Soonish

Episode 2.04 is a special crossover show featuring Tamar Avishai's The Lonely Palette, one of the founding shows in our new podcast collective, Hub & Spoke. In this episode Tamar focuses on Italian Futurism, a pre-World War I art movement fueled by a heady mix of diesel and testosterone. The Futurists consciously aimed to use painting, sculpture, and photography to celebrate speed, power, industry, and all of the exhilarating ways technology was changing the world. What they couldn't represent—because it hadn't happened yet—was the ruin and destruction technology would bring to Europe as soon as the war began. After the war, artists developed more ambivalent and nuanced ways of representing technological change, but Futurism still stands out as art's first bold embrace of modernity. Theme music by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Javier Suarez / Betterwithmusic.com. For more details on this episode, visit soonishpodcast.org and thelonelypalette.com. Soonish is a proud member of Hub & Spoke, a Boston-based collective of smart, idea-driven podcasts. Check out all of our shows at hubspokeaudio.org.

Episode 2.03: For a sane, humane, and skeptical perspective on what’s happening to Silicon Valley and why our high-tech economy seems to be failing us, there’s no better source than Tim O’Reilly, master trend spotter and founder of computer book publisher O’Reilly Media. Soonish’s in-depth conversation with the admired entrepreneur, investor, and author focuses on his new book “WTF: What’s The Future and Why It’s Up to Us,” published October 10. In the interview—and in the book—O’Reilly shares the mental maps he uses to make sense of emerging technologies and their impact. And he argues that if we want to avoid the worst side effects of AI and automation and learn the lessons of networked platforms like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber, and Lyft, we’ll have to rewrite the hidden algorithms behind government, business, and the financial system. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Javier Suarez, aka Jahzzar, www.betterwithmusic.com For more information about this episode, go to www.soonishpodcast.org. To support the show, please sign up as a regular donor at www.patreon.com/soonish.

Episode 2.02: Big news! Soonish is a founding member of Hub & Spoke, a Boston-centric collective of smart, idea-driven podcasts. Together with the art history podcast The Lonely Palette and the new philosophy-and-culture show Ministry of Ideas, we’re celebrating independent audio storytelling and the power of art, science, arguments, and ideas to change the world. In this episode you’ll hear the Ministry of Ideas pilot, “The Shape of History,” hosted by Zachary Davis and produced by Nick Andersen, Pallavi Kottamasu, and Virginia Marshall. To subscribe to Ministry of Ideas, visit ministryofideas.org or search Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcatcher. And for more information about Hub & Spoke, visit hubspokeaudio.org. Music in this episode is by Graham Gordon Ramsay and Lee Rosevere.

Episode 2.01: The conflict in Charlottesville in August of 2017 showed that Americans are having a hard time figuring out how to represent the country’s past, let alone how to fix the present or plan for the future. But sometimes a stunning natural event like a total solar eclipse can bring us back together—if only for a few minutes. For the Season Two premiere of Soonish, host Wade Roush went on a road trip across 10 states, visiting the place with more Confederate monuments than any other place in America (hint: it’s not in the South); a virtual ghost town whose very name once stood for hope and the future; and a village in Illinois where the total solar eclipse lasted longer than anywhere else in the country. Special guest star Tamar Avishai, host of The Lonely Palette Podcast. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Tim Beek and Lee Rosevere. For more information about this episode, including an eclipse video and road trip photos, check out www.soonishpodcast.org. To support Soonish, go to patreon.com/soonish.

Episode 1.10: Just in time for Independence Day 2017, it's a special politics edition of Soonish! With his attacks on judges and journalists, his attempts to quell inquiries into his campaign’s Russia ties, his early-morning tweetstorms, and so much more, Donald Trump has breached every norm of presidential conduct. And he’s testing the constitutional separation of powers in ways the nation’s founders could never have anticipated. In this episode, we try to understand Trump’s impact on government—and what his presidency might mean for America’s future—using a metaphor from the aerospace business: gimbal lock. It’s one of the perils that haunted the astronauts on the star-crossed Apollo 13 moon mission, and it may be a useful way to understand what happens when a single powerful figure undercuts the founders’ system of checks and balances, or what journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson has called our “constitutional gyroscope.” Featured guests include Amy Shira Teitel, Yascha Mounk, and David Eaves. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Lee Rosevere and Tim Beek, timbeek.com. Find more information about this episode at www.soonishpodcast.org. To support Soonish, please go to patreon.com/soonish.

Episode 1.09: When Boston’s elegant Longfellow Bridge opened in 1907, it was innovative example of classical European bridge architecture adapted for a busy American city. But over the next century, officials allowed the bridge to rust to the point of near-collapse. And recently, a futuristic new cable-stay bridge, the Zakim Bridge, was built across the Charles River just a mile downstream, displacing the Longfellow as an icon of the city and proving that Bostonians still have a taste for modernity. Now the Longfellow Bridge is being painstakingly restored and recreated, down to the last rivet. But for the price of fixing it, the state could have built at least two Zakim-scale bridges in its place. This week Soonish asks: Why go to all that trouble? When should we preserve the parts of our urban environments that connect us to the past? When should we boldly remodel our cities to support growth and innovation in the future? And how can we balance the two impulses? The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Tim Beek, timbeek.com. More information about this episode at www.soonishpodcast.org. To support Soonish, please go to patreon.com/soonish.

Episode 1.08: Why do "productivity" tools like email, to-do lists, and calendars make so many of us feel miserable and overburdened? Why hasn't anyone come up with a better way for us to manage our diverse commitments and our chronic information overload? This episode of Soonish looks at our personal futures and the tools we use to manage them. We talk with folks who are pursuing new technologies for keeping our lives organized. We look at the kludge-y but often brilliant productivity solutions people have hacked together for themselves. And we ask whether, in some way, we’re all missing the real point. Maybe in the rush to be productive, we’ve forgotten how to prioritize the things that truly make us happy. Music in this episode is by Graham Gordon Ramsay and Lee Rosevere. For more information about all the people and ideas in this episode, go to https://www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2017/5/11/108-hacking-time To become a supporter of Soonish, please visit http://www.patreon.com/soonish

Episode 1.07: More than 500 people have flown in space since Yuri Gagarin’s historic ride in 1961—and virtually every one of them has been a military officer or government employee. But now that’s changing. Jeff Bezos’s rocket company Blue Origin aims to begin commercial passenger flights to space in 2018, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX has announced plans to send two private citizens around the moon, also in 2018. Meanwhile, here on Earth, there’s a boom in space-related innovation and investment, not just at big aerospace companies but at dozens of smaller startups. This week on Soonish, we look at the new era of space entrepreneurship (#newspace for short) and ask who’s founding space startups, what progress these companies are making in areas like microsatellites and propulsion, and how new technology is giving enthusiasts around the world more ways to get involved in space exploration. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music this week by Podington Bear. For more information on this episode, visit https://www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2017/4/20/107-astropreneurs

Episode 1.06: After in-depth episodes about movies, monorails, museums, manufacturing, and meat, the show goes meta and I talk about Soonish itself. Hear how Carl Sagan and extraterrestrials helped to kickstart my science journalism career, how the Challenger disaster woke me up to technology’s double-edged nature, and how the New York World’s Fair of 1939 got me thinking about the world of the future. Also, I explain how you can now support Soonish directly through Patreon. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music in this episode by Podington Bear. For more details on this episode visit www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2017/3/29/106-origin-story.