Kqeds Perspectives

77 years ago, in Nazi-occupied Holland, a Dutch Christmas tradition became a brush with disaster for then 6-year-old Anita Frank, whose memories haunt her to this day.

On Christmas morning, millions of gifts will be unwrapped. But Heidi Swillinger has had her small but favorite gift for many years.

Our personal and national lives have gone off the rails, and Pete Gavin says normal never looked so good.

Mac Clayton says the march to racial equality in America is characterized by upswings and downswings.

Richard Swerdlow says the high-speed freeway to effective COVID vaccines was built in humble classrooms where science basics are taught.

When the season's first rainy day arrived, Marilyn Englander devoted it to a walk in the woods.

Even psychotherapist Larry Jin Lee is having trouble coping with anxiety and depression during the pandemic.

With time on his hands, Richard Friedlander takes a walk and discovers a world he’d largely ignored – his own neighborhood.

Debbie Duncan looks at how COVID has changed our vocabulary.

Marcy Fraser was an AIDS nurse throughout that plague. Now she reaches out to all nurses on the frontlines of a new scourge.

Things are just things, but they’re also artifacts that tell the story a life. Dan Goldes has this Perspective. My 90‐year‐old mother died recently, and my two brothers and I spent a few days cleaning out her house in Santa Rosa. As we sorted through the drawers, cabinets, and boxes, we spent time laughing, crying a little, and ribbing her in absentia for all the things she saved: receipts from long‐ago purchases, paintings my younger brother and I made in grade school, books she’d read decades before. Why, I thought, does someone save all this stuff? Then I realized that what we were looking at were artifacts. My mother was born into the Depression and was divorced with a young son by the early 1950s. She made her way to a new life in California, married again, had two more sons, divorced a second time, and spent the next 40 years discovering her path. That path wasn’t always easy for a 50‐something woman who had spent 20 years raising kids. As I looked at the boxes of stuff we were giving to friends, donati

Have you spent a crazy amount of time on things that barely crossed your mind before, just because you have to do something with all that time? Linda Gebroe has.

For most of us, extended self-isolation is a new challenge. For Liz Travis Allen, it's old hat.

https://www.kqed.org/.stream/anon/radio/perspectives/2020/12/PerspLoudmouthsEllenGreenblatt.mp3

A visitor from China provides Andrew Lewis a window into how the pandemic is being handled elsewhere. The difference is stark.

For Gabrielle Selz, working a jigsaw puzzle is about much more than idle entertainment.

Les Bloch has a toe tapping suggestion for beating the COVID blues.

Jason Saleh asks why the homes lost, deaths and displacement of wildlife aren't counted among the costs of wildfires.