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, and his work has won six Peabody awards, the highest awards in broadcasting. (Erica won a Peabody too, so these folks know whereof they speak!)

To me, Jay and Erica's conversation is a beautiful and elegant cri de coeur about public radio’s founding values, and it reminded me why I make audio and why I joined forces with the other folks at Hub & Spoke to try to create more space for indepencent voices in podcasting. At one point Erica asks Jay what’s so “public” about public radio and Jay answers that for him, it was about openness to all citizens who cared—he literally walked into NPR off the street and somebody gave him a recorder, showed him how to work it, and told him to go out and talk to people and bring back their stories. That dedication to public voices and public service persists, perhaps especially at stations in smaller or more remote markets—the same stations that might have to go off the air now that they're losing their federal funding. The big questions now are: How can we keep those stations alive? And what will public media look like after the current storm?

Thank you to Jay, who generously spent some time with me back in 2022 when I was looking for advice on how to raise money for Hub & Spoke, and thank you to Erica for making and sharing this episode. You can hear more Rumble Strip episodes at http://rumblestripvermont.com.

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 also a nod to New Mexico’s growing role in the national conversation about whether and how substances like MDMA, mushrooms, and ibogaine should be legalized and regulated.

For thousands of years people have been ingesting compounds found in plants and fungi to facilitate religious ceremonies or help them access a kind of higher wisdom. In more modern times these substances have been used by people who want to explore their own inner psyches, or people who need help getting past addiction or deeply rooted psychological trauma. The US government criminalized the use and study of most psychedelics back in the 1960s. But in the last decade there’s been a major resurgence in interest in how they work and what they can teach us about consciousness or help us heal. 

Michael Pollan’s books How to Change Your Mind and This Is Your Mind on Plants have both been huge bestsellers. And lawmakers in Oregon, Colorado, and now New Mexico have decriminalized certain psychedelics and begun to create frameworks for therapeutic use. Here in New Mexico, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed a bill earlier this year called SB 219, the Medical Psilocybin Act, that sets up a regulated system for people with PTSD and substance abuse disorders to use mushrooms under the guidance of a licensed healthcare provider.

That was a big step and it means New Mexico has the opportunity to help lead the country toward a future where psychedelics and their benefits are better understood and more widely available. That’s why The Enchanted State event feels so timely, and it’s why I wanted to interview Adele.

Learn more about this episode at http://www.soonishpodcast.org.

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 dissect the Democrats’ mistakes; what feels much more urgent to me is figuring out how to understand the moment we’re in now and how to respond to it. How did civic conversations that used to be built around mutual respect and a shared sense of reality devolve into a free-for-all where lies are more powerful than truth? How did trust in government and institutions decay to the point that a majority of voters were willing to hand power to a disruptor who feeds on chaos and confusion? What options are open now for people who still care about values like community and compassion and equality and enlightened self-government?

To talk it through I reached out this week to two people who helped me think about those questions in two different ways that you could loosely call top-down and bottom-up. The top-down thinker is Jamais Cascio. He’s a futurist and scenario planner based in California, and he’s a familiar voice to listeners of this podcast. The last time Jamais joined us was during the pandemic, and we talked about a framework he’d come up with to help describe the historical forces at play in that crisis. The framework has an acronym, BANI, which stands for Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. Those feel like pretty good adjectives for this moment too, and in our chat we dived into how a BANI framework helps describe our experience of the Trump era and how we can adapt and respond to the coming changes.

The bottom-up thinker featured in this episode is named Rose Friedman. She’s the co-founder and executive director of a nonprofit called The Civic Standard. And she spends every day thinking about how to support dialogue and togetherness and mutual aid in her rural corner of Vermont. I think it’s the kind of work that could help build a new foundation for democratic dialogue and get us past the fear, terror, and loneliness some politicians would like us to feel. In the second half of the episode, I explain how I learned about The Civic Standard—and why I think their mission is so important.

For notes, resources, and a full transcript of this episode, go to https://www.soonishpodcast.org/515-valley-of-doom

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 college. These are the "Four Valleys"—the Valley of Hope, the Valley of Survival, the Valley of Greed, and the Valley of Doom. 

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 is our very first Expo series, and the creators Amy Geller and Gerald Perry released the first episode just this week.

