Podcasts about overstory

This is an encore presentation of a program originally aired in November of 2024.  In this program, two novelists who've created visions of a future after significant climate change...talk about whether their fiction can help shape reality.  Across his life, Richard Powers has been driven by an insatiable curiosity for humans and the world around us. This has led him from budding scientist to award-winning author, from Bangkok to the Netherlands, and has helped him win a Pulitzer Prize and a Macarthur Genius Grant. Powers is best known for his novels, including The Gold Bug Variations, named a Time Book of the Year, The Echo Maker, which received a National Book Award, and The Overstory, which received a Pulitzer Prize. Powers' fourteenth novel, Playground delves into the lives of artists, scientists, and teachers who choose to start seastedding - living on floating cities. On October 30, 2024, Richard Powers came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with fellow novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future.

Perched high above the clouds, Overstory is unlike anything else in Manhattan.Launching a refined, high-end cocktail bar in the heart of the Financial District was a bold bet. The neighborhood has long been defined by dive bars, happy hours, and big screens—not destination drinking. Yet Overstory has defied expectations, becoming one of the most celebrated bars in the country.Co-founder Harrison Ginsberg joins Adam Teeter on The Buildout to share how the idea was born, how the team brought it to life, and why taking a risk on an unconventional location paid off.Follow us: https://www.instagram.com/buildoutpodcastOverstory: https://www.instagram.com/overstoryHarrison Ginsberg: https://www.instagram.com/harrison.ginsbergVinePair: https://www.instagram.com/vinepairHosted by VinePair Co-Founder: https://www.instagram.com/adamteeterProduced and edited by: https://www.instagram.com/dolldoctor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stories run us, until we can see them. In this episode, Kristina and Anna unpack how “the subconscious” is less a black box and more an ecology of repeating narratives. They move from storytelling tropes (plot armor, fish-out-of-water) into a bigger claim. Our inner villains are story structures, and healing is stewardship, not erasure. Along the way, they explore ancestral threads, family patterning, and a practical way to step out of the script mid-scene.Key TopicsWhy common storytelling tropes feel manipulative once you can “see the scaffolding”Plot armor, fish-out-of-water, and how character arcs predict what “can” happen in a storyThe idea that the subconscious is knowable, because it's made of stories, not mysteryA working hypothesis: the nine Inner Villains are nine recurring story structures in human lifeStewardship vs elimination. You don't delete the story, you change how it plays outAncestral patterning, embodiment, and what it means to carry a lineage thread without becoming itHow relationship dynamics can become “setups” that keep a villain role alive (the trash-day example)Sankhara, craving, aversion. As story addiction, not just “bad habits”Choosing an arc intentionally. Using attention as the lever for behavioral changeA simple exercise: identify what chapter you're in, then choose a different next pageNotable Moments and Quotes (short excerpts)“The subconscious is not unknowable.”“We are taught we are just the tree, not the root system.”“Trauma is not the beginning of something. It's the middle of something.”“You're not that character anymore.”“I'm sick of choosing the same page.”Practical Takeaways1) Name the script while you're in itWhen you hear yourself saying lines you've said a hundred times, pause and label it: “Oh, this is that story.”2) Swap “fixing” for “stewarding”Ask: “What would the easier version of this lesson look like?” Not “How do I eliminate this forever?”3) Find the setupIf a conflict repeats like clockwork, assume there's a hidden payoff. Example: being the savior, being righteous, being indispensable.4) Use attention as your control leverBehavior is mostly automatic. Attention is the steering wheel. Practice moving attention on purpose.5) Try the chapter exercise“This is the chapter where I'm angry.”“This is the chapter where I make a plan.”“This is the chapter where the protagonist stops performing the old role.”Suggested Listener Reflection PromptsWhat story do I keep reenacting because it gives me an identity?Where do I get to be the savior, the martyr, or the judge?What would it look like to let consequences happen without drama?If I'm not trying to “win” this scene, what choice becomes available?Which arc am I unintentionally feeding with my attention right now?MentionedDelaney Rowe (comedian, Instagram) for character trope satireGame of Thrones as an example of subverting plot armorFallout as fish-out-of-water worldbuildingThe Pitt (HBO) as fish-out-of-water workplace introductionMurder at the End of the World (Brit Marling) as a female-led “sleuth” archetypeRichard Powers, The Overstory and the root network metaphorAboriginal Australian songlines and ancestral story-carryingAinslie MacLeod (past-life framing and “you're not in that story anymore”)Drama Triangle vs Empowerment Triangle (reframing roles and choice)Listener HomeworkPick one recurring conflict this week.Name the story.Identify your role.Choose one small inversion. A different tone, a different action, or no action at all.Notice what becomes possible when you refuse the old script.Call to ActionIf this episode hit you, send Kristina and Anna a note with:The story you're realizing you live inside, andThe one choice you want to practice to steward it differently.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Trees are a major cause of power outages. They're also a wildfire risk—when branches hit a conductor, a small spark can become a big blaze. Lynn Petesch of Overstory joins thinkenergy to talk trees, exploring how AI, satellite imagery, and vegetation intelligence help utilities prevent outages and reduce wildfire threats. Including Hydro Ottawa, who saw a 44% drop in tree-related outages since partnering with Overstory. Listen in for how we work together to keep the grid safe in an era of extreme weather.   Related links  Overstory: https://www.overstory.com/ Lynn Petesch on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynnpetesch/  Trevor Freeman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-freeman-p-eng-8b612114  Hydro Ottawa: https://hydroottawa.com/en    To subscribe using Apple Podcasts:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thinkenergy/id1465129405   To subscribe using Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7wFz7rdR8Gq3f2WOafjxpl   To subscribe on Libsyn: http://thinkenergy.libsyn.com/ --- Subscribe so you don't miss a video: https://www.youtube.com/user/hydroottawalimited Follow along on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hydroottawa Stay in the know on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HydroOttawa Keep up with the posts on X: https://twitter.com/thinkenergypod ----- Transcript: Welcome to thinkenergy, a podcast that dives into the fast, changing world of energy through conversations with industry leaders, innovators and people on the front lines of the energy transition. Join me, Trevor Freeman, as I explore the traditional, unconventional and up and coming facets of the energy industry. If you have any thoughts, feedback or ideas for topics we should cover, please reach out to us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com, Hi everyone. Welcome back. Today on thinkenergy, we're going to be talking about trees. Yes, you heard that correctly. Trees. I know this is a show about energy, but there's actually a very real connection between our electricity grid and those slow growing, majestic givers of shade, lumber, fruit and so many more benefits. Honestly, who doesn't love trees? But I'm not just kicking this episode off in my capacity as a tree hugger. Let's take a look at this through a utility lens, and I will use Hydro Ottawa as an example. Hydro Ottawa service territory includes some very rural and very forested areas. Even our urban territory has a fairly extensive tree canopy. As a result, Hydro Ottawa trims about 60,000 trees each year. Why? Because trees contracting power infrastructure is a big problem. Tree interference remains a leading cause of power outages for us. Strong winds force them onto our wires. Heavy snow or freezing rain builds up and weighs down branches, breaks limbs, and increases the risk that part of a tree may touch a line, and in some extreme cases, heavy storms can even send trees or branches crashing into our poles, damaging the poles. The struggle between power lines and trees, which, again, don't get me wrong, we all love trees, has been going on for years. There is a constant struggle between trimming enough and getting the right trees trimmed and maintaining as much tree coverage as we can. In 2022 we identified a disruptor in this dance, the solution came through a partnership with Overstory, a company that uses satellite imagery, infrared technology and artificial intelligence to help utilities manage vegetation and trim trees more efficiently. And the timing could not have been better. Just days after we started working with Overstory in the spring of 2022 the derecho hit Ottawa. Our Ottawa based listeners will remember this storm well. It was monumental in the history of our city, and indeed for us as utility, winds reached 190 kilometers an hour. For our non-metric listeners, that's nearly 120 miles per hour. The storm ripped through poles houses and cause considerable damage to our city's urban forests. Overstory played a crucial role during the cleanup and in helping us level up our vegetation management strategies moving forward, we realized that the insights we got from Overstory would help improve our proactive approach to tree encroachment and hazard identification, and this is essential in this era of extreme weather events. We know that climate change is causing more frequent and more extreme weather events. According to Climate Central, the number of weather related power outages in the United States increased by 78% between 2011 and 2021 and severe weather accounted for over 1000 outages across Nova Scotia just in the year of 2024 we want to keep you connected during these heavy storms, and that's why we're looking to organizations like Overstory. So what does Overstory do to help us keep the lights on? Well, without giving away too much, because we're going to get into the details shortly, Overstory through a detailed analysis of the scans they do of our entire grid, identifies high risk areas, which we can then prioritize and better focus our resources when it comes to vegetation management, this level of monitoring and focus reduces the risk of trees from coming into contact with our poles and disrupting Your connection to the grid, the results speak for themselves. Since partnering with Overstory, we've reduced vegetation related outages by 44% and that's only part of the story, as we'll discuss further, Overstory also plays a crucial role in helping utilities prevent wildfires in high risk areas across North America, similar to extreme weather, wildfire frequency and intensity is also increasing, in part due to climate change expanding cities and many other factors. And when wildfires do happen, these stories are heartbreaking. What many people don't realize is that lots of wildfires are sparked by trees making contact with power lines, and that is why Overstory plays a key role in tagging areas where those fires are most likely to ignite and spread, making it easier for utilities to prioritize trimming work and vegetation management in those areas. To dive more into how Overstory is helping us here at Hydro Ottawa and. And other utilities helping us identify and act to mitigate risk associated with vegetation. I'm really excited to have Lynn Petesch on the show today. Lynn is Overstory's, Head of Customer Success, and has spent the past 10 years building customer facing teams with a specific focus on technologies that tackle the climate crisis. She began her career working for the United Nations and the diplomatic service of her home country, Luxembourg, before moving into the tech sector to really work in environments where she could drive impact more quickly and at greater scale. Lynn Petesch, welcome to the show.   Lynn Petesch  05:34 Thank you. Thanks for having me.   Trevor Freeman  05:36 Okay, so let's start at the very top with a high level look at what Overstory does and how the organization came to be.   Lynn Petesch  05:45 Yeah, let me tell you about Overstory. I mean, we are a vegetation intelligence platform. We use remote sensing and AI to give electric utilities, including Hydro Ottawa and others, a clear, system wide view of their risk. They always do it because they want to address three things, or sometimes more, but kind of, there's always a few goal posts, and it's either improving reliability, reducing wildfire risk, if that is if they're in an area where there is a concern, and or improving operational efficiencies. So Overstory very much becomes a decision-making tool for their programs were used mostly by the vegetation management people, operations people, wildfire mitigation teams, and they each time they want to either use a program that exists, prioritize it, reshape their work. They might be preparing for storm. They might be working on a wildfire mitigation risk so the company, more broadly, was founded in 2018 by Anniek Schouten and Indra den Bakker. This was back in the Netherlands, and they were leveraging, or getting really interested in satellite imagery, and were very initially using it for deforestation purposes. So, the climate resilience DNA has always been with us. But like any startup, we were looking at that kind of target audience that was most interested in what we had to offer. And pretty quickly, we landed on the electric utilities. They had the most pressing need to use remote sensing at scale to solve very big problems, honestly. And so we pivoted into that space of electric utilities, and then in 2020 Fiona Spruill, who's our CEO right now, she joined us. She shaped the company into what it is today, and that is really around building safer and more reliable operations.   Trevor Freeman  07:33 That's great, and I want to dive into some of the details. Our listeners will know that we talk a lot about grid modernization here and talk a lot about better intelligence of what's happening on the grid in all aspects, and something we haven't really talked about, and I'm excited to talk to you about today is the sort of vegetation management side of it. So really excited to get into the details. But before we do that, I'm always really curious to understand, you know, the people behind the conversations. How did you get into this area of, you know, high tech vegetation management? I touched a little bit on your bio in the intro, but give us a sense of, you know, how did Lynn come to be in the space that you're in right now?   Lynn Petesch  08:12 Yeah, I wouldn't say I grew up thinking I was going to work in this space, but I love working in it now. So actually, right out of college, I went to work for the United Nations, but then in the last 15 years, I started working at high growth tech companies, startups, and I've always been focused on leading and building CS operations, which is basically the customer success teams. They're the ones that are in front of the customers, implementing these software programs, kind of working very closely with customer solving problems. And about four years ago, I decided that I did want to focus the rest of my career on solving the climate crisis more broadly. And I remember very clearly that I came across Overstory. And there was two things that really resonated with me. One was hearing that utility caused wildfires could be as thing of the past, like they are preventable. And the other thing was learning about this world where vegetation is the biggest cause of outages, which is, you know, I did not know before. And so I think, you know, having these very clear goals is very compelling to kind of work on something where it's so easy to understand what the big problems are. So I joined Overstory, and for the last couple of years, I've been building a team that gets really deeply embedded in these utilities, specifically with the vegetation management and the WiFi mitigation teams. And we work on their programs. We understand their programs, we help them reshape their programs. We roll out, obviously, the software element that is Overstory. It's been very fun and rewarding work   Trevor Freeman  09:40 That's great. And I really love, you know, talking to people from a variety of areas that they touch on climate change and the climate crisis. And I think there's a bunch of us who share that passion of wanting to do something. I spoke with a group of you know, recent grads about what is a green. In career. What is it? What does a career in climate change look like? And really it looks like whatever you want it to look like. There are so many aspects that touch on this. So kind of neat to hear how that was your passion, and then you figured out where it made sense for you to enter into the climate sphere. So that's great.   Lynn Petesch  10:15 Yeah, I guess when I was young, I thought you had to be a scientist to work on time, yeah. And I think now anyone can find an angle on how to contribute to it. And I think it needs everyone to help contribute.   Trevor Freeman  10:24 Yeah, any job can be a green job if you care about it and if you make it that okay. So let's get back to Overstory. Tell us a little bit about the evolution of the company. You talked about it kind of founding about seven years ago. Tell us how it's evolved and progressed over those seven years.   Lynn Petesch  10:41 Yeah, so when we started working with utilities, I think at that point, everyone was kind of assessing whether satellites could be kind of good use case for analyzing vegetation. We're now talking about 30 centimeter imagery. So the resolution of satellites has become incredible. You can really see branches. You can detect species of trees. You can see if they're healthy or not. So initially, that was kind of our m-o we really were the leading provider to find out, where are the trees, how close are they, in terms of proximity to your network, so to the conductor, which is the risk. You know, we're looking at the terrain. If you're looking in the mountains and in Colorado, you have very different terrain than maybe in Ottawa. So detecting tree species has been really interesting, detecting the health of trees, how that decline is furthering. A lot of utilities are experiencing a lot of tree decline die off right now. So that was how we started. And then we started working with the really big utilities. And you had to think about this problem at scale. Now, we might be scanning with satellites, hundreds, 10s of 1000s of miles at a time, and some of these utilities, they might have 1000s, if not 10s of 1000s, of trees that could pose a risk to their network. They might have had a really big, large weather event, a storm that knocked over some of their system. So at that point, it all becomes about that decisioning tool. Everything starts becoming a prioritization, and I think that's now where we're really leaning into is making not just surfacing the data, but making it very actionable. Utilities have a lot to deal with. They deal with very tight budgets, they deal with crew constraints. They might have an aging workforce, their regulatory pressure, they're really vulnerable to storms. Increasingly, there's a lot of wildfire exposure. So everything becomes a decision of, where should I focus my intention? Where can I get the biggest bang for my buck? What should I do? What should I not focus on? And that decisioning is where we really want to be a key player in.   Trevor Freeman  12:44 Absolutely. And looking forward, I know I'm kind of we're jumping the gun here. We haven't gotten into the details of what you do. But looking forward, what is your vision for, kind of the future of this space and how it's going to continue to evolve? Are you mature as a company yet, or as a sector, or is it still a lot of growth to happen?   Lynn Petesch  13:01 Yeah, I think vast majority utilities are now leveraging remote sensing. It could be lighter, it could be drones, it could be satellites. So that has become a pretty established tooling within the sector. I think what our vision really is, is providing utilities that shared resilience, first picture of risk. So you know, we imagine a world where you can, kind of like, see the emerging risks, and you can start becoming proactive. Being proactive in the space of vegetation management has been really challenging. You never know where the next tree is going to fall. And over the last couple of years, customers suddenly have access to this risk across their territory so that they can start being proactive about it. As a matter of fact, that was a key use case, also with the team at Hydro Ottawa, is to start launching these proactive programs. And I think when we think about it, we get very excited about the world in which anyone from the field crews to the vegetation managers to the operation folks to the execs, to the regulators, the community partners who think about the safety of their communities, the regulators all have that kind of shared view of risk. Just imagine, they all understand the same risk. They operate off the same sheet, and they make the same data driven decisions that could solve a lot of problems, because now the data is often scrambled across different people. Certain people have access to it and certain people don't.   Trevor Freeman  14:25 Great. Okay, so let's get into the specifics here. I want to actually talk about specifically what you what Overstory does. How do you find we've kind of talked about vegetation management, obviously, you're supportingHydro Ottawa and other utilities in our vegetation management programs. How do you find and tag high risk vegetation? What is high risk like? What do you actually do on a day to day basis?   Lynn Petesch  14:47 Yeah, that's the part that I deal with the most often. So excited to get into specifics. Implementing with Overstory is actually pretty easy. I mean, when we start working with a customer, we need to know where is your grid. So we need to understand where your power lines are. Planning. We need to understand the main configurations of them. How tall are the poles, etc, so we can really compute that whole focus of where the trees in relation to your power lines, to your conductors. That's all ultimately that we're focusing on. Increasingly, we're all seeing focusing on the ground. I'll be talking about that as well. We then task these satellites over your territory. We do that during the leaf on season, so that will be the summer, essentially. And then we run all these models. So we are first needing to understand, where are the trees, what is their height, what is their health? An unhealthy tree is much more likely to fall and cause damage to your power lines. We're looking at the fuels on the ground. We can help you determine what type of equipment you might need to attack certain types of vegetation. And we always compute it to that risk to the conductor. And we look at your right of ways. Now, I think the interesting part about your question is the what is high risk? And that is, can be very different across different utilities, and I think that's the maybe the unique part with Overstory is that we can configure it to your standards. So every utility has very unique components. If you're on the West Coast and you're concerned about wildfires, your tolerance to risk will be very different. And if you're on the East Coast, where you're mostly concerned about not causing too many outages, including that you might have specific trimming specifications. The crews running around with chainsaws, they know exactly how far out they need to trim, how much they can trim, and there's a bit of a risk tolerance thing. So we built very configurable risk frameworks for all of our utility partners, so high means one thing to hydro Ottawa means something different to a customer in California that is facing a very different type of risk.   