KQED's Forum - TopPodcast.com

Latest Episodes:

Eric Garcia’s ‘We’re Not Broken’ Aims to Change the Conversation About Autism Oct 08, 2021

Show notes

For decades, organizations, doctors and parents focused on treating autism as a disease and steered millions of dollars in funding to find a “cure” instead of to provide services to autistic people. Political journalist Eric Garcia chronicles that history in his new book “We’re not Broken: Changing The Autism Conversation,” and draws on his own experience as an autistic person to lay out the ongoing challenges and misperceptions they face. Garcia points out that autistic people are often portrayed as white male children or engineers, when in fact autistic people come in every gender and ethnic background. We talk with Garcia about why autism is so misunderstood and how to change the narrative.

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Lunches That Got You Through The Pandemic Oct 08, 2021

Show notes

Has all the pandemic time in your home kitchen perfected your souffli? Or maybe you've realized it's possible to survive on just condiments. For a lot of us our cooking habits vacillated during this time between unrealistically high culinary expectations and dispiritingly low ones. But hopefully you've found at least a few just right, joy bringing, doable dishes that have brought comfort to your day. We want to hear about those meals.

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California's Newly Minted Laws Oct 08, 2021

Show notes

Governor Gavin Newsom has until October 10th to sign or veto the bills on his desk. We'll talk with KQED's politics team's Katie Orr and Marisa Lagos about some of the bills he's signed into law, including drug sentencing reform and the nation's first ban on nonconsensual removal of a condom during sex. And we'll look at some of the closely watched bills still waiting on a decision.

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Is Your Pandemic Gray Hair Here to Stay? Oct 07, 2021

Show notes

The pandemic forced many of us to rethink cultural norms — one being the expectation that people, especially women and younger folks, should color or hide their roots. Amid salon closures and cancelled social events, many people chose to grow out their gray hair, and some are sticking with the look. We’ll talk about why for some the choice to go gray can feel fraught, and why for others it brings a sense of empowerment. And we want to hear from you: Did you decide to grow out your gray hair during the pandemic? Or are you on the fence about whether to forgo the dye? What does gray hair mean to you?

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What Memes Say About Hispanic Heritage Month Oct 07, 2021

Show notes

Hispanic Heritage Month ends Oct. 15, and in a recent column for the Los Angeles Times, staff writer Daniel Hernandez explores the meaning behind the plethora of ironic memes that have popped up to celebrate and poke fun at the occasion. Some of the memes offer ironic takes on popular songs, characters such as Mama Coco from the movie “Coco,” and customs such as eating a tortilla slathered with butter or using ovens to store pots and pans. Hernandez joins us to discuss the memes and the deeper themes they reveal about, as he writes, “the state of ambivalence that we have about ourselves, and that non-Latino Americans continue to have about us.”

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Two Californians win Nobel Prize for Research on How We Sense Touch, Temperature and Pain Oct 07, 2021

Show notes

Two California scientists, David Julius from UCSF and Ardem Patapoutian from San Diego's Scripps Research, have won the 2021 Nobel Prize for medicine. In their work, which focuses on the biology of our senses, Julius and Patapoutian identified receptors that allow the cells in your body to sense touch and temperature. Their findings hold potential medical applications for better treatment of chronic pain. We talk with the prize-winning researchers about their work.

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Journalist Ben Fong-Torres Subject of New Documentary About His Life and Work Oct 06, 2021

Show notes

Not many people get a backstage pass to history, but Ben Fong-Torres has. As a writer and music editor for Rolling Stone magazine, Fong-Torres stood at the center of an era of rock and roll from which acts like Bob Dylan, The Doors, the Grateful Dead and Elton John emerged, and his writing was so revered by musicians that Fong-Torres was often the only journalist bands would talk to. A new documentary by Suzanne Joe Kai taps into Fong-Torres’ personal archives and includes interviews with him as well as some of his famous subjects to tell the story of how Fong-Torres, the Bay Area-born son of Chinese immigrants, found himself in the middle of the cultural zeitgeist. We’ll talk to Fong-Torres about the film, which will be shown at the upcoming Mill Valley Film Festival.

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Why the History of Chavez Ravine Still Haunts Dodger Stadium Oct 06, 2021

Show notes

During a recent Los Angeles Dodgers game, three people sprinted across the field waving banners with the names of former neighborhoods -- Bishop, La Loma and Palo Verde -- that were razed on the land that is now home to the team’s stadium. The protest was an attempt to call attention to a piece of L.A. history known as the Battle of Chavez Ravine, when in the 1950s city officials displaced roughly 1,800 mostly Mexican American families from the area. Officials promised to build a new public housing complex where the families could live, but instead sold the land to the Dodgers to build a stadium. We talk about that history and Mexican Americans’ deep and complicated relationship with the team.

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'System Error’ Describes What’s Wrong with Big Tech Oct 06, 2021

Show notes

During the past decade, widespread optimism for what technology could accomplish turned into a backlash against Silicon Valley and what it has spawned. Social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter hold enormous power over our economies and lives, but nobody is quite sure how to rein in the companies. In their new book, “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot,” three Stanford University professors from different fields spell out exactly what has gone wrong and offer ideas to hold the powerful accountable in meaningful ways.

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Anita Hill on America's Ongoing Reckoning with Gender-Based Violence Oct 05, 2021

Show notes

It's been 30 years since Anita Hill testified before an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee during Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearing, describing how he sexually harassed her in the workplace. Anita Hill joins us to reflect on that experience, which she says laid bare the systemic faults in a confirmation process that still casts doubt on the credibility of women, and to talk about her new book "Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence."

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