Innovation Hub
655 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 2 years ago - ★★★★★ - 310 ratingsInnovation Hub looks at how to reinvent our world – from medicine to education, relationships to time management. Great thinkers and great ideas, designed to make your life better.
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Episodes
The People Powering AI Decisions
October 08, 2021 08:00 - 50 minutes - 46.2 MBThe 1964 Supreme Court Case Jacobellis v. Ohio presented a highly subjective question to the justices: what is obscenity or pornography? How do you define it? Where do you draw the line? In response, Justice Potter Stewart gave us the iconic line, "I know it when I see it." His ambiguous answer works fine for humans who can make judgement calls on the fly, but the algorithms that rule our lives need rules that are much more concrete. Say you flag something as inappropriate on socia...
The Lost Art of Listening
October 01, 2021 08:00 - 31 minutes - 44.1 MBWe have become accustomed to politicians shouting at each other, and confrontational TV talk show hosts who do anything but listen to their guests, but how good are any of us at truly focusing on the words of others in our conversations? Listening is a lost art, according to Kate Murphy the author of “You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters,” and the cost to our health, our relationships, and our society is steep, she says. Murphy explains how the modern world ...
The Evolution of Play
October 01, 2021 08:00 - 17 minutes - 24.6 MBChildhood today is radically different than it was just a few generations ago. Before the coronavirus pandemic, kids’ busy schedules included school, homework, chores, sports, music lessons and other activities. Those packed schedules often left out one key element that is crucial to growth and learning — play. That’s according to Dorsa Amir, a postdoctoral researcher and evolutionary anthropologist at Boston College. Amir has studied the Shuar people of Ecuador, a non-industrializ...
When Romance Meets Ratios
September 24, 2021 08:00 - 50 minutes - 70 MBIn 2019, women hit a milestone in gender parity when they became the majority of the college-educated workforce. While it may be easy to see how this achievement will impact the economy, earnings, and job opportunities, it is probably a little bit harder to predict how it will shape, of all things, the dating market. Jon Birger, a business journalist and former senior writer at Fortune, has authored two books on the connection between ratios and relationships. Birger acknowledges t...
Why Exercise?
September 17, 2021 08:00 - 49 minutes - 69.1 MBExercise is a relatively recent phenomenon. After all, it’s difficult to imagine a caveman on a treadmill. And it’s safe to say that paleolithic humans never pumped iron. But something changed as we moved from the plow to the Peloton. Exercise - physical exertion for the purpose of improving health or fitness - became a huge part of modern life, and a nearly $100 billion global industry. But why do we spend so much time and money at the gym or on the track and does it actually help...
How Gay Marriage Won
September 10, 2021 08:00 - 50 minutes - 46.3 MBIn the decades since Roe v. Wade, public sentiment about abortion has remained fairly steady. By contrast, in the mid-1990s, only around a quarter of the country supported gay marriage, and then, somehow, just 15 years later, those numbers had nearly doubled. Sasha Issenberg, author of “The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage,” tracks the twists and turns that the fight for same-sex marriage in America took, from a power struggle over a parade in Ha...
Will The Future of Work Leave Workers Behind?
September 03, 2021 08:00 - 50 minutes - 46.6 MBThe U.S. economy has come a long way since the darkest days of the pandemic, but the future remains uncertain for many, especially those hit the hardest: low-wage workers. Last April, David Autor, an MIT economist, predicted that a pandemic-induced recession would be an “automation forcing event,” with executives rapidly deploying non-human labor to replace workers, particularly in the service sector - and he was right. Autor and Betsey Stevenson, who served as chief economist at t...
How the West Dominated Our Brains
August 27, 2021 08:00 - 50 minutes - 69.4 MBAbout 1500 years ago, the world was a very different place; Pope Gregory was spreading Catholicism far and wide, a plague was running rampant, and some dominoes were about to start falling. The end of that cascade would end up in a world where a certain group of people started to think quite differently from those who had come before them. Their brains began to change, the societies they built thrived and they grew so influential and culturally dominant that their way of thinking pe...
