I'm able to put out a new episode of Soonish every three to six weeks. For folks who love to think about the future, that's a long time to wait! To help tide you over, I've made a list of other podcasts and radio shows about science, technology, innovation, and the future that you might like. I aim to keep adding to this list. If you have a favorite future-oriented show that's not shown here, let me know!

Soonish went public one year ago today, at a big party at the PRX Podcast Garage. It was only 12 months ago, but it feels like it was a different era. Barack Obama was president! No one had heard the term "alternative facts"! You could browse Twitter without fear of nuclear conflagration! But as we barrel into an unknown future, buffeted every day by news that gets stranger and stranger, I've managed to stay sane in part by just doing the work and making the show. We need to think clearly about the future, now more than ever. Having the freedom to focus on where technology is going, one episode at a time, has been a huge joy and privilege. I'm so thankful to everyone who has listened to the show over the past 12 months and to everyone who…

We're thrilled to announce that Soonish is now part of the library of high-quality podcasts at NPR One. It's NPR's mobile listening app, featuring a customized blend of radio programs and podcasts from NPR, member stations, and independent partners. You can download NPR One for iOS and Android. Find Soonish inside the app by clicking the Search (magnifying glass) icon in the upper right of the screen and typing in "Soonish." From there you can listen to…

Dear Friends: Before we all turn off the computers, put away the smartphones, and settle in for a long week of holiday relaxation, I wanted to reach out to all Soonish mail list subscribers, Patreon supporters, Facebook followers, and blog readers and thank you for helping to make this an amazing first year for the podcast. I launched the show on January 13, 2017, at the beginning of a year that has brimmed with political tumult and natural and human-made disasters. But with your help and encouragement, I've been able to stay focused on making the show, which reached a series of big milestones. 1) I produced 10 episodes in the show’s first season and five (so far) in the second season. With each episode, the show’s audience has grown bigger. I’m in a great position to reach lots of new listeners in 2018. 2) I’ve been able to test and refine the basic ideas driving the show, zeroing in on…

Do you like science? Do you like movies? Then what could be better than a night at the movies with Science On Screen, the series created by the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, MA, that pairs current, classic, cult, and documentary films with talks by notable figures from the world of science, technology, and medicine. I'm not sure I count as "notable," but at the Coolidge's invitation I gave a Science On Screen talk last week keyed to the classic 1999 comedy OFFICE SPACE from writer/director Mike Judge. The video of the talk was just posted online. Check it out…

Huge news! Yesterday I joined up with my fellow podcasters Tamar Avishai of The Lonely Palette and Zachary Davis and Nick Andersen of Ministry of Ideas to unveil Hub & Spoke, a new audio collective designed to help each show grow through mutual support and cross-promotion. Click through for the official press release…

For your viewing enjoyment, here a few of my best shots from Gettysburg, PA, Future City, IL, and Makanda, IL. For the full story behind these images, listen to Soonish Episode 2.01, Shadows of August: The Eclipse Road Trip Edition.

In Episode 1.08, Hacking Time, I argued that we’re not well served by the technology tools that promise to keep us productive and efficient at work. I’ve been searching for a long time, and I’ve never found the idea e-mail manager, the ideal calendar, or the ideal to-do list app. (Or the ideal robot-who-will-just-do-my-job-for-me.) All I really want is a tool that can help me manage all the information coming at me and meet my commitments in a stress-free way. But it turns out that technology can abet the problem rather than aiding with it.  So I’ve hacked together a combination of digital and analog methods as best I can. And I think lot of people still struggle to survive in workplaces where the constant stream of tasks and meetings and memos can be deadening. The up side to this truth is that it's the fuel for a lot of great office-comedy movies and TV shows—and Mike Judge’s Office Space (1999) is the granddaddy of them all…

If you follow @soonishpodcast on Twitter you may have noticed a few links to Soonish-related items on Fair Observer.

It's a California-based news publication and "crowdsourced multimedia journal" about global politics, co-founded by my friend Atul Singh. This summer Fair Observer offered to republish some Soonish episodes and blog posts, and of course I said I'd be delighted…

The Pulse, the weekly WHYY health and science show hosted by Maiken Scott, published a space-themed episode on July 21 called "Leap of Space." The second segment of the show, '2001' Came and Went, But the Movie's Ideas Still Resonate, might sound familiar to Soonish listeners. It's a condensed version of Episode 1.01, How '2001' Got the Future So Wrong. Staffers at The Pulse approached me about adapting the episode after they decided to do a space show and heard the Soonish episodes about 2001 and Astropreneurs. I said yes right away, of course. And working with them was a blast. It was a challenge to squeeze a 33-minute episode down to about 6.5 minutes!  But…

It was fun to learn this week that Soonish was mentioned alongside other Cambridge- and Somerville-based podcasts and radio productions in a magazine feature about the Sonic Soirée, the monthly potluck and critique session for Boston-area audio makers. The piece is in the July-August issue of ScoutSomerville, the free bi-monthly. I've been going to Sonic Soirées for a couple of years now, and I was at the May gathering when Scout freelancer Adrianne Mathiowetz showed up to do research for her story. The real star of the story was my friend and colleague Tamar Avishai, maker of the awesome art history podcast The Lonely Palette (and one guest in Soonish Ep. 1.03, Can Technology Save Museums?). But Adrianne also kindly talked about me and Soonish. She called me…

