Soonish

Hello again, Soonish listeners! You might remember that in the final episode of Soonish last year, I said I'd be back in the podcast feed one last time  to tell you about a new audio project I've been working on. Well, today I'm finally launching a new show I'm calling Turning Corners. It's full of inspiring stories about people in the Four Corners states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado who are working to bridge old divides, heal the land, and make life better. 

If you liked Soonish, I think you'll like this new show too, so...

Hey Soonish listeners! I'm back in your podcast feed with some exciting news. I'm about to launch a new podcast called Turning Corners. 

It's full of inspiring stories about people in the Four Corners states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado who are working to bridge old divides, heal the land, and make life better. Today I'm sharing a short trailer that explains a little more about the show

If you liked Soonish, I think you'll like this new show too. As soon as the first episode is ready, I'm going to drop that he...

David Mindell is a historian, an engineer, a startup founder, a venture investor—and now the author of The New Lunar Society: An Englightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution. The 2025 MIT Press volume is all about James Watt, Matthew Boulton, and the other inventors and entrepreneurs who kickstarted the first industrial revolution in Great Britain back in the late eighteenth century, and what they got right and what they missed about how technology can transform work and how to translate invention into social progress. But it’s also about how engineers innovate (or fail to innovate) today, and what...

Today we're bringing you an episode of our sister Hub & Spoke show Rumble Strip, from producer Erica Heilman. It's a conversation with Jay Allison about public media—what it's for, why it's important, and what we stand to lose if the anti-intellectual MAGA right succeeds in killing it off. 

Jay is an independent public radio producer who founded WCAI, a public radio station in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, as well as Transom, a resource and school for people learning how to make audio. He produces the Moth Radio Hour, he curated the recurrng feature "This I Believe" on NPR...

My guest this week, Adele Getty, is the author of A Sense of the Sacred and an educator in the field of assisted psychedelic therapy. Together with her husband Michael Williams, she started a non-profit here in Santa Fe called the Limina Foundation. Its mission is to support treatment for addiction and PTSD through both synthetic and plant-based psychedelic medicines.

On September 7, the foundation will host an event here in my adopted hometown of Santa Fe called The Enchanted State. That’s a play on New Mexico’s official nickname, which is the Land of Enchantment. But it’s...

If you listened to my previous episode, you’ll remember that I described four "valleys" or scenarios for how the 2024 presidential election could unfold. The fourth scenario was one where Donald Trump wins both the electoral college and the popular vote, with a margin big enough to claim he has a mandate for change. I called that the Valley of Doom. And like it or not, that's the one we're in. 

Now that we know which path we’re really on, it’s time to think through through what’s next. Plenty of other smart people are trying to...

Why does every presidential race lately get described as "the most important election of our lifetimes"? Because it's true. In any election where Donald Trump is on the ballot, Americans are faced with a world-changing choice about whether we want the democratic experiment to continue. Right now, four weeks out from the 2024 vote, it's totally unclear which choice we'll make, but it's not too soon to be thinking about the possible consequences. This episode of Soonish walks through four plausible post-election scenarios, with the main outcomes driven by who wins the popular vote and who wins in the electoral...

Don't worry, the next regular season of Soonish is still coming. But meanwhile I wanted to bring you something really special that I think you’ll like. It's first episode of a new podcast from Hub & Spoke called The Rabbis Go South. It’s a documentary that we’re presenting as part of a new project we’ve cooked up called the Hub & Spoke Expo.

The Expo is our way of working with independent audio creators who are making limited-run series, as opposed to the ongoing podcasts that make up the rest of the collective. The Rabbis Go South...

I’ve been arguing on the show since 2019 that the companies that run the big technology platforms—Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the rest—have far too much wealth and power. In the world these companies have built, we exist only to generate behavioral data. We supply that data through our decisions about what social media posts to click on and what stuff to buy and what videos and songs we consume; the companies hoover it up and use it to craft and curate more content they know we’ll like, so that they can sell us even more stuff. 

This...

The most important piece of advice David Baron ever got: “Before you die, you owe it to yourself to see a total solar eclipse.”

The recommendation came from the Williams College astronomer Jay Pasachoff, a beloved teacher and textbook author, after Baron interviewed him for a 1994 radio story. Baron listened—and it changed his life. He saw his first eclipse in Aruba in 1998, and has since become a true umbraphile. The upcoming eclipse of April 8, 2024, will be the ninth one he’s witnessed.

A veteran science journalist and former NPR science correspondent, Baron joined Soonish from his...

