If you listened to my previous episode, you’ll remember that I described four "valleys" or scenarios for how the 2024 presidential election could unfold. The fourth scenario was one where Donald Trump wins both the electoral college and the popular vote, with a margin big enough to claim he has a mandate for change. I called that the Valley of Doom. And like it or not, that's the one we're in. Now that we know which path we’re really on, it’s time to think through through what’s next. Plenty of other smart people are trying to dissect the Democrats’ mistakes; what feels much more urgent to me is figuring out how to understand the moment we’re in now and how to respond to it. How did civic conversations that used to be built around mutual respect and a shared sense of reality devolve into a free-for-all where lies are more powerful than truth? How did trust in government and institutions decay to the point that a majority of voters were willing to hand power to a disruptor who feeds on chaos and confusion? What options are open now for people who still care about values like community and compassion and equality and enlightened self-government? To talk it through I reached out this week to two people who helped me think about those questions in two different ways that you could loosely call top-down and bottom-up. The top-down thinker is Jamais Cascio. He’s a futurist and scenario planner based in California, and he’s a familiar voice to listeners of this podcast. The last time Jamais joined us was during the pandemic, and we talked about a framework he’d come up with to help describe the historical forces at play in that crisis. The framework has an acronym, BANI, which stands for Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. Those feel like pretty good adjectives for this moment too, and in our chat we dived into how a BANI framework helps describe our experience of the Trump era and how we can adapt and respond to the coming changes. The bottom-up thinker featured in this episode is named Rose Friedman. She’s the co-founder and executive director of a nonprofit called The Civic Standard. And she spends every day thinking about how to support dialogue and togetherness and mutual aid in her rural corner of Vermont. I think it’s the kind of work that could help build a new foundation for democratic dialogue and get us past the fear, terror, and loneliness some politicians would like us to feel. In the second half of the episode, I explain how I learned about The Civic Standard—and why I think their mission is so important.

Why does every presidential race lately get described as "the most important election of our lifetimes"? Because it's true. In any election where Donald Trump is on the ballot, Americans are faced with a world-changing choice about whether we want the democratic experiment to continue. Right now, four weeks out from the 2024 vote, it's totally unclear which choice we'll make, but it's not too soon to be thinking about the possible consequences. This episode of Soonish walks through four plausible post-election scenarios, with the main outcomes driven by who wins the popular vote and who wins in the electoral college. These are the "Four Valleys"—the Valley of Hope, the Valley of Survival, the Valley of Greed, and the Valley of Doom.

Don't worry, the next regular season of Soonish is still coming. But meanwhile I wanted to bring you something really special that I think you’ll like. It's first episode of a new podcast from Hub & Spoke called The Rabbis Go South. It’s a documentary that we’re presenting as part of a new project we’ve cooked up called the Hub & Spoke Expo. The Expo is our way of working with independent audio creators who are making limited-run series, as opposed to the ongoing podcasts that make up the rest of the collective. The Rabbis Go South is our very first Expo series, and the creators Amy Geller and Gerald Perry released the first episode just this week. We’re really proud that we can help get the show out to the world, because it tells the story of an important but little-known episode in the history of the pivotal civil rights summer of 1964. You’ve heard of the march in Selma and the bus boycotts in Montgomery. But what you probably haven’t heard is that Black civil rights groups led by Martin Luther King Jr. also faced vicious opposition to their effort to integrate the deeply segregated city of St. Augustine, Florida. As part of a strategy to bring as much media attention as he could to the situation in St. Augustine, Dr. King called on friends from the Jewish community to come to Florida to participate in marches and other actions. Sixteen rabbis heeded that call, and they were so successful at getting under the skin of local law enforcement that they all ended up in a jail run by sheriff’s deputies who were also leaders of the local Ku Klux Klan. Amy and Gerry went out and talked to the surviving members of that group about why they did what they did to help their Black compatriots, and what this rare moment of Black-Jewish cooperation can teach us today. So I hope you enjoy this first episode, and if you do you can hear the rest of the story in new episodes of The Rabbis Go South, coming out every Monday from now through late October. You can find it at hubspokeaudio.org/rabbis or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ve been arguing on the show since 2019 that the companies that run the big technology platforms—Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the rest—have far too much wealth and power. In the world these companies have built, we exist only to generate behavioral data. We supply that data through our decisions about what social media posts to click on and what stuff to buy and what videos and songs we consume; the companies hoover it up and use it to craft and curate more content they know we’ll like, so that they can sell us even more stuff. This unimaginably profitable business model has been called “surveillance capitalism”—but that term doesn’t feel right, since surveillance is usually covert, and these companies are doing what they do right out in the open, with our willing participation. This week on the show, we bring you an interview with Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis, who has a better name for it: technofeudalism. The thesis of his new book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism is that since 2008 or so, old-fashioned capital has been eclipsed by Internet-powered cloud capital. The real power in today’s economy, Varoufakis argues, resides not with the owners of the means of production, but with the owners of the platforms that turn our behavior into data and use that data in turn to modify our behavior. Whereas old-fashioned feudal lords collected actual rent from their serfs in return for the right to farm the land they owned, cloud capitalists collect cloud rent—a tax on access to their platforms. If you’re like me, you’re not very happy about the rise of technofeudalism and the decline of free, open markets. And you worry about how democracy can survive and how we can continue to flourish as creative beings when so much wealth and power is concentrated in so few companies and people. Fortunately, Varoufakis isn’t simply in the business of diagnosing the problem. In Technofeudalism, together with his 2021 science fiction novel Another Now, he does a lot of work to sketch out alternative worlds and ways we could get there.

