Dear friends,
I’m not in the habit of sending year-end newsletters full of personal and family news. And yet something this year told me I needed to write one. 2022 felt more pivotal, somehow. So if you’ll indulge me, I want to spend a few pages talking about the things that were important to me this year, and how events in the larger world overlapped with my little sphere.
I suppose one of the reasons I’m writing this is that I have fewer regular outlets for the stuff I want to say. I quit Facebook in 2018 out of disgust with Mark Zuckerberg’s maladministration. Elon Musk’s antics finally drove me off Twitter this November, after 15 years on the platform. I’m experimenting with alternatives like Mastodon and Post (where you can find me here, here, and here), but they don’t yet have a natural place in my routine. I also haven’t made as many podcast episodes as usual this year, due to other commitments that I’ll mention in a moment. So I’ve been feeling a little silent.
I’m sure this bothers no one but me. Maybe part of what’s happening is that after a hallucinatory decade spent blaring away in 140- or 280-character increments and processing all our public and private trauma on social media, we’re finally retreating into our own mental spaces. We’re discovering that we don’t actually need to share what we’re thinking and feeling every moment of the day, or know what everyone else is angry or scared about. We can just be.
Or maybe not. In any case, I’ve got the writing bug today.
Some of my work did get out into the world in other ways this year. In October, after more than two years of behind-the-scenes work, my collaborator A. R. Capetta and I brought out Tasting Light: 10 Science Fiction Stories to Rewire Your Perceptions. It’s an anthology of hard science fiction stories by leading writers of young-adult SF and fantasy, published by Candlewick Press and the MIT Press. It’s similar in spirit to Twelve Tomorrows, the previous hard SF anthology I edited in 2018, except this one features an even broader set of characters and settings. A. R. and I wanted reintroduce technology-driven speculative fiction to an audience that’s been served a whole lot of swords-and-sorcery and post-apocalyptic-death-match stories over the past two decades. And we wanted to show that there’s a place in SF for people of every age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, identity, and status. The stories in Tasting Light are truly luminous, and I look forward to seeing what our amazing contributing authors dream up next.
My one big audio project of 2022 was a podcast miniseries called The Persistent Innovators, made in collaboration with InnoLead, a Boston-based innovation consulting and media company run by my friend Scott Kirsner. Typically, big established companies are where innovation goes to die—but a few companies manage to keep reinventing themselves decade after decade. I wanted to know what sets them apart. The four episodes in the series looked at Apple, Disney, Lego, and the giant drug maker Novartis, featuring interviews with current and past leaders from each organization. The series ran first on InnoLead’s podcast Innovation Answered and then on my podcast Soonish. After years spent covering venture-capital-funded innovation at small startups, I developed a bias toward smallness, but I’ll admit I came out of the project with a lot more respect for the rare individuals who figure out how to lead large organizations to repeated success.
I didn’t make a whole lot of Soonish episodes this year beyond The Persistent Innovators. The excuse I’ll offer is that I chose to put most of my podcasting energy into Hub & Spoke, the collective of independent podcasts I co-founded in 2017. A couple of years ago, we decided a to try to incorporate as a non-profit, and see if we could raise money to support independent podcasters making the kind of informative, entertaining, quirky content we ourselves make and love. These producers make so much great work, but they do it outside the bounds of public media or the giant streaming companies like Spotify, SiriusXM, and iHeartRadio, and therefore they need to support themselves through their day jobs or (like me) their freelance gigs. We want to help them buy back a little more of their own time, so they can keep making audio.
To advance that vision, we obtained a major seed grant in late 2021 from my dear friends Kent Rasmussen and Celia Ramsay. In June 2022 we started putting that money to work by contracting with a full-time development director, the creative and indefatigable Lynn Rozental. She’s spent the last few months helping us build a professional fundraising operation. That meant I was a boss again, after six years of having only one direct report—myself! And it meant it was time to get serious about putting together Hub & Spoke’s Form 1023, the exhaustive, baroque, detailed, labyrinthine form the IRS requires from organizations requesting tax-exempt status. Our goal is become an independent 501(c)(3) organization, so we can end our reliance on our (exceedingly attentive and supportive) fiscal sponsor, the Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston. I spent much of the year explaining how we want to do that on the form—I’ve written books that were easier—and we’re still tweaking it now. But I’m hopeful that Hub & Spoke will emerge from the process with a clear and compelling vision of how we want to shore up the ecosystem that supports independent podcasters.
Along the way, we’ve received some welcome reminders of the value of the work we’re doing. In June my friend and colleague Erica Heilman, a Vermont-based audio producer who makes the Hub & Spoke show Rumble Strip, became the first independent podcaster in history to win a Peabody award, broadcasting’s equivalent of the Pulitzer, for her searing episode “Finn and the Bell.” That led to a feature review of Rumble Strip in The New Yorker, and the show landed on the “Best Podcasts of 2022” lists at multiple publications, including The New Yorker and The New York Times. We couldn’t be prouder of Erica and her accomplishments.
In the fall, Lynn Rozental and I had a series of meetings with audio industry leaders and foundation officials to try to explain how we want to help Erica, and more people like Erica, keep making the kind of audio our democracy needs today: fact-based yet opinionated, informative yet rivetingly entertaining. One of the folks we met was Jay Allison, the founder of Atlantic Public Media, public radio station WCAI, the Transom radio training workshops, and The Moth storytelling event series and radio broadcast. Jay offered us some great advice and invited me to write a piece about Hub & Spoke for the Transom website. We ended up calling it An Indie Audio Maker’s Manifesto. If you want to know more about the work we’re trying to do, go read it.