We’re really proud that we can help get the show out to the world, because it tells the story of an important but little-known episode in the history of the pivotal civil rights summer of 1964. You’ve heard of the march in Selma and the bus boycotts in Montgomery. But what you probably haven’t heard is that Black civil rights groups led by Martin Luther King Jr. also faced vicious opposition to their effort to integrate the deeply segregated city of St. Augustine, Florida. As part of a strategy to bring as much media attention as he could to the situation in St. Augustine, Dr. King called on friends from the Jewish community to come to Florida to participate in marches and other actions. Sixteen rabbis heeded that call, and they were so successful at getting under the skin of local law enforcement that they all ended up in a jail run by sheriff’s deputies who were also leaders of the local Ku Klux Klan. Amy and Gerry went out and talked to the surviving members of that group about why they did what they did to help their Black compatriots, and what this rare moment of Black-Jewish cooperation can teach us today.

So I hope you enjoy this first episode, and if you do you can hear the rest of the story in new episodes of The Rabbis Go South, coming out every Monday from now through late October. You can find it at hubspokeaudio.org/rabbis or wherever you get your podcasts. 

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 unimaginably profitable business model has been called “surveillance capitalism”—but that term doesn’t feel right, since surveillance is usually covert, and these companies are doing what they do right out in the open, with our willing participation. This week on the show, we bring you an interview with Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis, who has a better name for it: technofeudalism.

The thesis of his new book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism is that since 2008 or so, old-fashioned capital has been eclipsed by Internet-powered cloud capital. The real power in today’s economy, Varoufakis argues, resides not with the owners of the means of production, but with the owners of the platforms that turn our behavior into data and use that data in turn to modify our behavior. Whereas old-fashioned feudal lords collected actual rent from their serfs in return for the right to farm the land they owned, cloud capitalists collect cloud rent—a tax on access to their platforms.

If you’re like me, you’re not very happy about the rise of technofeudalism and the decline of free, open markets. And you worry about how democracy can survive and how we can continue to flourish as creative beings when so much wealth and power is concentrated in so few companies and people. Fortunately, Varoufakis isn’t simply in the business of diagnosing the problem. In Technofeudalism, together with his 2021 science fiction novel Another Now, he does a lot of work to sketch out alternative worlds and ways we could get there.

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 home in Boulder, CO, to talk about his 2017 book American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic Race to Catch The Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World. It’s a dramatic account of the total eclipse of July 29, 1878, which crossed through Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Texas and drew a fascinating cast of characters into its path, including a young Thomas Edison.

Everyone who chased the 1878 eclipse went West for their own reasons. In Edison’s case, it was to prove his bona fides as a scientist, not just an inventor. For the arrogant University of Michigan astronomer James Craig Watson, it was to hunt for the hypothetical planet Vulcan. For Vassar College astronomer Maria Mitchell and her students, it was to prove to a skeptical public that women could do science and still be “feminine.” Baron’s book shows how their adventures made the eclipse into a major cultural and scientific turning point for the young nation, previously considered a backwater of science. And it reminds us that for the people who flock into the path of totality, an eclipse can still be transformative today.

The first edition of Baron’s book came out right before the great American eclipse of August 2017, and it has now been reissued with a new afterword priming readers for April 8 eclipse. In an unexpected twist for a work of narrative science history, the book is now being made into a Broadway musical, which will have its world premiere at Baylor College in Waco, TX, on April 7, the day before the eclipse.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited is Baron? “Oh, gosh, it’s going to sound silly, but it’s 100, it’s a million,” he says. “I mean, my life revolves around going to solar eclipses, and this one I’ve been looking forward to for a very long time.”

Soonish will be in Mazatlán, Mexico, for the total eclipse of April 8, 2024. If you’ll be there too, drop us a note at [email protected].

This episode is dedicated to the memory of Jay Passachoff (1943-2022).

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 become more political than I ever expected (it’s the democracy, stupid), and where it’s going in the future.

Monorails: Trains of Tomorrow? (January 25, 2017)

Meat Without the Moo (March 8, 2017)

Astropreneurs (April 20, 2017)

Hacking Time (May 11, 2017)

Looking Virtual Reality in the Eye (January 5, 2018)

A Future Without Facebook (March 22, 2019)

Election Dreams and Nightmares (October 31, 2019)

Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible: How One Futurist Frames the Pandemic (May 12, 2020)

Unpeaceful Transition of Power (June 24, 2020)

After Trump, What Comes Next? (September 15, 2020)

American Reckoning, Part 1: Civil Wars and How to Stop Them (October 9, 2020)

American Reckoning, Part 2: A New Kind of Nation (October 12, 2020)

The End of the Beginning (November 15, 2020)

Goodbye, Google (June 25, 2021)

A special thanks to Tamar Avishai for co-hosting this episode and making it so fun.

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All the additional music in the show is from Titlecard Music and Sound in Boston.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show!

