Soonish cover art

Soonish

Soonish

By: Wade Roush
Listen for free

About this listen

 We can have the future we want—but we have to work for it. Soonish brings you stories and conversations showing how the choices we make together forge the technological world of tomorrow. From MIT-trained technology journalist Wade Roush. Learn more at soonishpodcast.org. We're a proud member of the Hub & Spoke audio collective! See hubspokeaudio.org.All rights reserved Science Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Whose Private Mountain? Turning Corners, Episode 1

    Whose Private Mountain? Turning Corners, Episode 1
    Feb 6 2026
    Hello again, Soonish listeners! You might remember that in the final episode of Soonish last year, I said I'd be back in the podcast feed one last time to tell you about a new audio project I've been working on. Well, today I'm finally launching a new show I'm calling Turning Corners. It's full of inspiring stories about people in the Four Corners states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado who are working to bridge old divides, heal the land, and make life better. If you liked Soonish, I think you'll like this new show too, so I'm dropping the first full episode into this feed for your listening pleasure. If you'd like to stay on a listener, please take a minute to find Turning Corners in your favorite podcast app and hit follow or subscribe. You can also get the show delivered directly to your email inbox by signing up for a free subscription at turningcorners.org.For this episode, I went inside Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to talk with artists and curators about a daring new exhibit called “Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country.” It’s an act of community storytelling, meant to both illuminate and soften some of the old boundaries and tensions between indigenous artists and the Anglo art establishment O’Keeffe represented.The exhibit features the work of a dozen artists from the six Tewa-speaking pueblos of northern New Mexico. All express in different ways their love of the vibrant land their people have inhabited for hundreds or thousands of years—and all grapple with the way O’Keeffe, still America’s most famous female artist, repeatedly framed the landscape around Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu as an empty, silent realm that she alone could properly interpret. “It’s my private mountain,” O’Keeffe once said of Tsi-p’in or Cerro Pedernal, the striking flat-topped mountain visible from her home. “It belongs to me. God told me that if I painted it enough, I could have it.” In point of fact, the mountain is on U.S. Forest Service land, and is the site of Tsi-p’in-owinge, a ruin that was the ancestral home of the people of Nambe, Ohkay Owingeh, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, and Tesuque pueblos. So O’Keeffe’s quote—even if it was meant in a poetic or tongue-in-cheek way—rings in modern indigenous ears as a provocation. And indeed, for Jason Garcia, the Santa Clara Pueblo artist who co-curated the Tewa Nangeh exhibit, it served as an organizing theme. He worked with curator Bess Murphy at the O’Keeffe Museum and with the contributing artists to gently but irrevocably overturn the idea that any one artist can speak for an entire region.For more show notes, images from the exhibit, and a full transcript, please go to https://www.turningcorners.org/p/whose-private-mountain-pueblo-artistsFEATURED VOICESJason Garcia, who also goes by Okuu Pin (Turtle Mountain), is an artist from Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico who specializes in clay tiles and printmaking. He co-curated of the Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country exhibit (2025-2026) at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Garcia’s work documents the ever-changing cultural landscape of his home, including cultural ceremonies, traditions, and stories, and also draws on 21st-century popular culture, comic books, and technology. Garcia’s juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary materials and techniques connects him to his Ancestral past, landscape, and cultural knowledge. He studied fine arts at the University of New Mexico (Bachelor’s, 1998) and the University of Wisconsin (MFA, 2016).Bess Murphy, PhD, is the Luce Curator of Art and Social Practice at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She joined the O’Keeffe Museum in 2022, and Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country, which she co-organized with Jason Garcia, is her first curated show at the museum. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Bard College and a PhD from the University of Southern California, and from 2015 to 2022 she was the creative director and curator of the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts in Santa Fe. Michael Namingha is a photographer and silkscreen artist who hails from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo in New Mexico and the Hopi tribe in Arizona. His work, which often features surrealistically altered images of the natural landscape, has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world, from New Mexico to Arizona, California, Indiana, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Virginia, as well as Canada, Germany, and Japan. He splits his time between Santa Fe and Brooklyn, where his studio is located. He studied strategic design and management at the Parsons School of Design.Wade Roush, PhD, is the creator and host of Turning Corners. He’s an MIT- and Harvard-trained freelance science and technology journalist, editor, and audio producer who has written for publications such as Science, MIT Technology Review, Xconomy, and Scientific American. From 2017 to 2025 he produced the tech-and-culture podcast ...
    Show More Show Less
    48 mins
  • Preview: Turning Corners

