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PODCAST

Interplace

Interplace explores the interaction of people and place. It looks at how we move within and between the places we live and what led us here in the first place. interplace.io

science social sciences

All Episodes

27:12

From Microsoft to the Surveillance State

Interplace ·

2026/02/23

Hello Interactors,Watching all the transnational love at the Olympics has been inspiring. We’re all forced to think about nationalities, borders, ethnicities, and all the flavors of behavioral geography it entails. After all, these athletes are all there representing their so-called “homeland.” And in the case of Alysa Liu, her father’s escape from his. Between the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the fall of the Berlin wall, “homeland” took on new meaning for many immigrants. This all took me

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21:48

Street Snatches, Stolen Soil, and the Power of Care

Interplace ·

2026/01/31

Hello Interactors,Minnesota has seen federal incursion and overreach before. And not just in 2020. These removal tests we’re witnessing are rooted in the premise of US ‘manifest destiny’ and how quickly the notion of ‘home’ can be made fungible by a violent state. But likeminded bodies always resist being bullied.SCAFFOLD, SOVEREIGNTY, AND SEIZUREOn December 26, 1862, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln authorized the hanging of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota. The execution, staged

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22:58

The Mind Can't Act Alone and AI Can't Either

Interplace ·

2026/01/16

Hello Interactors,It’s winter. So, as the sun tilts toward the sun (up north) my writing tilts toward the brain. It’s when I put on my behavioral geography glasses and try to see the world as a set of loops between bodies and places, perception and movement, constraint and choice. It’s hard to do that right now without running into AI. And one thing that keeps nagging at me is how AI is usually described as this super-brain perched in the cloud, or in a machine nearby, thinking on our behalf.That

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23:54

Trains, Planes, and Paved-Over Promises

Interplace ·

2025/12/15

Hello Interactors,Spain’s high-speed trains feels like a totally different trajectory of modernity. America prides itself on being the tech innovator, but nowhere can we blast 180 MPH between city centers with seamless transfers to metros and buses…and no TSA drudgery. But look closer and the familiar comes into view — rising car ownership, rush-hour congestion (except in Valencia!), and growth patterns that echo America. I wanted to follow these parallel tracks back to the nineteenth-century U.S

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27:36

An Economic Geography of Complicity and Control

Interplace ·

2025/11/23

Hello Interactors,I’m back! After a bit of a hiatus traveling Southern Europe, where my wife had meetings in Northern Italy and I gave a talk in Lisbon. We visited a couple spots in Spain in between. Now it’s time to dive back into our exploration of economic geography. My time navigating those historic cities — while grappling with the apps on my phone — turned out to be the perfect, if slightly frustrating, introduction to the subject of the conference, Digital Geography.The presentation I

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36:03

Spirals of Enclosure

Interplace ·

2025/10/05

Hello Interactors,Fall is in full swing here in the northern hemisphere, which means it’s time to turn our attention to economics and economic geography. Triggered by a recent podcast on the origins of capitalism, I thought I’d kick off by exploring this from a geography perspective.I trace how violence, dispossession, and racial hierarchy aren’t simple externalities or accidents. They emerge out of a system that organized itself and then spread. Capitalism grew out of dispossession of land and

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23:50

Masters of Mess Making and Meaning

Interplace ·

2025/08/24

Hello Interactors,My wife and I recently started watching the mini-series 100 Foot Wave, which follows extreme surfer Garrett McNamara’s quest to ride the mythical 100-foot breaker. The show has put Nazaré, Portugal on the map — not just as a place, but as a symbol of human daring against forces far larger than ourselves.At the same time, I’ve been listening to physicist-philosopher Sean Carroll’s recent “solo” podcast on the emergence of complexity, tracing how the universe began in simplicity and

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25:58

Native or Not? How Science, Politics, and Physics...

Interplace ·

2025/08/10

Hello Interactors,It’s been awhile as I’ve been enjoying summer — including getting in my kayak to paddle over to a park to water plants. Time on the water also gets me thinking. Lately, it’s been about what belongs here, what doesn’t, and who decides? This week’s essay follows my trail of thought from ivy-covered fences to international borders. I trace how science, politics, and even physics shape our ideas of what’s “native” and what’s “invasive.”INVASION, IVY, AND ICEAs I was contemplating this

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19:43

When the Sky Swells, the Land Breaks

Interplace ·

2025/07/13

Hello Interactors,It’s hard to ignore the situation in Texas, especially as I turn my attention to physical geography. 'Flash Flood Alley', as it’s called by hydrologists, had already been pounded by days of relentless rain, soaking the soil and swelling the rivers. It left the region teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Then came the deluge. A torrent so sudden and intense it dumped a month’s worth of rain in under an hour. Roads turned to rivers. Homes were lost. Lives were too. As the

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4:47

Red, White, and Choo Choo

Interplace ·

2025/07/04

Hello Interactors,Happy Fourth of July and welcome to a brand new season of Interplace! We’re kicking things off with a video of my cross-country rail trip that took about four days to ride…and nearly twice as long to edit and produce. This first ever Interplace video launches our summer focus on physical geography and the environment. I hope you enjoy a slow journey through space, place, and the unexpected beauty between the coasts. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with

