Category Archives: Podcast

Podcast

Forum from the Archives: Have We Learned How to Talk About GLP1s?

Audio

Airdate: Tuesday, June 30 at 10 AM

An estimated one in eight Americans has now tried a GLP-1 medication like Ozempic or Wegovy: to lose weight, manage diabetes or experiment with anecdotal, off-label benefits. Yet GLP-1s can be hard to talk about — whether you want to ask someone if they take one, respond if you do, or discuss weight without dredging up unhealthy diet discourse. We’ll hear how you’re navigating these conversations in the age of GLP-1s. Tell us: How are GLP-1s showing up in your world?

Podcast

Forum from the Archives: Tune-Yards’ Merrill Garbus on How She Makes Her Signature Sounds

Audio

Airdate: Tuesday, June 30 at 9 AM

Oakland based art-pop band Tune-Yards is widely loved for their complex and funky rhythms, layers of sound, thrillingly dynamic vocals, and thought provoking lyrics. Last year, the duo, Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner, released a new album, “Better Dreaming,”which was praised by critics as highly danceable and jubilant while, as always, grappling with the state of the world. As part of our week-long celebration of Bay Area music, we listen back to our interview, listening party and live music demonstrations Merrill Garbus.

Podcast

Forum from the Archives: Ranchers vs. Wolves: Navigating a Controversial Comeback

Audio

Airdate: Monday, June 29 at 10 AM

After a century-long absence, gray wolves are returning to California. Biologists estimate some 70 wolves are living in the state, and recently, a female wolf traveled into Los Angeles County, the first such sighting. But their comeback is not without controversy. Ranchers in rural counties say they’re losing livestock to predation, while conservationists say the wolves bring ecological benefits as they reclaim part of their historic range. How do you think the state should manage our wolves?

Podcast

Forum from the Archives: Mariachi San Jose Performs Live in Studio

Audio

Airdate: Monday, June 29 at 9 AM

For people of Mexican descent, mariachi music is synonymous with milestones such as weddings, birthday parties, funerals or maybe just Saturday-morning chores. The genre, which originated in the 18th century in the western state of Jalisco, has morphed into one of Mexico’s most beloved styles of music that is now popular worldwide. In California, more high schools and colleges such as San Jose State have added mariachi music programs. As part of our week celebrating local music, we’ll listen back on our show with Mariachi San Jose, an ensemble of college students, who joined us in studio for a special live performance.

Podcast

‘Toy Story 5’ Goes to Infinity and Beyond as Its Toys Confront Technology

Audio

Airdate: Friday, June 26 at 9 AM

Thirty years ago, a cowboy doll and a space ranger taught a generation that the toys in our closets might have inner lives of their own. Pixar’s beloved gang returns in Toy Story 5 — and this time, the threat to playtime isn’t a rival toy or a forgetful kid heading off to college. It’s the glowing rectangle in every child’s hands: a tablet. We’ll hear from the film’s co-director Kenna Harris and its producer Lindsey Collins about the joys and challenges of reviving this beloved franchise.

Podcast

Why Pete Hegseth is Blocking Black Officer Promotions

Audio

Airdate: Friday, June 26 at 10 AM

During his second term, President Trump has taken aim at DEI initiatives across the federal government, a focus that has been embraced by his cabinet. Deriding “affirmative action promotions,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth directly intervened to block the promotions of more than a dozen Black and women officers. The Atlantic’s Clint Smith recently reported on those snubs and how the Pentagon’s history of prominent Black service members has been scrubbed from public view; he joins us to share their stories.

Podcast

As the U.S. Nears 250 Years, What Was Happening in the Bay Area?

Audio

Airdate: Thursday, June 25 at 9 AM

As our nation nears its 250th anniversary, we reflect on what was going on in the Bay Area at the time. In 1776 California was newly part of the Spanish colony that would later become Mexico. The summer of 1776 was also pivotal in San Francisco’s history: construction started on the Presidio and Mission Dolores was founded five days before the Declaration of Independence was signed. Most of the local population consisted of indigenous people and some Mexican settlers. The people, ecosystems and coastline were dramatically different. We look back on the Bay Area in 1776.

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This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal.

The San Francisco Bay was quite a different place 250 years ago. It was ringed with salt marshes. All of Mission Bay was still a bay. Creeks abounded, flowing from the nearby hills to the bay or ocean. This was an estuarial, tidal place — a place of wetlands, mud flats, and sand dunes.

Our descriptions of these places do not come from the longtime inhabitants of this land, the different indigenous groups that made this place home for many generations. Instead, the earliest recorded impressions come from those who came to settle the Bay Area for the Spanish crown. Father Pedro Font accompanied the De Anza expedition from the desert Southwest to San Francisco. He was priest, cartographer, and kept a detailed diary of the group’s wanderings. On arriving at the Golden Gate, he looked down across what would become the Presidio and Marina, sweeping over to what is now downtown, and made an observation that calls out across time: “Although in all my travels I saw very good sights and beautiful country, I saw none which pleased me so much as this. And I think that if it could be well settled like Europe, there would not be anything more beautiful in all the world, for it has the best advantages for founding in it a most beautiful city with all the conveniences desired by land as well as by sea.”

Setting aside the obvious problematic components of this — what did Font see? What was the actual landscape like? And what were the societies like that Font’s group came to colonize and displace?

Here to take us back those 250 years, we’re joined by Steven Hackel, professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Junípero Serra: California’s Founding Father. Welcome.

Steven Hackel: Nice to be here. Thank you so much.

Alexis Madrigal: We also have Michael Wilcox, senior lecturer in Native American Studies in the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford, who serves as the tribal historic preservation officer for the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area and is a founding board member of the Muwekma Ohlone Cultural Preservation Land Trust. Welcome, Michael.

Michael Wilcox: Thank you. Welcome.

Alexis Madrigal: And we have Laura Feinstein, Resilient Landscapes Program Director at the San Francisco Estuary Institute. Welcome, Laura.

Laura Feinstein: Thanks for having me.

Alexis Madrigal: Laura, let’s start with you — and with this landscape and this bay. A lot of the work you and the Estuary Institute have done has been on historical ecology, trying to figure out what the land, sea, and landscape around here would have looked like. What would you have seen?

Laura Feinstein: If you had stepped onto a ridgeline in 1776 and looked out on the Bay Area, you would have seen redwood forests along the hillsides, in the deeper crevices and along the creeks — trees bigger than the ones you can find in Mendocino County today. Across the open hillsides, there would have been native grasslands speckled with oak trees. If you followed a creek down as it reached the flatlands, the water would spread out — the creeks hadn’t been channelized the way we’ve done to them now, so every winter they would spread across their banks and create freshwater wetlands around them. You’d see sycamore groves and willow trees. And as you went further down that gradient, the creeks would start to meet bay water, mixing with salt water, and you’d see tidal wetlands taking over, with fish feeding among the plants. Further out, mud flats where thousands of shorebirds fed. And finally, the bay.

One of the most remarkable things about all of it was that the gradients — from freshwater to saltwater, from land to sea — were so much longer and more gradual than they are today. That meant enormous potential for a huge diversity of species, and for species like Chinook salmon to migrate between fresher and saltier waters at different stages of life. And sprinkled around on the hills every few miles — Indian villages.

Alexis Madrigal: Michael Wilcox, that’s such an interesting description of this place — in part because we know now that even though the Spaniards who arrived here thought of it as a completely natural, unaltered, wild landscape, that really wasn’t the case at all.

Michael Wilcox: Yeah. In recent years, historians have been focusing on transformations of food systems and of the natural environment through what’s called fire ecology. When people enter into landscapes managed by indigenous people, they tend to assume, as you said, that what was there was simply natural. But when people are pulled off the land into missions, that disrupts not only the food systems people relied upon — it transforms the natural environment in ways that are not predictable.

One of the main drivers of change was the introduction of cattle into California. Cattle were the economic engine of the mission system, and the numbers are pretty staggering. At the peak, there were perhaps two hundred thousand head of cattle, horses, and other livestock in the Bay Area. If each animal needs between seven and a half and ten acres of land to graze per year, that’s essentially the entire Bay Area.

Alexis Madrigal: And so you go from a food system in which — from what we understand — there was plentiful food, a non-agricultural society, or rather a set of societies, that were able to sustain themselves through harvesting wild and lightly tended products, working relatively few hours, and keeping the ecosystems of the area in balance.

Michael Wilcox: Yeah. Most people think of societal success as tied to permanent village settlements and the accumulation of resources — big buildings, metallurgy, agriculture. But what’s really interesting about California and the Bay Area in particular is that you don’t need agriculture here. Agriculture requires an intervention into the reproductive system of a plant or animal for year-round survival. It can create great surpluses — but for the Bay, you don’t need that. In fact, it’s actually a disadvantage to become an agriculturalist, because it’s not the best strategy when what you need can be obtained by moving between different elevations in the bay.