Trevor Freeman  16:49 So you're out there assessing, essentially, just for the context of our listeners, you know, we've got power lines that run overhead. They run through residential neighborhoods, commercial areas, but also forested areas, treed areas where there's lots of vegetation near our equipment, your company really gets an understanding of the the interaction between the vegetation and our lines, and says, these ones are too close, or this is a tree that's, you know, not healthy, and could come in contact with your lines based on your analysis. So help us, like, let's paint that picture a little bit more detailed. How do utility companies take the information that you are coming up with, that your analysis is coming up with, and use that to run a vegetation management program more effectively? What does the utility do with that information?   Lynn Petesch  17:37 Yeah, so we always center it around four main use cases. One is optimizing a program that already exists. It's creating a targeted program for you. It's quantifying your work and risk reporting. And I'll dive into each and every one of them a little bit to illustrate a bit more what that could mean. So when we think about program optimization, a lot of utilities, they have existing vegetation management cycle. They might have a regulatory obligation to visit their territory every four years, for example. Now, a lot of times they've been doing their program the same way for the last 10 maybe 20 years, but the conditions in their territory are different, right? I mean, the things we're seeing, the storms are heavier. There's more tree decline that we're seeing right now. So they know they need to adapt and they need to adjust it. But it's big programs with lots of budgets attached to it, a lot of crews running around. So starting to think about how you can start pulling a socket that you're meant to trim forward, or starting to tackle an area where you say, is more residential, there's fewer trees, focusing on your high risk areas. First re managing these programs is one key component that we work with a lot of companies on. And thinking about Oklahoma, Gas and Electric, for example, that they have a budget, and they can only do that much with the budget, and it was really about reinventing where they can get the biggest impact. The other one, the second use case, is this targeted program creation, and I'll use the Hydro Ottawa use case for that. You know, they had suddenly a view about where are all of their hazard trees? Hazard trees are these trees that are declining, they're dying, or they're dead, and they could have an impact on your system. Now, suddenly you know where they are, so you can start building a targeted program about dedicating some time and budget and crews to actually going and addressing those trees that has a big impact on your reliability and on reducing tree cost outages. And there's many others, sort of like hotspotting, is a very common term about starting to become proactive and doing something for a specific program. And the third one is work quantification. And I think there, when you think about it again, there's large contractors that are running around, managing your territory. And now we utilities, for the first time, often have that data to actually assess how much work there is. So that's really helpful in terms of negotiating your contracts, getting better bids. Some utilities say it's really hard to find contractors that want to work on their system, because it's very hard to estimate how much work there is, or they might have a budget to mow certain vegetation along a transmission corridor. Just knowing how much vegetation there is is a really helpful tool to address it and prioritize it in the right way. And then the fourth use case is the risk reporting, and that is about getting that baseline view about your risk and tracking it year over year. And this is really where we want utilities to have that data to report it out to their boards, insurers, regulators, and often it's used to defend your budgets, secure your budgets, or really have some data to kind of back you up on what the problems are that you're facing.   Trevor Freeman  21:05 Great. So you talk about data, and you know, each of those use cases that you mentioned, or strategies that you mentioned really are about getting the right information in the hands of the right people to make decisions and sort of more efficiently and effectively make decisions, but it's a lot of data. And so Hydro Ottawa has over 6000 kilometers of lines. You know, this, of course, as our partner, we have a big territory, and we have a fairly treed territory. That's a lot of data points. You're collecting a lot of data from your satellites. You're doing analysis on that. How are you doing that analysis? Is it, you know, AI is kind of a buzzword, and every sector right now, and the utility sector is no different. Are you using some form of AI or machine learning analytics? What are you doing in terms of, you know, crunching the numbers and coming up with the right actions?   Lynn Petesch  21:59 Totally, yeah, AI is a buzzword, but it's also very exciting. I think utilities have really embraced it already. They're using it for demand forecasting. They're using it for customer service. They're using it for asset planning. I mean, at the core, Overstory has been using AI to turn remote sensing data into operationally useful intelligent about their vegetation. So when you say yes, Hydro Ottawa has that many 1000s of kilometers of overhead lines, we need to a rank it to them. This is your worst circuit. This is your worst area. This is the area where you have the most hazard trees, for example. So we can really rank order on a span level, from the worst to the best, right? So that could be one thing, it's still an overwhelming amount of data. So where we started by using AI to kind of predict that whereas the trees How tall are, they were and they were relation to the conductors. Now what we're really excited about, or kind of leaning into, with AI, is how to intelligently, kind of assess and prioritize risk. So not every hazard tree has the same impact. If a hazard tree falls on a line where more houses are dependent on you will knock out the power of more people. So it's always a prioritization exercise, and leveraging AI for that is what is most exciting to us right now. And I think it's important to note that we also don't just want it to be a black box. All of the models we've built, they're always validated by certified arborists and kind of our utility partners. And I think at this stage, this is very important, because every tree that we find exists in the real world, and so validating this, AI in the with ground truthing, has been really important for us to also build that trust in the technology.   Trevor Freeman  23:42 That's great. And I do think it's helpful for our listeners to kind of understand the context before this, this work is sort of done, you know, in the absence of a tool like yours, it's, it's sort of done. You know, there's a degree of manual effort here. There's a degree of patrolling the lines. There's a cycle of vegetation management. So if you've done a line this year in three years or four years or five years, you want to be looking at it again. This takes a little bit of that, I don't want to call it guesswork, but it takes a little bit of that manual effort out of the equation, and really focuses efforts in the right way. And it's only with the tools that you know you folks are using that you're able to do that volume of analysis and get that pinpoint accuracy. So that's fantastic. Let's, let's get into kind of the success of it at all, like the big picture. We've obviously talked a couple times here that you're our partner here at Hydro Ottawa, so I know that the success that we're having with you, but you know, tell us some of the great success stories with other utility partners. Are you, you know, are you actually reducing weather related outages? Are you seeing the impact of using the overstory tools and methodology to support utility partners?   Lynn Petesch  24:58 Yeah, I mean weather related outages can mean many things. You have trees knocking over, like the pole might crack, etc, you know, those there's a lot of things that can happen during a storm. And I've heard a lot of stories about side of some of the storms that Ottawa has experienced in the past years, where, you know, you could have had anything, and they're just heavier, and that the consequences are really strong, but what we can impact is the tree cost outages, right? And that we've proven with Hydro Ottawa, where, within a year, by focusing that targeted program on going to an area where you had a massive amounts of these trees that were dying off and they at any point, was just a little bit too heavy wind could be toppled over and fall on the line, we had a 44% reduction in tree cost outages. That's a real, tangible number. You can see, I'm thinking about utility as well. In the on the East Coast, a co op that runs through very rural areas. In those areas, you have a trees outside of the right of way that are toppling over on two lines. So tree cost outages are a huge issue for them, and it's really impacting their safety and safety those key, key KPIs that utilities are always tracking and by us just giving them a rank order of which has a tree they had so many of them, which has a tree to even go to first, because if that has a tree were to fall on a line, a ton more people are going to be out of power than if the other one were to fall the line, you will have, like one rural cabin that will not have power. And that led to a reduction of something around 90% of tree cause outages is to 70% it's still a long way to go, but it was a really tangible number that you can see, and it shows that if you then do that proactive work, you have real impact on your tree cost outages. And it's if I think about our customer in California, Pacific Gas and Electric, for example, it's a lot around helping them understand where they don't need to go. So it's kind of doing something of a visual inspection and actually skipping certain spans, that can be itself a really big use case. Because right now, if you don't have an understanding about where your risks are, you might be spending trucks to roll for hours around areas where there is not really any tangible work to be done. So redirecting them to the right areas is where we've seen a lot of success there, and that obviously leads to budget wins, right? You'll be saving a lot of money by doing that. And those are kind of the use cases that we chase and that we kind of help prove the cases on.   Trevor Freeman  27:29 Absolutely, yeah, there's, there's only so many resources you can you can throw at this, and making sure that we prioritize and focus those resources in the right spot is absolutely critical. You were just talking about the West Coast, and you mentioned this earlier. I know wildfires is is an area that is obviously of great interest for your organization. We're fortunate here at Hydro Ottawa, and that we haven't really had to deal with that much. But anybody who's you know following the news knows this is a major problem for us. So how, what is your role in helping those utilities prevent wildfires? Maybe give us, like, a very quick primer on why utilities are a factor when it comes to wildfires first, and then how your organization is supporting that.   Lynn Petesch  28:13 So unfortunately, utility cost wildfires tend to be the most catastrophic wildfires because they're critical infrastructure, and we've obviously seen that happen across the world, in in the US recently, again and again. But utility cost wildfires, as I said at the beginning, are also the actual wildfires that are preventable. So that's really where we're lying to lying into a lot of the forests right now. They've become Tinder boxes. That is obviously because of fire suppression policies? That's because of forest management techniques that have been leveraged in the last couple of 100 years that are slowly changing at different paces? Canada's had some, unfortunately, some really bad fire seasons recently as well. And so where overstory wanted to place itself as a net prevention space to even not add to the point where you have a spark, because there's a lot of tools out there that focus on mitigation and what is, what do you do when you see that first plume of smoke coming up? And so we've landed in kind of really focusing on the prevention side, so that utilities are hopefully in the future, not the ones that spark any of those catastrophic wildfires we've already always been looking at that the vegetation that could touch your conductor, right? That's I've been speaking about that a lot, but now we're really excited for the first time, and we recently announced that we launched a fuel detection model. So that's us looking at the ground fuel conditions, and those are actually usually the key contributors to the spark that spreads the fire. We're now providing that to utilities as a much higher resolution than ever before. For me, it's interesting because I've spent a lot of time looking at trees, and now I'm going into the field and I'm looking at the ground, and it's a new perspective. But yet again, we could just, you know, we don't want to overwhelm our customers. A lot of maps and showing the fuel conditions, necessarily, we can really help them identify those spans where a single failure would have the greatest consequence. So yet again, it's about how to make that data that, you know, there's a lot of wildfire risk map out there, but make it a very actionable list of spans that if they were to tackle those they are very proactively reducing the risk of igniting a fire. And as a result of the protecting their communities.   Trevor Freeman  30:29 Got you so it's not just about the overhead trees, branches, etc, contacting the line. It's, you know, if a switch goes, if an insulator pops, if, if something happens that will cause sparks. What's happening on the ground below that line, and how do we make sure it is able to withstand sparks? That might happen.   Lynn Petesch  30:49 Exactly if you have dry grasses, if you have sagebrush, if you have certain types of fuels, they're just much more likely to spark a fire and then spread, spread out without there even be any any trees you have these prairies along Texas that can blow up in a fire very quickly, and the fires can spread to tremendous sizes. And so understanding the fuels on the ground is really important.   Trevor Freeman  31:15 Super interesting and fascinating work to get involved in. As you mentioned, this is obviously an area of, I don't even know if I call it growing concern anymore, great concern for for the utility industry and all of us. Yeah. So with the technology that's, you know, we talked about AI a little bit ago, it's literally growing before our eyes. It's really evolving fast. Do you see your technology evolving along with it. What's what's kind of next for your organization? You talked about getting into sort of the ground vegetation management. What comes next? How do you see it evolving as AI and tools evolve?   Lynn Petesch  31:52 Yeah, I mean, if we see that the future is where we want to support a grid that is much safer and reliable, as I mentioned, we also want to make it sure it's resilient to the climate and the economic pressures that there are. So our initial focus and our continued focus, and where we have a lot of our expertise has been with vegetation. Now we're starting to look at the ground fuels, then that naturally evolves into looking at the asset vulnerabilities. So you know, the actual polls, and if there's any failures potentially on those as well as further weather exposures, right? It becomes, then about the soil moisture. It comes about the wind speed. It becomes around the rain, precipitation, etc. So there's a myriad of things that we can start looking at and that we want to start looking at in order to get that more holistic view of risk, and go beyond just vegetation right now, where we're investing most heavily in is that wildfire risk. There's also the resolution that we see with satellites right now is at 30 centimeter that may drop down to 15 or 10 centimeters, so the resolution will get higher. There's other sources that we're exploring already flying, sometimes aerial imagery that is at that five to 15 centimeters, then you would really start seeing soon, you can start seeing a leaf on a on a tree. It gets really impressive. There's lighter there's lots of other kind of remote sensing technologies that we're looking to leverage in the future. And then, as a company as well, we're starting to, obviously expand internationally. We started working with utilities in New Zealand that have very similar problems and various regulatory changes. They also have a problem with wildfire risks. So that is, that is another angle that at Overstorey We're chasing right now.   Trevor Freeman  33:35 Yeah, I'm glad you brought up that. You know, understanding of other assets beyond just vegetation, has kind of been running through my head of we talk about, and I think we've talked about it here on the show. If we haven't, I should do an episode on that, like a digital twin, a digital twin of our grid, and really having a good understanding of not just, you know, a line drawn on a map of, Hey, your circuits run this way, but really physically, what's happening out there, and being able to sort of model that interact with it in a digital way, to understand, if we do X, Y and Z, what happens. So the technology that you guys are using to really get good imagery and understanding of what's out there, well, I think what I'm hearing from you is could potentially be leveraged in that next level to understand, what pulls do we have? What health are they in? What you know, what's happening with that conductor? Is it sagging too much? Is it in good health? Like there's, there's all this opportunity that's really fascinating to hear.   Lynn Petesch  34:31 Yeah, already. Now, when we look at transmission corridors, we look at the sag of these lines, and the terrains are also really challenging, something to look at. So there's a lot of factors that need to be taken into account. And that can only expand as we want to look at risk more beyond just the vegetation element.   Trevor Freeman  34:48 Very cool. Well, Lynn, very interesting to hear this. I'm really glad you came on the episode or the show today to talk to us. Fascinating to hear what Overstory have to I know that we're super excited to be. Working with you here at Hydro Ottawa and excited for what comes next. We always end our interviews with a series of questions, so I'm going to dive into those and here we go. What is a book that you've read that you think everyone should read?   Lynn Petesch  35:13 I was thinking about an author more than a book. My favorite author is Jonathan Franzen. If I would recommend one book, it'd probably be Corrections, his most famous one, I believe. But they're like, these chunky, 800-900 page books where you kind of get immersed in these families and you feel like you know them at the end, and they kind of, I think about them for like, months afterwards. They're really good reading, at least for the winter when it's cold and you spend a lot of time inside. So probably Jonathan Franzen books, yeah.   Trevor Freeman  35:41 Yeah, we're we're recording this just before the holidays, and I think we'll be releasing the episode after but winter is such a great time to curl up with a book, and it's awesome to have a good recommendation of a nice thing.   Lynn Petesch  35:53 It'll be called in January.   Trevor Freeman  35:56 Absolutely. So same question, but a movie or a show?   Lynn Petesch  36:00 Yeah, I'm not a big movie buff, but I recently rewatched What's Eating Gilbert Grape, seen it with Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio, and I always felt like Leonardo DiCaprio should have received an Oscar for that performance back when he was 14. But, yeah, it's a beautiful movie. awesome.   Trevor Freeman  36:20 Awesome yeah, that's a bit of a blast from the past, but you're right. That is a fantastic one. If someone offered you a free round trip flight anywhere in the world, where would go?   Lynn Petesch  36:27 French Polynesia, because it's so far I've never been a friend who went. I'm sure it's very expensive to go there, so it'd be great for someone too. Yeah, no, that's a place I'll go one day.   Trevor Freeman  36:41 So, yeah, fantastic. Who is someone that you admire?   Lynn Petesch  36:45 Yeah, that's a it's a tricky one, because I was thinking about, like, people, you know, in, I know, family, etc. But like, if I were to think about a, and it's a little left field, about a public persona, and also a bit of a blast from the past, I'll think about Tina Turner. She's been my icon since I'm a kid, I was always listening with my dad to Tina Turner. And I think the word that I've probably most used in today's episode was like resilience. And I always think about her as like possibly the most resilient woman in the world who reinvented herself and her career in her 40s and 50s, and is this complete power woman, you know, always done everything at her own terms. So get so much energy from not just her music. I've seen so many documentaries about her, and she's always been this kind of woman that I know, filthy with energy and kind of like drive. So I'm a big, big fan of Tina Turner.   Trevor Freeman  37:38 That's fantastic. I have to say, that's never come up on the show before, and now I need to go and dive down a rabbit hole of like, learning about Tina Turner listening to some music.   Lynn Petesch  37:47 Yeah, she's great woman.   Trevor Freeman  37:48 Yeah, good answer. Last question, what's something about the energy sector, or let's expand that to kind of the climate sector that you're really excited about?   Lynn Petesch  37:59 Yeah, I'm gonna take a very high level. But I think the thing I've always been following the most is, like, that broad topic of the energy transition, and I think the recent changes, or like, kind of the way we talk about it, has become a lot more interesting, because it used to be this kind of fluffy, big kind of vision, and now we're in that phase where it just has to be very practically implemented, and we're trudging along with it, no matter the political climate, etc, there is kind of a move forward. And I actually really liked the way that, I think, when I first started learning about it, or getting interested in it, it was always about renewables, and now it's around just sort of like needing to build a system that is both, like low carbon and climate resilient. And there's something in that, like way we talk about it now that I find really interesting. There's immense amounts of innovation in it. So yeah, I'm just enjoying following what's happening on that and how we are. We're moving that direction, no matter what's happening right now. So that's exciting.   Trevor Freeman  38:55 Yeah, okay, when I know my listeners are probably roll their eyes, because I say this all the time, but it's a very exciting time to be in this industry, and very exciting to kind of see the evolution of energy and how we're interacting with it, how it's impacting our society. And we really feels like we're at an inflection point. And very great to have you working on one aspect of it that people probably don't think about a lot. So thanks very much for what you're doing.   Lynn Petesch  39:19 Yeah, exactly. When you start working for Overstory, the one thing that happens is, wherever you go, you see trees and power lines. And I have very keen eye for, unfortunately, trees that are in poor health right now. So that's one of the professional things I've developed.   Trevor Freeman  39:35 Carry like a spool of red ribbon around you can, like, tie on the at risk trees and just so someone could come along. Lynn, thanks so much for coming on the show today. Really appreciate it. It's been great chatting with you.   Lynn Petesch  39:45 Thank you so much.   Trevor Freeman  39:46 Take care. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the thinkenergy podcast. Don't forget to subscribe. Wherever you listen to podcasts, and it would be great if you could leave us a review. It really helps to spread the word. As always, we would love to hear. From you, whether it's feedback comments or an idea for a show or a guest, you can always reach us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com..