FIXED: Walter Isaacson on How Gene Editing Will Change Life
August 24, 2021 19:54 - 49 minutes - 68.8 MBWalter Isaacson has made a habit of profiling world-changers: innovators who, through their discoveries, upend the way we live. Recently, he’s been preoccupied with individuals who have unlocked what he calls “fundamental kernels of our existence” - first Albert Einstein and the atom, then Steve Jobs and the bit, and now, in his latest work, Jennifer Doudna and the gene. In The Code Breaker, Isaacson dives into the CRISPR revolution and how the booming field of gene editing is alte...
Sal Khan on Leveling the Playing Field, In and Out of the Classroom
August 13, 2021 08:04 - 30 minutes - 27.6 MBEducators around the country were plunged into a massive experiment with virtual learning last year, when more than 50 million K-12 students were sent home at the start of the pandemic. Many were soon knocking on the door of the father of online education, Sal Khan, looking for help. The founder and CEO of the nonprofit Khan Academy, which provides free educational resources to anyone who wants them, says he was impressed with the “heroic efforts” of numerous school districts to clo...
Pandemic Politics Hit the Classroom
August 13, 2021 08:01 - 20 minutes - 18.5 MBAll over the country, school districts are grappling with how to safely reopen classrooms in the midst of a resurgent pandemic. While many have already made decisions about in-person learning, state and local governments are clashing over mask mandates and vaccination requirements. Edward-Isaac Dovere, a staff writer for The Atlantic and author of “Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump,” discusses the political and practical implications of such diverg...
Has Cleaning Gone Too Far?
August 06, 2021 08:02 - 25 minutes - 35.3 MBIt has been said that cleanliness is next to godliness, but the constant disinfecting and scrubbing of our homes, offices and public spaces during the coronavirus pandemic has taken these seemingly virtuous efforts to a whole new level. COVID-19 is now understood to spread primarily through close contact with infected people, rather than contaminated surfaces, but that hasn’t stopped consumers from snapping up cleaning products that promise to kill 99% of germs. Trying to eliminat...
America's Sherlock
August 06, 2021 08:00 - 24 minutes - 33.4 MBImagine a crime scene, and what it might take to solve the case. Do you think about dusting for fingerprints? DNA collection? According to Kate Winkler Dawson, author of “American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI” and associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, the man we can thank for that approach is Edward Oscar Heinrich. In the early 20th century, Heinrich took the world of forensics from guesswork, confession, and coercion t...
Can Capitalism Save Us from Capitalism?
July 30, 2021 08:00 - 49 minutes - 69.2 MBBusiness won’t save the world, but — according to Harvard economist Rebecca Henderson — it can help fix it. Henderson, author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, became preoccupied with economics after working for the consulting firm McKinsey & Company where her job was “shutting plants” down if they proved unable to adapt to market changes. Since then, Henderson has been animated by the question of how to build a more just and sustainable system.
How to Beat Burnout
July 23, 2021 08:00 - 50 minutes - 45.9 MBIn Japanese, the word “karoshi” translates to “death by overwork.” As reports of workplace burnout have skyrocketed since the pandemic, it’s a phrase that aptly encapsulates a feeling that thousands of workers have experienced over the past year. But the issue is neither temporary nor solely catalyzed by the pandemic; instead, we face a long-term health risk with rippling impacts. This is the argument put forth by Jennifer Moss, a journalist and author of the forthcoming book “The ...
Climate Migration Is Already Here And It's Going To Get Worse
July 16, 2021 08:00 - 50 minutes - 46 MBA migration crisis is already underway, and it's caused, at least in large part, by climate change, according to modeling by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine. Their expert analysis shows that without the proper preparation and political will, it will worsen as soon as 2050. Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of Geosciences and International Affairs at Princeton University, explains how the increasingly deadly combination of heat and humidity is driving people from their home...