Think about what those wetlands offered — what an amazing ecosystem. There’s no need to accumulate anything to sustain yourself if you can move from place to place, up and down the creeks and ridges and all the way to the ocean to acquire your food. And it’s much better food. It’s better for you. If something’s not available in one place, you move to where there’s a better source. The nutrients are amazing. Just one example: chia. Everyone knows chia today, but there were dozens of different kinds of plant seeds that native people here used. The health of the people here was pretty remarkable.

Alexis Madrigal: Steven Hackel, let’s talk about the other side of this moment of contact. One of the things that your books really put a fine point on — which I think I knew somewhere in the back of my mind — is that when we think of colonial Spanish history, we think of Cortés, Tenochtitlan, all the things going on in central Mexico. But that was, in 1776, a couple hundred years in the past. The transformations of Mexico were long complete. And yet from, let’s say, 1600 until right before 1776, the Bay peoples had very little contact with Spaniards.

Steven Hackel: That’s true. The original colonization of Mexico was a 1510s and ’20s phenomenon. Spain moved gradually north up through Baja California, exploring various parts of the Pacific Ocean. At some point Spain did consider establishing a settlement in California as early as 1603, but they realized that ships returning from the Philippines didn’t actually need a way station in California — it was just as easy to keep sailing south back to central Mexico. So you’re right: Alta California, upper California, was not really home to Spanish settlers or explorers until 1769, the early 1770s, the mid-1770s — much later. But the systems that were then initiated, the demographic changes, the institution of settlement and rule, were very similar in many ways to what had occurred two centuries earlier, much further south in Spain’s empire.

Alexis Madrigal: You wrote a book that really focuses on the mission at Monterey. What knowledge did indigenous people have — at least as best we can tell — when the Spaniards arrived to stay? And obviously these accounts are conflicting, and they often come through the colonizers’ eyes.

Steven Hackel: I think there was a general awareness of colonization, of Spanish intruders further south, especially as they proceeded up Baja California in the late seventeenth century. But direct contact hadn’t occurred until much later. I think there had to have been an awareness of perhaps opportunity in terms of trade, but also of the danger — conquest and oppression — that could come with European intruders.

Alexis Madrigal: That’s so interesting. Laura, when we look back on the landscape you’ve described, are there any areas that remain intact today where you might say — this is what it might have looked like, this is what this particular slice of ecosystem could have been?

Laura Feinstein: They’re few and far between, and the remaining landscapes that reflect what things used to look like are fragmented — smaller patches than what was there before. But one place I might go to get a sense of what the wetlands might have looked like in the 1700s would be up the Petaluma River. The wetlands there used to be about twice as large as they are now, and they weren’t separated from each other by levees or patches of farmland — they would have been continuous. But you can still get up the Petaluma River and into areas where you feel completely surrounded by wetlands on either side of you. You can still see the tide go in and out and cover vast distances on either side of the river. That can give you some sense of what it would have been like.

Alexis Madrigal: We’re looking back on what was going on in the Bay Area 250 years ago as the United States nears its 250th anniversary. We’ve got Laura Feinstein, Resilient Landscapes Program Director at the San Francisco Estuary Institute; Steven Hackel, professor of history at the University of California, Riverside; and Michael Wilcox, senior lecturer in Native American Studies at Stanford. We’re taking your calls — what questions do you have about the Bay Area 250 years ago? Call us at 866-733-6786. Email forum@kqed.org. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.

Podcast

Four’s a Crowd: Olivia Wilde and Edward Norton on ‘The Invite’

Audio

Airdate: Thursday, June 25 at 10 AM

What happens when an ordinary dinner party becomes a reckoning for a marriage? That question drives “The Invite,” a new film directed by and starring Olivia Wilde. The film follows a couple whose tense evening with their transgressive upstairs neighbors forces them to confront questions about desire, jealousy and whether it’s possible to have a new relationship with the same person. We’ll talk with Wilde and co-star Edward Norton about their six-week workshopping process, working with relationship expert Esther Perel and the freedom to improvise and shape a story whose ending audiences are already debating.

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This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim.

A new film directed by Olivia Wilde called The Invite stars her and Seth Rogen as a married couple, and Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz as the neighbors from upstairs coming to dinner for the first time. Over the course of a single night in Wilde and Rogen’s San Francisco apartment, the four manage to surface marriage’s deepest resentments and greatest capacities for intimacy. Based on a screenplay by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, adapted from a Spanish film by Cesc Gay, The Invite grapples with how to reinvent a relationship that’s turned stale and bitter. Olivia Wilde and Edward Norton join me now. Olivia, welcome to Forum.

Olivia Wilde: Thank you.

Mina Kim: And Edward, it’s great to have you back on Forum.

Edward Norton: Yes. Too long.

Mina Kim: Since Motherless Brooklyn. So, Olivia, our entire Forum team saw The Invite together when it premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival, and we could not stop talking about it afterward — about the two of your performances and, of course, the very relatable relationship issues the film tackles. Tell me what drew you to this story.

Olivia Wilde: Well, first of all, that screening at the Castro was one of our best. I’m so happy you all saw it there. What an incredible theater. I was so drawn to this story in its original form — Cesc’s film, which was based on the play he wrote and directed. I thought, what a great story, what a simple and powerful idea, and what an opportunity to gather a group of artists together and adapt it into something that feels really specific and personal to us in this moment. To make the American version feel specific to a lot of our cultural idiosyncrasies around relationships. It felt like a wonderful challenge and an opportunity to work with some of my favorite people in the world.

Mina Kim: What about relationships felt so modern and present to you right now?

Olivia Wilde: I think everyone today is dealing with a kind of isolationism, and we’ve become unfamiliar with friction. The idea of an unpredictable social experience is something quite foreign to most of us. Through social media and everything else, we curate our lives so completely that we sanitize them of all spontaneity — even the way we use GPS to get from point A to point B. We don’t leave much room for mistakes or discovery. And I think that relates to relationships, to meeting new people, to being forced to feel seen in ways that are maybe very uncomfortable.

For this couple, they’re in a very tense place, nearing what I think of as contempt — the sort of point of no return. They haven’t been socializing much, partly to avoid being witnessed. And this night is about being forced to acknowledge the tension they’ve been sitting on top of, and being witnessed by two people who completely change their minds about what’s possible — as individuals and within relationships.

Mina Kim: Edward, what made you want to get involved in a project like this?

Edward Norton: I had also seen Cesc’s film. In Spain it was called Sentimental, and I think we got to see ourselves as the couple upstairs. Everything Olivia said — it was hysterical and tender, very Spanish in its inflections and language and the idiosyncrasies of the characters. But it struck me exactly the same way: what he had done was create this armature that you could hang any four people on. You could hang couples from any culture on it and revisit and reimagine it in infinite ways.

It’s a funny comparison, but think about something like Hamlet — I saw a great production of it at the RSC in Stratford last summer — and ask how it still works in different ways four hundred years later. It’s because it’s a meditation on existential uncertainty and grief and all of it. Actors bring themselves into it, directors bring themselves into it, and they reinterpret and reimagine it contextually. And I think what Cesc had addressed — the difficulty of, as Esther Perel says, eroticism in a long-term relationship, and honesty — is also universal and timeless. The prospect of doing our own spin on it was really delightful to me.

And candidly, when I watch something and love it, I do this thing where I go, oh god, what would I have done with that? I start projecting a film that doesn’t exist in my head. And literally when I was going through that exercise, I thought of Seth. He was one of the first people I thought of — he’s an old friend, we’ve done other things together. And I loved Olivia’s films. I loved Booksmart. I loved Don’t Worry Darling. When I heard she was going to do this, a huge part of the draw was Olivia and Seth, and then Penélope, who I’ve been friends with for almost thirty years. The chemistry of what Olivia was proposing was just too exciting to pass up. I think I jumped through the phone before she was finished.

Mina Kim: Well, let’s talk about that spin, that chemistry. Olivia, you play Angela, the host of this dinner party. Tell us a little about her.

Olivia Wilde: Angela is riddled with anxiety, a people-pleaser to a fault. She’s someone desperately hungry to be seen. She went to art school, didn’t do anything with her degree, is a frustrated artist who channeled all that creativity into creating a home. She married Joe — they’ve been together twenty years, married for fifteen. She gave everything up thinking it would make her lovable, make her safe, that it was the life they were choosing together. And she’s arrived at this midlife crisis of understanding that she’s completely unsatisfied in every way, and she resents him deeply for it. Until this particular night, she hasn’t really come to the realization that she too bears some responsibility for giving up what she always dreamed she’d have. She’s struggling to connect with her own eroticism, her own identity. She’s lost — but she’s also a really emotional and vulnerable person, very porous, very susceptible to the energy around her. Just being around Edward and Penélope’s characters lights her up. It’s like she’s suddenly overtaken by this awareness of what’s possible. You can see it energizing her, rocking her world.