If you like the types of stories and interviews you hear on Soonish, I know you’ll like all the other Hub & Spoke shows. February is the month of love, and so the collective is raising money to invest in what we love — independent podcasting. Please consider participating in our Valentine’s Day fundraiser at hubspokeaudio.org/love

You can also support Soonish with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

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 different angles. It's hosted by Lori Mortimer and edited by Tamar Avishai. Production assistance from Nick Andersen. Music by Evalyn Parry, The Blue Dot Sessions, and a kiss of Dionne Warwick.

Listen to the full episodes we excerpted here:

Rumble Strip, “Forrest Foster Lays Karen to Rest”

Mementos, “Cherie’s Letters”

Ministry of Ideas, “Consumed”

The Lonely Palette, “Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Desired Moment (c. 1770)”

Discover the full slate of Hub & Spoke shows.

And please share the love by supporting Hub & Spoke's Valentine’s Day fundraiser. Donate here.

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 collection called Tasting Light: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Rewire Your Perceptions, and after more than two years of work, it comes out today—October 11, 2022.

Tasting Light highlights the plausible futures of science fiction rather than the enticing-but-impossible worlds of fantasy. Don’t get me wrong: I love both kinds of stories. But fantasy doesn’t need any extra help these days—just turn on your favorite streaming TV network and you’ll see show after show featuring dragons, magic, and swordplay. There’s some great science fiction out there too (The Expanse, For All Mankind, the never-ending Star Trek universe), but it isn’t nearly as pervasive.

The two genres do different kinds of work, and I think Hollywood and the mainstream publishing world have been focusing so hard on one that the other has been getting edged out. That’s too bad, because to me, fantasy is the literature of escape, longing, and lost worlds, while science fiction is the literature of hope and possibility. And hope is something we need more of these days.

As a project, Tasting Light was born at Candlewick Press, a prominent publisher of YA and middle-grade books based here in the Boston area. Candlewick had formed a pair of collaborations with the MIT Press called MITeen Press and MIT Kids Press, and they were looking for someone to put together a YA-oriented science fiction collection under the MITeen Press imprint—a book that would do for the YA market what the MIT Press and MIT Technology Review’s Twelve Tomorrows books (one of which I edited in 2018) was doing for mainstream sci-fi. Namely, prove that it’s stil possible to create technically realistic “hard” science fiction in the style of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, or Robert Heinlein from the 1950s and 1960s, but do it in a way that speaks to readers now in the 2020s. (For more on the Twelve Tomorrows vision listen to my 2018 episode Science Fiction That Takes Science Seriously.)

At the same time, though, MITeen Press wanted to open up space for stories that reflect a wider range of human experiences and perspectives. So they recruited A. R. and me to edit, and we went out and recruited the smartest, most accomplished, most diverse set of authors we could find to write hard sci-fi stories with heroes who would be recognizable and relatable to young adults today.

As you’ll hear in today’s episode, that includes William Alexander, whose story “On the Tip of My Tongue” follows two young people of unspecified gender as they attempt to tame the loopy orbital mechanics of a space station suspended at the L1 LaGrange point. It includes the Chicago-based thriller and sci-fi writer K. Ancrum, who wrote a lovely story called “Walk 153” about a the complex relationship that develops between a lonely, infirm, elderly woman and the college student who helps her experience the outside world through his GoPro-like body camera. And it includes the prolific Elizabeth Bear, who wrote a story called “Twin Strangers” that tackles the issues of body dysmorphic disorder and anorexia through a story about two teenage boys and their misadventures programming their “dops” or metaverse avatars. 

There’s also a luminous story by A. R. themself called “Extremophiles,” set amidst the ice of distant Europa. And there are five more remarkable stories by Charlotte Nicole Davis, Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson, A.S. King, E.C. Myers, and Junauda Petrus-Nasah, as well as a gorgeous comic / graphic novella by Wendy Xu about a sentient robot and the teen girl who discovers it in the forest.

The reviews of Tasting Light have been wondrous and welcome. Kirkus Reviews gives it a rare starred review and says “Capetta and Roush introduce engaging, thoughtful, beautifully written entries about identity and agency, all unfolding within the bounds of real science.” Publishers Weekly calls it “dazzling” and notes that “the creators seamlessly tackle relevant issues such as colonization, misogyny, transphobia, and white entitlement in this eclectic celebration of infinite possibility and the ever-present human spirit.” Buzzfeed says “Each story is unique, brilliant, and brimming with hope.”

I hope the three excerpts you’ll hear in today’s episode will entice you to get a copy of Tasting Light for yourself; it’s available at Amazon and everywhere you buy books. Or if you decide to become a new supporter of Soonish on Patreon at the $10-per-episode level or above, between now and December 31, 2022, I’ll send you a free signed copy of the book!

For more about this episode, including a full transcript, please visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org/soonish-509-tasting-light