    Preview: Turning Corners
    Jan 27 2026

    Hey Soonish listeners! I'm back in your podcast feed with some exciting news. I'm about to launch a new podcast called Turning Corners.

    It's full of inspiring stories about people in the Four Corners states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado who are working to bridge old divides, heal the land, and make life better. Today I'm sharing a short trailer that explains a little more about the show

    If you liked Soonish, I think you'll like this new show too. As soon as the first episode is ready, I'm going to drop that here too, so you can even more of a taste. I hope you'll search for Turning Corners in your favorite podcast app and hit follow or subscribe. You can also go to turningcorners.org and sign up to get the podcast sent directly to your email inbox.

    FULL TRAILER SUMMARY

    Turning Corners is a new podcast offering inspiring stories about the people and organizations working to make life better in the Four Corners states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. It’s produced in Santa Fe, NM, by me, Wade Roush.

    I feel like we’re immersed every day in discouraging news about how our broken politics and failing institutions are keeping us from accomplishing real change. You know, the kind of change that could lift people up and remind us that we really are in this together. But here in the West and Southwest there are a lot of real people doing creative, groundbreaking work to strengthen communities, bridge old divides, reduce inequality, and save the planet.

    They’re bring their unique cultures and histories to bear. They also bring a uniquely Southwestern type of courage and public spirit, along with a can-do, no-bullshit attitude. They’re tackling hard problems—and so they don’t always succeed. But I think their stories can be an inspiration for people all over the country. And I’m starting this show because I want to bring those stories to you.

    Episode 1—about a groundbreaking new exhibit at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico—is coming very soon. Subscribe to Turning Corners on Substack to get that episode and every future episode (plus full transcripts) in your email inbox, or hit follow or subscribe in your favorite podcast app.
    Show More Show Less
    6 mins
  • Final Episode: David Mindell on What It Takes to Power an Industrial Revolution

    Final Episode: David Mindell on What It Takes to Power an Industrial Revolution
    Oct 24 2025

    David Mindell is a historian, an engineer, a startup founder, a venture investor—and now the author of The New Lunar Society: An Englightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution. The 2025 MIT Press volume is all about James Watt, Matthew Boulton, and the other inventors and entrepreneurs who kickstarted the first industrial revolution in Great Britain back in the late eighteenth century, and what they got right and what they missed about how technology can transform work and how to translate invention into social progress. But it’s also about how engineers innovate (or fail to innovate) today, and what they might learn or relearn if they took a look back at that founding generation of industrialists.

    Mindell, who's been a friend ever since we were both doctoral students in MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society in the early 1990s, is the perfect guest for this 60th and final episode of Soonish. The show has always been motivated by a set of big questions: How is computing changing the nature of work, play, artistic expression, and communication? How can we design our cities, our transportation systems, and even our political systems to be more resilient? In an economy dominated by strife-fueled social media and rising technofeudalist empires, what's the future of democracy? How much of our techological future is predetermined, and how much of it can we shape proactively?

    David brings to bear the tools of historical scholarship—along with his experience in engineering, academia, and the entrepreneurial world—to explore the same kinds of questions. This new book, in particular, asks how Watt, Boulton, and their colleagues distilled Enlightenment scientific values, hands-on experimentation, and collaboration into a set of founding principles for industrial society—and how can we rethink those principles for a world of labor scarcity, climate change, pandemics and other global disruptions, and burgeoning new technologies like artificial intelligence.

    For show notes, links, and a full transcript of this episode, please visit https://www.soonishpodcast.org/soonish-517-what-it-takes-to-power-an-industrial-revolution
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 8 mins
No reviews yet