Mina Kim: She completely springs this dinner party on her husband Joe, played by Seth Rogen — the last thing he wants to do that night. And the dinner is with the upstairs neighbors, played by Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz. Edward, your character is Hawk, an ex-firefighter living upstairs with his girlfriend Piña, played by Penélope Cruz. What called you to Hawk?

Edward Norton: I like characters with unsuspected depth. I like characters with secrets, who are holding onto something that, when you examine it later, you realize was always there underneath what you were seeing. This story kind of unpeels that.

Olivia and I talked a lot. In Cesc’s film the man upstairs is indeed a firefighter, but they don’t lean into it much — it’s noted but not developed. Olivia was amazing with all of us in saying: I really want to treat each of these characters as an empty frame that we can each fill with ourselves, bring our own baggage to, our own memory drawer of insights and stories and ideas about character.

My character’s name wasn’t Hawk in our script. That came from real life. There’s a real Hawk — he’s a friend of mine, someone who changed his own name based on his initials in his midlife. A lot of people rolled their eyes at it, but he went forward with it for his own reasons. I told Olivia that story, and she was like, no — Hawk. That is great. So we came up with this idea of a person who has changed his life and changed his name. And then we developed what his secret was, doing the old acting school exercise of: what is he carrying? I liked the idea of someone who seems one way and then hits you by surprise with what his other layers are.

Mina Kim: I want to dig into that experimental process. Right after the break, we’re talking with Edward Norton and Olivia Wilde about their new film, The Invite. Stay with us for more. This is Forum. I’m Mina Kim.

Podcast

SF Giants Pride Night Fallout Amplifies

Audio

Airdate: Wednesday, June 23 at 9 AM

During a San Francisco Giants home game this month dedicated to the LGBTQ+ community, four pitchers drew attention for their protest of the team’s themed rainbow uniform. One player opted out of wearing the uniform entirely, while three others doctored their hats with a bible verse that has been used by some Christian groups to “reclaim” the rainbow. Major League Baseball issued a warning to those players that writing of any kind on uniforms goes against league rules. That, in turn, led to the Department of Justice opening a civil rights investigation into whether the MLB is discriminating against the players’ religious rights. Amidst it all, many San Francisco Giants fans have felt betrayed by a team that has long stood by its hometown LGBTQ community. We’ll talk about the controversy, its fallout and how you’re responding.

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This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal.

Sports are political. There’s no way around it. As much as sports teams are just corporations with various financial incentives, they live and die by getting the people of a place to buy into the idea that these teams represent the city where they’re located. And if that city is San Francisco — a famously, fabulously, historically queer city — many people expect the San Francisco teams to at least pay polite lip service to the values of the region. But what happens when an employee of one of these companies, say a baseball player, doesn’t agree with the politics, culture, or ethos of the place?

Here to talk about what happened with the San Francisco Giants and what it says about the strange place of sports and athletes in our current political landscape, we’re joined by Alex Simon, sports editor with SFGate. Welcome, Alex.

Alex Simon: Thank you for having me.

Alexis Madrigal: We’ve got Ann Killion, longtime sports columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle. Welcome back, Ann.

Ann Killion: Thank you very much.

Alexis Madrigal: And we’ve got Bradford William Davis, reporter and cultural critic who runs the sports newsletter EyeBlack. Welcome, Bradford.

Bradford William Davis: Good to be here.

Alexis Madrigal: Alex, for people who haven’t been paying attention — it’s been a big story in the Bay Area for the last couple of weeks — what happened?

Alex Simon: On June 12th, the Giants held their annual Pride Night. They’ve been celebrating the LGBTQ community for years, going all the way back to the mid-nineties when they held their first “Until There’s a Cure” night. For the last five years, the Giants have been wearing Pride flag hats on the field — replacing the orange SF logo with a rainbow design. This year, four players objected to that, and three of them wrote a Bible verse on the rainbow hat to signal their protest of the Pride celebration.

Alexis Madrigal: Ann, what has the reaction been?

Ann Killion: The reaction in the San Francisco and Giants community has been pretty strong. People feel alienated, disappointed. They feel like on a night meant to celebrate inclusiveness, these players co-opted the whole event, hijacked it, and effectively flipped the metaphorical bird at them. And they felt let down by the team’s response — the Giants issued a both-sides-style statement full of platitudes, essentially “we’re sorry if you’re hurt,” and then went radio silent. They let this thing build and build, went out of town a couple of days later, and it’s grown into, as you said in the introduction, another chapter in the culture wars.

But the paying customers are very upset — and it’s not just gay customers. It’s the community broadly. The Giants have leaned very strongly for many decades into the idea that they represent San Francisco, and embracing the gay community has been a big part of that. A lot of people feel very let down.

Alexis Madrigal: Let’s hear from a listener. Sarah in San Francisco is a Giants fan and a member of the LGBTQ community, and she left us this voice memo.

[CLIP]

Sarah: I was incredibly disappointed when I found out the news. It felt like a huge miss from the players’ perspective to choose Pride Night of all nights to make this statement. I didn’t see them attempting to come out with this pro-Bible rhetoric any other night of the week. So it did feel like a very specific slap in the face for their queer fans. I also think this was terribly mishandled from a management perspective. The manager could have taken better steps to get ahead of this, could have avoided the whole PR disaster that happened after the fact, and could have come out with a stronger statement in support of inclusivity and to the wide fan base that actually supports the SF Giants. Across the board, it was just a giant L for the Giants, who don’t need any more help with L’s because their record is doing that for them. And it just makes it really hard to continue to support this organization given these huge missteps.

[END CLIP]

Alexis Madrigal: Thank you for that, Sarah in San Francisco. And we want to hear from you — what was your reaction to the way the Giants handled Pride Night? What would you want to ask or tell the Giants? Call us at 866-733-6786, email forum@kqed.org, or find us on Bluesky, Instagram, or Discord at KQED Forum.

Bradford, you cover sports and think about them within a broader political and historical context. What comes to mind when you hear about these Bible verses on the hats?

Bradford William Davis: It’s not a terribly surprising dynamic. Clayton Kershaw did something kind of similar recently. And unfortunately, Landen Roupp is not Clayton Kershaw, so there’s a bit more scrutiny on him. Winning helps and fixes a lot of things. But regardless — the kind of people who play Major League Baseball are frequently white guys from suburban backgrounds, and they come with views that are oftentimes hostile to queer fans and the broader community. I think many baseball fans implicitly know this, but it’s unfortunate when it bubbles to the surface so plainly. It’s a reminder that not every fan is thought of in the same way by the people they’re cheering for.

Alexis Madrigal: Ann, I’ve long thought baseball players come through a different filtration system than, say, NBA players — coming up through small towns, riding buses across the country. If fans sort of know that in the back of their minds, what was so particularly galling about what happened here?

Ann Killion: Baseball has always been a conservative sport — probably the most conservative of the major professional team sports in America. A lot of these players come from small towns, ride buses through the South in their formative years, and that’s long been part of the culture. And we live in a time when people feel much more emboldened to wear their beliefs, literally in this case, on their hat.

But what this really speaks to is organizational failure. The Giants aren’t naive about who is in their clubhouse. When you’ve been doing something for thirty years — celebrating Pride Night — you communicate with your players. You sit them down and talk about where they work, why this community matters, why this demographic matters. The Giants have made significant money selling Pride merchandise — you can go on their website right now and buy a Pride logo hat for $52.99. So the fact that this happened really points to a breakdown in communication: bringing these players into the fold, laying out their options, explaining the expectations, and making clear the potential consequences of a public protest.

They could have brought in community members to speak to the team. Mike Krukow, the Giants broadcaster, whose son is gay — Mike could speak very eloquently about this. There were options. Somehow, this wasn’t handled properly.

Alexis Madrigal: Former pro baseball player, yes. Alex, there’s at least one other episode in Giants history from the nineties that’s echoing for some fans. Can you talk about that?

Alex Simon: Back in 1996, Mark Dewey protested “Until There’s a Cure” night — an evening honoring San Franciscans affected by the HIV and AIDS epidemic. It was a night led by Rod Beck, one of their star pitchers at the time. Dewey turned the ribbon players were wearing sideways to make it look like the Jesus fish. And I’d also mention that Ann’s Chronicle colleague Susan Slusser wrote two years ago about Nick Ahmed — then the Giants’ shortstop — who also wrote a Bible verse on his Pride hat.

It’s also worth noting that the specific Bible verse these players chose adds an extra layer of controversy. It’s from Genesis, referencing the story of Noah’s flood — where God put a rainbow in the sky as a covenant that he would never flood the earth again. Conservative Christians have increasingly used this passage to argue that the rainbow is a symbol of their faith, not of the gay community — an effort to reclaim that symbolism. For these players to choose that specific verse, out of countless others in the Bible, is what has made this so stark. And as Ann pointed out, it reflects a real organizational breakdown — especially now that the players have said publicly they discussed this for days, even weeks, beforehand. Somehow the Giants organization never intervened or found a way to handle it properly. It’s probably not a great look when the MLB commissioner, responding to Republican senators, is pointing to the organization’s lack of communication as the problem.

Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about the San Francisco Giants after a botched Pride Night celebration and the fallout that’s followed. We’re joined by Alex Simon, sports editor at SFGate; Ann Killion, sports columnist at the Chronicle; and Bradford William Davis, reporter and cultural critic who runs the newsletter EyeBlack. We’re taking your calls and reactions to what’s been going on with the Giants and what it says about this particular moment in our city’s history. One listener writes in: “These athletes are bigoted and everyone knows it. Boycott the Giants.” Do you feel the same way? Call us at 866-733-6786. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.

Podcast

America’s Complicated History at 250

Audio

Airdate: Wednesday, June 24 at 10 AM

The United States celebrates its 250th anniversary on July 4th. Past presidents have marked similar milestones by reflecting on our complex history, but for President Trump, the commemoration will mark just how great America’s history has always been. Many historians argue that the Trump Administration is whitewashing the nation’s violent past, and for the New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb, it’s just the latest example of Trump weaponizing racial politics. Cobb joins us to talk about America at 250, and why our historical scars matter.

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This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim.

If commemorations like America’s 250th tell us as much about the times we’re in as they do about the events they’re marking — according to historian Jelani Cobb — then what does it say, just as a starting point, that there are two federal entities charged with honoring the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, one created by Congress and another created largely by the president, and that they are competing with each other for branding and resources?

The New York Times’ Jennifer Schuessler has been covering the dispute over how to honor the nation’s 250th at the highest levels of government, and she joins me now. Welcome to Forum, Jennifer.

Jennifer Schuessler: Thanks for having me.

Mina Kim: Help me understand, in broad strokes, how far back planning for America’s 250th has been going on — and how we’ve arrived at a point where two competing entities are in charge of the festivities.

Jennifer Schuessler: It really all got started back in 2016, when Congress passed a law establishing a bipartisan commission — the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission. Try saying that three times fast. They were charged with planning and coordinating festivities for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which falls next week on July 4th — including coordinating among the states. The commission got off to a slow and rocky start, and around 2022 there was some housecleaning and a new chair was brought in, but it was still functioning as a bipartisan body trying to get its programs off the ground.

On the campaign trail, President Trump took a great interest in this anniversary. He promised to throw a massive yearlong birthday party, said he would create his own task force on day one of his second term, and talked about staging events like a Great American State Fair that would last all year somewhere out in America. After returning to office in January 2025, he issued an executive order almost immediately establishing that task force. They began working with America250 — the colloquial name for the congressional commission — and there was some tentative cooperation, but also tensions and disagreements. Late last year, President Trump announced he had formed his own separate group called Freedom250, which would essentially take over planning for many big national events and would also compete for fundraising dollars.

So right now, America250 is still operating, but Freedom250 exists alongside it. There’s been a lot of confusion, particularly among Americans who only realized very recently that this anniversary was happening at all — confusion over who is doing what, and to what degree different things are partisan.

Mina Kim: So America250 is mainly the congressional body, and Freedom250 is largely a presidential creation. Where has the conflict between them shown up most?

Jennifer Schuessler: It’s been largely behind the scenes — they haven’t directly clashed in public. But they’ve essentially gone their separate ways in terms of events. Most of what has happened or will happen in Washington relating to the 250th is being put on by Freedom250, the Trump-backed group. For example, they are organizing the Great American State Fair, which opens tomorrow on the National Mall. About a month ago, there was a wave of news around that event when musicians who had been scheduled to perform at evening concerts began dropping out almost as soon as the concerts were announced, saying they hadn’t realized how closely tied the event was to President Trump and that they saw it as partisan. The president then got out ahead of them and said the concerts should just be canceled — that he would headline the fair himself. Tonight he is set to speak at a big kickoff event on the Mall, and tomorrow all the fair’s booths, rides, and the giant Ferris wheel will open.

Mina Kim: The fair runs through July 10th, as I understand it. And there’s also been competition for money. Congress appropriated $150 million for the 250th anniversary commemoration, and America250 says they’ve received very little of it — that most has gone to Freedom250?

Jennifer Schuessler: Yes. To be clear, America250 had received about $60 million through normal appropriations prior to this. But of this new $150 million final push, America250 says they’ve only received $25 million, with much of the rest — it’s not entirely clear how much has been disbursed or exactly where it’s gone — apparently going to Freedom250.

Mina Kim: I want to invite listeners in. How will you mark America’s 250th this July 4th? Are you planning to? Why or why not? How do you feel about celebrating our country at this moment? Email forum@kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786.

The state fair on the National Mall is Trump’s marquee event, as you describe it. But you also note that he has described July 4th itself as functioning like a Trump rally. What do you know about that?

Jennifer Schuessler: On July 4th itself, in a somewhat different area of the Mall — down by the Lincoln Memorial and the reflecting pool — there will be a gigantic fireworks event. Organizers are claiming it will be the largest fireworks event in history anywhere, breaking a record set recently in the Philippines. They say there will be 851,000 individual fireworks, military flyovers, patriotic music, and a speech by President Trump. He has described it on social media as a Trump rally, which he wrote in all caps. It remains to be seen exactly what it will be, but it will be a very large event.

Mina Kim: This has drawn significant criticism from Democrats and others. The argument is that the president is making America’s 250th about himself and using public funds to do it through Freedom250?

Jennifer Schuessler: Yes, that’s the criticism from Democrats and from some watchdog groups calling for greater transparency around the fundraising. More broadly, some people feel the president is centering himself in the national story rather than making this a celebration of the country’s history writ large. I haven’t been to Washington in a couple of weeks — I’m going down tomorrow for opening day of the fair — but on social media you can see photos of large banners on some federal buildings featuring President Trump’s face alongside George Washington. That is not going over well with people who think this should be a more unifying celebration of all of America and all of our history.

Mina Kim: Many have also accused the president of using the milestone to promote a sanitized version of American history. Can you remind us of this administration’s efforts to remove historical markers that it interprets as disparaging American historical figures?

Jennifer Schuessler: It goes back, in some ways, to President Trump’s first term. He took a great interest in history and called for a return to what he describes as patriotic history — one that celebrates the heroes of the past. That’s when he first called for the creation of a National Garden of American Heroes, a sculpture garden honoring 250 heroic Americans from across history. He revived that in his second term, and last April he issued an executive order called “Restoring Faith and Sanity to American History,” in which he claimed that progressives were promoting a negative, racially divisive view of the country.

That executive order had two main parts. He attacked the Smithsonian for promoting what he called divisive racial ideology — he’s been on a sustained campaign to pressure the Smithsonian to adjust its exhibits. And he called on the National Park Service, which is part of the Department of the Interior, to conduct a broad review of all historical material at its sites. The Park Service oversees hundreds of sites across the country — not just large parks like Yosemite or Yellowstone, but all sorts of historical sites, including the Mall itself.

There has been significant pressure to remove or revise signage, and there have been some very high-profile examples. Perhaps most visibly: in Philadelphia in February, Park Service employees were ordered to use crowbars to remove signage at a site called the President’s House, which sits right next to the Liberty Bell, very close to Independence Hall. This is the excavated and partly reconstructed foundation of a mansion where George Washington and then John Adams lived during the first decade of the new country, when Philadelphia was still the capital. The signage and memorial there had focused strongly on the enslaved people who had lived at that site — owned by George Washington — their stories, and their efforts to escape, as well as Washington’s dogged efforts to recapture them. The site had become something of a flashpoint among critics on the right, and in February, workers were ordered in to remove those signs with crowbars. Some have since been restored, but a court recently ruled that the Park Service has authority over the site, so the outcome remains uncertain. It’s a vivid example of what some people see as history being erased.

Mina Kim: You have to leave us, but since you’ve covered the so-called history wars for years — is the American public broadly open to understanding the darker parts of our history, or closed off to it?

Jennifer Schuessler: That’s a big, open question. But people who work in museums, at historical sites, and in public history will very frequently point to research from multiple groups showing that across the political spectrum — including Americans who describe themselves as very conservative — the majority of people are genuinely open to honest, fact-based history. They don’t want to be told what to think, but they do want to hear the truth.

Mina Kim: Jennifer Schuessler of The New York Times, thank you. More after the break. This is Forum.

Podcast

Looking to Avoid Yosemite Crowds? Check Out These Alternate Hikes, Campsites and Destinations

Audio

Airdate: Tuesday, June 23 at 10 AM

Visitors to Yosemite National Park are reporting huge summer crowds and nearly impossible parking, which are the result of federal staffing cuts and the elimination of the park’s entry reservation system. We’ll dig into the cause and impact of the changes at Yosemite and discuss where else in California you can find peak outdoor experiences.

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Lesley McClurg: Welcome to Forum. I’m Lesley McClurg. I’m in today for Mina Kim.

Yosemite. My family visited every summer when I was growing up. I loved it. Half Dome, Yosemite Falls, riding my bike through the campgrounds—those are all really strong memories. Luckily, none of my memories are colored by the really long lines and parking lot headaches that visitors are experiencing this year.