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22:05

How Cities Loop Us In

Interplace ·

2025/06/08

Hello Interactors,My daughter in Manhattan’s East Village sent me an article about the curated lives of the “West Village girls.” A few days later, I came across a provocative student op-ed from the University of Washington: "Why the hell do we still go to Starbucks?" The parallels stood out.In Manhattan’s West Village, a spring weekend unfolds with young women jogging past a pastry shop in matching leggings, iced matcha lattes in hand. Some film it just long enough for TikTok. Across the country,

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18:11

Beaks, Brakes, and Brainwaves

Interplace ·

2025/06/01

Hello Interactors, This week, four strange bird encounters landed in my lap — three in real life, one on my screen. First, a crow tore through the bushes in our yard chasing a frantic nuthatch. Moments later, I spotted two more crows feasting on roadkill just outside our house. Then, while walking with my wife, we watched four ducks in hot pursuit of another, flapping furiously down the street — some kind of aerial turf war. And finally, scrolling through my feed, I stumbled on a paper describing a

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23:08

Launchpads, Land Grabs, and Loopholes

Interplace ·

2025/05/25

Hello Interactors,I was in Santa Barbara recently having dinner on a friend’s deck when a rocket’s contrail streaked the sky. “Another one from Vandenberg,” he said. “Wait a couple minutes — you’ll hear it.” And we did. “They’ve gotten really annoying,” he added. He’s not wrong. In early 2024, SpaceX launched seven times more tonnage into space than the rest of the world combined, much of it from Vandenberg Space Force Base (renamed from Air Force Base in 2021). They’ve already been approved to fly

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23:00

Cities in Chaos, Connection in Crisis

Interplace ·

2025/05/11

Hello Interactors,This week, I’ve been reflecting on the themes of my last few essays — along with a pile of research that’s been oddly in sync. Transit planning. Neuroscience. Happiness studies. Complexity theory. Strange mix, but it keeps pointing to the same thing: cities aren’t just struggling with transportation or housing. They’re struggling with connection. With meaning. With the simple question: what kind of happiness should a city make possible? And why don’t we ask that more

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24:31

You Are Here. But Nowhere Means Anything

Interplace ·

2025/05/04

Hello Interactors,This week, the European Space Agency launched a satellite to "weigh" Earth's 1.5 trillion trees. It will give scientists deeper insight into forests and their role in the climate — far beyond surface readings. Pretty cool. And it's coming from Europe.Meanwhile, I learned that the U.S. Secretary of Defense — under Trump — had a makeup room installed in the Pentagon to look better on TV. Also pretty cool, I guess. And very American.The contrast was hard to miss. Even with better

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21:38

Cities on the Brink, Faster Than You Think

Interplace ·

2025/04/27

Hello Interactors,Every week it seems to get harder to ignore the feeling that we're living through some major turning point — politically, economically, environmentally, and even in how our cities are taking shape around us. Has society seen this movie before? Spoiler: we have, and it has many sequels. History doesn't repeat exactly, but it sure rhymes, especially when competition for power increases, climates collapse, and the urban fabric unravels and rewinds. Today, we'll sift through history’s

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21:35

Between Urban Order and Emerging Meanings

Interplace ·

2025/04/19

Hello Interactors,Cities are layered by past priorities. I was just in Overland Park, Kansas, where over the last 25 years I’ve seen malls rise, fall, and shift outward as stores leave older spaces behind.When urban systems shift — due to climate, capital, codes, or crisis — cities drift. These changes ripple across scales and resemble fractal patterns, repeating yet evolving uniquely.This essay traces these patterns: past regimes, present signals, and competing questions over what's next.URBAN

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20:30

The Hollow City

Interplace ·

2025/04/12

Hello Interactors,Spring at Interplace brings a shift to mapping, GIS, and urban design. While talk of industrial revival stirs nostalgia — steel mills, union jobs, bustling Main Streets — the reality on the ground is different: warehouses, data centers, vertical suburbs, and last-mile depots. Less Rosy the Riveter, more Ada Lovelace. Our cities are being shaped accordingly — optimized not for community, but for logistics.FROM STOREFRONTS TO STEEL DOORSLet’s start with these two charts recently

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21:36

Peach Baskets and Passing Lanes to Global Stars and...

Interplace ·

2025/03/22

Hello Interactors,It’s March Madness time in the states — baskets and brackets. I admit I'd grown a bit skeptical of how basketball evolved since my playing days. As it happens, I played against Caitlin Clark’s dad, from nearby Indianola, Iowa! Unlike the more dynamic Brent Clark, I was a small-town six-foot center, taught never to face the basket and dribble. After all, it was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s era of back-to-the-hoop skyhooks. By college, however, I was playing pickup games in California,

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20:49

Misinformation Nation

Interplace ·

2025/03/08

Hello Interactors,From election lies to climate denial, misinformation isn’t just about deception — it’s about making truth feel unknowable. Fact-checking can’t keep up, and trust in institutions is fading. If reality is up for debate, where does that leave us?I wanted to explore this idea of “post-truth” and ways to move beyond it — not by enforcing truth from the top down, but by engaging in inquiry and open dialogue. I examine how truth doesn’t have to be imposed but continually rediscovered —

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