KQED's Forum

From the undocumented immigrants who work in industrial slaughterhouses to the guards charged with keeping order in the most notorious U.S. prisons: they're the hidden workers journalist Eyal Press writes about in his latest book, "Dirty Work." Press explores the psychic and emotional toll borne by poor people and people of color who are disproportionately trapped in jobs that the public at large sees as morally tainted, but essential to maintaining our prevailing social order. We'll talk with Press about what he uncovered. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Forum Book Club pick for August 2021 is Nawaaz Ahmed’s debut novel “Radiant Fugitives.” Set in San Francisco in and around 2010, it tells the story of Seema, a lesbian and political organizer with doubts about the efficacy of politics even as she works on the campaigns of President Obama, District Attorney Kamala Harris and California’s 2008 proposition on gay marriage. Over the course of the final five days of her pregnancy, she tries to reconnect with her estranged, terminally ill mother who has travelled from India for the birth, and her devout Muslim sister, in from Texas. Narrated by Seema’s newborn son, the novel weaves together three generations’ stories, drawing inspiration from the Quran and the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Japanese baseball player Shohei Ohtani is having the season of his career. Last week the Los Angeles Angels pitcher hit his 40th home run of the season, setting a franchise record for the fastest player to reach the figure. Ohtani’s performance both on the mound and at the plate is drawing comparisons to another top pitcher with a big swing: baseball legend Babe Ruth. Amidst all the fanfare, though, Ohtani’s rising stardom is revealing long-standing biases in baseball and sports media after two commentators made ignorant and offensive remarks regarding his race and nationality. We’ll talk about the excitement surrounding Ohtani and his impact on baseball. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a story for the Los Angeles Times, journalist Tyrone Beason shines a light on the experience and history of Black Americans living in Palm Springs. While few in numbers, Black residents are part of a history that reaches back to the first half of the 20th century when, Beason writes, "hundreds of Black people from the South, and from Los Angeles and the Bay Area, settled in desert communities like Palm Springs." Beason interviews a number of current residents, some whose families have been in Palm Springs for generations, about the homes they've made in predominantly Black neighborhoods and the discrimination they've faced. Beason joins us to discuss how the U.S.'s legacy of segregated housing is reflected in Palm Springs and why Black Americans in California's desert assert they are "here to stay." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When visitors now walk into the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, they’ll face a mural outlining the earth’s strata designed by the late feminist artist Luchita Hurtado, part of BAMPFA’s newest exhibit “New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century.” The exhibit examines the feminist practice of more than 67 contemporary artists through pieces spanning the past two decades of feminist art. With sections dedicated to examining gender expansivity, the “male gaze” and women’s labor, the exhibit is part of a larger BAMPFA effort to bring together more than 100 arts organizations dedicated to social justice known as the Feminist Art Coalition. We’ll speak with the exhibit’s curator to discuss what it means to center feminism in 21st century art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her debut memoir, "Don’t Let it Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body," Savala Nolan’s 12 deeply personal essays probe unsettled territory in her own life. Nolan tackles motherhood, sex, and feelings of otherness from the perspective of a self-described big-bodied mixed-race woman. One essay recounts her persistent prenatal pain that was ignored by her white physicians despite multiple emergency room visits. The author and director of the Center for Social Justice at the University of California, Berkeley, joins us to share her observations about the way our culture treats Black women. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nearly half of California is mired in exceptional drought, including vast swaths of the Central Valley, which produces roughly 40% of the nation's fruits, vegetables and nuts. Water shortages in the region are having profound effects on growers, who are uprooting crops, letting fields lie fallow and turning their lands into solar farms and other uses. We'll hear from farmers about how the drought is affecting their operations and the steps they're taking to mitigate the worst impacts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Morgan, conductor of the Oakland Symphony Orchestra died last week at 63. Morgan was known as a virtuosic conductor and a passionate advocate for making classical music accessible to an Oakland community he was deeply invested in. He embraced a melding of musical genres, even bringing in comedian W. Kamau Bell and activist Dolores Huerta to curate playlists for his orchestra to perform. “Being a classical musician, being a conductor, being Black, being gay — all of these things put you on the outside,” Michael Morgan, said in 2013. “So you get accustomed to constructing your own world because there are not a lot of clear paths to follow and not a lot of people that are just like you.” We remember Michael Morgan with some of the musicians and performers he worked with. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Citizen app, which, like Nextdoor, has been blamed for inciting vigilantism, recently launched a private service of on-call safety experts that users can contact 24/7 for help. Called “Protect,” this service monitors a user’s location, connecting them with a Citizen employee who can decide to bump the situation up to a 911 call.  We’ll hear about the new frontier of safety apps and why critics say these crime and safety-reporting apps promote harassment, racial bias and over-surveillance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“The ‘zero COVID’ dream of fully stamping out the virus is a fantasy,” writes the Atlantic’s Ed Yong in his most recent piece, “How the Pandemic Now Ends.” Yong, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on COVID-19, updates his seminal March 2020 article “How the Pandemic Will End” in wake of the delta variant. Vaccines alone will not end the pandemic, he writes — the pandemic will now never fully end, it will mutate into an endemic. But how long it takes for that to happen depends on mitigation efforts — many of which have been eschewed by state and local governments in an attempt to return to “normalcy.” He joins us to discuss this stage of the pandemic’s estimated impacts on hospitals and vulnerable populations as well as how we’ll reach the light at the end of the tunnel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices