Soonish

About Soonish

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.

Publisher

Wade Roush

Category

science · society & culture · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

10 Dec 2016

Latest episode

6 Feb 2026

Latest episodes

63 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Feb 2026

   Whose Private Mountain? Turning Corners, Episode 1

   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.

2. 

   27 Jan 2026

   Preview: Turning Corners

   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.

3. 

   24 Oct 2025

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

   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.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.9 / 5

80 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

7 ratings

Contact Soonish

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.