The Amazon Effect
July 09, 2021 08:00 - 50 minutes - 69.5 MBJuly 2021 is a big month for Amazon’s Founder and former CEO, Jeff Bezos. Not only did he step down as CEO of the company he built into a $1.63 trillion empire, he will also fly into space on the first crewed flight of his New Shepard rocket ship. And yet, the space trip is just the most recent of Bezos’ boundary-breaking endeavors. Bezos and his company have revolutionized American business, extending their reach into nearly every industry— from retail, to media, to healthcare, and...
To Rethink the Constitution
July 02, 2021 08:00 - 49 minutes - 69.3 MBThe Constitution, first drafted in 1787, stands as the supreme law of the land in the U.S. But Mary Anne Franks — a law professor at the University of Miami who grew up attending a fundamentalist church in Arkansas — says that often “we read it not as a text but as Scripture,” much in the same way she was taught to read the Bible as a child. Franks, author of The Cult of the Constitution, argues that originalism — the judicial view that the Constitution should only be interpreted a...
A Learning Revolution for a Post-Pandemic World
June 25, 2021 08:00 - 50 minutes - 46.1 MBSchool is out for the summer, but many students, educators and parents are still reeling from an earthquake in K-12 education. It will take time to recover from learning loss, fractured relationships, stress and other problems caused or exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Nevertheless, as we emerge from crisis mode, some see a chance to transform American education for the better. Paul Reville, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Pedro Noguera, dean of the...
The Death Grip of Email
June 18, 2021 08:00 - 49 minutes - 45.7 MBConstantly checking your email might feel like textbook responsible work behavior but, according to Cal Newport — a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and author of A World Without Email — it can actually wreak havoc on productivity. Newport argues that our out-of-control inboxes are keeping us from being the thinkers, workers, and problem solvers we could be if email ran our lives less.
Inventing Latinos
June 11, 2021 08:00 - 50 minutes - 69.5 MBOn the 2020 U.S. census, Americans faced five options: White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. These might have reflected a broad swath of the population, but for citizens from any of the dozens of countries south of the United States, there was a pretty obvious choice missing: Latino. Laura Gómez, a law professor at UCLA and the author of “Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism,” argues t...
What’s The Point of Exercise?
June 04, 2021 08:00 - 49 minutes - 69.1 MBExercise is a relatively recent phenomenon. After all, it’s difficult to imagine a caveman on a treadmill. And it’s safe to say that paleolithic humans never pumped iron. But something changed as we moved from the plow to the Peloton. Exercise - physical exertion for the purpose of improving health or fitness - became a huge part of modern life, and a nearly $100 billion global industry. But why do we spend so much time and money at the gym or on the track and does it actually hel...
To Crack the Code of Wall Street
May 28, 2021 08:02 - 29 minutes - 40 MBHave you ever wanted to be rich? Really rich? Gregory Zuckerman, a special writer at The Wall Street Journal and author of “The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution,” shares the story of the mathematicians who cracked Wall Street’s code. Starting from humble beginnings in a strip mall on Long Island, NY, the hedge fund company that Simons started (where about 300 people work today) now pulls in more money in a year than companies like Hasbro and Hy...
A Goodbye To Language As You Know It
May 28, 2021 08:00 - 20 minutes - 28 MBIt seems like every time a dictionary publishes a new update, people flock to social media to talk about it. Whether they’re responding to the addition of the word “fam” or the dad joke, They always return to the question of what consequences these additions will have. Do they really spell disaster for the English language? Turns out, the “updation” (new to the Oxford English Dictionary as of last year) of language isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And it’s been going on for as long ...
The Man Behind 24-Hour News
May 21, 2021 08:02 - 37 minutes - 34.9 MBIt might be difficult to remember now, but there was a time when the news wasn’t 24/7. There were morning and evening editions of the paper; the nightly news was, well, nightly; radio offered updates from time to time. But there’s a whole lot of difference between that world and today’s never-stop cavalcade of heartbreak, tragedy, excitement, and despair. And one of the biggest dividing lines between those two realities was the creation of CNN. Journalist Lisa Napoli is the author ...
