Soonish

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Introducing Hub & Spoke Oct 13, 2017

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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.

Shadows Of August: The Eclipse Road Trip Edition Sep 14, 2017

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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.

Washington, We Have A Problem Jul 03, 2017

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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.

A Tale Of Two Bridges Jun 08, 2017

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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.

Hacking Time May 11, 2017

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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

Astropreneurs Apr 20, 2017

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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

Origin Story Mar 29, 2017

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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.

Meat Without The Moo Mar 08, 2017

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Episode 1.05: We meet people working to promote a range of alternatives to meat from livestock--including a cricket farmer, a researcher studying ways to grow meat from muscle cells in the laboratory, and a startup founder commercializing jackfruit, a huge fruit from India with a meat-like texture. The logic behind their work is simple. In the coming decades, as the human population expands toward 10 billion people by 2050, we'll probably have to figure out how to replace a lot of the meat we currently get from pigs, chickens, cattle, and fish with other forms of protein. That's partly because we’re already running out of the land and water needed to raise more livestock. But on top of that, a big chunk of all greenhouse-gas emissions comes raising animals. So finding protein sources that don’t depend on traditional livestock agriculture is both an economic necessity and, possibly, a way to slow global warming. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music in this episode by Podington Bear and Lee Rosevere. For more information on this episode visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2017/3/8/105-meat-without-the-moo

Future Factories, With Workers Built In Feb 22, 2017

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Episode 1.04: Six million manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the U.S. since 2000, and you've probably heard economists and politicians say "those jobs aren't coming back." But that view isn't quite right. It doesn’t account for a cultural and technological revolution sweeping the United States—one that promises to redefine manufacturing, make it drastically more accessible, and create a ladder to new kinds of jobs for unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled workers alike. In this episode of Soonish, we visit TechShop, a maker space where craftspeople are using high-tech tools to come up with new products. We talk with a business strategist at the Xerox-owned Palo Alto Research Center, where programmers are inventing design software that can help people get their ideas to market faster. We tour 99Degrees, a company in an old Massachusetts mill town where one entrepreneur is creating a path to skilled high-tech employment for manual garment workers. And we meet Bill Taylor, an 88-year-old mechanical genius in Belmont, MA, who has an elaborate workshop in his basement and decades of perspective on the changing manufacturing scene in the U.S. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Lee Rosevere. For more background on this episode visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2017/2/22/104-future-factories-with-workers-built-in

Can Technology Save Museums? Feb 08, 2017

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Episode 1.03: Museum attendance declined steeply in the first decade of this century, according to a survey by the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA found that audiences were being siphoned away by the Internet, television, and other distractions. So, technology can be seen as a threat to museums—but maybe it's also a tool they can use to re-engage with the public. In this episode of Soonish, we visit museums in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Boston to see how some curators and educators are leaning on software, mobile devices, and digital media to get visitors excited about art. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Philipp Weigl and Kai Engel.

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