How To Write About Violence (with Fonda Lee and Lauren Beukes)
Battles and smackdowns are a key part of many science fiction and fantasy stories — but how do you do them right? Do you have an obligation to show the…
Ghost World (2001) w/ Lucé Tomlin-Brenner
“I just hate all these extroverted, obnoxious, pseudo-bohemian losers."
No such thing as the oldest language
It's easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there's an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them!…
Alien ecosystems and the algae menace
All of us live embedded in webs of life known as ecosystems, and that can get pretty creepy -- or astonishingly beautiful. Inspired by the mind-blowing new animated series Scavengers…
The Future of Transportation Has Arrived With Your Pad Thai
Baruch Herzfeld is the CEO and co-founder of PopWheels, where he is working to develop New York City’s first e-bike battery-swapping network. PopWheels aims to solve the growing problem of…
Prologue to Ursula K. le Guin
In the 1960s, Ursula K. le Guin represented a changing of the guard in science fiction literature. She was part of a generation of novelists who questioned the colonist mindset…
Road Ecology with Ben Goldfarb
In his new book, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, independent conservation journalist Ben Goldfarb writes about how roads and cars are wreaking havoc on…
Bureaucracy from Kafka to Dickens and Gospodinov
The Palace of Dreams is a novel set in the Ottoman empire but used by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare to reflect on the totalitarian state. Lea Ypi has been…
Leaving the Fold
A week after Jerry Springer’s death, we go back to a story we first broadcast years ago, about a side of Springer most people don’t know and can’t imagine: his…
Our Opinions Are Correct: Why Silicon Valley is doomed to misunderstand the future, with Dr. Joy Buolamwini
Silicon Valley markets itself as the place where futures are born, and yet tech corporations have no real understanding of where our civilizations are headed. We are wrapping up our…