Looks Like New is the podcast that asks old questions about new technology. Each month, we speak with someone who works with technology in ways that challenge conventional narratives and dominant power structures. The name comes from the phrase “a philosophy so old that it looks like new,” repeated throughout the works of Peter Maurin, the French-American agrarian poet.
Looks Like New is a production of the Media Enterprise Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder. It airs on the fourth Thursday of every month on KGNU radio at 6 p.m., or online as a podcast at lookslikenew.net.
This month on Looks Like New, we have a special episode featuring Steve Lamos, recorded by Looks Like New's previous producer, Alexander Lipka. Steve is a scholar and educator at the University of Colorado Boulder and drummer for the band American Football, whose work spans music, writing, and pedagogy. His literary work includes Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction and Notebooking Resonances in Music.
In this conversation, Alexander and Steve explore how music scenes were once built on physical infrastructure like record stores, college radio, and local venues, and what's replaced that in the modern world of streaming and algorithmic discovery. Steve unpacks the close, reflective listening practice he calls "notebooking," and considers whether today's music culture carries that tradition forward or represents something new entirely. Steve also covers how institutions shape whose stories get told and preserved, both in the classroom and across music culture more broadly, and how listeners may bring more intention to the way they engage with music today.
23 Jul 2026
Who gets to make the rules online?
From subreddit rule pages to Mastodon server blocklists, the internet is full of quiet governance decisions most of us never see. On this episode of Looks Like New, Júlia Martins Rodrigues talks with Sohyeon Hwang about who's making them and what it would take to share this power.
Sohyeon is a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, about how everyday people build real power over the technologies shaping their lives. Hwang studies the "governance laboratories" of subreddits, fandom wikis, and Mastodon servers places where volunteer moderators write rules, borrow them from other communities, and improvise systems of collective self-governance in real time. Their conversation moves from where online community rules actually come from, to a framework for comparing decentralized protocols like ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Nostr, and Farcaster, to why Hwang believes governance is best understood not as an end state but as an ongoing, adaptable process built on trust.
25 Jun 2026
How can VR tell the story of genocide?
On this episode of Looks Like New, MEDLab's Stephanie Abdalla speaks with Dr. Naim Aburaddi, artist, journalist, and PhD graduate whose work explores how immersive tech can document destruction. Aburaddi is the co-founder and co-director of the Phoenix of Gaza XR Project, an interactive virtual reality experience that documents life in Gaza through its culture, history and decades of subjugation by outside powers. It has been exhibited at institutions including MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, and Yale, as well as internationally. Naim is A Data Justice Fellow at Princeton's Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab and recipient of the 2024 Mellon ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. His work has been featured by the BBC, WGBH, Colorado Public Radio, and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
Their conversation moves from the personal to the political, following Aburaddi's life growing up in Gaza and pursuing journalism abroad, to how storytelling became both a survival tool and a form of resistance.
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
YouTube views
90,698
Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
2 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
4 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 69 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
77
Social presence
0
YouTube
76
Engagement
76
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