the SF Film Festival examines the trial and its consequences. Forum talks with the film's producer as well as Huey Newton’s brother, Melvin, and David Harper, jury foreman during the historic trial which changed his life, and the lives of many others.

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Airlines, transit agencies and rideshare companies across the country are no longer requiring passengers and staff to wear face coverings after a federal judge in Florida on Monday struck down federal mask mandates for public transportation. That’s leaving travelers to navigate a patchwork of local rules and raising health and safety questions for some. We’ll talk about the impact of the ruling, which the Department of Justice may appeal, and hear how you’re feeling about going maskless on airplanes, trains and buses.

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About a decade ago national publications started paying a lot of attention to Oakland’s food scene. The city burst out of San Francisco’s shadow to become a distinct culinary city in its own right. KQED Food Editor Luke Tsai writes that the buzziest of Oakland’s “golden age” restaurants were headed by women of color, “charismatic chefs who were cooking food that was deeply personal, reflecting the cultures that shaped their identities—Afro-Caribbean, Mexican, Korean, Lao.” But over the years notable favorites like Brown Sugar Kitchen, Fuse Box and Juhu Beach Club have closed, and this month beloved Miss Ollie’s has shut its doors. We’ll talk with Luke Tsai and Miss Ollie’s owner Sarah Kirnon about the forces that changed Oakland’s restaurant scene and we want to hear from you. What do you remember from that era? What restaurants are exciting to you now?

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Marlene Sanchez grew up in San Francisco’s Mission District and experienced the effects of the criminal justice system from an early age. She landed in juvenile detention after getting into a fight at school, an experience that led her to community organizing and activism by the time she was 15. Now she’s the new executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, working to end mass incarceration. We’ll talk with Sanchez, the first woman of color to lead the organization, about the fight for criminal justice reform, advocating for incarcerated women and what it means to invest in communities of color.

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Pain is a "hallmark of consciousness among all beings," writes physician Haider Warraich in his new book "The Song of Our Scars." Pain, he explains, is also gendered, racial and above all so personal that it's the one thing truly our own. Like an estimated 1.5 billion people worldwide, Warraich himself lives with chronic pain, brought on by a devastating back injury. We'll talk to Warraich about the biology of pain and how we experience what he calls our most complicated sensation.

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“Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free,” warns a character in “The Candy House,” illuminating the novel’s larger curiosity around Big Tech in its setting: a world where minds and memories can be uploaded to the cloud and accessed by others. “The Candy House” is Jennifer Egan’s follow-up to her 2010 novel “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. Known for its inventive playing with form — each chapter can be read as an independent short story, with distinct and yet interconnected characters; one chapter is told entirely through PowerPoint — “Goon Squad” introduced some of the characters and storytelling techniques continued and expanded in this new novel. Egan joins us to discuss storytelling in our online age and why she considers this book an “homage to fiction.”

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What’s in a name? The question originally posed by Shakespeare is also the title of New York University sophomore Aria Young’s winning entry to this year’s NPR College Podcast Challenge. Young changed her name from 杨沁悦, or Yáng Qìn Yuè, when she moved to Pennsylvania from Shanghai for high school because her original name was “too hard for the English tongue to pronounce,” she says in the podcast. But sometimes she feels her adopted last name isn’t quite right either. We’ll talk about what it means to change your name to “fit in” in America, or to have learned your family has done so, and we’ll hear from listeners about what their names mean to them.

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Coronavirus cases are on the rise in the northeastern United States, driven by the highly transmissible BA.2, a subvariant of Omicron. We’ll look at what the increase portends for the Bay Area, where cases remain relatively low amid loosening restrictions. And we’ll get the latest on the Covid lockdowns in China which have led to clashes with police over evictions and food shortages.

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