What Future 2018

Co-editor Rose Eveleth, and contributors Lauren Smiley, and Annalee Newitz discuss What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas To Reclaim, Reanimate And Reinvent Our Future.

Rose Eveleth is a producer, designer, writer and animator. She’s dabbled in everything from research on pelagic invertebrates to animations about beer to podcasts about fake tumbleweed farms. These days, she explores how humans tangle with science and technology. She’s been a columnist for BBC Future and Motherboard, the producer of the Story Collider, the special media manager at Nautilus, a new digital magazine about science, culture and philosophy and the managing editor for LadyBits, a place where women are smart about science. She also edited the Smart News blog at Smithsonian Magazine, and founded Science Studio, a home for all the best science multimedia on the web. Even before that she was an editor of all things animated at TED Education, and a contributing editor at Smart Planet. Most recently she helped ESPN’s award winning documentary series 30 for 30 launch their podcast and is currently the producer and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about the future.

Lauren Smiley is based in San Francisco and writes about humans in the tech age for WIRED, San Francisco Mag, California Sunday Magazine, and New York Magazine.

Annalee Newitz is the author of the Science Fiction novel, Autonomous, the non-fiction books Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction and Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, and is an editor-at-large for Ars Technica, a freelance science journalist for magazines and newspapers as well as the co-host, with Charlie Jane Anders, of the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Newitz is the founder of io9, and was the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo. Newitz’s writing has appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, The Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, 2600, New Scientist, Technology Review, Popular Science, Discover and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

About What Future

The future is here and, frankly, it sucks. Without doubt, our culture is at a crossroads. Political strife and economic crises are byproducts of a larger looming challenge, one in which we will have to ask ourselves what constitutes a meaningful life. We must do the hard work of imagining a different kind of reality for ourselves. It’s work that anticipates the worst but sees hope on the other side of catastrophe, or at least possibility; that presumes disaster and says, now what? A best-of-the-year anthology, What Future is a collection of long-form journalism and essays published in 2016 that address a wide range of topics crucial to our future, from the environmental and political, to human health and animal rights, to technology and the economy. What Future includes writing from authors Elizabeth Kolbert, Jeff Vandermeer, Bill McKibben, Kim Stanley Robinson, as well as the scientists, journalists, and philosophers who are proposing the options that lay not just ahead, but beyond, in prestigious magazines and journals such as The Atlantic and The New Yorker.