After a long hiatus, Soonish is back for a celebration: this is the 50th full episode of the show! (I’m not counting a few bonus episodes in that total.) Tamar Avishai, creator and host of the Hub & Spoke podcast The Lonely Palette, joins this time as co-host to help us take a look back at the first 49 episodes of the show. She quizzes me on the accuracy of many of the technology forecasts and predictions I offered along the way. And she prompts me to explain how the show has evolved since its launch in 2017, why it’s beco...

Hey listeners! A new, original episode of Soonish is coming very soon. Meanwhile, I wanted to share a Valentine's Day treat.

As the philosopher Haddaway once asked, "What is love?" Well, it can be anything that stirs the heart: passion, grief, affection, kin. The desire to consume; the poignancy of memory. At Hub & Spoke—the collective of independent podcasts where Soonish was a founding member back in 2017—we want to stretch our arms, and ears, around it all. 

This special episode of our anthology show, the Hub & Spoke Radio Hour, looks at love from four diffe...

Why does the world of young adult fiction seem to have more wizards, werewolves, and vampires in it than astronauts and engineers?

And why have the writers of the blockbuster YA books of the last 20 years fixated so consistently on white, straight, cisgender protagonists while always somehow forgetting to portray the true diversity of young people’s backgrounds, identities, orientations, and experiences?

Well, you could write a whole dissertation about those questions. But instead, my friend and colleague A. R. Capetta and I went out and assembled a counterweight. It’s a YA science fiction coll...

This week we're featuring a conversation with Ian Coss, co-creator of Newts, a wild new six-part musical audio drama from PRX and the fiction podcast The Truth. The show is inspired by the writings of the Czech journalist and science fiction pioneer Karel Čapek. He’s best known for coining the  word "robot" in his 1920 play Rossum's Universal Robots, or R.U.R—but his less famous 1936 novel War with the Newts is actually a funnier, weirder, and more biting reflection of politics and social affairs in the first half of the twentieth century.  It's also a sprawling, jumbled, irrever...

For most people, nightmares produce insomnia, exhaustion, and unease. For Graham Gordon Ramsay, a spate of severe nightmares in April 2020 developed into something more lasting and meaningful: a five-movement, 18-minute musical work for organ or string ensemble called "Introspections." To me, it's one of the most arresting artistic documents of the opening phase of the global coronavirus pandemic, and so we've made it the subject of this week's Song Exploder-style musical episode. (Headphones recommended!)

Graham is a friend of the podcast; longtime listeners will recognize him as the composer of our opening theme. But he's also a...

Last summer, a pair of murals celebrating New Mexico's landscape, heritage, and diversity appeared in Albuquerque's historic Old Town district. The large outdoor pieces by muralists Jodie Herrera and Reyes Padilla—two artists with deep roots in New Mexico—brought life back to a once abandoned shopping plaza and became instant fan favorites, endlessly photographed by locals and tourists alike. 

But in a January hearing, the the city’s Landmarks Commission, which is charged with preserving Old Town and Albuquerque’s other historical districts, said the murals were unauthorized and ahistorical and should be destroyed. Business owners and the a...

When you hear people use the phrase "It's a hits-driven business," they're usually talking about venture capital, TV production, videogames, or pop music—all industries where you don't make much money unless you come up with at least one (and  preferably a string of) massively popular products. But you know what's another hits-driven business? Drug development. This week, we present the fourth and final episode in the Persistent Innovators miniseries, originally produced for InnoLead's Innovation Answered podcast and republished here for Soonish listeners. It's all about the giant Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, maker of more than a dozen blockbuster dru...

LEGO is so omnipresent in today’s culture—through its stores, its theme parks, its movies, and of course its construction kits—that it’s hard to imagine a world not strewn with billions of colorful plastic LEGO bricks. Yet less than two decades ago, in 2003, the company came close to extinction, thanks to a frenetic bout of new-product introductions that left out LEGO’s core customers: the kids and adults who just love to build stuff with bricks. In today’s episode of Soonish, hear how the family-owned company behind the LEGO “system of play” recovered from this near-death exper...

This week, Soonish presents Part 2 of The Persistent Innovators, a miniseries I've been guest-producing and guest-hosting for Innovation Answered, InnoLead's podcast for people with creative roles inside big companies. You can think of Persistent Innovators as the corporate equivalent of human super-agers—meaning they don’t settle into a complacent old age, but manage to keep reinventing themselves and their products decade after decade. Two weeks ago I republished the miniseries' debut episode about Apple, and now I want to bring you the next episode, about The Walt Disney Company. As you'll hear, I focused on how the rise of n...