Let’s talk about what’s going on and maybe how you can avoid these headaches and potentially even find other truly wild experiences in other parts of California that are just as beautiful.

We’re joined by Sarah Wright. She is KQED’s outdoors engagement reporter. Welcome, Sarah.

Sarah Wright: Thanks so much.

Lesley McClurg: So what’s going on? Why did Yosemite get rid of its car reservation system this year?

Sarah Wright: Yeah. So when they announced the change in late February of this year, the National Park Service said that they had evaluated traffic patterns, parking, visitor use, all of these items from 2025, and they had decided that this reservation system that we’ve had since 2019, essentially, did not need to occur this year.

When I asked for more details about what this data was and what it showed, I didn’t get a response. But the park had indicated to other media outlets and to me that they didn’t see high demand for Yosemite as a problem. They were like, this is a normal function of a national park. We’re not worried. We’re going to forge ahead.

Lesley McClurg: So before, how did it work? What would people do to make a reservation?

Sarah Wright: Yeah. So basically, you would log on and sign up for a timed entry. That allowed visitors to have a slot when they were guaranteed to be able to get into the park.

The idea behind this was basically just to spread out visitation, not only across days to get rid of these long lines on peak weekend days, but also across hours so that these 9, 10, 11 a.m. peak times to get into the park wouldn’t have people sitting in traffic for 3 or 4 hours.

Lesley McClurg: And so what did park employees and visitors say about how it was working?

Sarah Wright: So I experienced this. I went to the park with the timed entry, I believe it was in 2021. And it was pretty seamless. I think I got the reservation a month or so in advance, and I was kind of reassured knowing that I was going to get into the park. I was going to be able to find parking at trailheads. I didn’t feel like I had to change my itinerary in response to crowds.

And folks this year have told me that that has changed a bit on peak weekends. Now they’re seeing these long wait times, and it’s really difficult to get parking in the Valley in particular on these peak weekend days during these peak hours.

Lesley McClurg: Is there a push then to bring the system back?

Sarah Wright: Yeah. I’ve talked to a few advocates, even local business owners, who say that even though they are getting a lot of business with this open park, they want the reservation system back—not only to make people’s visitor experience more seamless.

I mean, they have tour times to hit, right? Waiting in line isn’t ideal. They’re also worried about harm to the park. Lots of these wilderness areas and national forests have permitting systems for a reason, and it’s to disperse visitation and the impact that visitors have on parks across time and across distance.

They’re worried that the very thing people are coming for is being degraded by so many people coming all at once.

Lesley McClurg: And are we seeing that? Are we seeing more trash or maybe people damaging the park or hurting the wildlife?

Sarah Wright: Yeah. Particularly last year during the government shutdown, that was kind of the first time there wasn’t a reservation system for a while. There were lots of reports of trash at various national parks, lots of reports of damage to things like open meadows, people parking illegally, and ending up overusing trails or areas that you really shouldn’t be driving vehicles over or bringing massive amounts of people into.

So there were definitely reports of the effects of overcrowding, not only on the visitor experience but also on the park itself.

Lesley McClurg: It’s almost like we’re loving Yosemite to death—or not there yet, but potentially doing damage to the park.

What about the fact that there are a lot fewer park employees? How is that affecting the park experience?

Sarah Wright: Yeah. It’s had a big effect ever since last February, when many park rangers were fired or not hired for seasonal work.

There have been fewer and fewer people around in the park—these enforcement rangers who are able to educate first and then also ticket and enforce rules for people who aren’t following them.

When I was there during the government shutdown, I saw rangers here and there. They definitely were around. But I sensed this sort of air of, okay, we can do whatever we want among visitors. And I think once somebody sees somebody breaking the rules, they’re more inclined to break the rules themselves.

So having staff around to educate, to be at the front of a trailhead and say, “Hey, you need to put your snacks away or else the squirrels are going to come eat them,” I found that super helpful because it puts that little reminder in your head of what to do and how to behave.

Lesley McClurg: And not just the squirrels, but the bears. There’s some real danger if people aren’t safe with their food, etc.

Are we seeing similar stories at other national parks across the country because of the changes under the Trump administration?

Sarah Wright: Yeah. There were a couple of other parks that also dropped their reservation systems this year, and all parks have really been affected by these staffing cuts.

And that’s not even to mention the Trump policies last year and this year around signage at national parks. There was this whole movement to take down signs or cover up signs that Trump deemed disparaged Americans.

That was actually recently struck down in the courts, so we’ll see if there’s going to be any sort of restoration of those signs or what’s going to happen next.

But speaking to park superintendents and folks who work in parks at all levels across the nation, there’s been this era of fear, uncertainty, and insecurity for park rangers who just really aren’t sure if their jobs are secure, what’s going to happen next, and how they can carry out their mission to conserve and welcome people to parks.

Lesley McClurg: To these really beautiful places.

Well, visitors who purchase the annual America the Beautiful Pass will notice that Trump’s face is on this year’s pass. Have other presidents done this? How unprecedented is this move?

Sarah Wright: It’s unprecedented.

The pass has historically featured flora and fauna from one of the national parks. I have one from last year. It features the roseate spoonbill from the Everglades, and I actually got to go to the Everglades last year. I didn’t see the spoonbill, but I was looking for it the whole time because it was on my pass.

So this is very much a different move, and a lot of people have complained about Trump’s face on the pass. Some companies have even started selling sleeves so that people can cover it up in their wallets.

But just be aware, if you’re planning on doing that, you shouldn’t alter the pass itself because you could accidentally void it. So don’t mess with the plastic, but go ahead and cover it up if that’s what you’d like to do.

Lesley McClurg: I imagine that some audience members are going to hear this and be like, okay, I’m not going to Yosemite this summer. It sounds terrible.

Are there still ways to find solitude in the park?

Sarah Wright: Absolutely. And look, if you’ve never been to Yosemite or if you’ve had these plans for months, you should go. It’s amazing. It’s always worth it. I have a fun time every time I go to Yosemite.

But the summer right now in particular—the snow has almost melted—so go to the high peaks, the higher parts of Yosemite. Get out of the Valley if you’ve already experienced the Valley. It’s iconic. It’s beautiful. But the rest of the park is huge. It has so much to offer, and right now in the summer is the time to experience it.

That would be my first recommendation: get out of the Valley.

My second recommendation would be to bring things that help keep you independent. Bring your own bike so that if you find a parking spot, you can bike around. There are also bikes for rent in the Valley.

You could consider taking public transit to get there. YARTS offers buses that go into the park every single day. Bring your own food. That will save you money and time when you’re waiting in line at vendors in the park.

There are lots of ways to insulate yourself against these crowds. Just make sure you’re doing everything within the rules. Store your food away from bears. Make sure you’re parking somewhere you’re allowed to park for long periods of time. All that sort of stuff.

But there are definitely ways to experience and love the park. Chief among those is trying to go during off-peak times. If you can go on a weekday, if you can go early in the morning or later in the evening, that’s all going to help as well.

Lesley McClurg: Just slow down there a little bit. You brushed on it, but on the public transportation options, where can you take public transportation from? Do you have as much freedom when you’re there? What if you want to camp and you don’t have a car? Give us kind of a lay of the land.

Sarah Wright: Yeah. So the main public transit agency is called YARTS. These are big buses, and they’re actually super comfy, nice coach buses. They have lots of space for luggage underneath, so you can even bring all of the camping equipment you want to bring.

They come from both sides of Yosemite. You can come from the Eastern Sierra side, or you can come from places like Merced on the west side. There is overnight parking where the bus depots are, so if you want to leave your car there, you can do that.

And the coolest thing that I learned this year is that if you take public transit into Yosemite, you get access to the backpacker campgrounds. These are basically first-come, first-served walk-in campgrounds in the park, and you are guaranteed 3 consecutive nights—1 night at each backpacker campground.

These are pretty low-cost campgrounds that you can just walk into with your stuff.

Lesley McClurg: Like what kind of cost?

Sarah Wright: I want to say—oh gosh, I’d have to check—I want to say it’s under $20. So pretty great for Yosemite Valley.

These are the same iconic campgrounds that everybody else is staying in. You get to walk right up with your stuff. You can stay there. You can have a lovely time. You just have to move the next night to a different one.

There are shuttles within the park that can take you around to the various campgrounds. In the Valley itself, there’s also a Valley shuttle, which most people take anyway because driving a car is kind of crazy in the Valley.

So it’s really not that different of an experience without a car. And if you are mainly sticking to these main trailheads, it’s totally doable via public transit.

Lesley McClurg: We are talking about this summer’s massive crowds at places like Yosemite National Park. We’re hearing about some alternatives and some good advice from Sarah Wright. She is our KQED outdoors engagement reporter.

We would love to hear from you. Have you been to Yosemite this year? Tell us about your visit. What was it like? Maybe what’s the best campsite you’ve ever stayed at in California? Was it in Yosemite, or was it somewhere else? Maybe there’s an unexpectedly beautiful place that you’ve discovered in the state that you’re willing to share with other listeners.

