On Science Policy IRL, we talk to people in science policy about what they do and how they got there. In this installment, host Lisa Margonelli talks to Bhavya Lal about the trajectory of her career. Lal began as a nuclear engineer, then completed a midcareer PhD and began to work in science policy. A few years in, she decided to specialize in space policy—which is when things really started to get interesting. Lal has since served in a variety of roles at NASA, including acting chief of staff, chief technology officer, and associate administrator for technology, policy, and strategy. She is currently a professor at the RAND School of Public Policy. 

In this episode, Lal shares how policy and governance became her passion, how she went from writing reports to leading programs at NASA, and the big questions that drive her work. 

Resources

• Read Lal and Roger M. Myers’ Fall 2025 Issues piece, “A Strategy for Building Space Nuclear Systems That Fly,” to learn more about NASA’s efforts to build a nuclear reactor in space. 
• Read Lal and Myers’ white paper “Weighing the Future: Strategic Options for US Space Leadership.”
• What does space leadership mean? Lal explores this in her SpaceNews piece, “The US can get to the moon first — and still lose.”
• Check out Earth Abides, the novel that inspired Lal’s career.

Artificial intelligence assistants such as Google’s Gemini have exploded in popularity, constantly offering to help summarize a document, craft an email response, or answer a question. AI chatbots take this even further. These chatbots—sometimes called AI companions—generate conversations with users, and because they “remember” interactions and modulate their responses, they can appear, at times, quite human. 

On this episode, host Megan Nicholson explores chatbots with J. B. Branch, the Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen. Branch discusses who is using chatbots, what the companies behind these AIs are doing, and how they might be regulated. He also wrote about this topic in his essay for our Fall 2025 edition, “AI Companions Are Not Your Teen’s Friend.” Resources:J. B. Branch on the need to regulate AI chatbots:

• “AI Companions Are Not Your Teen’s Friend,” Issues in Science & Technology.

• “AI chatbots shouldn’t be talking to kids — Congress must step in,” The Hill. 

Learn more about AI companions’ impact on teens mental health by reading Common Sense Media’s risk assessment. 

Visit the Tech Law Justice Project to read more about the current lawsuits in California state courts against OpenAI. 

What could regulating AI chatbots look like? See a model state law from Public Citizen.

Our miniseries Not Now, But Soon challenges the stories we often tell about disasters and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies.

On our final episode of this season, host Malka Older examines the role art and fiction play in understanding war. She talks with art and culture historian Brigitte van der Sande, who has spent 25 years studying how war is represented in art—research that brought her to many active conflict zones. Van der Sande discusses how art humanizes the victims of war and spurs action, and how humor and imagination can be forces for resistance. 

Resources: 

• “Inside Hell We Build Paradise.” Read more about van der Sande’s visit to Rojava, Syria, as part of efforts to build democracy in the region. 
• Check out Other Futures, a multidisciplinary festival that presents speculative visions of the future, founded by van der Sande in 2018. 
• See artwork mentioned in this episode: “The Eyes of Gutete Emerita” and “Soft Target.”
• Learn more about van der Sande’s latest project, Culture House FKA the Cannibals. 

This podcast is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a speculative fiction series that uses imagination to explore how science and technology will shape our future. Read the short stories from the series published by Issues in Science and Technology.

Our miniseries Not Now, But Soon challenges the stories we often tell about disasters and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies.

On this episode, host Malka Older is joined by Nasir Andisha, ambassador and permanent representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations, to reimagine Afghanistan and the stories we tell about its past, present, and future. As ambassador, Andisha represents the people—not the current government—of a country that has been navigating disaster for decades. He shares the story of what it’s like to lose his nation while continuing to advocate for its people.Resources

Visit Nasir Andisha’s website to learn more about human rights, policy, and Afghanistan’s challenges.

This episode features brief audio snippets from the BBC and Inside Edition. 
This podcast is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a speculative fiction series that uses imagination to explore how science and technology will shape our future. Read the short stories from the series published by Issues in Science and Technology.

Our miniseries Not Now, But Soon challenges the stories we often tell about disasters and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies.

On this episode, host Malka Older examines the stories behind statistics with Julisa Tambunan, deputy executive director of Equal Measures 2030, a global feminist coalition. Tambunan uses data to advocate for policies that center the lived experiences of women, girls, and underrepresented minorities. She explains why gender inequality is a disaster and how collecting better data—both statistics and stories—can help create a better future for everyone.

Resources

Visit Equal Measures 2030 to learn more about achieving gender equality through data-driven advocacy. 
This podcast is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a speculative fiction series that uses imagination to explore how science and technology will shape our future. Read the short stories from the series published by Issues in Science and Technology.

Our miniseries Not Now, But Soon challenges the stories we often tell about disasters and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies. 

On this episode, host Malka Older explores food systems with investigative journalist Thin Lei Win. Win shares her experience growing up in Myanmar, and how that has shaped how she sees the intersection between food production, climate, and disasters. 
This podcast is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a speculative fiction series that uses imagination to explore how science and technology will shape our future. Read the short stories from the series published by Issues in Science and Technology. 