The Watch Named Arnold
May 21, 2021 08:00 - 11 minutes - 10.5 MBIt might be hard to believe, but there was a time when time wasn’t as exact as it is now. When people would come over on “Tuesday” rather than “Tuesday at exactly 2:30.” Ainissa Ramirez is a scientist and author of The Alchemy of Us How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, and she tells the story of how Materials Science made time so important. Strangely enough, it involves a woman who sold time, using a watch named Arnold.
Why We Can’t Quit Cities
May 14, 2021 08:03 - 33 minutes - 30.7 MBMany cities fell out of favor during the coronavirus pandemic, as those with means abandoned them for safer pastures – often to the annoyance of both the people left behind and residents of the places they fled to. However, British historian and writer Ben Wilson says our love-hate relationship with cities is an age-old story that has been repeated again and again for over 6,000 years. In his latest book, “Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention,” Wilson c...
The Future of Traffic
May 14, 2021 08:00 - 15 minutes - 14.6 MBWith the pandemic creating a wave of employees who have decided to work from home part-time, it might be reasonable to assume that traffic will get a lot better. After all, how can there be traffic when a big slice of workers are sitting in their home offices? Not so fast, says Michael Manville, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, who has spent his career studying traffic. Manville argues that our new lifestyles and rhythms won’t fix congested highways, but there is one way to he...
Why It’s Hard to See that Less Is More
May 07, 2021 08:02 - 27 minutes - 37.9 MBWhen figuring out how to tackle a problem, our instincts are almost always to add: we make to-do, not to-don’t lists after all. But just because humans have a harder time seeing subtraction — which can come in the form of tearing down buildings, dismantling barriers, and pruning old ideas — as a viable solution doesn’t make it any less useful of an approach. Leidy Klotz is a professor of architecture, engineering, and business at the University of Virginia and the author of “Subtr...
How COVID Has Crushed Working Women
May 07, 2021 08:00 - 22 minutes - 31.1 MBIn 2019, women were doing exceptionally well in the workplace — hitting record-setting workforce participation numbers, holding more non-farm payroll jobs than men for only the second time in history (in 2009, they had also briefly outpaced men, as men lost jobs more quickly during the Great Recession). Then came COVID-19, which disproportionately affected women and particularly women with children. Over many months, the issue of child care has “slowly come to a boil” as working ...
An Invisible Future for American Jobs
April 30, 2021 08:02 - 34 minutes - 32.2 MBOver the last several decades, manufacturing jobs in the U.S. have withered. Meanwhile, health care has become the fastest growing job sector in the country, and it’s been on top for years. According to Gabriel Winant, a historian at the University of Chicago, and author of “The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America,” not only are those two opposing trends related, but there are also some serious consequences to the connection.
Take a Look at This Photograph
April 30, 2021 08:00 - 14 minutes - 13.4 MBFrom Mathew Brady’s Civil War photographs, to some of the first images of Earth in space, photography has shaped the way we see ourselves. Which means that when photographic technology changes and progresses, it can really shift our self-image. Ainissa Ramirez is a scientist and the author of The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, and she was previously on Innovation Hub to talk about how materials science altered the way we think about time. Now, she tell...
The Made Up World of Money
April 23, 2021 08:00 - 49 minutes - 69 MBMoney is “a social agreement,” according to Frederick Kaufman, a journalism professor at the City University of New York. You and the cashier both agree that a $20 bill — a green piece of paper that any baby or dog wouldn’t hesitate to tear to shreds — is worth something, and this consensus imbues the bill with value. Eventually, babies get on board, as they’re taught the value humans have long ascribed to different types of currency; a value that’s socially constructed, but so deep...
