KQED's Forum

In the fall of 1967 Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther party, was charged with shooting and killing a police officer on the streets of West Oakland. The trial that followed came to revolutionize the jury selection process in criminal proceedings and put the then relatively unknown Panther Party into the national spotlight. The film “American Justice on Trial” premiering Friday at the SF Film Festival examines the trial and its consequences. Forum talks with the film's producer as well as Huey Newton’s brother, Melvin, and David Harper, jury foreman during the historic trial which changed his life, and the lives of many others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Airlines, transit agencies and rideshare companies across the country are no longer requiring passengers and staff to wear face coverings after a federal judge in Florida on Monday struck down federal mask mandates for public transportation. That’s leaving travelers to navigate a patchwork of local rules and raising health and safety questions for some. We’ll talk about the impact of the ruling, which the Department of Justice may appeal, and hear how you’re feeling about going maskless on airplanes, trains and buses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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