This week, I've got something different for Soonish listeners. I'm sharing Part 1 of "The Persistent Innovators," a miniseries I'm currently guest-producing and guest-hosting for InnoLead's podcast Innovation Answered. The big question the series tackles is: "How do big companies become innovative—and stay innovative?" I'm looking at four long-lived global companies—Apple, Disney, LEGO, and Novartis—and asking how they've all stayed creative and curious long past the age when most companies stop innovating and decide to coast on profits from their existing businesses. 

For this initial episode, I traced Apple's evolution from a renegade upstart in the ear...

Clock time is a human invention. So it shouldn’t be a box that confines us; it should be a tool that helps us accomplish the things we care about.

But consider the system of standard time, first imposed by the railroad companies in the 1880s. It constrains people who live 1,000 miles apart—on opposite edges of their time zones—to get up and go to work or go to school at the same time, even though their local sunrise and sunset times may vary by an hour or more.

And it also consigns people like m...

What if a technology company becomes so rich, so powerful, so exploitative, and so oblivious that that the harm it's doing begins to outweigh the quality and utility of its products? What if that company happens to run the world's dominant search, advertising, email, web, and mobile platforms? This month's episode of Soonish argues that it's time to rein in Google—and that individual internet users can play a meaningful part by switching to other tools and providers. It's half stem-winder, half how-to, featuring special guest Mark Hurst of the WFMU radio show and podcast Techtonic.

* * *  

B...

Venture capital is the fuel powering most technology startups. Behind every future Google or Uber or Snapchat is a syndicate of venture firms hoping for outsize financial returns. But the vast majority of venture money goes into Internet, mobile, and software companies where consumer demand and the path to market are plain. So what happens to entrepreneurs with risky, unproven, but potentially world-changing ideas in areas like zero-carbon energy or growing replacement human organs? If it weren't for an MIT-born venture firm called The Engine and a tiny handful of other venture firms tackling "Tough Tech," they'd probably never...

In this episode of Soonish you'll meet Stanley Crooke, the former CEO of Ionis Pharmaceuticals and the head of a new nonprofit called N-Lorem, which is working to make mutation-correcting "antisense oligonucleotide" drugs available free for life to people with uncommon genetic diseases. 

These are conditions so rare they often don't have a name. But while the diseases themselves are unusual, the problem isn't: as many as 350 million people worldwide are thought to carry mutations that give rise to unique "N of 1" health problems.

The debut of hyper-personalized antisense medicines is a topic I covered i...

The coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on education on schools around the world, often rendering in-classroom instruction too dangerous for both students and teachers. But one reason the effects of the pandemic haven’t been even worse is that, in education as in many other fields, a few new technologies were ready for broader deployment.

I’m not talking about Zoom and other forms of videoconferencing, which have by and large been a disaster for both K-12 and college students. Rather, I’m talking about massive open online courses, or MOOCs, as well as the huge b...

In honor of the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden—a day of long-awaited endings and new beginnings—I'm republishing my Season 2 opener, "Shadows of August," which I first released a little more than three years ago, during the the fiery early months of the Trump presidency. On a road trip to southern Illinois to witness the total eclipse that sliced across the continent on August 21, 2017, I had a couple of other adventures: at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, I unintentionally got conscripted as a fake Confederate soldier in a bizarre reenactment of Pickett's Charge. I also met a few of the Black resi...

In 1973, there was only one man who believed everyone on Earth would want and need a cell phone. That man was a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper.

“I had a science fiction prediction,” Cooper recounts in his new memoir, Cutting the Cord: The Inventor of the Cell Phone Speaks Out. “I told anyone who would listen that, someday, every person would be issued a phone number at birth. If someone called and you didn’t answer, that would mean you had died.”

Your email address or Facebook profile may have displaced your phone number as the marker...

Soonish's six-month detour into electoral politics finishes where it started, with a conversation with our favorite futurist, Jamais Cascio. We talked late on November 6—when it was already clear that Joseph R. Biden would win the presidential race, but before the networks had officially called it—and we explored what Biden's unexpectedly narrow win will mean for progress against the pandemic; for the fortunes of the progressive left; and for the future of democracy in the United States.

Turning Donald Trump out of office was an enormous and crucial accomplishment, and Biden voters should take a moment to c...

Welcome to a special two-part series about the looming clash over the future of America. In Part 1, we looked at the tattered state of our democracy and searched for peaceful ways through an election season in which one candidate—Trump—has threatened violence and disruption if he doesn’t win. Here in Part 2, we look at the work waiting for us after the election: fixing the way we govern ourselves so that we’ll never have another president like Trump or another year like 2020.

The real breakdowns in our system go much deeper than Trump—hence the cliché tha...

Welcome to a special two-part series about the looming clash over the future of America. In Part 1, we look at the tattered state of our democracy as the election approaches, and we assess nonviolent ways to respond to the twin threats of political polarization and President Trump's thuggish behavior. Part 2 is coming October 12.