In the last few 6 or 7 years – and bear with me here - I've become much more interested in the nature of the relationship between humans and other species, forces or whatever – animals, birds, trees, plants, the elements… nature, I guess. I think the genesis was when I listened to a conversation with the novelist Richard Powers and he was talking about his book The Overstory and how we should think of ourselves as being part of life itself, not think of living in terms of “our life” – a subtle distinction – but his conclusion was that it would help us all live more harmoniously. But the human obsession with domination, together with our selfishness I guess - and we're going back centuries here – has led us down a very different path where anything non-human is deemed as being there to serve us. That doesn't make any sense to me, it just feels destructive.It also made me think of our relationship with our senses – hearing, seeing, smell, taste and touch and, as hearing is the first sense that we experience in the womb, about how we listen to music – is it about pleasurable listening or is there more? Should we be going back further into times past to re-evaluate our relationship with sound? When I think of Guido of Arezzo, the monk who first started creating “music” by plotting notes on a page, was that when music first became objectified as a score on a piece of paper, almost imprisoned on the page? Should music really be more about a creative act of improvisation where it shapeshifts and changes each time you perform it? Is that how it keeps its energy? How do we listen with more intention?I'm getting to the point, you'll be glad to know! OK, well, Massimo Pupillo has just unleashed an absolute beast of a record with his band Zu. It's called Ferrum Sidereum (cosmic iron – yes, it sounds better in Latin) and it's one of the most phenomenal pieces of music that I've heard in a long time. One hour 20 minutes of incredible energy that bridges that gap between its creators, the vitality and energy of the natural world and me the listener. I once read music described as “our umbilical cord to mother nature”. This record feels like that. https://www.iwannajumplikedeedee.comI Wanna Jump Like Dee Dee is the music podcast that does music interviews differently. Giles Sibbald talks to musicians, DJ's and producers about how they use an experimental mindset in every part of their lives.- brought to you from the mothership of the experimental mindset™- cover art by Giles Sibbald - doodle logo and art by Tide Adesanya, Coppie and Paste

In our 24-hour news cyclone, it's easy to get lost in all the stories.  Thann Bennett of The Equipped Newsletter and radio show encourages us to keep our focus on the Overstory of God and His Kingdom.  It will help keep stories like those around Venezuela, Iran, and others in it's proper perspective.  Chris Martin, author of "A Wolf in Their Pockets," addresses the news that social media giant Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram) knows their sites are used extensively by human traffickers to hook young people, but have don't little that really stops it.   The Reconnect with Carmen and all Faith Radio podcasts are made possible by your support. Give now: Click here  

As you look ahead to 2026, what's rising to the top of your marketing priorities? In this special episode of Growth Talks with Krystina Rubino, we highlight our favorite CMO insights on building brands that customers trust and love.  It's packed with insights on subjects all CMOs should be thinking about today, such as brand versus performance marketing, incorporating AI into your marketing strategy, and how to build and enable your team.

Las vacaciones se acercan, y para lograr desconectarse de las app y las noticias, Gina Jaramillo, historiadora del arte, gestora cultural, locutora y escritora, nos comparte una serie de recomendaciones sobre qué leer y qué ver para aprovechar los días de descanso. Qué leer: Mamina y su aprendiz de botánica, Gina Jaramillo. El Bosque de las Brujas, Sandra Lawrence. The Overstory, Richard Powers. Raíz que no desaparece, Alma Delia Murillo. Genios de Qatar: de niños a cracks, Alberto Lati. Serpiente, espiral del tiempo, Ana Paula Ojeda y Juan Palomino. Qué ver: Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom (Netflix). Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful? (Prime/YouTube). Paris is Burning (Netflix). Peggy Guggenheim, adicta al arte (Mubi/YouTube). Frankenstein (Netflix).

