Note to Self

» see wnycstudios.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

It started on 10 September 2012 with a different name and a smaller idea. New Tech City was a WNYC show about technology in New York, hosted by Manoush Zomorodi, who had come to it after twenty years in news including Reuters and two years at the BBC in Berlin. The early run is a local-radio show about a city that happened to be full of startups.

The rename landed on 27 May 2015. Listeners had asked for a title that described what the show had drifted into, which was the purposeful use of technology rather than the arrival of it, and Note to Self is what they got. The format settled into something short and conversational, usually a single guest and usually under half an hour, with Zomorodi narrating her own attempts to follow whatever advice the guest had just given.

It was good enough to win the technology category at the 2017 Academy of Podcasters awards and to get a nomination at the 2019 iHeartRadio awards for science and tech. The 299 episodes in the feed cover the entire period during which the phone went from a thing you owned to a thing that was managing you, and the show was unusual in treating that as a problem with a possible solution rather than as weather.

~ the listener experiments ~

The device that made the show was the challenge. Bored and Brilliant ran in 2015 and asked people to stop filling their empty minutes, then reported back on what they said happened; St. Martin's Press published Zomorodi's book of it in September 2017. Infomagical followed in 2016. The Privacy Paradox launched on Monday 30 January 2017, with a week of daily challenges from 6 to 10 February, and tens of thousands of people signed up to spend five days auditing what their phones knew about them.

This is the part I could only read about. The challenges were built on a public radio relationship that does not exist where I am: you sign up with your email, you get a daily prompt, you reply with your results, and a few days later the show plays your voice back to the rest of the audience. I have never been inside one of those loops, and the episodes about them are the only ones where the show is clearly talking to a room I was not in.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the quiet stop ~

Zomorodi left WNYC in 2018 to start Stable Genius Productions with her colleague Jen Poyant. The show kept going without her for a stretch and she was back in the chair for the end of the run, which makes the final stretch read like a return rather than a wind-down.

The last episode is dated 14 October 2019. It runs twenty minutes, and the guest is Richard Culatta of the International Society for Technology in Education, talking about how you raise a child into a decent citizen of the internet. Nothing in it says that it is the last one. No announcement followed, and none of the sources that cover the show give a reason for the ending.

Zomorodi took over NPR's TED Radio Hour in 2020, which is a bigger show and a narrower job. WNYC's page for Note to Self is still up and still carries the tagline "your guide to an accelerating world" in the present tense. All 299 episodes still play.

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