These are probably the last two pre-election episodes I’ll make, so I decided to try something a little ambitious and probably a little crazy: making sense of 2020 in all its perverse complexity. It’s a cliché at this point to say that Donald Trump...

Donald Trump will not be president forever. Whether he leaves office in 2021 or 2025; whether he steps down peacefully or not; whether he’s replaced by a Democratic president or a Republican one—he will leave. And then the country will face the immense task of restoring democratic norms and facing up to the failings that allowed a populist, white-nationalist demagogue like Trump to reach office in the first place.

In this episode, with help from University of Chicago political scientist Will Howell, we look at the leading explanations for Trump’s rise and the competing ideas about ways t...

Voters, hold on to your hats. The U.S. election system could face an unprecedented array of challenges in November, from the coronavirus pandemic to the prospect of cyberattacks to the depradations of President Trump himself. And that means there’s a non-zero chance that the election will misfire, leaving us with the wrong president—or no president at all—come noon on January 20, 2021.

At least, that’s the argument legal scholar Lawrence Douglas lays out in Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020, a new book that goes into extreme and eye-opening detail about th...

Futurists—who sometimes prefer to be called scenario planners or foresight thinkers—specialize in helping the rest of us understand the big trends and forces that will shape the world of tomorrow. So here’s what I really wanted to ask one: Is a cataclysm like the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 the kind of event we should be able to see coming? If so, then why didn’t we do more to get ready? Why has the federal government’s response to the spread of covid-19 been so inept? And above all, what should we be doing now to get our politi...

Fifty years after Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins went to the moon, it’s hard to shake off the afterimage of the Saturn V rocket rising into the sky on a column of flame, and remember that the astronauts' bold adventure was also the product of decades of work by engineers, politicians, propagandists, and even science fiction writers. That’s the gap Lillian Cunningham of the Washington Post set out to fix in her podcast, Moonrise. And she’s here with us today to talk about how the show got made, what she thinks the Apollo story can te...

The moment in the voting booth when you put your pen to your ballot (or put your finger to the electronic touchscreen, as the case may be) is democracy distilled. It’s the act that makes America a republic. But while the casting your vote is critical, it’s everything that happens before, during, and after that moment that makes up the larger election system. And these days there are whole armies of people working to influence and disrupt that system—and opposing armies working to protect it and make it safer and more accessible.

In this specia...

In this short bonus episode, hear the bizarre story of a college student who scaled a New England weather tower on a dare, stole a curious scientific instrument as a trophy, and inadvertently disrupted a series of climate observations going back more than 130 years.

I made this four-minute, non-narrated piece in 2018 as part of the 24-Hour Radio Race from KCRW’s Independent Producer Project.

To view the show notes, a photo gallery, and a full transcript visit soonishpodcast.org/307-the-great-blue-hill-heist

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

Additional music is...

Apple used the opening keynote presentation at its annual World Wide Developers Conference in San Jose in June to roll out the usual array of software updates and new computer hardware. But tucked into middle of the keynote was one the event's most consequential and underappreciated pieces of news: For the first time in more than three years, Apple will offer its own LCD computer monitor, the Pro Display XDR.

It's a serious piece of gear, with 20 million pixels and new techniques for handling light and heat that deliver extremes of brightness, contrast, and color. And it...

Earlier this year Soonish took on social media in an episode called A Future Without Facebook. In that show I explained my own decision to quit the troubled platform and talked with friends and colleagues about their own reasons for staying or going.

But the story of how these platforms are confounding earlier hopes for social media—and are instead blowing up our democracies—was never just about Facebook. In today’s special follow-up episode, I speak with national security expert Juliette Kayyem and former Twitter engineer Raffi Krikorian about the challenges spanning all of our social media...

The adjective “visionary” gets thrown around a lot, but it’s literally true of Chesley Bonestell and Arthur Radebaugh, the two illustrators featured in this week’s episode. Both men used their fertile visual imaginations and their artistic skills to create engaging, influential depictions of human space exploration and our high-tech future. Their work was seen by millions of magazine and newspaper readers throughout the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s—boosting public support for space exploration and industrial R&D at a critical time for the U.S. economy. Now, both men are the subjects of documentary films.

Chesley Bonest...

Every technology has its growing pains, but Facebook, at age 15, has matured into a never-ending disaster. Here at Soonish, I'm fed up, and I'm closing my accounts. In this episode, you’ll hear how I reached this point, and how other Facebook users are coming to grips with the chronic problems at the social network. You might just come away with some ideas about what to do to limit Facebook’s power over your own life!

The first signs that something was seriously wrong at Facebook surfaced in—well, when?