Support for KQED podcasts comes from San Francisco International Airport.

You can fly back in time and visit SFO's Aviation Museum and Library to learn about the history of commercial aviation.

No boarding pass needed. Learn more at flysafo.com slash museum.

Support for forum comes from Broadway SF, presenting Parade, the musical revival based on a true story.

From three-time Tony-winning composer Jason Robert Brown comes the story of Leo and Lucille Frank,

a newlywed Jewish couple struggling to make a life in Georgia. When Leo is accused of an

unspeakable crime, it propels them into an

unimaginable test of faith, humanity, justice, and devotion. The riveting and gloriously hopeful

parade plays the Orpheum Theater for three weeks only, May 20th through June 8th. Tickets

on sale now at Broadwaysf.com.

From KQED.

From KQD in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.

Writer Azar Nefisi says totalitarian regimes pay too much attention to poets and writers harassing,

jailing and even killing them.

But in America, the problem is too little attention, silencing artists through indifference and negligence.

Nefisi's new book, Read Dangerously, The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times,

makes the argument for reading fiction not as an escape from our political problems, but as part of the solution to them.

We'll talk with Nefisi for the hour about authoritarian tendencies in the U.S.

being curious about your enemies and what she learned from her father, who was in prison for four

years in Iran. That's all next after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

Azarnifisi's new book is a series of letters to her late father, discussing the writer she turns to when grappling with oppression, war, and injustice, including Solomon Rushdie's, or Neil Hurston, Margaret Atwood, and James Baldwin.

...