Email your comments and questions: Forum@KQED.org. You can find us on all the social platforms—Discord, Bluesky, Facebook. We’re @KQEDForum. Or you can just give us a call: 866-733-6786. Again, 866-733-6786.

We’ll be right back after this break.

Podcast

U.S. Lifts Oil Sanctions on Iran as Fragile Peace Deal Terms Negotiated

Audio

Airdate: Tuesday, June 23 at 9 AM

As part of negotiations over terms of the ceasefire memorandum between Iran and the U.S., the Trump Administration on Monday temporarily lifted all oil sanctions on Iran, a significant reversal of longstanding American policy. Critics in the president’s own party have sharply criticized the deal which includes a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran, a ceasefire and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Over the weekend, fighting in Lebanon and threats from Trump to “hit Iran very hard again” threatened the fragile detente. Will the peace hold? We’ll talk to experts about the deal with Iran and its implications.

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Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. With a ceasefire in place that at least portends an end to the U.S. war in Iran, the world’s attention has turned to what the peace may look like. In the initial deal, the Strait of Hormuz would be fully reopened, and Iran would get a $300 billion reconstruction fund. But what about the longstanding issues? The U.S. has wanted a new regime in Tehran for decades. The U.S. has wanted to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon for decades. The U.S. has wanted to decrease the influence of the Iranian regime throughout the region for decades. Did the war help attain these long-term goals, or has it returned us to something like the status quo ante?

Here to discuss the ceasefire, the ongoing negotiations, and the medium-term future, we’re joined by three experts. David Sanger, White House and national security correspondent with The New York Times. His most recent book is New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West. Welcome.

David Sanger: Great to be with you.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. We’ve also got Jonathan Lemire, staff writer at The Atlantic, who also serves as the co-host of the MSNBC show Morning Joe. Welcome, Jonathan.

Jonathan Lemire: Thank you so much.

Alexis Madrigal: And we’ve got Alan Eyre, a distinguished diplomatic fellow with the Middle East Institute, an expert in Iran, former senior U.S. diplomat who was a key member of the U.S. negotiating team for the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. Welcome.

Alan Eyre: Thanks for having me.

Alexis Madrigal: So, David Sanger, catch us up on the status of this ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran. It feels to me like everything coming out has been confusing and contradictory. So where do we stand?

David Sanger: Well, if it sounds confusing and contradictory, that’s largely because it is. You may recall that more than a week ago, the U.S. and Iran agreed on a 14-point document, just a page and a half, very vague, very general. Only one of the paragraphs on it even referred to Iran’s nuclear program.

And that document was supposed to be the guideline, really sort of a table of contents, for a bigger negotiation that much more resembles, or is intended to resemble, what the U.S. did in 2015 when it spent 18 months—and Alan can tell you the story from the inside—negotiating what became the Obama-era agreement. It had the awful and awkward name of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, an acronym that only the State Department could learn to love.

Alexis Madrigal: Only superior to the JCPOS.

David Sanger: Yes. That’s it. And it was about 159 pages, laid out very specifically what Iran was required to do, what sanctions would get lifted at what times. It was really fully down in the weeds.

The document that was put out the other day and that the president signed at Versailles was anything but. The president has described this as a peace agreement. And as you saw, he actually called me Sunday night before last just to argue what a great breakthrough it was.

But what’s happened since is that, as JD Vance went to negotiate this in Switzerland, the Americans will come out and say, well, there’s been agreement now on allowing nuclear inspectors back in. And a few hours later, the Iranians say, well, no, there hasn’t. That topic barely came up.

Or the Americans will say, there’s been agreement now that we’ll unfreeze some funds, but they’ll go to buying U.S. farm goods for the hungry people of Iran. And the Iranians will come back and say, look, in your 14 points it says we can spend this money any way we want.

And in the interim, what this has accomplished is that the U.S. blockade has ended. Ships are beginning to move through the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians are now free, having conceded nothing really at this point. They are free to go sell their oil on the world markets in dollars, which they haven’t been able to do in years, if not decades, which is bringing in—or should start bringing in—very large amounts of money to the Iranians, but also reduces to some degree the American leverage as they try to get to this agreement in the next 60 days.

And many experts, and I think Jonathan agrees, believe that 60 days will stretch to months or years.

Alexis Madrigal: Alan Eyre, is there anything in these 14 points or anything around these negotiations that you’ve heard so far that is new and good for the U.S. policy positions relative to where we were—not, you know, 2 weeks ago—but on January 1, say, 2026?

Alan Eyre: No. This is a massive strategic blunder. We’ve done irreparable harm to the region and to the globe and to the United States. But fortunately, this administration finally realized that when you’re in a hole, the first thing you do is stop digging.

So yeah, as David said, this MOU is very lopsided in Iran’s benefit. But again, there’s no international law here. This MOU is an invitation to the dance. What’s important now is what the two sides negotiate going forward.

No higher-level judge is going to punish the U.S. or Iran for violating the MOU. It’s purely a power relationship between the two sides. And unfortunately, in that, Iran has the upper hand because they can constrain, if not stop, maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which is the most important variable in this whole megillah.

Because Iran was not a nuclear threat before the war—an imminent nuclear threat. They had not sought to weaponize for a long time. Unfortunately, as a result of this war and our installation of a new, more radical, more militarized, less risk-averse, and more anti-U.S. regime, they might well seek a weapon.

That’s a problem that we’ll have to monitor. But the ticking time bomb here is maritime traffic through the Strait. So that’s beginning to increase.

My concern is that if there are bilateral talks between the U.S. and Iran, Iran will eat our lunch because the U.S. team, I don’t think, has the requisite expertise or inclination to do what’s necessary to get a deal that will—forget being better than Obama’s—as good as Obama’s.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. I mean, Jonathan, the other problem with the negotiations, it seems from the outside, is that there’s a lot of fractures within Trump’s team about Iran, about what’s happening, which sort of seems like it’s constraining the frontline negotiators and what they can actually do.

Jonathan Lemire: It’s remarkable in Trump’s second term when Republicans are willing to stand up to him and question his decisions. But we have seen that a few times, and most notably here with Iran.

There’s certainly some hawks—Senator Lindsey Graham among them, Ted Cruz, some outside voices like Mark Levin, the influential conservative radio host—who have been sharply critical of the decision to enter into this MOU, saying that Iran can’t be trusted.

Within the administration, there are those who feel—Secretary of State Rubio, Secretary of Defense Hegseth have voiced some concern—that Iran won’t uphold their end of the bargain.

But there are others in the White House who look, they can read a poll. They can read the sign on a gas station that says how high gas prices have been now for months. And they feel like this war needs to end because it’s taking such an economic toll, and it was in such a stalemate.

And then, of course, the other element of this is the third party to this war, Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has received the focus of Trump’s wrath a number of times in recent weeks. Trump calling him extremely difficult and using far more colorful language than I can here, disagreeing with his assessment that the war needed to continue.

So all of that is clouding the picture of these negotiations, which, I agree with everything said so far, are really just, “Let’s agree to keep talking,” and all the thorny issues are yet to be addressed.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. You know, David, you mentioned the Strait of Hormuz and oil as being—or actually it was Alan who mentioned it as being the most important component of this.

When we’re looking at what’s actually happening in the Strait of Hormuz right now, this is what I’ve been most confused about because we’ve seen “open.” We’ve seen “closed.” We’ve seen ships are moving, according to reporting from some of your colleagues at The Times, David.

And yet we’ve also seen oil prices just plummet during this time back to 2024 levels. What do we know about how this is actually going to work under this new structure?

David Sanger: We don’t know a lot. I mean, what we heard from Secretary of State Rubio was that the goal here was to return things to the way they were in February 2026 before the war began.

And I just want to remind you, the closing of the Strait of Hormuz was not a cause of the war. It was a result of the war, right? Something that the Iranians had never done before—not during the American hostage crisis, not during the Iran-Iraq War, not during our cyber sabotage of their centrifuges in 2010 and 2012—but did it this time.

So the goal is to get back to where we were. The reality is we probably never will. And the reason for that is twofold.

First of all, the Iranians have discovered they have this superweapon, right? More useful than nuclear weapons ever are because you use nuclear weapons, you’re feeling great about it for about an hour, and then you know what happens. But with this, they can dial up and dial down access.

Second, the president said in his call to me that there would be no tolls permanently. But the agreement only holds off the tolls for 60 days while this negotiation is underway.

And the Iranians are already making it clear that, no, no, no, they don’t plan to impose tolls. But with Oman, which is on the other side of the Strait, they may begin charging for services. They haven’t explained what these services are.

Alexis Madrigal: Key services: letting you go through.

David Sanger: Right. And it may be keeping the Strait clear of mines. It might be an environmental fee. We certainly have that for transit on some waters, right? Keeping the waters clean and so forth.