In this episode of The Dutch Kubernetes Podcast, Ronald and Jan talk with Andrea Giardini, cloud native consultant and trainer, live from Dutch Cloud Native Day. Andrea shares his journey into cloud and Kubernetes and dives deep into a real-world use case where Kubernetes, data engineering, and AI are used to help prevent wildfires.Andrea explains how his client Overstory uses satellite and aerial imagery to monitor vegetation near power lines. By combining geospatial data, machine learning models, and infrastructure data from energy providers, they can calculate risk profiles and alert operators before vegetation causes sparks or fires. Instead of reacting to disasters, the platform focuses on prevention.From a technical perspective, Kubernetes plays a critical role. The workloads vary massively, ranging from small CPU-based tasks to extremely heavy jobs requiring dozens of CPUs, large amounts of memory, or GPUs. Kubernetes provides the flexibility to dynamically scale these workloads, spin resources up and down when needed, and keep costs under control.The conversation also covers the data engineering workflow. JupyterHub is used extensively for data exploration, but Andrea explains why notebooks alone are not reliable for long-term, repeatable processing. Once experiments are validated, workflows are moved into reproducible Python pipelines using a cloud-native workflow orchestrator (Dagster), fully integrated with Kubernetes.They further discuss handling large datasets in object storage, running different pipeline steps with different resource profiles, GPU scheduling, and improving developer experience with pull-request-based preview environments. The episode highlights how cloud native technologies are not just about infrastructure efficiency, but can have real-world impact on safety, sustainability, and climate-related challenges.Stuur ons een bericht.ACC ICT Specialist in IT-CONTINUÏTEIT Bedrijfskritische applicaties én data veilig beschikbaar, onafhankelijk van derden, altijd en overalSupport the showLike and subscribe! It helps out a lot.You can also find us on:De Nederlandse Kubernetes Podcast - YouTubeNederlandse Kubernetes Podcast (@k8spodcast.nl) | TikTokDe Nederlandse Kubernetes PodcastWhere can you meet us:EventsThis Podcast is powered by:ACC ICT - IT-Continuïteit voor Bedrijfskritische Applicaties | ACC ICT

I've been a fan of Ben's since his first book, Schott's Original Miscellany came out in 2002, a collection of quirky facts and insights into subcultures; his 13 (!) subsequent books expanded on the theme and have sold more than 2.5 million copies, in multiple languages, to date. Ben also wrote two of the best "homage" books in the style of PG Wodehouse, which, if you're a Wodehouse fan, I urge you to read. His newest book, Schott's Significa, delves into the worlds of hidden languages and subcultures: open-outcry stock trading hand signals, the unspoken languages of the servers of Eleven Madison Park, and the very-much-spoken insider slang of everyone from the diamond dealers of midtown Manhattan to world-famous cocktail bars like Tres Monos and Overstory. We had a very pleasant and - as you might expect - wide-ranging chat about everything, enjoy!Ben on IG: https://www.instagram.com/benschott/Ben on X / Twitter: https://x.com/benschott?s=21&t=kTsTPMPK0kgHLvK8ldrFXQBen's website: https://www.benschott.com/Buy Ben's books (and support independent bookshops): https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=ben+schott Get in touch with Duff!Podcast business enquiries: consulting@liquidsolutions.org (PR friends: we're only interested in having your client on if they can talk for a couple of hours about OTHER things besides their prepared speaking points or their new thing, whatever that is. They need to be able to hang. Oh, plus we don't edit, and we won't supply prepared or sample questions, or listener or “reach” stats, either, and no, you can't sit in on the interview or Zoom.) Retain Philip's consulting firm, Liquid Solutions, specialised in on-trade engagement & education, liquor brand creation and repositioning: philip@liquidsolutions.orgPhilip on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/philipsduff/ Philip on Facebook: Philip Duff Philip on X/Twitter: Philip Duff (@philipduff) / Twitter Philip on LinkedIn: linkedin.com Old Duff Genever on Instagram: Old Duff Genever (@oldduffgenever) • Instagram photos and videos Old Duff Genever on Facebook: facebook.com Old Duff Genever on X/Twitter: ...

Bookwaves/Artwaves is produced and hosted by Richard Wolinsky. Links to assorted local theater & book venues   Richard Powers: Playground, a novel about Big Tech and AI Richard Powers discusses his latest novel, “Playground” with host Richard Wolinsky, recorded in the KPFA studios October 31, 2024. Richard Powers won the Pulitzer Prize i 2019 for “The Overstory,” and the National Book Award in 2006 for “The Echo Maker.” He is also the author of “The Time Of Our Singing,” “Orfeo,” and “Bewilderment.” He has been a Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist multiple times. “Playground” brings together the history of Silicon Valley and the growth of A.I. with a look at deep ocean diving and the notion of floating cities in a story that circles back on itself, and was possibly written by an artificial intelligence. Complete interview     Bebe Moore Campbell (1950-2025), Best Selling Novelist Bebe Moore Campbell (1950-2006), in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded August 23, 2001 while on tour for her novel, “What You Owe Me.” In her books, she explored racial justice, childhood obesity and the tensions in friendships between Black and white people; she shared the stigma of mental illness and memories of the summers she spent with her father in North Carolina. Bebe Moore Campbell died of brain cancer on November 27, 2006 at the age of 56,  and was on the verge of recognition as a major African American novelist and journalist at the time of her death. Her first novel, published in 1992, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, won the NAACP Image Award for Literature that year, and was a notable book in both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Her second novel, Brothers and Sisters, hit the New York Times best seller list after two weeks. Along the way, she became a regular commentator on NPR's Morning Edition. I interviewed Bebe Moore Campbell on August 23, 2001 while she was on the publicity tour for her fourth novel, What You Owe Me. Most of the interview focuses on that book. Bebe Moore Campbell would only write one more novel before her untimely death 72 Hour Hold. As for October, 2025, none of her works have been adapted for film or television. This was one of the final Bookwaves interviews recorded on analog tape, and was digitized and edited on October 20, 2025. This interview has not aired since 2002. . Bebe Moore Campbell Wikipedia page   Book Interview/Events and Theatre Links Note: Shows may unexpectedly close early or be postponed due to actors' positive COVID tests. Check the venue for closures, ticket refunds, and mask requirements before arrival. Dates are in-theater performances unless otherwise noted. Some venues operate Tuesday – Sunday; others for shorter periods each week. All times Pacific Time. Closing dates are sometimes extended. Book Stores Bay Area Book Festival  See website for highlights from the 110th Annual Bay Area Book Festival, May 31 – June 1, 2025. Book Passage.  Monthly Calendar. Mix of on-line and in-store events. Books Inc.  Mix of on-line and in-store events. The Booksmith.  Monthly Event Calendar. BookShop West Portal. Monthly Event Calendar. Center for Literary Arts, San Jose. See website for Book Club guests in upcoming months. Green Apple Books. Events calendar. Kepler's Books  On-line Refresh the Page program listings. Live Theater Companies Actors Ensemble of Berkeley.  See website for readings and events. Actor's Reading Collective (ARC).  Mary Jane by Amy Herzog, directed by Amy Kossow, November 6 – 30, Magic Theatre, Fort Mason. African American Art & Culture Complex. See website for calendar. American Conservatory Theatre  Stereophonic (in association with BroadwaySF, at the Curran), Oct 28 – Nov 23. Awesome Theatre Company. See website for information. Berkeley Rep. The Hills of California .by Jez Butterworth, Oct. 31 – Dec. 7, Roda Theatre. Mother of Exiles by Jessica Huang, World Premiere, Nov. 14 – Dec. 32, Peets Theatre. Berkeley Shakespeare Company The Tempest, Oct. 24 – Nov. 2,  Immersive theatre. Point Montara Lighthouse. Brava Theatre Center: See calendar for events listings. BroadwaySF: Stereophonic (in association with ACT), Oct 28 – Nov 23, Curran. See website for complete listings for the Orpheum, Golden Gate and Curran Theaters. Broadway San Jose:  Some Like It Hot, Oct. 21-26. See website for other events. Center REP: The Woman in Black, U.S. Tour, November 5-23.. Central Stage. See website for upcoming productions, 5221 Central Avenue, Richmond Central Works Dada Teen Musical: The Play by Maury Zeff, Oct. 18 – Nov. 16, Cinnabar Theatre. Young Rep: Disney's The Little Mermaid, November 14-23, Studio Space, Petaluma Outlet Mall. Club Fugazi. Dear San Francisco ongoing. Check website for Music Mondays listings. Contra Costa Civic Theatre Ebenezer Scrooge, an adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” by Joel Roster, December 6 –  21. . See website for other events. Golden Thread  Pilgrimage by Humaira Ghilzal and Bridgette Dutta Portman, a co-production with Z Space, October 24 – November 8, Z Space's Steindler Stage. Hillbarn Theatre: Murder for Two, a musical comedy, October 9 – November 2, 2025. Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. See website for upcoming productions. Los Altos Stage Company. Freaky Friday, The Musical. October 24 – November 2. A Christmas Carol, November  28 – December 21.. Lower Bottom Playaz  August Wilson's King Hedley II, November 8 -30. BAM House, Oakland. Magic Theatre. Actors Reading Collective: Mary Jane by Amy Herzog, directed by Amy Kossow, November 6 – 30, See website for other events and productions. Marin Shakespeare Company: See website for events and productions. Marin Theatre: Sally and Tom by Suzan-Lori Parks. October 30 – November 23. The Lightning Thief, MSC Teen Company, November 7 -9. Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts Upcoming Events Page. New Conservatory Theatre Center (NCTC)  Spanish Stew by Marga Gomez, October 17 – November 23. New Performance Traditions.  See website for upcoming schedule Oakland Theater Project. Cabaret, November 21 – December 14. Odd Salon: Upcoming events in San Francisco & New York, and streaming. Palace of Fine Arts Theater.  See website for event listings. Pear Theater. Ada & The Engine  by Lauren Gunderson, November 21 – December 7. See website for staged readings and other events. Playful People Productions. Disney's Moana JR., Oct 17-19; Newsies, November 8-16. Presidio Theatre. Peter Pan Panto, Nov. 29 – Dec. 28. See website for complete schedule of events and performances. Ray of Light: The Rocky Horror Show. October 9 – November 1, The Oasis. Ross Valley Players: See website for New Works Sunday night readings and other events. San Francisco Playhouse. Noises Off by Michael Frayn. September 25 – November 8. SFBATCO.  See website for upcoming streaming and in- theater shows. San Jose Stage Company: See website for events and upcoming season Shotgun Players.  Sunday in the Park with George, November 15 – December 30. South Bay Musical Theatre:  Let It Snow: A Broadway Holiday Celebration, December 20-21,Little Women, The Broadway Musical, January 24 – February 14, 2026. SPARC: See website for upcoming events. Stagebridge: See website for events and productions. Storytime every 4th Saturday. The Breath Project. Streaming archive. The Marsh: Calendar listings for Berkeley, San Francisco and Marshstream. Theatre Lunatico Frankenstein, October 11 – November 2. Theatre Rhino  The Break-Up written and performed by Tina D'Elia, November 6-23. Streaming: Essential Services Project, conceived and performed by John Fisher, all weekly performances now available on demand. TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. A Driving Beat by Jordan Ramirez Puckett, Oct 29 – Nov. 23, . Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts Second Stage.Georgiana & Kitty, Christmas at Pemberley by Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon, Dec. 3 – 28, Lucie Stern Theatre. Word for Word.  See website for upcoming productions. Misc. Listings: BAMPFA: On View calendar for Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Berkeley Symphony: See website for listings. Chamber Music San Francisco: Calendar, 2025 Season. Dance Mission Theatre. On stage events calendar. Fort Mason Center. Events calendar. Oregon Shakespeare Festival: Calendar listings and upcoming shows. San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. See schedule for upcoming SFGMC performances. San Francisco Opera. Calendar listings. San Francisco Symphony. Calendar listings. Filmed Live Musicals: Searchable database of all filmed live musicals, podcast, blog. If you'd like to add your bookstore or theater venue to this list, please write Richard@kpfa.org   The post October 23, 2025: Richard Powers – Bebe Moore Campbell appeared first on KPFA.

On this episode we sample Ledaig 18 Year while talking about making another large purchase, the ease in finding older scotch, peat as an accent, giving small bottleshops a shot, challenging yourself to read and right more, The Overstory, getting through a work that you're not in love with, Underworld, giving up on a book, books that everyone has a copy of but noone has read, reading outside of your norm, Dungeon Crawler Carl, a bit of frothy language, The Alchemist, Greenlights, entering into the mind of McConaughey, speculative fiction, Paarable of the Sower, Prophet Song, why do we read fiction?, Looking for Alaska, reading a book because it's banned, crazy Calvino, No Nonsense Spirituality, reading the book before seeing the movie, and the TBR pile.  Support Us On Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DrepandStone We'd love to hear from you! https://linktr.ee/DrepandStone Don't forget to subscribe! Music by @joakimkarudmusic Episode #311

Geoffrey Challen is a Computer Science Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.With some professors, there's a before and after in your reality as a student—you see things differently. For me, that was Challen's CS 125 (now called CS 124).After I picked up my phone and called the head of physics, he said I couldn't take Physics 211 because my transcript didn't show calculus. Even though I knew it and had taught myself, he didn't let me take it and hung up on me. I found myself with an open spot, and it was this class I'd heard so much about—CS 125 with Geoffrey Challen. I'd heard it was tough, but he was unique and idiosyncratic, and that was interesting, so I took the bait.And it changed me. Not necessarily because of anything I learned, although it helped my understanding of how technology worked, but because of how he saw the world. He spoke openly, questioned norms, and never just went through the motions. Unlike typical professors—front-row nerds and teacher's pets—Challen is a hacker, a rebel. He fell asleep in classes, sat in the back, resisted authority, and now builds his courses around that spirit.His iconic cap reads τέχνῃ—the ancient Greek root of the word technology—which means "the art and skill of making." For Challen, teaching technology isn't just about tools or code; it's about guiding students to become creators. After all, perhaps we shouldn't be called Homo sapiens (the wise ones), but Homo technologicus—those who craft, build, and innovate through τέχνῃ.Challen might not be considered the wisest by some of his colleagues, but the future—reflected in today's students—seems to know better. They don't call him “professor” as much as they call him “dope” or “based.”That's what you get with Challen—not just a professor, but someone who shows you a different way to see the world, to resist conformity, to build things that you want. Someone who proves that being yourself, even when it costs you, is worth it.EPISODE LINKS:Geoffrey Challen's Website: https://www.geoffreychallen.com/Geoffrey Challen's Learn CS Website: https://www.learncs.online/Geoffrey Challen's Society and Technology Class: https://archive.is/SdNAnGeoffrey Challen's Reddit Account: https://www.reddit.com/user/geoffreychallen/comments/?sort=topBooks MentionedWhen Things Go Missing by Kathryn Schulz: https://archive.is/J5ztkLincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders: https://amzn.to/4k0FdbPBeing Wrong by Kathryn Schulz: https://amzn.to/43Umit4Coders by Clive Thompson: https://amzn.to/4jJk1GSThe Overstory by Richard Powers: https://amzn.to/4mUCG5gBewilderment by Richard Powers: https://amzn.to/446zYSSThe Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie: https://amzn.to/45fxEdx

