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Soonish

Wade Roush

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We can have the future we want—but we have to work for it. Soonish brings you stories and conversations showing how the choices we make together forge the technological world of tomorrow. From MIT-trained technology journalist Wade Roush. Learn more at soonishpodcast.org. We're a proud member of the Hub & Spoke audio collective! See hubspokeaudio.org.
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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 firs…
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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 ac…
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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 independe…
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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’…
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This week we're featuring a conversation with Ian Coss, co-creator of Newts, a wild new six-part musical audio drama from PRX and the fiction podcast The Truth. The show is inspired by the writings of the Czech journalist and science fiction pioneer Karel Čapek. He’s best known for coining the word "robot" in his 1920 play Rossum's Universal Robots…
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For most people, nightmares produce insomnia, exhaustion, and unease. For Graham Gordon Ramsay, a spate of severe nightmares in April 2020 developed into something more lasting and meaningful: a five-movement, 18-minute musical work for organ or string ensemble called "Introspections." To me, it's one of the most arresting artistic documents of the…
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Last summer, a pair of murals celebrating New Mexico's landscape, heritage, and diversity appeared in Albuquerque's historic Old Town district. The large outdoor pieces by muralists Jodie Herrera and Reyes Padilla—two artists with deep roots in New Mexico—brought life back to a once abandoned shopping plaza and became instant fan favorites, endless…
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When you hear people use the phrase "It's a hits-driven business," they're usually talking about venture capital, TV production, videogames, or pop music—all industries where you don't make much money unless you come up with at least one (and preferably a string of) massively popular products. But you know what's another hits-driven business? Drug …
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LEGO is so omnipresent in today’s culture—through its stores, its theme parks, its movies, and of course its construction kits—that it’s hard to imagine a world not strewn with billions of colorful plastic LEGO bricks. Yet less than two decades ago, in 2003, the company came close to extinction, thanks to a frenetic bout of new-product introduction…
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This week, Soonish presents Part 2 of The Persistent Innovators, a miniseries I've been guest-producing and guest-hosting for Innovation Answered, InnoLead's podcast for people with creative roles inside big companies. You can think of Persistent Innovators as the corporate equivalent of human super-agers—meaning they don’t settle into a complacent…
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This week, I've got something different for Soonish listeners. I'm sharing Part 1 of "The Persistent Innovators," a miniseries I'm currently guest-producing and guest-hosting for InnoLead's podcast Innovation Answered. The big question the series tackles is: "How do big companies become innovative—and stay innovative?" I'm looking at four long-live…
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Clock time is a human invention. So it shouldn’t be a box that confines us; it should be a tool that helps us accomplish the things we care about. But consider the system of standard time, first imposed by the railroad companies in the 1880s. It constrains people who live 1,000 miles apart—on opposite edges of their time zones—to get up and go to w…
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What if a technology company becomes so rich, so powerful, so exploitative, and so oblivious that that the harm it's doing begins to outweigh the quality and utility of its products? What if that company happens to run the world's dominant search, advertising, email, web, and mobile platforms? This month's episode of Soonish argues that it's time t…
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Venture capital is the fuel powering most technology startups. Behind every future Google or Uber or Snapchat is a syndicate of venture firms hoping for outsize financial returns. But the vast majority of venture money goes into Internet, mobile, and software companies where consumer demand and the path to market are plain. So what happens to entre…
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In this episode of Soonish you'll meet Stanley Crooke, the former CEO of Ionis Pharmaceuticals and the head of a new nonprofit called N-Lorem, which is working to make mutation-correcting "antisense oligonucleotide" drugs available free for life to people with uncommon genetic diseases. These are conditions so rare they often don't have a name. But…
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The coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on education on schools around the world, often rendering in-classroom instruction too dangerous for both students and teachers. But one reason the effects of the pandemic haven’t been even worse is that, in education as in many other fields, a few new technologies were ready for broader deploym…
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In honor of the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden—a day of long-awaited endings and new beginnings—I'm republishing my Season 2 opener, "Shadows of August," which I first released a little more than three years ago, during the the fiery early months of the Trump presidency. On a road trip to southern Illinois to witness the total eclipse that sliced …
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In 1973, there was only one man who believed everyone on Earth would want and need a cell phone. That man was a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper. “I had a science fiction prediction,” Cooper recounts in his new memoir, Cutting the Cord: The Inventor of the Cell Phone Speaks Out. “I told anyone who would listen that, someday, every person would…
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Soonish's six-month detour into electoral politics finishes where it started, with a conversation with our favorite futurist, Jamais Cascio. We talked late on November 6—when it was already clear that Joseph R. Biden would win the presidential race, but before the networks had officially called it—and we explored what Biden's unexpectedly narrow wi…
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Welcome to a special two-part series about the looming clash over the future of America. In Part 1, we looked at the tattered state of our democracy and searched for peaceful ways through an election season in which one candidate—Trump—has threatened violence and disruption if he doesn’t win. Here in Part 2, we look at the work waiting for us after…
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Welcome to a special two-part series about the looming clash over the future of America. In Part 1, we look at the tattered state of our democracy as the election approaches, and we assess nonviolent ways to respond to the twin threats of political polarization and President Trump's thuggish behavior. Part 2 is coming October 12. These are probably…
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Donald Trump will not be president forever. Whether he leaves office in 2021 or 2025; whether he steps down peacefully or not; whether he’s replaced by a Democratic president or a Republican one—he will leave. And then the country will face the immense task of restoring democratic norms and facing up to the failings that allowed a populist, white-n…
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Voters, hold on to your hats. The U.S. election system could face an unprecedented array of challenges in November, from the coronavirus pandemic to the prospect of cyberattacks to the depradations of President Trump himself. And that means there’s a non-zero chance that the election will misfire, leaving us with the wrong president—or no president…
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Futurists—who sometimes prefer to be called scenario planners or foresight thinkers—specialize in helping the rest of us understand the big trends and forces that will shape the world of tomorrow. So here’s what I really wanted to ask one: Is a cataclysm like the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 the kind of event we should be able to see coming? If so,…
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Fifty years after Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins went to the moon, it’s hard to shake off the afterimage of the Saturn V rocket rising into the sky on a column of flame, and remember that the astronauts' bold adventure was also the product of decades of work by engineers, politicians, propagandists, and even science fiction writer…
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