But whatever it is, you’re going to need an E-ZPass.

Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about the situation in Iran, the status of the peace deal between the U.S. and that country. We’ve got David Sanger of The New York Times, Jonathan Lemire of The Atlantic and MSNBC, and Alan Eyre, distinguished diplomatic fellow at the Middle East Institute.

We’re taking your questions, concerns, and comments about the Iran deal too. 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. Forum@KQED.org.

We’ll be back with more right after the break.

Podcast

Katherine Dunn on ‘How GPS Shaped the Modern World’

Audio

Airdate: Monday, June 22 at 10 AM

We rely on the Global Positioning System for so much — mapping our commutes, tracking our runs, hailing ride shares, matching with dates and more — that it can be hard to remember life before it. The U.S. military sent the first GPS satellite to space in 1978, and journalist Katherine Dunn says remembering those military roots can help us understand of how enemy actors today are distorting, blocking and threatening GPS around the world. Dunn says it’s time we address our global dependency and rethink how we’ve phased out many GPS alternatives. We’ll talk with Dunn about how GPS works, the types of attacks we’re seeing and what can be done about them. Do you remember a time before GPS?

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This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Lesley McClurg: Welcome to Forum. I’m Lesley McClurg, in today for Mina Kim.

I honestly think GPS might have saved my life 2 weeks ago. I mean, maybe it wasn’t a totally life-threatening situation, but I was in Yellowstone National Park with my 7-year-old daughter. It was just the 2 of us backpacking. We had received some pretty bad information from a brand-new ranger, and we ended up on the wrong trail about 7 miles in.

When I realized that our closest camping spot was potentially another 20 miles down that trail, I knew that was not a good idea with a 7-year-old. So we decided to go off-trail, cross-country for a few miles, because it was the closest route I could see to get to a river—we needed water for dinner that night.

I pulled out my handy phone, where I had downloaded maps before we went completely offline. Luckily, I was able to figure out where we were and where we needed to go because I had downloaded maps onto Gaia. I am now a devotee of GPS because I think it saved my life.

Let’s talk about GPS with Katherine Dunn. Her new book is Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World. Welcome, Katherine.

Katherine Dunn: Thanks for having me, Lesley.

Lesley McClurg: Would you call yourself dependent on GPS?

Katherine Dunn: Yes. I’m completely dependent on GPS. I’ll give you an example. Today, I had 3 things going on. I’ve lived in London for 12 years. I was going to places I know very, very well. I used Transit Planner and Google Maps for all 3 of those journeys, and I’ll probably use it to get home, even though I live about a 20-minute drive from here. So that’s a complete dependence, I would say.

Lesley McClurg: In a nutshell, how does it work? How did it get me to that beautiful river that night and actually to a campfire and a good evening rather than a disastrous day with my 7-year-old?

Katherine Dunn: Yeah, exactly. So what this is, it’s a kind of web of satellites all around you. There’s a minimum of 24, and you or I, wherever we are, are in sight of 4 at any one time.

The important thing is there are 4 things that the satellites are calculating for. They’re sending radio waves down, and the chip in your phone is doing these calculations. It’s longitude and latitude—we all know those. It’s altitude, so if you were high up or down in a canyon, it’d be calculating for that. And the fourth one, which is kind of the secret sauce of GPS and gets forgotten about a lot, is time.

In particular, it makes a bad clock a good clock, in very simple terms. It gives us this ultra, ultra, ultra-accurate time. It’s these 4 things, and it’s just radio signals. But contained in those radio signals, it’s a computer talking to a computer talking to a computer. It’s really those 4 dimensions that make it so useful.

Lesley McClurg: Did we have any sense in the 1970s, when it was first invented, that it would be so ubiquitous and that we would be so dependent on it?

Katherine Dunn: You know, it’s funny. If you talk to the people who are considered the fathers of GPS, many of whom are in California, they’ll say they always knew it was going to be transformative.

I think one of the things that became clear quite quickly is that it was a lot more accurate than they thought it was. There’s this iconic story about dropping 5 or 6 bombs, and only 4 bomb craters showed up. All of a sudden, they realized it was much more accurate than expected.

They definitely thought it was going to be transformative for things we think about now, like maps, but even they didn’t anticipate exactly how transformative it would be. It quickly started to take on a life of its own and be adapted for all kinds of things they never expected. That happened almost from the beginning. From the early 1980s, it started taking on a life of its own.

Lesley McClurg: And how long did it take until we wholeheartedly trusted it?

Katherine Dunn: Well, it’s funny because there are cases where maybe we shouldn’t have trusted it yet, and people already started trusting it blindly.

But I think a moment a lot of listeners will remember is when, in the 2000s, the U.S. government took the brakes off. They had made it artificially less accurate for civilians. Once they removed those restrictions, you could really have it in cars. If you had a little suction-cup-mounted TomTom or something like that, that was the moment most people started experiencing GPS for the first time.

Then the moment it became what we think of today was probably the late 2000s. The second iPhone was the first to have Google Maps and working GPS. I was a teenager at the time, but that was really the moment it changed my world and a lot of other people’s, too. It was that consumer-tech smartphone explosion.

Lesley McClurg: You kind of hinted at it there. There was a different version for the military than there was for civilians. Talk about how that worked and why that was.

Katherine Dunn: Yeah. It was this thing called selective availability—not a very sexy phrase, of course.

What it really meant was that when they realized GPS was so elegant, worked so well, and was much more accurate than expected, they started putting the brakes on it. They artificially made it less accurate. They brought it down, I think, from about 20 meters of accuracy to 100 meters.

Lesley McClurg: Why did they want the civilian version to be worse?

Katherine Dunn: It’s a good question. But if you think about it, it’s because anybody could use it. I’m sitting here in the UK, but I could be sitting in Beijing or Moscow and still be using GPS.

It was so accurate that they realized U.S. enemies could use it just as well as the U.S. military. The idea was that it would still be useful—you could still find your way on the side of a mountain—but it wouldn’t be as precise.

This was designed as a tool for precision bombing. The fact that your enemies would also have access to something ultra-accurate seemed a little problematic once they belatedly realized what they had on their hands.

Lesley McClurg: This binary played out in a not-so-pretty way. During Desert Storm, we really saw why it might not be a great idea for civilians to have a worse version of GPS. You point to examples like freeway repairs and earthquake detection. What was going on during Desert Storm that made people realize a reduced civilian version wasn’t such a great idea?

Katherine Dunn: Yeah. I think they’d already realized how this civilian dependence had sprouted.

From very early on, GPS had never been classified. It had always been open to civilians, but you really had to know what you were looking for. It was adopted early by mapmakers, surveyors, and academics. Then it started being adapted for all kinds of surveying.

That’s why, in the early 1990s, you have freeways in Los Angeles being mapped and maintained using GPS. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was using it to track earthquakes. It had taken on a life of its own, and officials realized there was a huge commercial dependence on it.

By the time you get to the Iraq War, a government official said something along the lines of, “We won’t degrade the global transit system just to spite Saddam Hussein.”

By that point, global transit systems around the world depended on GPS. The airport in Fiji was one of the first places to volunteer to use GPS. They told the FAA, “Let us try this. It would be really useful.” So if you’re degrading GPS at scale, you’re also affecting people in Fiji.

Lesley McClurg: Or repairing freeways the wrong way.

Katherine Dunn: Exactly. It took a little while for GPS to reach the level of integration we see now, but it was pretty early on that people were finding these uses for it. The cat was out of the bag.

Lesley McClurg: How did it used to work? Before GPS, what kinds of technologies did institutions rely on? How did the world function without GPS?

Katherine Dunn: Cast your mind back: paper maps.

Actually, there was a system before GPS called Transit. Regular people didn’t use it, but it was a satellite-navigation predecessor used in aviation. There were also radio beacons that created navigation paths across the continental United States. We were already using radio in a lot of ways to help with navigation.

For timing, there are these incredible stories about the lengths people went to in order to keep global time synchronized. To keep Paris in time with Washington, they would literally take a clock and fly it from Washington to Paris to keep all these clocks more or less in sync.

And of course, we used paper maps. Things weren’t always exactly where we thought they were. There are funny stories about GPS mapping projects discovering that landmarks like the Statue of Liberty were several yards away from where we thought they were.

The idea of where we think things are versus where they “actually” are didn’t always match up. We probably didn’t expect perfect precision back then. Today, we assume that if GPS says something is somewhere, it must be there.

That’s why it’s such a disorienting experience if you’ve ever used Google Maps around tall buildings in Manhattan and suddenly can’t figure out where you are. You end up frustrated and late for all your meetings.

I’m sure some listeners would say they still use Ordnance Survey maps. And yes, that’s how it used to be.

Lesley McClurg: And some sailors probably learn celestial navigation just in case. What is the difference between the civilian and military versions of GPS today? Or are they the same?

Katherine Dunn: The military version is encrypted. It’s harder to disrupt—not impossible, but harder.