Resources

Follow Win’s weekly newsletter, Thin Ink, to learn more about food, climate and where they meet. Get started with her newsletter with these articles: 

• “Moonstruck”: a critique of the focus of the food system’s focus on technology and productivity to solve food insecurity, at the expense of equity. 

• “A System Under Strain”: a roundup of recent reports on food systems. 

Win coordinated The New Humanitarian’s series on emerging hunger hotspots as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

Find more of Win’s food system investigations at Lighthouse Reports. 

• “The Hunger Profiteers”: how financial speculation could be fueling hunger. 

• “Farmers Protest, Who Gains?”: Who is leading the farmers’ protest in Europe and are they truly representative of farmers? 

Visit Kite Tales to read stories from Myanmar’s people in their own words.

Our new miniseries, Not Now, But Soon, challenges the stories we often tell about disasters, and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies. On our first episode, host Malka Older talks to Steven Gonzalez, an anthropologist of technology who researches the human labor behind data centers. 

Gonzalez is also a speculative fiction writer under the byline E. G. Condé. He is one of the creators of Taínofuturism, which incorporates Indigenous Caribbean traditions to imagine futures from a radically different perspective. His novella, Sordidez, explores how survivors’ efforts to rebuild after a hurricane intersects with oppression and conflict in a future Caribbean. 

In this episode, Gonzalez compares these different types of disasters: the dramatic and immediate impacts of the hurricane, and the slower, steadier, and often overlooked disasters of environmental destruction, resource depletion, and exploitation of human labor associated with our internet infrastructure. 

Resources: 

Visit Steven Gonzalez’s website to learn more about the impacts of cloud computing. 

Find Gonzalez’s fiction under the byline E.G. Condé. Check out his novella, Sordidez, winner of the Indie Ink Award for "Writing the Future We Need: Latinx/Latine Representation by a Latinx/Latine author." 

This podcast is part of the Future Tense Fiction project. Read all Future Tense Fiction stories here.

Why do disasters happen? How do we rebuild after a disaster? What lessons can we learn from them? Our new miniseries, Not Now, But Soon, challenges the stories we often tell about disasters, and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies. 

In this trailer episode, Lisa Margonelli introduces miniseries host Malka Older, an author, humanitarian aid worker, and disaster researcher. Older explains how she became involved in disaster work, and what disasters can teach us about society and our values. 

Not Now, But Soon premieres on September 16. This miniseries is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a collaboration between Issues and ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination.

Resources 

Rethink disasters by reading Malka Older’s Issues piece, “Disasters.” 

Check out Older’s Future Tense Fiction story, “Actually Naneen.” 

Find more of Older’s publications on her website, including Infomocracy, a cyberpunk political thriller, and ...and Other Disasters, a collection of short fiction and poetry centered around disasters. 

Watch Older discuss how speculative fiction can be used to create better policies in the Issues event, “How Can Science Fiction Help Design Better Science and Tech Policies?”

People know that their pets are unique individuals. Each dog has his or her own quirks, likes, and dislikes. But what about cormorants? Research reveals that wild animals are just as uniquely individual as our pets. Rats show empathy. Crows can hold grudges. Even termites have different personalities. What would it mean if society took animal intelligence and self-awareness seriously? 

Lisa Margonelli explores this question with Brandon Keim, author of the recent book Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World. Keim also wrote about animal intelligence and what it might mean for policy for Issues in the Spring 2025 issue. In this episode, Keim discusses animal personhood, movements around animal representation, and cormorants—one named Cosmos in particular. 

This is our last episode before our summer break, but we will be back in September with a miniseries about rethinking disasters. Write to us at [email protected] with your thoughts on this season and other ideas you’d like us to explore. Subscribe to the podcast and our newsletter to be the first to hear when we return. 

Resources: 

Learn more about animal individuality by reading Brandon Keim’s book, Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World.

Keim explores the policy impacts of new research on animal intelligence in his Issues piece, “When That Chickadee Is No Longer ‘A Machine With Feathers.’”
Visit Keim’s website to find more of his work.

Think tanks are a vital part of the policy ecosystem, but what do they do? In this installment of Science Policy IRL, host Jason Lloyd talks to Neil Chilson, head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute. He has been involved in science and technology policy for his whole career, previously practicing telecommunications law and serving as the Federal Trade Commission’s chief technologist.

In this episode, Chilson discusses what it’s like to work at a policy think tank, the questions about artificial intelligence that motivate his work, and why he is optimistic about our technological future. 

Resources

Check out Neil Chilson’s book, Getting Out Of Control: Emergent Leadership in a Complex World.

Find more of Chilson’s work on his website and explore his Substack, including: 

• “Red Teaming AI Legislation: Lessons from SB 1047”: How the concept of “red teaming” can be applied to creating legislation. 

• “10 Years After the Best Tech Policy Movie Ever”: Lessons from The Lego Movie for emergent leadership.

Learn more about the Abundance Institute’s vision for artificial intelligence policy by reading their recommendations here.