The most important piece of advice David Baron ever got: “Before you die, you owe it to yourself to see a total solar eclipse.” The recommendation came from the Williams College astronomer Jay Pasachoff, a beloved teacher and textbook author, after Baron interviewed him for a 1994 radio story. Baron listened—and it changed his life. He saw his first eclipse in Aruba in 1998, and has since become a true umbraphile. The upcoming eclipse of April 8, 2024, will be the ninth one he’s witnessed. A veteran science journalist and former NPR science correspondent, Baron joined Soonish from his home in Boulder, CO, to talk about his 2017 book American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic Race to Catch The Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World. It’s a dramatic account of the total eclipse of July 28, 1878, which crossed through Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Texas and drew a fascinating cast of characters into its path, including a young Thomas Edison. Everyone who chased the 1878 eclipse went West for their own reasons. To prove his bona fides as a scientist, in Edison’s case; to hunt for the hypothetical planet Vulcan, in the case of University of Michigan astronomer James Craig Watson; to prove to a skeptical public that women could do science and still be “feminine,” in the case of Vassar College astronomer Maria Mitchell and her students. Baron’s book shows how their adventures made the eclipse into a major cultural and scientific turning point for the young nation, previously considered a backwater of science. And it reminds us that for the people who flock into the path of totality, an eclipse can still be transformative today.

After a long hiatus, Soonish is back for a celebration: this is the 50th full episode of the show! (I’m not counting a few bonus episodes in that total.) Tamar Avishai, creator and host of the Hub & Spoke podcast The Lonely Palette, joins this time as co-host to help us take a look back at the first 49 episodes of the show. She quizzes me on the accuracy of many of the technology forecasts and predictions I offered along the way. And she prompts me to explain how the show has evolved since its launch in 2017, why it’s become more political than I ever expected (it’s the democracy, stupid), and where it’s going in the future.

Hey listeners! A new, original episode of Soonish is coming very soon. Meanwhile, I wanted to share a Valentine's Day treat. As the philosopher Haddaway once asked, "What is love?" Well, it can be anything that stirs the heart: passion, grief, affection, kin. The desire to consume; the poignancy of memory. At Hub & Spoke—the collective of independent podcasts where Soonish was a founding member back in 2017—we want to stretch our arms, and ears, around it all. This special episode of our anthology show, the Hub & Spoke Radio Hour, looks at love from four different angles. It's hosted by Lori Mortimer and edited by Tamar Avishai. Production assistance from Nick Andersen. Music by Evalyn Parry, The Blue Dot Sessions, and a kiss of Dionne Warwick.

Why does the world of young adult fiction seem to have more wizards, werewolves, and vampires in it than astronauts and engineers? And why have the writers of the blockbuster YA books of the last 20 years fixated so consistently on white, straight, cisgender protagonists while always somehow forgetting to portray the true diversity of young people’s backgrounds, identities, orientations, and experiences? Well, you could write a whole dissertation about those questions. But instead, my friend and colleague A. R. Capetta and I went out and assembled a counterweight. It’s a YA science fiction collection called TASTING LIGHT: TEN SCIENCE FICTION STORIES TO REWIRE YOUR PERCEPTIONS, and after more than two years of work, it comes out today—October 11, 2022.

This week we're featuring a conversation with Ian Coss, co-creator of Newts, a wild new six-part musical audio drama from PRX and the fiction podcast The Truth. The show is inspired by the writings of the Czech journalist and science fiction pioneer Karel Čapek. He’s best known for coining the  word "robot" in his 1920 play Rossum's Universal Robots, or R.U.R—but his less famous 1936 novel War with the Newts is actually a funnier, weirder, and more biting reflection of politics and social affairs in the first half of the twentieth century.  It's also a sprawling, jumbled, irreverent story that turns out to be perfect material for an adaptation like Newts. In the show, Ian and  his collaborator Sam Jay Gold have taken Čapek's speculative story about how humanity might deal with the appearance of a second intelligent, speaking, tool-using species on Earth and added wealth of new layers, not the least of which is a catchy Beach-Boys-inspired musical score. It's hard to describe in just a few words, but if you listen to the series (and our interview with Ian), you might just come away with a new perspective on the nature of our relationships with other animals; on the human species' alternately tender and warlike instincts; and on Karel Čapek's underappreciated contributions to 20th-century literature.

For most people, nightmares produce insomnia, exhaustion, and unease. For Graham Gordon Ramsay, a spate of severe nightmares in April 2020 developed into something more lasting and meaningful: a five-movement, 18-minute musical work called "Introspections." To me, it's one of the most arresting artistic documents of the opening phase of the global coronavirus pandemic, and so we've made it the subject of this week's Song Exploder-style musical episode. (Headphones recommended!)