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…

My interview with TechShop CEO Dan Woods for Soonish Episode 1.05, Future Factories—With Workers Built In, was so fun and wide-ranging that I wanted to share the full version here on the site. Woods has an academic background in aeronautics and business administration. At O'Reilly Media, Dan was the co-founder of the how-to magazine MAKE, overseeing sales, circulation, marketing, media relations, and community outreach. Together with MAKE co-founder Dale Dougherty, he dreamed up the first Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA, in 2006. That's where he met Jim Newton, who would shortly go on to found TechShop. Years later, Woods would leave O'Reilly to go to work for Newton at TechShop, and in 2016, he became CEO. Woods was seemingly destined by his upbringing to…

You might think that an audio program about the visual arts is a contradiction in terms. Every three weeks, Tamar Avishai proves that's wrong in her podcast The Lonely Palette. In each episode, Tamar picks a specific work of art, goes to the museum that owns it, and interviews visitors about their reactions. Then, drawing on her art-history training and her experience as a lecturer at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, she brings out threads within those reactions to weave a rich audio essay about the work's creator and the context of its creation. Tamar's very first regular episode was about my favorite painting at the MFA: Cezanne's Fruit and Jug on a Table. Cezanne was a visual philosopher and a bit of a weirdo—there's no way around it—and Tamar goes right to the core of his art when she explains that he was exploring what it means to…

I'm awed and touched by this Soonish-themed collage made by Ellen Petry Leanse. Browse the scans, and continue reading below for the story behind this gorgeous piece.

I've been working on something special with the fine folks at RadioPublic, a Boston-based startup that's creating new ways for people to find and hear great podcasts. One of the unique features of RadioPublic's app (available for both iOS and Android) is a constant supply of fresh playlists curated by "tastemakers." I guess I'm one of those now! RadioPublic invited me to make a future-themed playlist for them, and I was thrilled to follow through. Starting yesterday (January 24) and for the coming week, News from the Future is one of five featured lists within the app, alongside terrific lists from Gimlet co-founder Matt Lieber, radio producer Veronica Simmonds, The Audit (a podcast recommendation newsletter), and audio artist John Tjhia. My list points to other shows that have inspired me as I've…

Calling all retro-futurism buffs! For your viewing pleasure, here's the full video of Century 21 Calling, the 1962 AT&T promotional film mentioned at the top of this week's episode, Monorails: Trains of Tomorrow? The film was made for AT&T by Jerry Fairbanks Productions. (Fairbanks was a veteran Hollywood producer who invented of the Multi Cam sound synchronization system still used today to film TV sitcoms.) The film follows an impossibly effervescent teenage couple as they ride the monorail to the 1962 Seattle World's Fair—also known as the Century 21 Exposition—and then spend some time at the Bell Systems pavilion learning about cutting-edge telephone technologies like pagers and call waiting.

Here's the full recording from my visit with Thom Ditty, general manager of Seattle Monorail Services. Thom took a big chunk of time on October 12, 2016, to show me around the system and then to sit for an extended interview. The first third of the recording covers our backstage tour of the Seattle Monorail Services maintenance facility, in the shadow of the Space Needle at Seattle Center. The middle third covers our trip on the monorail from Seattle Center to Westlake Center, a downtown shopping mall, and back. For the final third we sat down in Thom's office to cover some general questions about monorail technology and the Seattle Center Monorail's place in the city's culture and its future. The monorail, built in 1962 to carry passengers to the Seattle World's Fair, is one of the city's most iconic attractions and has been featured in numerous films and TV shows, including, most recently…

There's probably no one in the world better versed on the history and varieties of monorail technology than Kim Pedersen, the founder and president of the Monorail Society. When he agreed to talk with me for Soonish Episode 1.02, "Monorails: Trains of Tomorrow?," I knew the story would turn out okay. The sound file here is the full recording of my October 2016 interview with Kim at his home in Fremont, CA. Kim founded the society of monorail fans and monorail professionals—which has 7,000 members around the world—back in 1989. He's traveled the world to visit and ride monorails of every type. In fact, he and his wife Carol plan many of their vacations around destinations with monorails. Kim collects monorail memorabilia, and he's even an accomplished painter of futurist art, including, of course, cityscapes graced with monorails. In 2015 Kim distilled all this knowledge into a gorgeous, image-rich, 248-page book called Monorails: Trains of the Future—Now Arriving. The book became my bible on the history and engineering of monorails as I was doing the research for this episode.

Friend and supporters of Soonish came out in force to help celebrate the release of the Soonish pilot episode last Friday, January 13, 2017. Slide show below! The party featured a live performance of sections of the pilot by yours truly, along with a fantastic spread of food prepared by my wonderful mom, Patricia Bates Roush. Folks from all over the Boston podcasting, media, and university communities attended, including old friends from Xconomy, MIT, and the Boston Globe. The kind folks at PRX let us hold the event at the PRX Podcast Garage in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, just across the Charles River from the Harvard campus. The Podcast Garage is a new recording studio and educational hub dedicated to promoting audio storytelling. I've attended numerous events there since they opened last August, and it's a fantastic resource for the local radio and podcasting community. Thank you to everyone who came out to learn about the show…

This bonus post is the full recording of my December 7, 2016, interview with Jason Pontin, the CEO, editor-in-chief, and publisher of MIT Technology Review. He's one of the stars of Soonish Episode 1.01, How "2001" Got the Future So Wrong. Jason was editor of The Red Herring from 1996 to 2002 and of The Acumen Journal, a life sciences magazine, from 2002 to 2004. I got to know him in 2004 when he became editor-in-chief at Technology Review, where I was a San Francisco-based senior editor. Jason is a big science fiction fan and an eloquent writer and speaker about technology and the future, which made him the perfect person to interview for the pilot episode of Soonish. That episode is ostensibly about the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it's really about how science fiction helps define our aspirations for the future, and what it means for society when we fall dramatically short of those aspirations.

As a piece of bonus content to go along with Soonish Episode 1.01, How "2001" Got the Future So Wrong, here's the full recording of my interview with Jamais Cascio. Jamais is a professional futurist / foresight thinker / scenario planner / "prognosopher" (take your pick of labels) who consults for the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, CA, and other organizations. He’s the author of numerous magazine and journal articles as well the 2009 book Hacking the Earth: Understanding the Consequences of Geoengineering. I interviewed Jamais at the IFTF offices on October 19, 2016, a couple of weeks before the presidential election. We focused on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and how the futurism that Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke were doing in that movie turned out to be so wrong—or to put it the other way around, how the world we actually got by 2001 was so different from the one portrayed in the movie. Jamais had some fascinating thoughts about all that, but we also talked about…

As an alum at Xconomy I have the title "contributing editor" and a standing invitation to write guest columns. In December 2015 I wrote a piece called The Best Podcasts of 2015: A Guide for New Listeners, and last week the folks at the site called up to see if I wanted to update the list for 2016. "Of course," I said, "as long as you'll let me plug one important up-and-coming podcast of 2017." They agreed, and the new list is up. It's called 50 Podcasts You Should Be Listening To—And 5 New Ways to Find Them. The bonus 51st podcast is Soonish. I also included some information about...

If there's a discrete moment of birth for a new podcast, it comes when you get the "Podcast Approved" notification from the Apple iTunes Store. For Soonish, that happened today. I'm popping some corks here at Soonish headquarters! Being listed in the iTunes Store means it's okay for me to start sharing the teaser episode, since listeners can now act on it by subscribing. Which I hope you'll do!