Ralph Gaston of Rusty's Hawaiian Coffee lays out how tariffs are affecting Kona coffee growers; Overstory's Noelle Fujii-Oride reports on a new program to support mental wellness among farmers

Welcome back to the Trees & Lines podcast. Philip Chen, Strategic Solutions Lead at Overstory, joins us to talk about how Overstory is helping utilities become more climate friendly, how they are leveraging data and technology to identify potentially hazardous trees, and the secrets behind their customer-centric model. Have a listen, hope you enjoy!Be sure to follow our LinkedIn page for the latest Trees & Lines news, updates & industry insights: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/trees-and-lines#VegetationManagement #UtilityLeadership #Overstory #RemoteSensing #AIForUtilities #ElectricUtilities #GridResilience #ForestryTech #InfrastructureInnovation #ClimateTech #TreesAndLines #SmartUtilities #MachineLearning #CLevelInsights #EnergyIndustry Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Noelle Fujii-Oride, founder of Overstory, shares the mission of the new digital journalism outlet; HPR staff reflect on their time as members of the Hawaiʻi Youth Symphony

New York City is home to dozens of world-famous attractions most visitors are eager to experience. Unfortunately, some of the most popular tourist attractions are not cheap.While some of these are worth the admission fee, we'll lay out cheap (and even free) alternatives to help ease the financial burden of exploring NYC.In this episode, we'll look at five familiar tourist attractions and offer alternatives for traveling on a budget. Here's what we'll cover:Observation Deck AlternativesStatue of Liberty AlternativesPedicab or Horse-Drawn Carriage in Central Park AlternativesBroadway Show AlternativesMuseum AlternativesAnd listen to the end because we're throwing in a bonus alternative you won't find on other recommendation lists.1- Observation Deck Alternatives The public library rooftop at Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (free) on the corner of 5th Avenue and 40th Street (close to flagship NYPL location)Instead, take the money you'd spend on an observation deck and go to a bar with a view - 2 for 1. Some options include Manhatta, Nubeluz, Overstory, Darling, 230 5thWhitney Museum has beautiful rooftop views of Chelsea and lower ManhattanPier 57 rooftop or Little Island (free)Roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met)Brooklyn Bridge Park (free)Central Park (free)2- Statue of Liberty AlternativesView it from the Battery Park area (free)Staten Island Ferry (free)This Episode's You'll Have to Check It Out Segment - Super BurritoMultiple locations in Brooklyn and a spot on Bleecker StreetPhenomenal margaritas with fresh-squeezed lime juiceCozy vibe and friendly staffThere's a live DJ, at least on the weekendWe didn't get a burrito, but they looked (and smelled) amazingCheck out Super Burrito on Bleecker Street here.3- Pedicab or Horse-Drawn Carriage in Central Park AlternativesCentral Park audio guide (free)Take the subway close to specific spots ($2.90 per swipe)Use Citi BikeRent bikes or electric scooters4- Broadway Show AlternativesRush ticketsLottery ticketsOff-broadwaySmaller theater performance groupsCollege performances like Juillard, Columbia, NYU, Fordham (in rare instances, free)5- Museum AlternativesMake friends with a local who will get you in via Pay As You Wish, which gets NY, NJ & CT into many museums at low costArt galleries, especially in Chelsea (free, usually). Use the free See Saw app (only on iOS)Bonus Idea: Live Pro Sports Events AlternativesGo to a bar near the stadium - So many good options near MSG and Yankee Stadium specificallyGo to a sports supporter's bar for your favorite team

As a new year unfolds, 2025 has already brought devastating natural disasters. From blizzards to wildfires, climate chaos is impacting our neighbors and communities in real time. My heart goes out to the people of Los Angeles for the profound losses they suffered last month, and for the difficult path of rebuilding that lies ahead. This devastation brings to mind a tragedy that struck even closer to home in 2018.I remember driving through Oakland that year, watching ash fall from the sky as the Camp Fire ravaged Paradise, California. That fire, still the deadliest and most destructive in California's history, was sparked by vegetation coming into contact with power lines-- a common risk that, coupled with dry conditions, strong winds, and human activity, can ignite a wildfire. That same year, at least 17 additional wildfires in California were triggered by power lines.Across the country and around the world, utilities face ongoing challenges from vegetation. The diversity of trees and their unique characteristics make it difficult to forecast where or when they might encroach on power lines. Traditional monitoring solutions like trucks, helicopters, and even drones cannot effectively or cost efficiently analyze the nearly 7 million line-miles of transmission and distribution that cover the US alone. In response, Indra Den Bakker and Anniek Schouten founded Overstory in 2018 — a software company that partners with utilities to predict and prevent wildfires caused by vegetation encroachment. Powerhouse Ventures is proud to be an early investor in Overstory, joining the team in 2020 via their seed round. It's been inspiring to watch the company grow, even in the face of immense loss.Overstory's founding CEO Indra tragically passed away in October of last year after a devastating battle with cancer, but his vision lives on. In a world where climate risks are increasing, Overstory's work is more critical than ever. Today, Overstory's CEO Fiona Spruill and her team are continuing to manifest Indra and Anniek's vision to reduce wildfire risks and make our grid resilient. This episode is a tribute to Indra, Anniek, and all that they've built together.Sponsors:Watt it Takes is brought to you by Powerhouse Innovation. Powerhouse Innovation is a leading consulting firm connecting top-tier corporations and investors - including corporate innovation teams, CVCs, and pensions - with cutting-edge climate technologies and startups that meet their specific criteria for engagement. Are you seeking strategic startup partnership or investment opportunities? Get in touch to see how you can leverage Powerhouse's expert team and vast network, including a database of over 13,000 climate tech startups, to help accelerate your innovation and investing goals. To learn more visit powerhouse.co. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Innovation partners with leading corporations and investors to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs entrepreneurs building the digital infrastructure for rapid decarbonization. To hear more stories of founders building our climate positive future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

GDP Script/ Top Stories for February 18th Publish Date: February 18th From The BG AD Group Studio, Welcome to the Gwinnett Daily Post Podcast. Today is Tuesday, February 18th and Happy Birthday to John Travolta ***02.18.25 - BIRTHDAY – JOHN TRAVOLTA*** I’m Keith Ippolito and here are your top stories presented by KIA Mall of Georgia Mulberry looking to annex commercial properties on city's outskirts Andrew Young reflects on lessons from a life of service and partnerships Georgia Attorney General under fire over lawsuit targeting federal disability protections statute All of this and more is coming up on the Gwinnett Daily Post podcast, and if you are looking for community news, we encourage you to listen daily and subscribe! Break 1: Kia MOG (07.14.22 KIA MOG) STORY 1: Mulberry looking to annex commercial properties on city's outskirts Mulberry, Gwinnett County's newest city, is pursuing legislation to annex over 100 mostly commercial land parcels, aiming for zoning control over key corridors like Hamilton Mill and Braselton Highway. Unlike Lawrenceville's residential-focused annexation plan, Mulberry's proposal, led by Mayor Michael Coker and State Sen. Clint Dixon, targets commercial centers like the Walmart at Hamilton Mill and Sardis Church Roads. The annexation, outlined in Senate Bill 139, won’t significantly impact Mulberry’s population and doesn’t require a referendum, focusing instead on managing future development and zoning. STORY 2: Andrew Young reflects on lessons from a life of service and partnerships Andrew Young, at 92, continues to inspire as a Civil Rights leader, former Atlanta mayor, and U.N. ambassador. His life and Atlanta’s growth are celebrated in an exhibit at the Lawrenceville Arts Center through March 31. During a fireside chat, Young shared stories of regional cooperation, advice from his father—“Don’t get mad, get smart”—and his resilience during a 1964 Civil Rights march attack. Reflecting on today’s polarized politics, he emphasized patience, collaboration, and focusing on helping others as keys to progress and democracy. STORY 3: Georgia Attorney General under fire over lawsuit targeting federal disability protections statute Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr faces criticism from lawmakers and disability advocates over a lawsuit targeting Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which protects individuals with disabilities from discrimination. Carr’s office claims the lawsuit only challenges a Biden-era rule adding "gender dysphoria" as a protected disability, but critics argue it seeks to declare Section 504 unconstitutional, jeopardizing broader protections. Families fear this could lead to attacks on other laws like IDEA, which supports students with disabilities. Advocates stress the importance of accommodations for education and independence, urging Carr to withdraw from the lawsuit to protect these vital protections. We have opportunities for sponsors to get great engagement on these shows. Call 770.874.3200 for more info. We’ll be right back Break 2: RINGLING BROS_FINAL STORY 4: Monkey Wrench Brewing raising money on GoFundMe to keep doors open Monkey Wrench Brewing in Suwanee is seeking to raise $40,000–$45,000 through a GoFundMe campaign to address financial challenges caused by equipment repairs, expansion costs, and inflation. Despite struggles, the brewery has thrived in event hosting and community support, celebrating its 5th anniversary and securing a new distributor. Co-owner Wayne Baxter remains optimistic, citing recent successes and plans to expand into distilled spirits once equipment is repaired. Alongside fundraising, Baxter is seeking new investors to help cover back debt and ensure the brewery’s future. STORY 5: Gwinnett's Overstory Rooftop Bar To Host Exclusive Código Tequila Dinner Overstory Rooftop Bar at the Westin Atlanta Gwinnett will host a special four-course dinner paired with Código 1530 Tequila on Thursday, Feb. 27, at 6 p.m. The event features Amazonian-inspired dishes like Fosforera seafood soup, Chica Morada Short Ribs, and Chocolate Dreams Cake, designed to complement the tequila’s flavors. With panoramic views of the Gas South District, tickets are $210 per person and available on Eventbrite. Overstory promises an unforgettable evening blending fine dining and premium tequila. Break: ***Guide Weekly Health Minute*** 08.20.24 GUIDE HEALTH MINUTE_FINAL*** Break 4: Ingles Markets 10 Signoff – Thanks again for hanging out with us on today’s Gwinnett Daily Post Podcast. If you enjoy these shows, we encourage you to check out our other offerings, like the Cherokee Tribune Ledger Podcast, the Marietta Daily Journal, or the Community Podcast for Rockdale Newton and Morgan Counties. Read more about all our stories and get other great content at www.gwinnettdailypost.com Did you know over 50% of Americans listen to podcasts weekly? Giving you important news about our community and telling great stories are what we do. Make sure you join us for our next episode and be sure to share this podcast on social media with your friends and family. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home Briefing and be sure to like, follow, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the BG Podcast Network Show Sponsors: www.ingles-markets.com  www.kiamallofga.com Ringling Bros #NewsPodcast #CurrentEvents #TopHeadlines #BreakingNews #PodcastDiscussion #PodcastNews #InDepthAnalysis #NewsAnalysis #PodcastTrending #WorldNews #LocalNews #GlobalNews #PodcastInsights #NewsBrief #PodcastUpdate #NewsRoundup #WeeklyNews #DailyNews #PodcastInterviews #HotTopics #PodcastOpinions #InvestigativeJournalism #BehindTheHeadlines #PodcastMedia #NewsStories #PodcastReports #JournalismMatters #PodcastPerspectives #NewsCommentary #PodcastListeners #NewsPodcastCommunity #NewsSource #PodcastCuration #WorldAffairs #PodcastUpdates #AudioNews #PodcastJournalism #EmergingStories #NewsFlash #PodcastConversations See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join me for a timely exploration of how weather shapes our landscapes, ecosystems, and personal experiences of the natural world. Writer and naturalist Matt Gaw discusses his latest book, In All Weathers. As we face an increasing onslaught of extreme and unpredictable weather patterns across the globe, Matt's reflections on walking through the elements—be it storm, drought, or downpour—offer both a poetic and urgent perspective on our relationship with the forces that govern life on Earth. Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation on resilience, adaptation, and the beauty found in even the most inhospitable conditions. Links In All Weathers: A Journey Through Rain, Fog, Wind, Ice and Everything In Between by Matt Gaw  www.mattgaw.com Other episodes if you liked this one: If you liked this week's episode with Matt Gaw you might also enjoy this one from the archives:  191: Plants and People - Hello and welcome to this week's episode where I'm speaking to Marion Whitehead from the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden in New South Wales, Australia, part of the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney. I talk with Marion about one of her areas of speciality; the intersection of plants and human feelings, particularly in the context of 3 books as recommended by Marion; Enid Blyton's ‘The Magic Faraway Tree', Frances Hodgson Burnett's ‘The Secret Garden' and ‘The Overstory' by Richard Powers. 220: The Gardener's Almanac - To book-end the winter break, I'm sort of picking up where we left off by talking about a way to mark the passing of the year and the seasons and to ground yourself and your gardening endeavours in the natural patterns that govern them. My guest is Lia Leendertz, author of the annual The Almanac: A Seasonal Guide and she starts by talking about the origins of her almanac.   Please support the podcast on Patreon

In this week's episode, host Kristin Hayes talks with Brent Sohngen, a professor at the Ohio State University and a university fellow at Resources for the Future, about the intersecting forces that are helping curb and reverse deforestation in Latin America. Sohngen discusses the origins of his research on forests in Latin America; the relationship between economic conditions, technological innovations, and the health of forests in Latin American countries; how property rights and community ownership can motivate effective stewardship of forests; and ongoing efforts to protect forests in Latin America and across the world. References and recommendations: “Reversing Deforestation: How Market Forces and Local Ownership Are Saving Forests in Latin America” by Brent Sohngen and Douglas Southgate; https://www.sup.org/books/politics/reversing-deforestation “A Wild Idea” by Jonathan Franklin; https://www.harpercollins.com/products/a-wild-idea-jonathan-franklin “The Overstory” by Richard Powers; https://www.richardpowers.net/the-overstory/

Welcome back to another episode of the Trees & Lines podcast. Jeff Wissing, Vegetation Management Supervisor at Holy Cross Energy, joins us to discuss his challenges in the mountains of Colorado, how he has been collaborating with Overstory to introduce new technology, and how Holy Cross is working to mitigate wildfires. Have a listen, hope you enjoy!#TreesAndLines #UtilitiesConference #HolyCrossEnergy #VegetationManagement #JeffWissing #WildfireMitigation #UtilityVegetationManagement #SkiCountryUtilities #Overstory #AIForUtilities #LiDAR #DataDrivenSolutions #WildfireRisk #DistributionLines #ElectricCooperatives #SustainableEnergy #GridReliability #ForestryManagement #TechnologyInUtilities #EnergyInnovation #UtilitySafety #ClimateResilience #MountainUtilities #CyclePlusApproach #RuralEnergy #InfrastructureManagement #EnergySolutions #UVMPrograms #UtilityBestPractices #RenewableEnergy Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of Fire Ecology Chats, Fire Ecology editor Bob Keane speaks with Heather Alexander and Jeffrey Cannon about reintroducing fire into mixed longleaf pine-hardwood woodlands, and how that will be affected by the shade-tolerant, fire-sensitive species that have grown during periods of fire exclusion.Full journal article can be found at https://fireecology.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s42408-024-00294-8

GDP Script/ Top Stories for December 31st Publish Date: December 31st From The BG AD Group Studio, Welcome to the Gwinnett Daily Post Podcast. Today is Tuesday, December 31st and Happy Birthday to Donna Summer ***12.31.24 - BIRTHDAY – DONNA SUMMER*** I’m Peyton Spurlock and here are your top stories presented by KIA Mall of Georgia Gwin Oaks Elementary Awarded McDonald’s Golden Grant Georgia's school choice program begins in 2025 Carr Secures Two New Convictions in Human Trafficking, Gang Case in Gwinnett County All of this and more is coming up on the Gwinnett Daily Post podcast, and if you are looking for community news, we encourage you to listen daily and subscribe! Break 1: Kia MOG (07.14.22 KIA MOG) STORY 1: Gwin Oaks Elementary Awarded McDonald’s Golden Grant Gwin Oaks Elementary School in Lawrenceville received a $10,000 grant from the McDonald's Golden Grants Program, funded by Greater Atlanta McDonald's Owners/Operators. The school will use the funds to purchase Pocketalk translators and advanced technology for ESOL students, enhancing communication and inclusivity. This initiative aims to foster cultural understanding and academic success. ESOL Teacher Deena Pagan expressed gratitude for the support, highlighting the positive impact on students' educational experiences. The grant program, in its seventh year, awarded funds to twelve organizations focusing on educational initiatives for K-12 students. STORY 2: Georgia's school choice program begins in 2025 Georgia's school choice program, effective in the 2025-2026 school year, offers up to $6,500 annually for students from low-performing schools to attend private schools. The program prioritizes families earning less than 400% of the poverty level. The initial list of eligible schools is under revision, with updates expected in the new year. Private schools can apply to join the program starting January 21, and parents can apply for scholarships from March 1. Georgia joins 33 states with similar programs, while Tennessee is also considering statewide school choice legislation. STORY 3: Carr Secures Two New Convictions in Human Trafficking, Gang Case in Gwinnett County Attorney General Chris Carr announced convictions in Gwinnett County for Jadah Henry and Jayda Wilson, involved in racketeering and human trafficking. Henry received a 25-year sentence, serving 10 years in prison, while Wilson got 15 years, serving five in prison. These are part of a larger case involving eight defendants linked to the LOTTO gang. The investigation began in May 2022 after a shooting incident. The Human Trafficking and Gang Prosecution Units, established in 2019 and 2022 respectively, have secured numerous convictions across Georgia, emphasizing the state's commitment to combating human trafficking and gang activity. We have opportunities for sponsors to get great engagement on these shows. Call 770.874.3200 for more info. We’ll be right back Break 2: Tom Wages (08.05.24 OBITS_FINAL) STORY 4: New Year's Eve celebrations & dining in Gwinnett County | 2024-2025 Gwinnett County offers a variety of New Year's Eve celebrations to welcome 2025. Highlights include: 1. **Midnight at Chateau Elan**: Enjoy a five-course dinner, wine, live music, and a champagne toast at Chateau Elan. 2. **Overstory’s NYE Celebration**: A rooftop event with champagne, prosecco, and a curated menu, featuring three ticket tiers. 3. **Pickle & Social**: A blacklight pickleball party with food, sparklers, and a midnight champagne toast. 4. **StillFire Brewing NYE Party**: Features DJ Todd and dueling pianos, with a $10 cover charge. These events offer diverse experiences for a memorable New Year's Eve. STORY 5: Gwinnett Solicitor's Office Donates Proceeds From Dash 4 Domestic Violence Awareness 5K The Gwinnett County Solicitor’s Office held a ceremony on December 12 to distribute $10,350 raised from the Dash 4 Domestic Violence Awareness 5K. The funds were given to Mosaic Georgia, Ahimsa House, and Partnership Against Domestic Violence, supporting services for survivors of sexual abuse, safe spaces for pets, and temporary housing. Solicitor-General Lisamarie Bristol emphasized community support for domestic violence survivors. The event also raised awareness for nonprofits addressing behavioral health and substance use, promoting mental and physical well-being. Break: ***Guide Weekly Health Minute*** 10.01.24 GUIDE HEALTH MINUTE_FINAL *** Break 4: Ingles Markets 9 Signoff – Thanks again for hanging out with us on today’s Gwinnett Daily Post Podcast. If you enjoy these shows, we encourage you to check out our other offerings, like the Cherokee Tribune Ledger Podcast, the Marietta Daily Journal, or the Community Podcast for Rockdale Newton and Morgan Counties. Read more about all our stories and get other great content at www.gwinnettdailypost.com Did you know over 50% of Americans listen to podcasts weekly? Giving you important news about our community and telling great stories are what we do. Make sure you join us for our next episode and be sure to share this podcast on social media with your friends and family. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home Briefing and be sure to like, follow, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the BG Podcast Network Show Sponsors: www.ingles-markets.com  www.wagesfuneralhome.com www.kiamallofga.com #NewsPodcast #CurrentEvents #TopHeadlines #BreakingNews #PodcastDiscussion #PodcastNews #InDepthAnalysis #NewsAnalysis #PodcastTrending #WorldNews #LocalNews #GlobalNews #PodcastInsights #NewsBrief #PodcastUpdate #NewsRoundup #WeeklyNews #DailyNews #PodcastInterviews #HotTopics #PodcastOpinions #InvestigativeJournalism #BehindTheHeadlines #PodcastMedia #NewsStories #PodcastReports #JournalismMatters #PodcastPerspectives #NewsCommentary #PodcastListeners #NewsPodcastCommunity #NewsSource #PodcastCuration #WorldAffairs #PodcastUpdates #AudioNews #PodcastJournalism #EmergingStories #NewsFlash #PodcastConversations See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Novelist Richard Powers has a way of making us see the world, and our place in it, in entirely new ways. His 2019 Pulitzer Prize Winning novel Overstory attuned readers to the power and mystery of trees. In his new novel, Playground, he focuses his awe and concern on marine life, the oceans and the perils we've inflicted on them. We talk to Powers about his epic story of friendship, colonialism and the looming power of AI.  Guest: Richard Powers, author, His new novel is "Playground." His previous books include "The Overstory" which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and "The Echo Maker" which won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction.

Today, Jeremy and Justin sit down and talk about overstories. What do you believe about yourself, and why does it matter? We hope today is helpful!

The Spark is hosting its annual book-as-gifts- guide. We spoke with Catherine Lawrence, co-owner of the Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, Travis Kurowski, (Ph.D) an assistance professor of creative writing at York College of Pennsylvania, and Carolyn Blatchley MLIS, Executive Director of Cumberland County Library System. The Midtown Schloar Bookstore recommendation can be found here. The Cumberland County Library Systems recommendations can be found here. Travis Kurowski Recommendations list below: NONFICTION Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music By Rob Sheffield I just ordered this book because I am in love with a woman who is the biggest Taylor Swift fan I have ever met. As it happens, I have only recently realized the most obvious thing about Swift's music: It's mostly about heartbreak. Our American Shakespeare of longing and distance, of regret and revenge, Swift's oeuvre is analyzed from first album to last by best-selling Rolling Stone journalist Rob Sheffield in this new book. From the publisher: “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music is the first book that goes deep on the musical and cultural impact of Taylor Swift. Nobody can tell the story like Rob Sheffield, the bestselling and award-winning author of Dreaming the Beatles, On Bowie, and Love Is a Mix Tape. The legendary Rolling Stone journalist is the writer who has chronicled Taylor for every step of her long career, from her early days to the Eras Tour. Sheffield gets right to the heart of Swift and her music, her lyrics, her fan connection, her raw power.” The Message By Ta-Nehisi Coates Baltimore native Ta-Nehisi Coates's new book of nonfiction takes a risk in being human. I've been following Coates since his days reporting for The Atlantic where he made national attention making a persuasive case for reparation. Since then, he's published a best-selling works of fiction and nonfiction, even written for Marvel Comics. This latest book from Coates is an analysis of how myths and stories shape cultures and nations, from Senegal to the ongoing war on Gaza. From the publisher: “In the first of the book's three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book's banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation's recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book's longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.” Lovely One: A Memoir By Ketanji Brown Jackson The election was hard for everyone—every national election has been in recent memory. Memoirs from people behind the scenes in spaces shaped by such elections have always been popular, more recently they seem to be a source of sustenance. I cannot see the new memoir by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—the first black woman and first public defender to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court—as anything else. From the publisher: “With this unflinching account, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson invites readers into her life and world, tracing her family's ascent from segregation to her confirmation on America's highest court within the span of one generation.” FICTION The Vegetarian By Han Kang 2024 Nobel winner for Literature, Han Kang also won the 2016 Booker Prize for her most widely read novel, The Vegetarian, a short novel I read in a gulp years ago when it was first translated from the Korean into English by Deborah Smith. The power of The Vegetarian is ineffable, which is an odd thing to say for a book—that it is beyond words—but that is the power and experience of great art.     A perfect introduction to Kang's work. From the publisher: “Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It's a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that's become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman's struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.” All Fours By Miranda July There has been no other book I've heard about as much this year as filmmaker and fiction writer Miranda July's latest novel All Fours, about what happens when we ignore our desires—by which I mean, ignore our very selves—and the confusing struggle it might be to ever find ourselves again. The conversations I've had about this book have been as rich and meaningful as the book itself, conversations I hold dear and have changed me forever. From the publisher: “A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, checks into a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in an entirely different journey. Miranda July's second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July's wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman's quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.” Playground By Richard Powers Richard Powers won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his previous novel The Overstory, arguably the single most important American novel ever published about our relationship to the environment, all told through the lens of our human relationship to trees. Powers's latest novel, Playground, is about artificial intelligence and the ocean. And I expect nothing less. From the publisher: “Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity's next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away. Set in the world's largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can. COMICS Future By Tommi Musturi I saw this book while browsing with my daughters and close friends at Lost City Books in Washington, DC—a bookstore I cannot recommend enough for its curation, display, and overall artistry in the selling of books—and it actually took my breath away. I saw it from across the room, huge and bold in color and design. Almost the shape and size of a small board game, this absolutely thrilling collection of Mutsuri's is so stunning it feels unbelievable it exists and, more than that, was somehow published. It's an atomic explosion of creativity fracturing the very medium of comics. Few art experiences in the world give such a rush. From the publisher: “A graphic, genre-mashing magnum opus from one of the most restlessly creative voices in comics. Tommi Musturi's Future traps the reader into a web of stories happening in different timespaces, providing perspectives on the possible futures of mankind through imaginary future worlds, current events, historical references, utopias, and ideals. Future is a mash-up of the familiar and the terribly alien: quotidian existence, sci-fi spectacle, utopian fantasy, AI dystopia, and other worst-case scenarios. Richly philosophical and allegorical, Musturi gives us alcoholic magicians, guerrilla art squads, mutant reality television hosts, and incel archaeologist-astronauts, among many others. Weaving between a variety of styles in illustration and narration that transform and reflect our constantly changing reality, Future is an impassioned graphic novel for our times that renews the medium of comics—a vital and multifaceted work of art.” Here By Richard McGuire Now a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks and Robin Writing, Richard McGuire's 2014 graphic novel Here is almost made small by calling it a graphic novel. It is, certainly, a work of fiction, and so technically then a graphic (comic) novel (fiction), but it's also one of the strangest and most beautiful works in the comics medium ever made. Every page of the book is a drawing of the same corner of the same room across 300 million years of history. Yes, the same space, variously drawn, across 300 million years. And seeing that space across time, stories do emerge, but only in the same way they do in the reality within which we all exist—because we construct them. Since the first pages of the book concept were published in 1989, its impact has rippled throughout the comics world, and continues to. From the publisher: “From one of the great comic innovators, the long-awaited fulfillment of a pioneering comic vision: the story of a corner of a room and of the events that have occurred in that space over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.” POETRY By Fady Joudah There are few contemporary issues as important as the well-being and fate of the Palestinian people, and few voices in American literature as important and prominent in this area as Palestinian American poet and physician Fady Joudah. The book's strange title, […], is a pictogram, a symbol evoking meaning: silence, perhaps, or erasure. The brackets for what has been omitted, the internal ellipsis for all that remains unsaid. Joudah wrote the poems in […] between October and December 2023, a time of much suffering, ceaseless since. From the publisher: “Fady Joudah's powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, ‘I am unfinished business,' articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah's survivance, […] speaks to Palestine's daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land. Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold. But ‘Repetition won't guarantee wisdom,' Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language ‘before [our] wisdom is an echo.' These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us ‘Wonder belongs to all.'” Wrong Norma By Anne Carson I've been following Canadian poet Anne Carson's career since I picked up a copy of her wildly experimental and stunning 1998 book, Autobiography of Red—" richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is”—while living for a summer at the home of potter Jim Romberg in southern Oregon, details that may seem insignificant, but that's not how art works on us. Carson is one of the world's—the world's—most experimentally stunning poets who somehow still reaches the depth of human emotion. A classicist who has translated the Greek Tragedies for the stage, along with the most stunning book of Sappho's poetry I've ever read, Wrong Norma is a sampling of the same erudition and emotion we have for decades expected from the poet. Oh, and she's incredibly funny. I haven't read this book yet, but I will, because I agree wholeheartedly with the late Susan Sontag about Carson: “She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote.” From the publisher: “Published here in a stunning edition with images created by Carson, several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose pieces have appeared in magazines and journals like The New Yorker and The Paris Review. As Carson writes: ‘Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget's Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That's why I've called them ‘wrong.'”Support WITF: https://www.witf.org/support/give-now/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Across his life, Richard Powers has been driven by an insatiable curiosity for humans and the world around us. This has led him from budding scientist to award-winning author, from Bangkok to the Netherlands, and has helped him win a Pulitzer Prize and a Macarthur Genius Grant. Powers is best known for his novels, including The Gold Bug Variations, named a Time Book of the Year, The Echo Maker, which received a National Book Award, and The Overstory, which received a Pulitzer Prize. Powers' fourteenth novel, Playground delves into the lives of artists, scientists, and teachers who choose to start seastedding, living on floating cities. On October 30, 2024, Richard Powers came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with fellow novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future.