The accuracy is still roughly the same. For civilians, the effective accuracy is often even better than the official specifications because there are supplementary systems on land—what are called differential systems—that make GPS even more accurate.

So there isn’t a huge difference. In conflict zones, you might see the military signal being used, or you might see disruptions targeted at the military signal. But we now have such a vast web of civilian infrastructure dependent on GPS that the distinction between military and civilian GPS is much more blurred than it was in the past.

Lesley McClurg: We’re talking about GPS—how it works, why it’s important, and why those military roots are key to understanding the future of the technology and the importance of keeping GPS online and secure for all of us.

We’re joined by Katherine Dunn. She’s a journalist and author of Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World.

We’ll be right back after this break. I’m Lesley McClurg.

Podcast

Bay Area Communities Resist Data Center Boom

Audio

Airdate: Monday, June 22 at 9 AM

Communities across the Bay Area, including Gilroy, Oakley and Pittsburg, are pushing back on new data centers in their cities. Data centers, which house the computing equipment and servers that power the internet, have been around for decades, but opposition to them has exploded as tech companies pour hundreds of billions of dollars into building thousands of new centers nationwide. Residents worry the facilities will suck up scarce water and electricity and pollute the environment to power the riches of AI investors. We’ll talk about the data center boom and how it’s playing out in the Bay Area.

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This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Americans, despite roughly half of us now using AI chatbots, are very wary of artificial intelligence. Polling shows that many people are worried about what AI will do to them personally, their work, and society at large. One area where those anxieties are coming out is in opposition to the massive data center building boom.

Here locally, Gilroy’s situation has grabbed headlines, with major opposition to the project showing up late but strong. Here to update us on what’s been going on down there, we’re joined by Britt Smith, a Gilroy resident, activist, and cofounder of Stop Gilroy Data Center. Welcome, Britt.

Britt Smith: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Alexis Madrigal: A way I understand it, Amazon started construction on a 436,000-square-foot data center last December. How did you actually hear about it, and how did you get involved?

Britt Smith: Yeah, that’s correct. So initially, even before it was the construction of a data center, Amazon had approached our town about developing a distribution center. Around December 2025 and January of this year, there were some conversations on our community Facebook pages asking about the status of this project. It was around the time that some fencing started to go up around the perimeter of the construction site.

Through some of those grassroots comments from my neighbors, I got very curious and started doing some digging. That’s when people really started to learn that this is now a data center, which is a very different use case than the distribution center that we were initially told about.

Alexis Madrigal: And the documents for all this stuff have been public, right, on city council records and things. But there weren’t large meetings or notices. What has actually gone out from the city government and Amazon to residents?

Britt Smith: Yeah, that’s a great question. Based on our ordinances here in Gilroy, which were last updated in 1981, the way that this process was approved was at the city staff level. Under no circumstances was this going to go before city council, any of the planning commissions, or really even have more of a public forum than what has been legally required for that type of use case.

What I found particularly interesting is that there are two signs up outside of the construction site that very loosely detail the scope of the project, but there really isn’t a lot of strong information. There could have been a QR code to learn more and point people to the city site.

Another issue I take is that the signage is not really accessible. The signs are at active intersections, and they’re only available in English. We know that I believe it’s something like 40% of our community primarily speaks languages other than English at home. I think there’s an accessibility issue with the information. Even if it’s available online, I think a lot more could have been done to bring it to the community.

Alexis Madrigal: Had you personally ever been involved in efforts like this, or is this kind of a new thing for you?

Britt Smith: This is a new thing for me. I grew up in Gilroy. I went to Gilroy High School and was part of leadership and tried to be involved in the community in that way. Then, when I moved back after my education, I heard the conversations that were going on with my neighbors and thought there’s a chance here for us to do something different, a chance for people to be more involved, and a chance for the information that’s going on around and at City Hall to be brought back out into the community.

Gilroy is pretty similar to a lot of communities in the Bay Area around the fringes of Silicon Valley, where most of our community is commuting to help grow the businesses in Silicon Valley. I think when people get home at the end of their long day, they are hoping that their city council and city government will be doing a little bit more to meet them where they are, as opposed to expecting all the onus to be on the citizens.

Alexis Madrigal: That’s interesting. If you have to reach back to student council in high school, you’re not a lifelong activist. For you, does this have to do with AI per se, or is it this data center itself that’s really driving your opposition? Or both?

Britt Smith: I’d say it’s a bit of both. But considering Gilroy’s agricultural history, for me and a lot of folks around town who are raising the flag on this, it’s really about the resource constraints.

Aside from the water usage, Amazon has told us that recycled water will be used at this facility. However, there’s no infrastructure yet to transport treated water from the Gilroy plant to the new data center site. It’s really unclear when that would even be constructed or go live.

Aside from that, we already have a constrained power grid. With PG&E, we have frequent outages in the South Bay. I believe it’s something like around two outages a month for customers served by PG&E. There’s already a lot of strain on our systems in this area, and I think adding something like a hyperscale data center with a lot of unknown variables in terms of usage adds a lot of concern for folks here in town.

Alexis Madrigal: Let’s bring in Hema Sivanandam, East Contra Costa County reporter for Bay Area News Group. Welcome, Hema.

Hema Sivanandam: Hi. Thank you. Good morning.

Alexis Madrigal: One of the interesting things is that this is going on down in Gilroy in the South Bay. You’re following this out in Contra Costa County. What’s going on out there in Pittsburg?

Hema Sivanandam: In Pittsburg, just to give a little background, it started in 2018 when the Delta View Golf Course shut down. That’s where this particular data center is being proposed, on 76 acres of the site and in three different phases.

Phase One was approved by city council in 2024. During the most recent meeting in June, city council had so many people coming in who were unhappy, frustrated, and angry because they felt they were caught off guard. They don’t want a data center because they are very worried about resource constraints and what the environmental and health implications would be. That’s what’s happening in Pittsburg in a nutshell at the moment.

Alexis Madrigal: Have you ever seen a turnout at a Pittsburg city council meeting like the one you saw opposing the data center?

Hema Sivanandam: To be very honest, no. I started covering the area in 2024, and usually the meetings are pretty chill. But that day, a lot of people showed up—more than 80 speakers and hundreds of speaker cards were submitted.

It was a bit tense because people were, at one point, heckling and saying to city leaders, especially the mayor, “Why aren’t you looking at us? We are here. We are concerned about this.” So there was a lot of drama.

Alexis Madrigal: That’s fascinating, too, because if you keep going east—for those who aren’t familiar with this part of the Bay Area—you hit Antioch, and then you keep going and you hit Oakley, which is basically in the Delta at that point. Oakley is the first city in the Bay Area, I believe, that’s passed a moratorium on new data center building. Is that right?

Hema Sivanandam: Yes. They passed a temporary moratorium. At first it was for 45 days, and then the city was told they could extend it, which they have done.

Until 2027, the city is not allowed to take applications for any data centers while it works out what can be done regarding land use and data centers. The city is still working out the details and is expecting to hold joint workshops with the planning commission and city council to determine what guardrails can be put in place.

Alexis Madrigal: Britt, back to you. Stop Gilroy Data Center is in your organization’s name, but this thing has already moved past that point, right? What are you hoping to get from your activism? Do you think it can still be stopped? Do you want to see a moratorium like the one in Oakley?

Britt Smith: Yeah. I think when we started this, we used the word “stop” very intentionally, with the idea that there’s a lot of people power, a lot of momentum behind this, and a real chance for our community to make change.

That being said, you’re totally right. Ground has been broken on this site. There are crews out there as we speak, and this project is off to the races.

But I do hope that, at least at this point, while the city doesn’t really have a path forward to stopping what’s underway, it can implement an oversight committee made up of local citizens, business owners, and people who are interested in the project. The goal would be to create guidelines and processes for reviewing the commitments Amazon has made to our city and ensuring that they are followed through on.

The other piece is making sure that something like this doesn’t happen again. We do have some members of our city council who are looking to amend our ordinances specifically to account for projects of this scale. While there aren’t any projects like this currently in the pipeline, I think it’s important to recognize that this community does not want a data center. If we are going to have one, it should be very closely monitored.

It would be in Amazon’s best interest to work closely with us and listen to us going forward. We also want to make sure that the resources we have in South County are reserved for the people of South County, not equipment and infrastructure that we’ve done fine without for this long. It’s important to respect our agricultural roots and the will of the people at this point.

Alexis Madrigal: Britt Smith, longtime Gilroy resident, activist, and cofounder of Stop Gilroy Data Center. Thanks so much for joining us.

Britt Smith: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Alexis Madrigal: We are still joined by Hema Sivanandam, East Contra Costa County reporter with Bay Area News Group. We’re talking about the data center boom, how it’s playing out in the Bay Area, the opposition to it, and the forces behind it.

We want to hear from you. What are your questions and concerns about data centers? Do you have thoughts about a proposed data center in your community?

You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. The email is forum@kqed.org. You can find us on social media—BlueSky, Instagram, and Discord. We’re KQED Forum.

I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.