KQED's Forum

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”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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"

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When writer Patricia Lockwood fell ill with Covid in March 2020, she says she felt insane for months, experiencing  “Brian fog” (not brain fog) and what she called “The Refrains,” where a single song lyric would play over and over in her mind. So she decided to make sense of it all by writing “a masterpiece about being confused.” We talk to Lockwood about what it was like to write while “insane” and edit while in full health, and how she found humor in the absurdity of illness. Her new novel is “Will There Ever Be Another You.”

Guests:

Patricia Lockwood, novelist and poet

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Giftflation is here. Prices for go-to gifts such as boxes of chocolates or the latest iPhone will be higher this year than last thanks to rising tariffs and inflation. And while consumers are anxious about the economy, they are still expected to break spending records by shelling out more than $1 trillion on holiday shopping. We’ll talk about your gift plans and hear tips from scouring craft fairs, to searching out meaningful finds from small businesses to going the  no-buy route such as gifting free babysitting or experiences.

Guests:

Amanda Mull, columnist, Bloomberg

Taylar Hagan-Colyar, founder, Sip Shop Eat!

Sarahjane Bernhisel, illustrator; co-founder, Bay Made

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With just weeks before enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expire for 22 million Americans, Congress faces mounting pressure to act on healthcare funding. We’ll talk about the negotiations unfolding on Capitol Hill, what we’re hearing from the White House and how the issue could shape the 2026 midterm elections.

Guests:

Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy, KFF - a nonpartisan health policy research, polling and news organization

Sam Liccardo, United States Representative, California's 16th Congressional District - includes Santa Clara and San Mateo counties

Jonathan Cohn, senior national correspondent, The Bulwark; author, "The Ten Year War: Obamacare and the Unfinished Crusade for Universal Coverage"

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Trump administration has paused all asylum immigration decisions, affecting more than a million people, following a shooting of two National Guard members allegedly by an Afghan asylum recipient. It’s just the latest in a series of escalating immigration restrictions that, according to experts, now target both undocumented immigrants and people who have entered the U.S. legally. For Afghan allies who worked with U.S. forces, the policy shift has been especially jarring: visa programs are on hold and previously approved cases are now under review. We’ll talk about what these sweeping changes mean for legal immigrants, asylum seekers, and the federal agencies carrying out deportations.

Guests:

Joseph Azam, board chair, Afghan-American Foundation

Nick Miroff, staff writer covering immigration, The Atlantic

Karen Musalo, professor of law and director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, UC Law San Francisco

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Journalist and author Simon Winchester says that wind is “a universal….It lifts seeds and supports birds and insects. It warms and it chills. It builds and creates; it ruins and destroys.” From a vibrating oboe reed to the fury of a hurricane, we talk to Winchester about how wind has shaped our lives and our planet — and how it’s shifting with climate change. His new book is “The Breath of the Gods.”

Guests:

Simon Winchester, journalist and author, "The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind" - his other books include "The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary" and "A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906"

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the U.S., it’s illegal to edit genes in human embryos with the intention of creating a genetically engineered baby. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Bay Area startups are focused on just that. It wouldn’t be the first such baby: in 2018, a Chinese scientist announced he had altered embryos to create a baby immune from HIV. He was sentenced to prison for the illegal practice of medicine. In the US and across the globe, ethical concerns about gene editing embryos to eliminate disease and replicate certain traits like a higher IQ are raising alarms. We’ll talk to experts about what is at stake and how innovations in genetic engineering are being directed.

Guests:

Dr. Fyodor Urnov, Professor of Molecular Therapeutics, University of California, Berkeley - Urnov is also the scientific director at its Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI)

Katherine Long, reporter, investigations team, Wall Street Journal - Long's latest piece is titled "Genetically Engineered Babies Are Banned. Tech Titans Are Trying to Make One Anyway"

Katie Hasson, executive director, Center for Genetics and Society

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices