It is often the most modest media that prove successful, adaptable, and resilient over the long term. Such is the case of the podcast, a mode of communication born in the early 2000s, derived from radio, whose monthly US audience has now grown to around 90 million and whose global audience reaches well into the hundreds of millions. Even more striking are the numbers behind the numbers: a content production pipeline, for instance, that counts…
 
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What comes after mobility? Or, rather, what comes after mobility when the word is understood, much as it has been during most of the course of the 20th century, as automobility? According to a manifesto that I wrote in the late summer of 2016, the answer is MOVABILITY. Movability is a word I encountered in the course of research in the Piaggio archives in Pontedera. Apparently coined by an advertising agency in the 1960s, it…
 
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For several decades philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and education theorists have contested once prevalent accounts of human intelligence as a single, unified or monolithic thing, arguing instead for plural models that accommodate some degree of multiplicity in thinking/learning/knowing modes. The result has been controversy, particularly between advocates (like Howard Gardner) of expanded definitions of intelligence and those who propose instead more restrictive, measurable definitions that push various skill sets outside the bounds of “intelligence” proper.…
 
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It’s easy to poke fun at some of the tics and tropes that have come to define TED over the course of its 32 years of “spreading ideas that matter.” But the fact remains that TED has had an enormous impact and the TED stage is one of the world’s leading communications and innovation platforms, now fully global, interconnected with a multiplicity of television, radio, and web-based channels, and followed by audiences that number in the…
 
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Printing was never monolithic as a technology. Over the course of its history, it has been employed in the service of producing everything from nimble playing cards designed to last for months to hulking tomes destined for millennia of consultation. And within the ever shifting universe of print, books have routinely been perceived as too available or unavailable, too large or small, too cheap or luxurious. This pendulum of concerns, inflected by transformations in the media…
 
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As many friends are aware, since June 2015 I have been leading a new venture that seeks to pioneer smart approaches to the mobility of people and things: Piaggio Fast Forward. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near MIT and Harvard, the startup is a development partner of the Piaggio Group, the largest European manufacturer of two-wheel motor vehicles and one of the world leaders in its sector. The Piaggio Group product range includes e-bikes, scooters, and…
 
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