Hub & Spoke, the nonprofit collective of audio makers dedicated to excellence in independent podcasting, announced today that it has secured its first major donation, a $100,000 gift from the Rasmussen Family Fund. The collective also announced that it is seeking to hire a development and communications manager to help build out its operations.

Exiting the Google ecosystem — as we explored in Soonish Episode 4.11, Goodbye, Google — is 1) a process, and 2) a continuum. You can’t do it all at once, and you can’t really reach the end. Rather than trying to cut Google out of your life entirely, it’s better to think of the metaphor of reducetarianism, the commitment to spare animals and the planet by eating less meat rather than zero meat.

So we've almost made it. 2020 is about to take its leave. It was a year that taught us so much about ourselves and the communities we live in—not all of it comfortable.

When I started reporting for Soonish four years ago, I never intended to make a podcast about politics. I just wanted to make a show about the future, and how part of being a smart citizen and a smart consumer is being more conscious about the ways we use technology. But then the election of 2016 turned everything upside down. And as the Trump years have rumbled onward, I’ve often found myself gravitating toward stories that are sorta about technology but are really about how American democracy works—or doesn’t work. And in Season 4, I’ve gone all the way, bringing you a series of conversations with futurists, legal scholars, and political scientists focused on ways to understand and confront current threats to our democratic norms and our system of government. In particular, I’ve concentrated on the danger represented by Donald Trump and his movement. Think of it as “political futurism.” Here in the Soonish Save-the-Future Kit I’m curating links to resources that can help you be a more informed and prepared citizen as we once again dive into a perilous and consequential election.

Making a solo, sound-rich, journalistic podcast is a challenging and sometimes lonely pursuit. It's made less lonely by colleagues, such as my fellow producers at Hub & Spoke. But the most encouraging thing is that so many people listen (and that some of you also send your hard-earned dollars my way via Patreon). You are, very literally, the reason I make the show. So it’s time to share an update about recent accomplishments and upcoming changes.

I interviewed Lillian Cunningham, Washington Post reporter and creator of the limited-run podcast Moonrise, on October 29. That was just three days before Apple released the first episode of For All Mankind, the counterhistorical drama series on Apple TV+ about an alternative world in which the Soviets beat the Americans to the moon. Lillian devoted great swaths of Moonrise to the largely forgotten history of the Soviet space program, and especially its presiding genius, Sergei Korolev. So I wanted to ask her whether she thought the premise of For All Mankind was at all realistic. You can hear her answer in this bonus interview tape.

Check out a slide show from Wade’s visit to Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Jose in June, 2019. It’s a Disneyland-like experience for 6,000 Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and WatchOS developers, and always kicks off with a much-anticipated keynote presentation hosted by CEO Tim Cook.

Boston Speaks Up is an interview podcast—produced by Zach Servideo of Fabric Media in partnership with AmericanInno—where leaders, creators, innovators and artists with connections to Boston share their stories of inspiration. I was Zach’s guest for the July 8 episode. We talked about everything from urban planning to inequality to machine learning. Check out the full post at AmericanInno or click through to use the embedded player.

In this bonus audio file, hear my full interview with Tamar Avishai, producer and host of the art history podcast The Lonely Palette, about Facebook and the role it plays in her life. Tamar—a frequest guest of the show, and my fellow co-founder at the Hub & Spoke audio collective—stands out from the other guests who contributed to Episode 3.03, A Future Without Facebook, in that she has no plans to leave Facebook, and she's totally at peace with her decision to stay.

I’m pleased to announce that in addition to producing Soonish, I’m now writing a monthly column for Scientific American, the nation’s oldest contnuously published magazine (launched in 1845). The column is called “Ventures,” and debuted in the …

The following post is a copy of message I posted to Facebook this morning. I’m also publishing it here because, as you’ll see, it relates to an upcoming episode of Soonish—one that I need your help with, whether or not you’ve ever followed me on Facebook. Read on, and please reach out to respond if the spirit moves you.

The following is a complete transcript of Soonish Episode 3.02, The Track Not Taken, published in audio form on Friday, November 9.

Twelve Tomorrows, the hard science fiction anthology from MIT Technology Review and the MIT Press that served as a jumping-off point for Soonish Episode 2.08, was the featured book on last week’s edition of the New Books in Science Fiction podcast from the New Books Network.

Today I'm binge-listening to Star Wars: The Original Radio Drama, produced by NPR and aired in 1981. I was inspired to check it out by the Theater for the Mind episode of Eric Molinsky's Imaginary Worlds podcast.

"William Shatner has called crypto 'cyber-snob currency.'" There, in a single sentence, from this week’s (dis)enchanting Nick Paumgarten New Yorker story about Ethereum, is the entire cryptocurrency mess in eight words. First off: what kind of world are we in where William Shatner 1) even knows about cryptocurrency 2) has an opinion about it 3) gets quoted on that opinion in the New Yorker 4) is actually correct?

It's been a privilege and an education to work with the composer/producer team of Joel Roston and Andrew Willis of Titlecard Music and Sound on this year's Soonish episodes. And now I'm thrilled to announce that Titlecard's original score from Episode 2.10, Making Music with Machines, is available for purchase at Bandcamp as a standalone album. Obtaining "pod-safe" music to set a mood, reinforce an emotional turning point, or help move a narrative along is a vexing challenge for independent podcast producers. For obvious legal reasons, it's important to…

The second segment or "movement" in Soonish Episode 2.10, Making Music with Machines, is all about a basic form of musical counterpoint called the canon. And our guide to the canon is Rudi Seitz, who is such a devotee of the form that he has released an entire album of 45 original canons perform on the harpsichord. It's called, naturally, Canons. It's available on Bandcamp and it's wonderful to listen to. The segment in the full episode focuses on Rudi's philosophy about the role of software in music composition. He uses a standard music notation program called Finale, from Boulder, CO-based MakeMusic, to capture drafts of his canons, and he says…

I'm thrilled to announce the publication of Twelve Tomorrows, the science fiction anthology I edited for MIT Technology Review and The MIT Press. With help from assistant editor Mark Pontin, I recruited famous and up-and-coming voices in science fiction to write "hard SF" stories that offer deep, provocative, funny, frightening perspectives on how present-day technologies could evolve. The book includes 10 original short stories and a 20-page, full-color graphic novella. Soonish fans are invited to join me at 6:00 pm June 5 at the MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge, MA, when I'll host an event with Twelve Tomorrows contributors Elizabeth Bear, SL Huang, and Ken Liu. The authors will read from their stories, and we'll discuss the role of hard science fiction in helping us understand how today's technologies are evolving.

I'm thrilled (and a little intimidated) to be part of the lineup of storytellers bringing you tales of science, medicine, and technology as part of the Story Collider performance during the Cambridge Science Festival. The event will be at 8:00 pm on April 15 at the Oberon Theater in Harvard Square, Cambridge. Info about the show is here. You'll hear stories from pediatrician-in-training and youth development expert Dr. Elorm Avakame, clinical psychologist and relationship expert Dr. Monica O'Neal, filmmaker and NOVA science editor Caitlin Saks, celebrity chef Dan Souza, and me.

As an experiment, I’m posting the full script for Episode 2.05, “The Future is Clear.” The conventional wisdom in the podcasting business is that posting full scripts of episodes is a good SEO move. That stands for Search Engine Optimization. In other words, if I post the full script, Google and other search engines might rank it highly it when people are searching for information about Corning, or Josh Simpson, or the MIT Glass Lab. I’ve never seen data to support this belief, but why not give it a try?