From 2014 to 2016 I volunteered for the MIT Alumni Association as the founding host of a program called Faculty Forum Online — Alumni Edition. It was a series of live video conversations meant to illustrate the diverse jobs and challenges that MIT alumni are tackling around the world. The forums were multicast on Google Hangouts, and my guests responded to chat questions coming in from audience members watching remotely. This Monday, May 22, I reprised the moderator role for a special "FFO/AE" conducted with a live audience at Newbury Court, a beautiful retirement community in Concord, MA. The topic was "Robots & Your Job," an area I touched on in Soonish Ep. 1.04, Future Factories, With Workers Built In. Watch here…

As a special bonus for all the productivity geeks out there, here's the full recording of my interview with Stever Robbins. I spoke with Stever back on April 25, 2017, and I used a bunch of tape from this interview in Episode 1.08 of Soonish, Hacking Time. I first met Stever probably eight or nine years ago after seeing him give a talk at a conference, and I've always been a big fan of his podcast, The Get It Done Guy's Quick and Dirty Tips to Work Less and Do More. In addition to being a podcaster, Stever is an entrepreneur and a career coach, an author, a fellow MIT alumnus, and simply one of the smartest people I know around the big questions about productivity. Like, how to…

Big news! On May 22 I'll be hosting a live Google Hangouts discussion on "Robots in the Workplace: How artificial intelligence and automation are helping (and hurting) American workers." The event will feature Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, and scholars from the Wharton School and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. All Soonish listeners are invited to join….

To get the link for the online-only Google Hangout on May 22, register here. It's free!

If you're an MIT alumnus and you'd like to attend the live taping of the session in Newton, MA, register here.

One of my most fascinating interviews for Soonish Episode 1.07, Astropreneurs, was with Ariel Waldman, the creator of Spacehack.org, the global director of Science Hack Day, and the author of What's It Like In Space?: Stories from Astronauts Who've Been There. Waldman has made it her personal mission to get more people involved in science, especially space exploration. Her talk at the New Space Age Conference at MIT's Sloan School of Management in March was part of what convinced me that I needed to make an episode about space entrepreneurship. A designer by training, Waldman formerly worked at…

If you enjoy Soonish, one of the most powerful things you can do to support the show is to leave a rating and a review of the show in the Apple Podcasts directory. There are plenty of other ways to find podcasts these days. But I've looked at my own download statistics, and more than half of the folks who discover and listen to Soonish are doing it using the Apple Podcasts app on their smartphones. That means Apple is still a key gatekeeper in the podcasting business. Every five-star rating and positive review greatly increases the chances that Apple will feature Soonish in search results, which helps the show reach more listeners. And who knows—someday maybe the Apple curators will even pick the show for their New and Noteworthy section. So, you're fired up to write a review? Great! Here’s how…

At a "Maker Mingle" event at the PRX Podcast Garage a couple of months ago, I made a new podcasting acquaintance: Chris Revill of Providence, RI. He makes an interview show called Let's Chat with Chris Revill and Friends. It's part of the Core Temp Arts podcast network. Soon after the Podcast Garage event, Chris invited me to be a guest on the show, and last week he published the resulting episode, which you can hear here. The conversation was fun and wide-ranging. We talked about everything from why I started Soonish to…

Winston Churchill wrote in 1931: "Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium." Churchill's prediction hasn't come true on the schedule he laid out. But people like Natalie Rubio are working as quickly as they can to bring about his vision of lab-grown meat, or what's now known as "cellular agriculture." The ability to grow meat in a laboratory or factory environment wouldn't just sidestep the "absurdity" of raising whole chickens, turkeys, pigs, or cows just for their meat. It could also save energy and water and…

Presented for your enjoyment: the full tape of Soonish's interview with Adam Salomone. In Episode 1.05 of Soonish, Meat Without the Moo, Adam shares some perspectives on The Jackfruit Company, the startup Annie Ryu founded to introduce jackfruit to Western consumers. But the truth is I could have done a whole show just around my conversation with Adam. He has an amazingly rich background in the food business, first as the longtime associate publisher of the cookbook publishing company Harvard Common Press (now part of the Quarto Group) and more recently as the co-founder and CEO of The Food Loft, a collaborative workspace in Boston for food and tech companies. At Harvard Common Press, Adam helped to…

I listen to a lot of podcasts. A lot. If you've seen my past lists of podcast recommendations, like this 2015 Xconomy piece and this 2016 sequel and update, you know that my list of must-listen shows runs into the dozens. Now there's an easier way for me to share shows and episodes that I especially like. It's the new personal playlist feature in the awesome podcatcher app from RadioPublic. I've used the feature to set up my own running playlist, which features great episodes that gave me new stuff to think about. By the way, that's a "deep link" with special superpowers. If you have the RadioPublic app installed on your iOS or Android device, and you tap the link from that device, the app will…