KQED's Forum

For the first time since the start of the pandemic, San Francisco's Museum of the African Diaspora reopened its doors to the public last week. Featured in the museum's newly renovated space are the first solo exhibitions of two of Africa's most critically-acclaimed contemporary artists: Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo and Malawi-born, Johannesburg-based Billie Zangewa. We'll talk with the curators about the shows, which both center and celebrate the Black gaze.

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Top oil and gas executives from Chevron, ExxonMobile, BP America and Shell will testify Thursday before a house committee examining the fossil fuel industry’s role in promoting climate disinformation. The probe, which House Democrats plan to model on the Big Tobacco hearings of the 1990s, will examine whether Big Oil has misled Americans about how fossil fuels have contributed to climate change and whether those companies can be held accountable. We’ll preview the hearing and also hear about efforts to hold responsible parties in the oil spill in Southern CA earlier this month.

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San Jose’s food scene has long flown under the radar. It’s overshadowed by the established culinary reputations of its San Francisco and Oakland neighbors and the city suffers from its association with frequently derided tech culture. But KQED food editor Luke Tsai says he’d rather eat in San Jose than almost anywhere else in the Bay Area. Tsai says San Jose’s robust immigrant communities have formed a thriving and diverse dining experience that deserves more time in the spotlight. Tsai joins us to talk more about the San Jose food scene and some of his favorite restaurants in the city.

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Sonoma County has seen a 100-year flood, a historic drought and six major wildfires that have left death and destruction in their wake, and subjected residents to months of bad air days and routine power shut-offs -- just in the last four years. What does living with chronic catastrophes like these do to people? How does it affect their minds, bodies and spirits? The four-part podcast, “Chronic Catastrophe,” led by journalism students at Santa Rosa Junior College, takes up that question, interviewing experts and local residents about the real impacts of climate change on people’s lives. We’ll talk with the podcast’s producers about the series and their own personal experiences coping through “chronic catastrophe.”

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"Judging is not for the faint of heart," writes Judge LaDoris Cordell in her new memoir "Her Honor." Over two decades, as the first Black female jurist to sit on a superior court in Northern California, Cordell oversaw thousands of civil and criminal cases, many of which laid bare for her the racial biases and other structural flaws that infect the legal system. We'll talk about her experiences on the bench and her proposals to reform how justice is administered in U.S. courts.

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After a flood of criticism from parents, three members of the San Francisco Board of Education are facing recall in a special election set for Feb. 15. Recall supporters accused the board members of mismanaging school re-openings during the pandemic, misplacing energy on renaming schools and changing the admissions process for Lowell High School, the elite magnet school, and being ill-prepared to steward the district’s finances amid a looming $116 million budget deficit. We’ll discuss what’s next for the school board.

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It's hard to talk about death. And the COVID-19 pandemic has made those conversations even harder, as families have grappled with the sudden illness of loved ones and hospital protocols have shifted those freighted interactions to Zoom. We’ll talk about how to start conversations about end-of-life care, post-mortem wishes and estate planning. And we want to hear from you: Has the pandemic inspired you to make an end-of-life plan? What advice do you need to have an effective conversation about death with your loved ones?

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When he founded the Internet Archive 25 years ago, Brewster Kahle ambitiously set out to create a modern-day library that would “create a permanent memory for the Web that can be leveraged to make a new Global Mind.” Housed in a former church on Funston Street in San Francisco, the archive has amassed 70 million gigabytes of data that includes 65 million books, texts, movies, audio files, and images. Its Wayback Machine has saved more than 653 billion web pages and counting. While Kahle’s ideals have stayed steady, the internet has radically changed. We’ll talk with Kahle and a panel of experts about what the internet is, could be and should be.  

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The Bay Area was hit with historic levels of rain on Sunday, causing massive flooding in Marin and power outages for close to 150,000 households. We'll get an update on the damage caused and talk about whether this extreme weather may be the new normal.

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Every year about 500,000 Americans who give birth experience anxiety, guilt and insomnia after their baby is born -- and some are even suicidal. The postpartum mental health care they receive varies greatly. Mother and Baby Units are considered the gold standard of inpatient psychiatric care for new mothers in England and several other countries, but none exist in the U.S., despite mental health issues being one of the leading causes of maternal death. We’ll look at the differences in postpartum mental health care in the U.S. and the U.K, and learn about California’s first inpatient perinatal psychiatry unit.

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