I want to say a bit about an audio project I didn’t do in 2022. Back in mid-2020, I made a series of podcast episodes brooding on the pandemic, the election, and the threat to democracy posed by the alt-right (which is now simply the right, having subsumed the entire Republican party). This is not the kind of thing I’m glad to be correct about, but every prediction I made in those episodes—about the weaknesses in our election system, the breakdown of democratic norms, and the lengths to which Donald Trump would to go to retain power—turned out to be accurate.
We escaped catastrophe, but only barely. Trump and his band of insurgents failed to overturn the 2020 election. But even as Democrats took over the White House and Congress, they were saddled with the epochal challenges of stopping Covid-19 and staving off economic collapse. Those crises left them little time to work on the bigger issues looming in the background: inequality, a reckoning with racism, our weakened democratic institutions, and, of course, climate change. Turncoats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema did their best to slow what progress there was. (My year-end wish is for them to appear as ghosts or villains in a Tony Kushner play.)
As the midterms loomed, I felt like it was time to make another episode about politics. It seemed that the Democrats had missed their opportunity to the reverse the poisons of gerrymandering, the filibuster, assaults on voting rights, and a rogue majority in the Supreme Court. Like everyone else in the media, I anticipated big Democratic losses in November up and down the ballot, allowing Republicans to make a run at permanent minoritarian rule in 2024. It felt to me as if the nation was on the road to all-out civil war.
I almost made a show about it. But something stayed my hand. And I’m relieved, because then a remarkable thing happened. A few things, actually. Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, providing an enormous boost in the race to rebuild our economy around zero-carbon technologies. The end of Roe turned out to be the beginning of the biggest wave of state reproductive-rights bills and constitutional amendments in the nation’s history, and even prodded Congress to enshrine marriage equality in law. Most importantly, midterm voters decided that the candidates who repeated the Big Lie couldn’t be trusted with power over future elections.
For the first time since 2016, in other words, it felt like there was some reason for hope. Trump’s political pull seemed to be weakening, while his legal troubles piled up. Inflation eased a bit. Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Jair Bolsonaro, and Pedro Castillo were ushered out. Ukraine held back Putin’s assault. Pandemic viruses are still with us, and still dividing us, but we have better tools for defending against them. The cradle of democracy rocked, but it didn’t fall. I’m so glad I didn’t make the mistake of issuing a doom-and-gloom podcast right before an election that may have signified the turning of the tide.
It’s also been a pretty great year for me on a personal level. In March I spent a week hanging out with my wonderful friend Ellen Petry Leanse in Santa Fe. The trip was a huge breath of fresh air, literally and spiritually. It reignited my passion for the American Southwest, and also inspired me to make a podcast episode about a fracas in Albuquerque over a pair of outdoor murals by painters of Latino and Native American heritage, including Ellen’s friend, the genius graffiti artist and muralist Jodie Herrera. I was also able to spend a day in Los Alamos, and finally got to see all the historic spots I’d only read about in the atomic-age history books. On the day I was there, Christopher Nolan was shooting his upcoming film Oppenheimer, and the town was buzzing with extras who looked like they’d stepped right out of 1945!
In May, I got a fairly horrible, three-week case of Covid-19. But it wasn’t all bad: In my delirium, I binge-watched a few gay-friendly rom-coms, like Heartstopper, Sex Education, and Young Royals. (Why couldn’t we have had shows like that when I was a teen?) It all got me thinking: maybe I’ve been single for long enough. Maybe the only person who ever makes me feel lonely, unhappy, or stuck is me.
So I hired a therapist to help me work through some of my irrational fears about relationships. (BetterHelp is pretty great, folks.) I got my friend Graham to shoot some new photos of me for my dating profiles. I dropped about 15 pandemic pounds. And I started dating again. Hey, maybe I buried the lede? Anyway, I haven’t found a boyfriend yet, but I’ve met some interesting guys. And if I can just endure the indignities of OKCupid and Hinge, I feel like I’ll eventually find someone who gets me and my weird combination of interests—and who likes dogs. (Gryphon is doing fine, by the way. He’s like a five-year-old puppy.)
Business-wise, I’ve had the pleasure of doing a bunch of freelance writing this year for a large Silicon Valley venture capital firm where some old colleagues from my magazine days are now running the media, communications, and outreach operation. It’s been a fun and challenging gig, and it’s evened out my cash flow, which had cratered during the pandemic. That’s given me the flexibility to continue my non-profit work at Hub & Spoke…and even to buy a new sofa to replace the one from 2006.
Speaking of flexibility, Gryphon and I were able to transplant ourselves to my family’s property at Torch Lake for a few sunny weeks this summer. Then I went back again in November when both of my parents got Covid-19, just as my mom was going in for emergency abdominal surgery. I was in Michigan for almost five weeks, helping with stuff like shopping and cooking while my mom recovered. She’s doing well now!
In the end, here’s why I’m breaking my no-holiday-newsletter rule: Politics, the pandemic, a faltering economy, and all the emotional fallout made the years from 2017 to 2021 feel like one long, vertiginous slide into the abyss. (In retrospect, it wasn’t the easiest time to be starting a podcast about the future.) But in 2022, for the first time since the Obama era, it felt like things were on the upswing, and I’ve begun to feel some real optimism again about our country and our planet. That felt like it was worth marking.
I’m grateful to have so many smart, generous colleagues and friends like you. May we all have the opportunity in 2023-24 to make new things, meet new people, and advance the projects we care about most, even as the country continues to heal from its recent wounds and begins to get a handle on the huge challenges coming up.
Thanks for reading. Give me a shout if you feel like it—I’m always reachable at wade.roush@protonmail.com or wade@soonishpodcast.org. Happy new year, and I wish you and yours a thriving, creative 2023.
Warmly,
Wade