The Internet Never Forgets
April 16, 2021 08:02 - 27 minutes - 25.3 MBDo you have memories from adolescence you’d rather forget? Previously, that choice — whether to open up that embarrassing high school yearbook or keep it firmly closed — generally rested in your hands. But for kids growing up in today’s social media landscape, the digital footprint they (or their parents) create can immortalize childhood and its growing pains forever. Kate Eichhorn, a professor of culture and media at The New School and author of The End of Forgetting, has research...
International Espionage With a Side of Corn
April 16, 2021 08:00 - 21 minutes - 20.1 MBWhen you have a really good idea, copycats may try to steal it for themselves — and that’s what investigators assumed was happening when an unfamiliar man was spotted in a cornfield in Iowa in 2011. They knew that companies like Monsanto were using those fields to grow new types of corn seeds, and that the company was notoriously tight-lipped about the trade secrets behind its crops; farmers didn’t even necessarily know what was being grown on their land. That secretiveness was not...
Should We Dial Back Democracy?
April 09, 2021 08:02 - 29 minutes - 40.7 MBHow much democracy is too much? Societies have been toying with different democratic models — from how often to hold elections, to who gets to vote and what the public can vote on — for centuries. Garett Jones, an economist and former Senate staffer, argues the current setup in the U.S. desperately needs some tinkering. Jones says the ancient Greeks, who granted brief political mandates and gave some citizens direct input on law, would be shocked by our modern American politics: “y...
Designing a More Just City
April 09, 2021 08:00 - 20 minutes - 28.6 MBLast year, many American cities were shut down for long periods during the coronavirus pandemic. They were also the backdrop for widespread demonstrations against racial injustice, in response to the death of George Floyd. As the Biden administration now plots out a road to recovery, with a massive infrastructure plan, Toni Griffin’s work designing cities and spaces focused on equity and inclusion could be more relevant than ever. Griffin, the founder of Urban American City, prof...
Secret Life of the Supermarket
April 02, 2021 08:00 - 49 minutes - 45.3 MBThere was a moment in early 2020 when life narrowed and the grocery store became a lifeline — in more ways than one. It was the source of breakfast, lunch and dinner, of course. But those lines emerging from sliding glass doors and wrapping around the block? For a while, they were as close to a social life as we could get, one of our last connections to the outside world. And, when certain items were in short supply in the early days of the pandemic, we were forced to think a lot mo...
Can You Rethink How You Think?
March 26, 2021 13:05 - 26 minutes - 24.3 MBOur brains are incredibly nimble pieces of machinery, and are actively being rewired and rewritten in response to experience. According to David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, the physical impact of this rewiring is so drastic that imaging is capable of distinguishing the motor cortex of a violinist from that of a pianist. Eagleman is the author of the book Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain, and he walks us through how our daily habits – and...
Your State’s Politics Might Be The Death of You
March 26, 2021 08:00 - 23 minutes - 21.4 MBPolicymakers have a thumb on the scale when it comes to how long we live. Jennifer Karas Montez, a sociologist and demographer at Syracuse University, has spent her career studying the social causes of death and disease in the United States - how differing state policies have contributed to a 7 year gap between the state with the highest (Hawaii) and the lowest (West Virginia) life expectancy in the U.S. Though COVID-19 has shined a light on how different state approaches to health...
Can Capitalism Save Us?
March 19, 2021 08:00 - 49 minutes - 69 MBBusiness won’t save the world, but — according to Harvard economist Rebecca Henderson — it can help fix it. Henderson, author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, became preoccupied with economics after working for the consulting firm McKinsey & Company where her job was “shutting plants” down if they proved unable to adapt to market changes. Since then, Henderson has been animated by the question of how to build a more just and sustainable system.
Walter Isaacson On How Gene Editing Will Change Your Life
March 12, 2021 09:00 - 49 minutes - 68.3 MBWalter Isaacson has made a habit of profiling world-changers: innovators who, through their discoveries, upend the way we live. Recently, he’s been preoccupied with individuals who have unlocked what he calls “fundamental kernels of our existence” - first Albert Einstein and the atom, then Steve Jobs and the bit, and now, in his latest work, Jennifer Doudna and the gene. In The Code Breaker, Isaacson dives into the CRISPR revolution and how the booming field of gene editing is alte...
Email’s Death Grip
March 05, 2021 09:00 - 49 minutes - 45.6 MBConstantly checking your email might feel like textbook responsible work behavior but, according to Cal Newport — a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and author of A World Without Email — it can actually wreak havoc on productivity. Newport argues that our out-of-control inboxes are keeping us from being the thinkers, workers, and problem solvers we could be if email ran our lives less.
Has Coronavirus Cleaning Gone Too Far?
February 26, 2021 09:02 - 25 minutes - 23.2 MBIt has been said that cleanliness is next to godliness, but the constant disinfecting and scrubbing of our homes, offices and public spaces during the coronavirus pandemic has taken these seemingly virtuous efforts to a whole new level. COVID-19 is now understood to spread primarily through close contact with infected people, rather than contaminated surfaces, but that hasn’t stopped consumers from snapping up cleaning products that promise to kill 99% of germs. Trying to eliminat...
America's Sherlock Holmes
February 26, 2021 09:00 - 24 minutes - 22.4 MBImagine a crime scene, and what it might take to solve the case. Do you think about dusting for fingerprints? DNA collection? According to Kate Winkler Dawson, author of “American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI” and associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, the man we can thank for that approach is Edward Oscar Heinrich. In the early 20th century, Heinrich took the world of forensics from guesswork, confession, and coercion t...
Rethinking the Constitution
February 19, 2021 09:00 - 50 minutes - 69.4 MBThe Constitution, first drafted in 1787, stands as the supreme law of the land in the U.S. But Mary Anne Franks — a law professor at the University of Miami who grew up attending a fundamentalist church in Arkansas — says that often “we read it not as a text but as Scripture,” much in the same way she was taught to read the Bible as a child. Franks, author of The Cult of the Constitution, argues that originalism — the judicial view that the Constitution should only be interpreted a...
From the Plow to Birth Control: How Tech Reshapes Relationships
February 12, 2021 09:00 - 49 minutes - 45.7 MBDuring this pandemic, we may be acutely aware that our love lives and family lives are entwined with the technology that’s all around us. But in fact, machines have been re-inventing our relationships since the days of the ancient plow, which likely led to the birth of marriage itself. That’s according to Debora Spar, a professor at Harvard Business School and former president of Barnard College. Spar, the author of “Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny,” take...
How to End Child Poverty with Social Security
February 05, 2021 09:02 - 23 minutes - 32.5 MBMore than 10 million American children lived below the poverty line before the COVID-19 crisis and now, with months of school closures, rising food insecurity and increasing unemployment, the situation has become even more dire for low-income families. Federal spending on children in the U.S. has lagged well behind other wealthy nations for years, and the country has not done nearly enough to fight child poverty, according to Melissa Kearney, a professor of economics at the Univers...
The True Toll of Loneliness
February 05, 2021 09:00 - 26 minutes - 36.9 MBIt’s been nearly a year since increased isolation has become the norm: since workplaces and schools shut down, hospitals and nursing homes stopped allowing visitors, and all of our social circles narrowed. The loneliness felt by so many people during the pandemic can affect our moods and our feelings, but it can also have a physical impact on our bodies, according to Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University. Holt-Lunstad and Ch...
Society in the Time of Plague
January 29, 2021 09:00 - 49 minutes - 45.7 MBIt may feel as though we are living in unusual times, with all the strange precautions we have been forced to adopt to try and contain COVID-19, but plagues have afflicted humans for thousands of years. The novel coronavirus is a threat “both wholly new and deeply ancient,” according to Nicholas Christakis, professor of social and natural science at Yale University, and the author of “Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live.” Tapping into...