Tomorrow, Today

The role of corn in our diet cannot be overstated, whether it's through animal feed for meat production, ethanol to transport our food, high fructose corn syrup, corn flour, or any of the other ways it has been introduced. Corn is a staple for good reason; it stores well, grows incredibly efficiently, and we've gotten really, really good at growing it. Despite this, there's an underbelly to this industry that often gets overlooked in the conversation about what the future of our food looks like. How did we get here, and how does the modern corn we eat today related to the crops indigenous people across the Americas have been harvesting and breeding for thousands of years? 

In this episode, we're joined by Helen Anne Curry, author of "Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture & the Crisis of Extinction" and Kranzberg Professor of the History of Technology in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Tech. We chat about this complex relationship between modern corn and its relatives, often called landrace or unimproved corn varieties. But are these actually unimproved varieties? Researchers became aware that the corn we grow today had a very narrow genetic pool, and it was imperative to make sure the diversity of corn that existed across the continents was protected. Like most things, it was more complex than that. How did the cold war, multinational corporations, and the green revolution impact the evolution of corn? Tune in to find out!

Historian Helen Anne Curry on her book "Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction" from University of California Press.

www.ucpress.edu/book/978052030769…/endangered-maize

Find Helen Anne Curry on Twitter at @HACurry

In this episode, the Tomorrow, Today team sits down with Dr. Chris Fuchs, founder of QBism, to discuss the intersections of philosophy and science. What are the limits of our ability to understand physics, and is objectivity even real? If it's not real, what are the implications and how does it impact our interactions with the world around us?

To read more work from Dr. Chris Fuchs and other physicists, visit: https://arxiv.org/

To support this project and to get early access to each episode, visit https://www.patreon.com/poorprolesalmanac

In this episode, the team at Tomorrow, Today is joined by Marisa Renee Lee, author of "Grief is Love", to discuss the impacts of Covid-19 & death under quarantine will have on the future of how we relate with the process of death.

In Grief is Love, Marisa reveals that healing does not mean moving on after losing a loved one—healing means learning to acknowledge and create space for your grief. It is about learning to love the one you lost with the same depth, passion, joy, and commitment you did when they were alive, perhaps even more. She guides you through the pain of grief—whether you’ve lost the person recently or long ago—and shows you what it looks like to honor your loss on your unique terms, and debunks the idea of a grief stages or timelines. Grief is Love is about making space for the transformation that a significant loss requires.

Marisa's background:

In 2010, Marisa joined the Obama Administration first as an appointee at the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) and later joined the White House Domestic Policy Council and the White House Office of Public Engagement where she ultimately served as President Obama’s Deputy Director of Private Sector Engagement. During her time in the administration Marisa focused on a variety of issues including entrepreneurship and access to capital in underserved communities, implementation of the Small Business Jobs Act and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and developed a variety of public-private partnerships with the business community on behalf of President Obama.

You can find her book at marisareneelee.com and her social medias @MarisaReneeLee

In this episode, we discuss the concept of community-- what is community, how do we define it, how do online communities fit into this space, and what does the future hold for the idea of community?

The question of community also offers some interesting insights into the idea of citizen science and decentralized sources of knowledge, such as wikipedia. What are the larger implications of this model for content sourcing, and how does it compare to individual specialists?

Dr. Amy S. Bruckman is Regents' Professor and Senior Associate Chair in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she studies online communities. Bruckman received her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in 1997. She is a Fellow of The ACM and a member of the SIGCHI Academy. She founded her first online community in 1993, and has been teaching the class 'Design of Online Communities' at Georgia Tech since 1998.

Her Book, "Should you Believe Wikipedia? Online Communities & the Construction of Knowledge" can be found anywhere you buy books, and she can be found moderating R/Science & on Twitter at @ASBruckman.

We chat with infectious disease specialist Dr. Ayesha Khan about superbugs, drug resistance, climate change, and how all of these things are exacerbated by one common denominator-- our economic model of growth. How does climate change reinforce the speed at which drug resistance is spreading, and what solutions are out there around solving the riddle of protecting people from these dangerous bacteria and fungi? Tune in to find out.

To hear more from Dr. Khan, take a listen to her podcast Disorderland wherever you get your podcasts, check out her newsletter at wokescientist.substack.com, or follow her on social media @WokeScientist!

With the development of more and more realistic video games and technologies, especially around the space of virtual reality, how can these technologies offer real benefits for society as a whole? In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Rachel Proffitt, Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri and Principal Investigator at the VR Augmented Rehab Lab. We chat about the many applications of virtual reality, from physical therapy to utilization as a tool for supporting neurodivergence. 

You can learn more about the resources the VR Augmented Rehab lab is building by visiting their website here:

https://healthprofessions.missouri.edu/proffitt-vr-ar-lab/

The research we discuss can be found on Google Scholar here:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FreXC9IAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

In this episode, we explore the idea of consensual non-Monogamy, the history of CNM and the history of CNM in academic research, and the implications it has for our future understanding of the subject. How does CSM fit into a larger narrative as inclusion for alternative lifestyles are being considered more acceptable, and what does that mean for the future of CSM?

Dr. Amy C. Moors is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Faculty Affiliate in Engineering at Chapman University. She serves as a Research Fellow at The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and the co-chair of the American Psychological Association’s Division 44 Committee on Consensual Non-Monogamy.

Check out Dr. Moors’ work:

https://www.amycmoors.com/

Andy

IG: @theandyciccone

IG @poorprolesalmanac

www.poorproles.com

Nash:

Twitter: @Itsnashflynn

Twitter: @DeathandFriends

In this episode, we discuss the concept of death and how it is understood differently across the animal kingdom. If we turn towards the natural world, we can see that the minimal cognitive requirements for a Concept of Death are in fact met by many nonhuman species and there are multiple learning pathways and opportunities for animals in the wild to develop a Concept of Death. We explore this further and what this means for the way we live today and moving into the future.

Check out Dr. Monso’s work:

https://susanamonso.com/

Andy

IG: @theandyciccone

IG @poorprolesalmanac

www.poorproles.com

Nash:

Twitter: @Itsnashflynn

Twitter: @DeathandFriends

In this episode, we dive into the paradigm of modern technology and ecological collapse with IT Carlow’s Dr. Dean McDonnell. Prior to his current appointment, Dr. McDonnell was an Associate Lecturer of Cyberpsychology in the Institute of Art, Design, and Technology (Dun Laoghaire), and in Educational and Developmental Psychology in Marino Institute of Education. We discuss his work “Addressing Biodisaster X Threats With Artificial Intelligence and 6G Technologies”

Check out Dr. McDonnell’s work: https://www.itcarlow.ie/research/researchers/meet-researchers-e-n/dr-dean-mcdonnell.htm

Andy

IG: @theandyciccone

IG @poorprolesalmanac

www.poorproles.com

Nash:

Twitter: @Itsnashflynn

Twitter: @DeathandFriends

Welcome to Tomorrow, Today, a podcast about the future we will build based on the research being done today. In our introduction, we discuss our backgrounds, our reasons for this podcast, and some of our hopes for the future and the project itself!

IG: @theandyciccone

IG @poorprolesalmanac

www.poorproles.com

Nash: 

Twitter: @Itsnashflynn

Twitter: @DeathandFriends