KQED's Forum

Three historic BIPOC-focused media outlets are celebrating anniversaries this fall - India Currents turns 35, Willie Ratliff, the publisher of San Francisco Bayview National Black Newspaper turns 90, and the Mission’s El Tecolote turns 52. These outlets may be small (compared to the mainstream media) but they are mighty. We’ll find out how their communities sustained their local media through the pandemic, and how the outlets sustained their communities in turn. Thriving together through difficult times. Guests:Vandana Kumar, Editor-in-chief, publisher and co-founder, India Currents.Nube Brown, Editor-in-chief, San Francisco Bayview National Black Newspaper.Alexis Terrazas, Editor-in-chief, El Tecolote. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The California condor is not one of nature’s cutest birds, but it is probably one of its most compelling. The largest bird in North America, the condor has a wingspan measuring nine and a half feet. It can fly at speeds up to 50 miles per hour, glide at 15,000 feet in the air without flapping, and can cover 150 miles a day. The condor once flew freely across the west, but by 1982, only 23 condors remained in existence worldwide, and by 1987, all living condors were in captive breeding programs. The success of those programs has allowed the reintroduction of the condor to the wild, and this year, the condor was reintroduced to Northern California in partnership with the federal government and partners like the Yurok Tribe. We’ll talk to experts about reintroducing a species to the wild, and hear from you: What comes to mind when you think of the California condor?Guests:Tiana Wiliams-Claussen, Director, Yurok Tribe Wildlife Department.Joe Burnett, Senior Wildlife Biologist and California Condor Recovery Program Manager, Ventana Wildlife Society.Ashleigh Blackford, California Condor Coordinator & At-Risk Species Coordinator, U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With the goal of helping San Francisco’s under-resourced students develop their voices as writers, the nonprofit 826 Valencia — founded at that exact address in San Francisco’s Mission District — turned 20 this year. There are now nine 826 chapters nationwide, and in San Francisco more than 5,600 students are served by the program in the back of its pirate store flagship, in its Tenderloin and Mission Bay centers and in eleven public schools across the city. Nearly 3 thousand students have been published in its writing collections and podcasts, proudly calling themselves published authors. We’ll hear some works by 826’s youth authors and talk with the founders and current team about the importance of celebrating — and publishing — youth voices.Related link(s):"Truth Of The Fenced Castle" by TiarriMore 826 Valencia PodcastsGuests:Dave Eggers, co-founder, 826 ValenciaNínive Calegari , co-founder, 826 ValenciaBita Nazarian, executive director, 826 ValenciaBianca Catalan, alumnus and Board Member, 826 Valencia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In one of her undergraduate history seminars, Harvard professor Drew Gilpin Faust recently discovered that the majority of her students could not read cursive. To them, it was like a foreign language. This is not surprising as cursive was not part of the Common Core educational standards introduced in 2010, though half of the nation’s states, including California, now include cursive in their curriculum. Some argue that computers have made the need for handwriting obsolete. But research suggests that handwriting, and cursive in particular, helps children read better and retain knowledge. What is lost when we cannot write or read in cursive? We’ll talk to experts on handwriting, and we’ll hear from you: Is cursive relevant anymore and how’s your handwriting?Guests:Drew Gilpin Faust, Arthur Kingsley University professor in History Organization, Harvard University - Faust is the former president of Harvard University; recent article for the Atlantic is titled, "Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive"Robert Wiley, assistant professor, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, GreensboroVirginia Berninger, professor emeritus, University of Washington College of EducationSandra Gutierrez, associate DIY Editor, Popular Science; recent article, "Wait, It's Not to Late to Get Good Handwriting" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jann Wenner started Rolling Stone magazine in San Francisco at the tender age of 21 – placing himself smack in the middle of 1967’s wild and groundbreaking music scene. We’ll talk with Wenner about San Francisco rock and roll, the legacy of Rolling Stone magazine and his new memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone”.Guests:Jann Wenner, founder, Rolling Stone Magazine; author of the memoir, "Like a Rolling Stone" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why do some people with mental illnesses recover while others with the same diagnosis don’t? According to New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv, the answer in part lies in the gap between people’s actual experiences and the language of contemporary psychiatry that names and defines their conditions. In her new book “Strangers to Ourselves” Aviv writes about people who she says “have come up against the limits of psychiatric ways of understanding themselves” -- a woman who stopped taking her meds because she didn’t know who she was without them, a man subject to years of failed psychoanalysis, and Aviv herself, who at age six was hospitalized for refusing to eat. We’ll talk to Aviv about her discoveries.Guests:Rachel Aviv, writer of "Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

President Biden says he aims to end hunger and food insecurity in the United States by 2030. Next week the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health will consider the policy changes needed to reach that goal. The last conference on hunger and health was in 1969 during the Nixon administration, and it led to many of the nation’s major health policies like child nutrition assistance and food stamps. We’ll talk about what hunger and food insecurity looks like in the U.S. now, and what it would take to ensure no Americans go hungry.Guests:Ahori Pathak, director of policy, Poverty to Prosperity Program at Center for American ProgressKassandra Martinchek, research associate, Urban InstituteDariush Mozaffarian, cardiologist and professor of nutrition, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University; co-chair of the Task Force on Hunger, Nutrition and health - an independent task force working to help inform the White House Conference Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ukraine surprised both Russia and the world last week with sharp counter offensives in the northeast that have retaken land occupied by Russian troops. Ukrainian forces liberating these areas have discovered not only hastily abandoned Russian outposts, but also further signs of war crimes: outside the town of Izium, a mass grave containing over 400 bodies, primarily civilians, some bearing evidence of torture, is in the process of being exhumed. As winter approaches, both sides of the war hope to make decisive progress and the United States on Friday pledged an additional $600 million to assist Ukraine. We’ll talk about where the war stands.Guests:Franklin Foer, staff writer, the Atlantic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Traveling on BART allows riders to move between Oakland to San Francisco in seven minutes – a modern convenience some people take for granted. The iconic light-rail system that makes it possible turns 50 this year. BART has grown from a dozen stations in 1972 to 50 connected by 131 miles of tracks. The milestone comes at a time when ridership hovers around 40 percent of pre-pandemic levels bringing major financial challenges. And, the current system still falls short of the original vision drawn up in the late 50s. We talk about how BART arrived at its current station and where the system plans to take us in the decades to come.  Guests:Dan Brekke, editor and reporter, KQED NewsRobert Powers, general manager, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)Lateefah Simon, BART Board member; president of Akonadi Foundation; co-chair of Governor Newsom's police reform task force Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The tech startup Sanas transforms accented English to a white, midwestern American voice. Sanas contends that this technology can help overseas call center workers who are dealing with racist harassment. But those who have studied call centers and the "white voice" say this only puts a filter over the very problems the technology aims to remedy. We'll talk with experts about intolerance for accented speech, the challenges facing international call center workers and what it means to “sound white.Related link(s):- Sanas, the buzzy Bay Area startup that wants to make the world sound whiterGuests:Sharath Keshava Narayana, Co-Founder & COO, SanasJoshua Bote, assistant news editor, SFGATEWinifred Poster, adjunct faculty in International Affairs, Washington University St. Louis; author, “Borders in Service: Enactments of Nationhood in Transnational Call Centres”Tom McEnaney, associate professor of Comparative Literature and of Spanish and Portuguese, UC Berkeley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices