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…

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.