Soonish Wade Roush

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!)