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 I'm dropping the first full episode into this feed for your listening pleasure. If you'd like to stay on a listener, please take a minute to find Turning Corners in your favorite podcast app and hit follow or subscribe. You can also get the show delivered directly to your email inbox by signing up for a free subscription at turningcorners.org.

For this episode, I went inside Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to talk with artists and curators about a daring new exhibit called “Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country.” It’s an act of community storytelling, meant to both illuminate and soften some of the old boundaries and tensions between indigenous artists and the Anglo art establishment O’Keeffe represented.

The exhibit features the work of a dozen artists from the six Tewa-speaking pueblos of northern New Mexico. All express in different ways their love of the vibrant land their people have inhabited for hundreds or thousands of years—and all grapple with the way O’Keeffe, still America’s most famous female artist, repeatedly framed the landscape around Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu as an empty, silent realm that she alone could properly interpret. 

“It’s my private mountain,” O’Keeffe once said of Tsi-p’in or Cerro Pedernal, the striking flat-topped mountain visible from her home. “It belongs to me. God told me that if I painted it enough, I could have it.” 

In point of fact, the mountain is on U.S. Forest Service land, and is the site of Tsi-p’in-owinge, a ruin that was the ancestral home of the people of Nambe, Ohkay Owingeh, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, and Tesuque pueblos. So O’Keeffe’s quote—even if it was meant in a poetic or tongue-in-cheek way—rings in modern indigenous ears as a provocation. 

And indeed, for Jason Garcia, the Santa Clara Pueblo artist who co-curated the Tewa Nangeh exhibit, it served as an organizing theme. He worked with curator Bess Murphy at the O’Keeffe Museum and with the contributing artists to gently but irrevocably overturn the idea that any one artist can speak for an entire region.

For more show notes, images from the exhibit, and a full transcript, please go to https://www.turningcorners.org/p/whose-private-mountain-pueblo-artists

FEATURED VOICES

Jason Garcia, who also goes by Okuu Pin (Turtle Mountain), is an artist from Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico who specializes in clay tiles and printmaking. He co-curated of the Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country exhibit (2025-2026) at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Garcia’s work documents the ever-changing cultural landscape of his home, including cultural ceremonies, traditions, and stories, and also draws on 21st-century popular culture, comic books, and technology. Garcia’s juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary materials and techniques connects him to his Ancestral past, landscape, and cultural knowledge. He studied fine arts at the University of New Mexico (Bachelor’s, 1998) and the University of Wisconsin (MFA, 2016).

Bess Murphy, PhD, is the Luce Curator of Art and Social Practice at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She joined the O’Keeffe Museum in 2022, and Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country, which she co-organized with Jason Garcia, is her first curated show at the museum. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Bard College and a PhD from the University of Southern California, and from 2015 to 2022 she was the creative director and curator of the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts in Santa Fe. 

Michael Namingha is a photographer and silkscreen artist who hails from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo in New Mexico and the Hopi tribe in Arizona. His work, which often features surrealistically altered images of the natural landscape, has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world, from New Mexico to Arizona, California, Indiana, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Virginia, as well as Canada, Germany, and Japan.  He splits his time between Santa Fe and Brooklyn, where his studio is located. He studied strategic design and management at the Parsons School of Design.

Wade Roush, PhD, is the creator and host of Turning Corners. He’s an MIT- and Harvard-trained freelance science and technology journalist, editor, and audio producer who has written for publications such as Science, MIT Technology Review, Xconomy, and Scientific American. From 2017 to 2025 he produced the tech-and-culture podcast Soonish. He’s the co-founder of the Hub & Spoke audio collective, the author of Extraterrestrials from the MIT Press, and the editor or co-editor of three volumes of hard science fiction: Twelve Tomorrows (2018), Tasting Light (2022), and Starstuff (2025).

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 here too, so you can even more of a taste. I hope you'll search for Turning Corners in your favorite podcast app and hit follow or subscribe. You can also go to turningcorners.org and sign up to get the podcast sent directly to your email inbox.

FULL TRAILER SUMMARY

Turning Corners is a new podcast offering inspiring stories about the people and organizations working to make life better in the Four Corners states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. It’s produced in Santa Fe, NM, by me, Wade Roush.

I feel like we’re immersed every day in discouraging news about how our broken politics and failing institutions are keeping us from accomplishing real change. You know, the kind of change that could lift people up and remind us that we really are in this together. But here in the West and Southwest there are a lot of real people doing creative, groundbreaking work to strengthen communities, bridge old divides, reduce inequality, and save the planet.

They’re bring their unique cultures and histories to bear. They also bring a uniquely Southwestern type of courage and public spirit, along with a can-do, no-bullshit attitude. They’re tackling hard problems—and so they don’t always succeed. But I think their stories can be an inspiration for people all over the country. And I’m starting this show because I want to bring those stories to you.

Episode 1—about a groundbreaking new exhibit at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico—is coming very soon. Subscribe to Turning Corners on Substack to get that episode and every future episode (plus full transcripts) in your email inbox, or hit follow or subscribe in your favorite podcast app.

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 they might learn or relearn if they took a look back at that founding generation of industrialists. 

Mindell, who's been a friend ever since we were both doctoral students in MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society in the early 1990s, is the perfect guest for this 60th and final episode of Soonish. The show has always been motivated by a set of big questions: How is computing changing the nature of work, play, artistic expression, and communication? How can we design our cities, our transportation systems, and even our political systems to be more resilient? In an economy dominated by strife-fueled social media and rising technofeudalist empires, what's the future of democracy? How much of our techological future is predetermined, and how much of it can we shape proactively? 

David brings to bear the tools of historical scholarship—along with his experience in engineering, academia, and the entrepreneurial world—to explore the same kinds of questions. This new book, in particular, asks how Watt, Boulton, and their colleagues distilled Enlightenment scientific values, hands-on experimentation, and collaboration into a set of founding principles for industrial society—and how can we rethink those principles for a world of labor scarcity, climate change, pandemics and other global disruptions, and burgeoning new technologies like artificial intelligence.

For show notes, links, and a full transcript of this episode, please visit https://www.soonishpodcast.org/soonish-517-what-it-takes-to-power-an-industrial-revolution

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).