VOICES: Chicken Cannons, Problem Bears, and the Hidden Business of Breaking Things on Purpose

Hudson Valley Community College welcomes journalist and author Alex Davies to campus as part of its Voices: A Library Lecture Series.

Alex Davies takes audiences inside test engineering — the hidden profession that decides what safe actually means — from a bird cannon that fires chickens into jet engines at 200 miles an hour to a grizzly bear with a government testing job.

Drawing on his new book, Kobuk the Destroyer, Davies shows how a small, imperfect, deeply human process of imagination, negotiation and compromise sits behind nearly everything we build, buy and trust, and why understanding it matters more than ever.

Alex Davies is a journalist and author who has reported for and led editorial teams at Wired, The Athletic and Business Insider. He has covered everything from autonomous vehicles and electric aviation to Formula 1 and the engineers behind the systems we rely on every day. His debut book, Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car (Simon & Schuster, 2021), was an award-winning inside account of the self-driving industry. His new book, Kobuk the Destroyer: And Other Tales from the Wild, Unseen World of Test Engineering (W. W. Norton, 2026), explores the hidden world of product testing.