In his 2019 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, “The Overstory,” Richard Powers imagines a world where only a few acres of virgin forest remain on the continent. A group of strangers band together to protect those few remaining trees, and in the process, discover the trees are communicating with each other. Powers' new novel, “Playground,” turns the same eye to the planet's oceans. As he tells Kerri Miller on this week's Big Books and Bold Ideas, his hope is that the power of storytelling will animate humans to behold the sea with fresh wonder — and act to preserve it before it's too late. “These last three novels of mine are attempts to find ways of telling stories that challenge that separateness or sense of entitlement,” he says, “that sense that we are the essential and perhaps the only interesting game in town and that everything else is a resource for our project.”Guest: Richard Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including “The Overstory,” “Bewilderment” and “Orfeo.” His new book is “Playground.” Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Novelist Richard Powers has a way of making us see the world, and our place in it, in entirely new ways. His 2019 Pulitzer Prize Winning novel Overstory attuned readers to the power and mystery of trees. In his new novel, Playground, he focuses his awe and concern on marine life, the oceans and the perils we've inflicted on them. We talk to Powers about his epic story of friendship, colonialism and the looming power of AI. Guests: Richard Powers, author, His new novel is "Playground." His previous books include "The Overstory" which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and "The Echo Maker" which won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction.

In this week's episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Stephen Jarvis, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics, about local opposition—often called “NIMBYism,” or Not In My Backyard—to renewable energy projects in the United Kingdom and the cost this opposition adds to the clean energy transition. Jarvis discusses the permitting process for renewable energy projects in the United Kingdom, how the local impacts of these projects often outweigh broader societal benefits in the permitting process, and potential solutions to better align local and societal interests for a more efficient and equitable clean energy transition. References and recommendations: “The Economic Costs of NIMBYism: Evidence from Renewable Energy Projects” by Stephen Jarvis, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/732801 “Wilding” by Isabella Tree; https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/isabella-tree/wilding/9781509805105 “The Overstory” by Richard Powers; https://www.richardpowers.net/the-overstory/ “Playground” by Richard Powers; https://www.richardpowers.net/playground/ “Extraction/Abstraction” by Edward Burtynski; https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/bookstore-inventory/extraction-abstraction-2024

 On Monday's show: A new report sheds light on how much lead is showing up in drinking water at Texas schools.Also this hour: Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers, author of 14 novels including The Overstory and The Echo Maker, talks about his work and his latest book, Playground, ahead of an event with Inprint tonight at 7:30 at The Alley Theatre.Then, veterinarian Dr. Lori Teller talks about issues affecting pet health.And we get an update on sports from Jeff Balke.

Richard Powers talks about his new novel Playground (W. W. Norton & Co., 2024). Playground gives us a masterful braided narrative of lives devoted to oceanography, computer programming, art, and literature, taking us from French Polynesia to right here in Illinois.  Powers is the author of fourteen acclaimed novels, including Orfeo (2014), The Overstory (2018), and Bewilderment (2021). He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize (for The Overstory), and the National Book Award.  Though he lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, Powers' has a unique connection to Chicagoland and our community. Not only did Powers grow up in nearby Evanston, but listeners will also hear of the mutual friendship we share with my former English teacher at Deerfield High School, Jeff Berger-White. Powers praises Jeff as having “raised generations of Deerfield High students to not just love literature, but to take it seriously as a tool with which to navigate life.” We explore this theme in Playground, which centers around the competitive intellectual high school friendship of two boys in Chicago. This is a profound conversation about the huge sea changes we face, from the climate crisis, to artificial intelligence, to how we attend to one another, and the role art can play. You can check out Playground and other books by Richard Powers here at the library, or check out his website.  In celebration of this special podcast conversation with Richard Powers, we'll be hosting a book discussion on Playground on Thursday December 5, at 7pm Central. Register to join us—the discussion will be held in a hybrid format, both in person at the Library and on Zoom. (Copies will be available to check out one month before the discussion.) We hope you enjoy our 65th interview episode! Each month (or so), we release an episode featuring a conversation with an author, artist, or other notable guests from Chicagoland or around the world. Learn more about the podcast on our podcast page. You can listen to all of our episodes in the player below or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments and feedback—please send to podcast@deerfieldlibrary.org. Follow us: Facebook Instagram YouTube TikTok The Deerfield Public Library Podcast is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include Adult Language.   

Richard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory, one of the most praised novels of the decade. His writing absolutely explodes with life. But perhaps Richard's most impressive skill is his character development. And we're not talking about the stodgy character arc you learned in English class. Richard shares 40+ years and 14 novels worth of insight on how to write characters that readers can't get out of their head.  This episode is a deep dive into the psychoanalytical complexities of character: drama and tension, thinking and feeling, motivation and suspense. Plus, we dive into the three different types of character-driven drama: People against People, People against Themselves, and People against the Environment.  In a nutshell, this episode is a novel-writing masterclass that you don't want to miss.  SPEAKER LINKS:  Website: https://www.richardpowers.net/ Books: https://www.richardpowers.net/category/novel/ New Novel “Playground”: https://a.co/d/g9nzmbO WRITE OF PASSAGE:  Want to learn more about the final class for Write of Passage? Click here: https://writeofpassage.com/ PODCAST LINKS:  Website: https://writeofpassage.com/how-i-write YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DavidPerellChannel/videos Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-write/id1700171470 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2DjMSboniFAeGA8v9NpoPv Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including Bewilderment, The Overstory, and Orfeo.  He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award.  He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. His new novel is called Playground. We talked about the ocean, plot and games, the structure of Playground, beguiling endings, water, play, the game Go, science and spirituality, immortality and talking to the dead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The prize-winning writer Richard Powers moves from the forests and outer space in his last two novels The Overstory and Bewilderment, to dive into the vast and mysterious ocean in his latest work, Playground. Through the lives of four main characters he explores the ubiquity of play in the natural world, and the role technology is playing in the game of evolution. The scuba diving philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith concludes his three part exploration of the origins of intelligence, with Living on Earth: Life, Consciousness and the Making of the Natural World. As he looks back at the origins of life and its divergence, he places humans within this 3.8 billion year history, and their shared sentience with other life forms, and weighs their current responsibilities on an evolving planet. The marine biologist Professor Heather Koldewey takes her responsibilities very seriously, acting to protect the oceans from over-fishing and plastic pollution. One of the world's leading authorities on seahorses, Koldewey has looked at forming partnerships with others to solve problems, from working with a manufacturer to turn discarded fishing nets into high-end carpets, to creating conservation areas alongside local fishing communities in projects across the Indian Ocean.Producer: Katy Hickman

Forests have always been magical places. But in the last couple decades, they seem to have gotten a little more magical. We've learned that trees are connected to each other through a vast underground network—an internet of roots and fungi often called the "wood wide web". We've learned that, through this network, trees share resources with each other. And we've learned that so-called mother trees look out for their own offspring, preferentially sharing resources with them. There's no question that this is all utterly fascinating. But what if it's also partly a fantasy? My guest today is Dr. Justine Karst. Justine is a forest ecologist at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on mycorrhizas—these are the symbioses formed between fungi and plant roots that are thought to be the basis of the "wood wide web." Last year, Justine and colleagues published a perspective piece in which they argued that some of the claims around the wood wide web have gotten out of hand. These new ideas about forests, they argued, have gotten decoupled from the actual on-the-ground—or under-the-ground—science. In reality, it's a field still riddled with unknowns and mixed findings. Here, Justine and I do a bit of mycorrhiza 101—we talk about what mycorrhizas are, how they evolved, and what the structures actually look like. We discuss the original 1997 study that inspired the term "wood wide web." We consider why it's so hard to figure out what's actually going on, mechanistically, under the forest floor. We discuss the increasingly popular notion of plant intelligence and what it means to empirical researchers in this area like Justine. We talk about why people—both members of the public and scientists themselves—have found wood wide web ideas so charming. And, finally, we discuss the question of whether a little bit of hype is really so bad—particularly if it gets people excited about forests, about science, and about conversation. I got as excited about the "wood wide web" as anyone. The idea totally captured my imagination a couple of years ago. So I was intrigued—if also a little dismayed—to learn recently that these ideas were getting some pushback. And I knew immediately we should talk to one of the researchers leading that pushback. Alright friends, let's get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Justine Karst. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode will be available soon.   Notes and links 5:00 – Popular treatments sometimes mentioned as over-hyping the wood wide web (and associated ideas) include The Hidden Life of Trees, Finding the Mother Tree, and the novel The Overstory. 9:30 – The landmark 1997 paper by Simard et al. that kicked off interest in the so-called wood wide web. 11:00 – A study showing that fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants. 11:30 – For more on the new interest in “plant intelligence” see our previous episodes here and here. On the notion of “fungal intelligence,” see here. 18:00 – A 1975 paper presenting a hypothesis about the origins of land plants. 20:00 – The California “mushroom bible” mentioned. 23:00 – A brief post (and infographic) on the differences between arbuscular mycorrhizas and ectomycorrhizas. 23:30 – Richard Powers' influential novel, The Overstory. Note that the novel doesn't exclusively focus on the wood wide web; it covers of ideas and findings about trees and forests, many of which are uncontroversial. 36:00 – Dr. Karst co-authored her perspective piece in Nature Ecology & Evolution with Dr. Melanie Jones and Dr. Jason Hoeksma. 50:00 – For more on aspens and how constitute clonal organisms, see here. 52:00 – The “mother tree” idea was popularized in Dr. Suzanne Simard's book, Finding the Mother Tree. 1:04:00 – Another recent critique of the wood wide web and mother tree idea is here. In it the authors write: “Reaching out to the general public to make people care about forests is certainly a praiseworthy goal, but not when it involves the dissemination of a distorted view of the plant world. In other words: the end does not justify the means.” 1:05:30 – Others influenced by The Overstory include Barack Obama and Bill Gates. 1:09:00 – A primer on myco-heterotrophic plants. 1:13:00 – See a recent presentation by Dr. Jared Farmer on trees and “chronodiversity” here.   Recommendations ‘Seeing plants anew,' Stella Stanford ‘Mother trees and socialist forests: Is the ‘wood-wide web' a fantasy?', Daniel Immerwahr   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.  For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

With his epic Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 novel The Overstory, Richard Powers earned acclaim for his rumination on the connected lives of trees, and the threats they face. In his latest novel, Playground, he explores what humans can learn from the underwater world that can seem so alien to us here on land. Powers joins Piya Chattopadhyay to discuss its themes of climate change, technological instability and the power of awe... and why he's trying to tell a more hopeful story about the existential threats facing us today.

In this week's episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Holly Caggiano, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, and Sara Constantino, an assistant professor at Stanford University, about the preferences of local residents and elected officials for large-scale energy projects in Pennsylvania. Caggiano and Constantino discuss factors that influence public support for renewable energy projects and the occasional misalignment between the perceived preferences and actual preferences of constituents from the perspective of their local elected officials. References and recommendations: “Community benefits can build bipartisan support for large-scale energy infrastructure” by Holly Caggiano, Sara M. Constantino, Chris Greig, and Elke U. Weber; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01585-9 “The People's Republic of Valerie, Living Room Edition” by Kristen Kosmas; https://53rdstatepress.org/Kosmas-The-People-s-Republic-of-Valerie-Living-Room-Edition “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor” by Rob Nixon; https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674072343 “Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing Across Time” by Thomas Hale Jr.; https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691238128/long-problems “The Overstory” by Richard Powers; https://www.richardpowers.net/the-overstory/ Climate & Community Institute reports; https://climateandcommunity.org/research/

Join us, Dear Listeners, as we fall under the thrall of The Overstory by Richard Power and teacher, writer, publisher and editor Melanie Haupt. It's a lengthy selection befitting a lengthy novel and the conversation covers man vs. nature, the devastation of loss, the nostalgia of Christmas, the longevity and patience of trees, and the writing that changes our lives.

All the gross products women put on their faces, plus 3 fantastic book reviews!

In collaboration with Tales of the Cocktail for our first entirely remote episode, we're on the horn with New York City's Harrison Ginsberg. He's a world-class bartender and bar director who cut his teeth at renowned establishments in Providence and Chicago before heading back to the Big Apple to help curate one of the finest hospitality experiences on the planet: Overstory, a 64th-floor cocktail bar that spoils visitors with a breathtaking view and equally memorable libations. He tells us all about his journey in a conversation covering the key differences between Chicago and NYC cocktail scenes, watching the first season of "Cheers" as training, the challenges inherent to memorizing an extensive repertoire of drinks, and so much more. 

