KQED's Forum

Just 22 percent of California communities vulnerable to wildfires have comprehensive, publicly available evacuation plans. That's according to a recent analysis by the USA Today Network-California, a collaboration of newsrooms around the state. We'll talk about new research into effective evacuation systems and what emergency management officials have learned about safe escape in the aftermath of the state's devastating wildfires.

As secretary of defense, Ash Carter urged the Pentagon to “think outside” of its “five-sided box.” Now, his new memoir offers a rare glance inside that five-sided box, recalling Carter’s decades of work at the Department of Defense. It offers a “user’s guide” to the $700 billion defense budget, a consideration of global trouble spots and an analysis of how the U.S. military could maintain its technological edge. Technology was a focus of Carter’s career; in 2016, he helped create the “Hack the Pentagon” program that offered payment for finding software bugs in Defense Department websites. Carter joins us to discuss America’s security challenges and his book “Inside The Five-Sided Box.”

More than 900,000 California seniors 65 and older are working or trying to get a job. That's up from 590,000 in 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Some seniors are choosing to work for a company or cause they love, but many others are caught up in a rising senior poverty rate. In this hour, we'll hear about the increase in working seniors, the challenges they face and what the state is doing to address the financial needs of this growing demographic.

Many seniors want to stay in their own homes as they age, but mental and physical limitations often get in the way. In this hour, we look at when aging in place is a viable option, how to make homes more accessible and what resources are available to support seniors and their caregivers.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Rick Atkinson writes that reading George Washington's frequent complaints about his troops "transforms the demigod into a sometimes petulant mortal." As Atkinson’s history of the Revolutionary War digs into the details of war and contemporary writings, it provides a rich, harsh portrait of the country's often simplified creation story. Atkinson joins Forum to talk about his book "The British Are Coming" and why Americans should still be taking lessons from the country’s founding.

Federal scientists say they will investigate why an unusual number of gray whales are washing up dead on West Coast beaches. About 70 whales have been found dead so far this year on the coasts of California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska, the most since 2000. In the Bay Area alone, at least 13 dead whales have washed ashore. We’ll talk with the Marine Mammal Center's Bill Keener about what’s going on and why it's happening.

California would be the first state in the nation to provide health care to some undocumented adults, under an agreement reached by Democratic lawmakers yesterday. We’ll discuss the latest on Governor Newsom’s first state budget.

The Department of Health and Human Services announced Thursday that it will no longer fund any research involving human fetal tissue conducted by in-house scientists at the National Institutes of Health. The Department also announced the immediate cancellation of NIH funding directed to UCSF for HIV research using fetal tissue. We'll talk about the politics and ideology behind the move and what the change means for medical research.

Monterey Bay is a marine sanctuary hiding a dirty secret: microplastics. Beneath the beautiful blue waters is a sea of tiny, plastic bits of debris in concentrations comparable to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, according to new research. The study, published Thursday by the Monterey Bay Research Institute and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, finds that this type of plastic pollution appears to be everywhere in the world’s oceans. Forum explores the issue of plastics pollution and what can be done about it.

Over the past 20 years, Stanford School of Medicine psychiatrist Shaili Jain has seen many traumas that can prompt post-traumatic stress disorder, from family violence, to a close escape from a major accident or fire, to being robbed. Dr. Jain joins us to talk about new treatments for PTSD, which affects an estimated 6 million people in the United States. She'll also discuss her new book “The Unspeakable Mind: Stories of Trauma and Healing from the Frontlines of PTSD Science."