KQED's Forum - TopPodcast.com

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Looking Back at Oakland’s Golden Age of Restaurants and What's Next Apr 20, 2022

Show notes

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 on Humanizing the Conversation Around Incarceration Apr 20, 2022

Show notes

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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Haider Warraich Mines the Nature of Pain in 'The Song of Our Scars' Apr 19, 2022

Show notes

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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Jennifer Egan’s ‘Goon Squad’ Follow-Up ‘The Candy House’ Examines Role of Fiction and Memory in an Online World Apr 19, 2022

Show notes

“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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Changing Your Name to ‘Fit In’ in America Apr 18, 2022

Show notes

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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What the COVID Bump in the Northeast Could Mean for the Bay Area Apr 18, 2022

Show notes

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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How the Tax Code Helps Preserve “The Whiteness of Wealth” Apr 15, 2022

Show notes

Author and Emory University professor Dorothy Brown says she became a tax lawyer to avoid dealing with race. “I learned early on that people might look at me and see black, but as far as tax law was concerned, the only color that mattered was green,” she writes in her book “The Whiteness of Wealth”. But it soon became clear to her that America’s tax system was worsening the country’s racial wealth gap, which it also helped create. As we approach tax day, we’ll talk with Brown about her new book and how the tax code is stacked against Black Americans.

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Procrastinating with the Weirdness of Wikipedia Apr 15, 2022

Show notes

Tax Day is coming up. If you’re a procrastinator, instead of compiling your receipts and looking for your W-2 form, you may have gone down a rabbit hole online— and there is no deeper rabbit hole than the one provided by Wikipedia. From the Streisand Effect to fart lightning to the lost state of Westsylvania, the social media account Depths of Wikipedia is dedicated to chronicling the weird and wonderful facts and articles on the internet’s free encyclopedia. We’ll explore some of the strangest topics, passages and photos on the site, and hear some of your favorite entries.

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The Songs That Make California’s Soundtrack Apr 14, 2022

Show notes

California living has inspired songwriters across generations and genres – from Otis Redding “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” to pop star Katy Perry saluting “California Gurls” to hip hop artists Dr. Dre and Tupac proclaiming “California Love.” The Golden State has also inspired many a playlist, including the “California Playlist” currently being crowd-sourced by The New York Times California Today newsletter. We’ll talk about and play some of the songs that make up the soundtrack of California and hear what songs capture the essence of California for you.

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‘First Lady of Native Radio’ Peggy Berryhill on the Voices of Gualala Apr 14, 2022

Show notes

Owner and manager of KGUA in Gualala, California, Peggy Berryhill has been described as “The First Lady of Native Radio.” As the host of KGUA’s flagship program “Peggy’s Place,” Berryhill spotlights community members: its artists, librarians and lighthouse operator. Part of the Muscogee Nation, Berryhill has worked over her more than four decades-long career to push back on Native stereotypes in mainstream coverage and has collected and preserved hundreds of hours of interviews with Native community members. She joins us on this episode of Forum to discuss the importance of community radio and of hearing Native voices.

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