Today on our episode #389 of All in the Industry®, Shari Bayer has a special show in honor of James Kent, also known as Jamal James Kent, an incredible chef, restaurateur, husband, father, and friend, who suddenly passed away this past weekend from a heart attack at the young age of 45. The New York Times wrote that James was “a distinguished chef and successful Manhattan restaurateur who seemed poised to become a food industry tycoon.” He was an extremely well-respected leader, and had already accomplished so much in our industry, and simply put, he was loved. As a tribute, we are rebroadcasting our episode #253 with James, which originally aired on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020, when Shari spoke with him remotely during the trying times of Covid. James' company, Saga Hospitality Group, includes restaurants, Crown Shy (one Michelin star) and Saga (two Michelin stars), and cocktail bar, Overstory (No. 3 on North America's 50 Best Bars list), which are all in the same building in Manhattan's Financial District at 70 Pine Street. Crown Shy is on the ground floor, and Saga and Overstory are part of the 62nd, 63rd, 64th and 66th floors, along with private dining room, 12 terraces and 360 panoramic views. James future plans included Snackville, re-imagined culinary concepts at the amusement park on Santa Monica Pier in California as a partnership with Saga Hospitality Group and private equity platform, S C Holdings; several projects from fine dining to a fast-casual chicken sandwich concept with NBA great LeBron James, whose investment firm is LRMR Ventures; a 140-seat restaurant at 360 Park Avenue South in Manhattan, inspired by the Grand Central Oyster Bar with Executive Chef Danny Garcia, who was just named winner of Top Chef: Season 21; a new bakery and casual all-day cafe in the newly renovated Domino Sugar factory building in Brooklyn with Executive Pastry Chef Renata Ameni; and five restaurants in partnership with Paris luxury department store, Printemps, at 1 Wall Street, led by Culinary Director Gregory Gourdet. James was also working with Shari's publisher Phaidon on a new book to tell the story of his restaurants at 70 Pine and his life growing up and cooking in NYC. Shari is proud to have called James a friend. Our deepest condolences to James' wife Kelly Kent and their children Gavin and Avery, and everyone who loved James too. Thank you, James, for sharing your story with us, and always making Shari feel special. She will greatly miss you. #RIP ** On episode #253 of All in the Industry®, Shari Bayer is joined by James Kent, Executive Chef of Crown Shy, and the Owner/Partner of J2K Creative. A Greenwich Village native, James started his culinary career as a summer apprentice at Bouley when he was fifteen years old, and has since spent time in the kitchens of Babbo, Jean-Georges, and Gordon Ramsay. James joined the team at Eleven Madison Park (EMP) as a line cook and was quickly promoted to sous chef, and in 2010, he placed first in the Bocuse d'Or USA Competition; then representing the US at the international finals of the Bocuse D'Or in Lyon, France, placing 10th in the world. When he returned to New York, he was named chef de cuisine of EMP, and under his leadership, the restaurant received numerous accolades including four stars from The New York Times, three Michelin stars, and a coveted spot on World's 50 Best Restaurants. James was promoted to Executive Chef of The NoMad in the fall of 2013, the same year that it received one Michelin Star. In 2017, he left to pursue his first solo project, an ambitious pair of restaurants in the landmark Art Deco building at 70 Pine Street in New York's Financial District, with his partner Jeff Katz. Crown Shy, the first of those restaurants, opened in March 2019, and received 2 stars from The New York Times and one Michelin Star just six months after opening. Today's show also features Shari's PR tip to strive for excellence; Industry News discussion, including COVID-19; and Solo Dining/Takeout experience from Einat Admony's Taim in the West Village, NYC. Stay safe and well. ** ** Check out Shari's book, Chefwise: Life Lessons from Leading Chefs Around the World (Phaidon). #chefwisebook **  Photo Courtesy of Saga Hospitality Group. Listen at Heritage Radio Network; subscribe/rate/review our show at iTunes, Stitcher or Spotify. Follow us @allindustry. Thanks for being a part of All in the Industry®. Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support All in the Industry by becoming a member!All in the Industry is Powered by Simplecast.

(0:00) Intro.(1:21) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel.(2:08) Start of interview.(2:41) Jennifer's "origin story." (3:41) Founding a non-profit at the start of her career: Breakthrough Pittsburgh.(4:15) The start of her tech career with Yahoo!(7:12) Her roles post Yahoo!: founding and selling The Dealmap to Google.(9:20) Her transition and tenure as president & COO of Change.org (scaling from 18 million to 200 million users). About her Motivational Pie Chart.(11:07) About Change.org (a social impact campaigning platform) and non-profit and PBC corporate structures.(14:18) Her time at Facebook (now Meta), leading the Facebook Groups product.(16:00) About Rising Team, the company she founded and where she currently serves as CEO.(22:10) On her board journey, and distinctions among different types of companies: non-profits, startups (Little Passports), public companies (Move, TEGNA & WeightWatchers) and VC/PE backed companies. "The truth is to join a public board, somebody needs to take a bet on you if you've never been on a public board."(32:19) On serving in a VC/PE backed company as a lead independent director and comp committee Chair (Arcadia). On board observer roles. Setting board norms.(36:55) On the benefit of boardroom diversity.(39:17) On dealing with the politicization of the boardroom, including DEI and ESG matters.(42:06) On the benefits of teaching (at Stanford GSB) for her CEO and board roles .(39:17) On dealing with the politicization of the boardroom, including DEI and ESG matters.(44:15) Three things top of mind on boardroom matters: 1) Setting up boards for success (norms, board evaluations, etc),  2) Keeping up with new technologies, and 3) Crisis scenario planning.(49:00) Books that have greatly influenced her life: Gung Ho,  by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles (1997)The Overstory, by Richard Powers (2018)(51:14)  Her mentors.*Reference to her LinkedIn Post: 5 Mentor Archetypes.(51:57)  Quotes that she thinks of often or lives her life by.(53:15) About her book: Purposeful: Are you a Manager or a Movement Starter? (2018) The 3 Cs: 1) courage, 2) community, and 3) commitment.(54:40) An unusual habit or absurd thing that she loves.(56:00)  The living person she most admires: Simone Biles.Jennifer Dulski is a Silicon Valley based executive and board member. She is currently CEO and founder of Rising Team, a company that provides tools, data, and community to turn managers into amazing coaches that build happier and more successful teams. You can follow Evan on social media at:Twitter: @evanepsteinLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/__You can join as a Patron of the Boardroom Governance Podcast at:Patreon: patreon.com/BoardroomGovernancePod__Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

This conversation features renowned singer Renée Fleming, interviewed by author Richard Powers. They discuss Fleming's book “Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness” before a live audience at the Kentucky Author Forum. This conversation was recorded on April 8, 2024 at The Kentucky Center in Louisville, Ky. Renée Fleming is one of the most acclaimed singers of our time, performing on the stages of the world's greatest opera houses and concert halls. She is also a leading advocate for research at the intersection of arts, health, and neuroscience. Her book, “Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness” contains essays from preeminent scientists, therapists, educators, and physicians about the powerful impact of music and the arts on health and the human experience. Richard Powers is the author of 13 novels. His 2019 book, “The Overstory” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

“Bananas Podcast” co-host and voice on BOB'S BURGERS, stand up comedian, Kurt Braunohler joins Joshua to talk about how his kids read more than him by virtue of them exhausting him. The two discuss their shared love of trees prompted by book “The Overstory” that Kurt says is one of his all time favorites even if he hasn't finished it yet. Their conversation ranges from a book about dishwashing to imagining Raymond Carver's stories as cartoonishly overwritten without his famed editor Gordon Lisch. They also discuss the stunted feelings of the cursed white male rugged individualists and CIA interference in U.S. art institutions and literature. Ultimately, it's about reading what you love, no matter if it's spiders in outer space science fiction or 70's NYC musician junkie memoirs.Books talked about include:“What People Talk About When They Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver“The Overstory” by Richard Powers“Dishwasher” by Pete Jordan“I Dreamed I was a Very Clean Tramp” by Richard Hell“Children of Time” by Adrian Tchaikovsky Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on Hello Monday we're observing Earth Day with a special episode featuring two professionals building careers in sustainability and climate action. The landscape has changed so much over the years, especially as the climate crisis becomes more urgent across the world. Fiona Spruill is the CEO of the climate tech company Overstory and Peter Ellis is the Global Director of Natural Climate Solutions Science for the Nature Conservancy. They sit down with Jessi to discuss the burgeoning opportunities in this field as we all find new and better ways to care for our planet.  Follow Fiona Spruill, Overstory, Peter Ellis, and The Nature Conservancy on LinkedIn. Follow Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn and order her debut memoir, now in paperback.  Join the Hello Monday community: Subscribe to the Hello Monday newsletter, and join us next week on the LinkedIn News page for Hello Monday Office Hours, Wednesdays at 3p ET.  To continue the conversation this week and every week, join our free LinkedIn group for Hello Monday listeners https://lnkd.in/hellomondaygroup

Mihika Kapoor is a design-engineer-PM hybrid at Figma, where she was an early PM on FigJam and is now spearheading development on a new product at the company that's coming out this June. She's known as the go-to person at Figma for leading new 0-to-1 products, and, as you'll hear in our conversation, beloved by everyone she works with. Her background includes founding Design Nation, a national nonprofit focused on democratizing design education for undergraduates; spearheading product launches at Meta; and community building within the NYC AI startup scene. In our conversation, we discuss:• How to effectively take ideas from 0 to 1 at larger companies• How to craft a compelling vision• The importance of vulnerability and feedback• The role of intuition and product sense in making decisions• How to practically communicate your vision• How to balance collaboration and strong opinions• Advice for building a strong team culture• Pivoting with grace and enthusiasm• The current AI revolution and its impact on PM—Brought to you by:• Paragon—Ship every SaaS integration your customers want• Lenny's Talent Team—Hire the best product people. Find the best product gigs• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/vision-conviction-hype-mihika-kapoor—Where to find Mihika Kapoor:• X: https://twitter.com/mihikapoor• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mihikakapoor/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Mihika's background(04:29) Core attributes of great product managers(07:34) Crafting a compelling vision(12:12) The vision behind FigJam (18:25) Delivering a vision without design or engineering skills(21:52) Creating momentum(26:36) The importance of strong conviction(27:45) Direct communication(32:48) Building hype(42:20) Immersing yourself in user insights(47:16) Operationalizing user insights  (50:33) Caring deeply about what you build(54:01) Finding passion in your work(57:00) Building a strong culture(01:07:07) Pivoting with grace and enthusiasm(01:11:48) Design Nation(01:13:15) Mihika's weaknesses(01:16:07) Building new products at larger companies(01:20:50) Coming up with a great idea(01:22:49) The key to going from 0 to 1(01:26:47) Spreading the idea across the company(01:29:15) Closing thoughts(01:32:11) Lightning round—Referenced:• Figma: https://www.figma.com/• Sho Kuwamoto on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shokuwamoto/• The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation: https://www.amazon.com/Medici-Effect-Preface-Discussion-Guide/dp/1633692949• FigJam: https://www.figma.com/figjam/• Cognition: https://www.cognition-labs.com/• Devin: https://www.cognition-labs.com/introducing-devin• David Hoang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhoang2/• Replit: https://replit.com/• The Making of Maker Week at Figma: https://www.figma.com/blog/the-making-of-maker-week/• Yuhki Yamashita on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuhki/• Jeff Bezos' Simple Decision-Making Framework Will Give You Clarity, Conviction, and Courage: https://medium.com/illumination/jeff-bezos-simple-decision-making-framework-will-give-you-clarity-conviction-and-courage-adf8d0183625• Alice Ching on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliceching/• Karl Jiang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karl-jiang-4a07424/• Kris Rasmussen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristopherrasmussen/• Config: https://config.figma.com/• Dev Mode: https://www.figma.com/dev-mode/• Asana: https://asana.com/• Julie Zhuo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-zhuo/• StrengthsFinder test: https://www.gyfted.me/personality-quiz/strengthsfinder-test-free• Dylan Field on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield/• Vishal Shah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vishalnshah/• Design Disruptors: https://www.invisionapp.com/films/design-disruptors• Daniel Burka on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dburka/• Jamie Myrold on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamiemyrold/• Design Nation: https://dn.businesstoday.org/• Stuart Weitzman on X: https://twitter.com/StuartWeitzman• Joe Gebbia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jgebbia/• Building a long and meaningful career | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/building-a-long-and-meaningful-career-nikhyl-singhal-meta-google/• Jambot: https://www.figma.com/community/widget/1274481464484630971/jambot• Hestia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hestia• Harry Potter series: https://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Paperback-Box-Books/dp/0545162076• Pachinko: https://www.amazon.com/Pachinko-National-Book-Award-Finalist/dp/1455563927/• Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration: https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Expanded-Overcoming-Inspiration/dp/0593594649• The Overstory: https://www.amazon.com/Overstory-Novel-Richard-Powers/dp/039335668X• Severance on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/severance/umc.cmc.1srk2goyh2q2zdxcx605w8vtx• Dune on Max: https://www.max.com/movies/dune/e7dc7b3a-a494-4ef1-8107-f4308aa6bbf7• Dune: Part 2: https://www.dunemovie.com/• Arc browser: https://arc.net/• Pika: https://pika.art/home• The power of recognition: Why you should celebrate your employees | Josh Miller: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/videos/the-power-of-recognition-why-you-should-celebrate-your-employees-josh-miller/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

This week, our MaxFun friends Ella McLeod and Jeremy Bent join host Dave Holmes for discontinued snack talk, EGOT trivia, and motiviational speechesJeremy Bent would like to plug Eurovangelists and recommends The Overstory by Richard PowersElla McLeod would like to plug Comfort Creatures and her books Rapunzella and The Map That Led to You and recommends Ordinary UnhappinessAnd finally, Dave Holmes is on Twitter @DaveHolmes.Dave would like to recommend Beautiful SongFind us on Twitter and Instagram! We are @TroubledPodWritten by Riley Silverman and John-Luke Roberts, recorded remotely over Zoom and produced by Christian Dueñas and Laura Swisher.Join the MaxFun fam:maximumfun.org/join