Innovation Hub

By WGBH

What's Innovation Hub about?

Innovation 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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Innovation Hub episodes:

10.08.2021
The People Powering AI Decisions
The 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...
10.01.2021
The Lost Art of Listening
We 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...
10.01.2021
The Evolution of Play
Childhood 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...
09.24.2021
When Romance Meets Ratios
In 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...
09.17.2021
Why Exercise?
Exercise 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....
09.10.2021
How Gay Marriage Won
In 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...
09.03.2021
Will The Future of Work Leave Workers Behind?
The 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...
08.27.2021
How the West Dominated Our Brains
About 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...
08.24.2021
FIXED: Walter Isaacson on How Gene Editing Will Change Life
Walter 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...
08.13.2021
Sal Khan on Leveling the Playing Field, In and Out of the Classroom
Educators 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...
08.13.2021
Pandemic Politics Hit the Classroom
All 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...
08.06.2021
Has Cleaning Gone Too Far?
It 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...
08.06.2021
America's Sherlock
Imagine 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...
07.30.2021
Can Capitalism Save Us from Capitalism?
Business 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...
07.23.2021
How to Beat Burnout
In 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...
07.16.2021
Climate Migration Is Already Here And It's Going To Get Worse
A 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,...
07.09.2021
The Amazon Effect
July 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...
07.02.2021
To Rethink the Constitution
The 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 —...
06.25.2021
A Learning Revolution for a Post-Pandemic World
School 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...
06.18.2021
The Death Grip of Email
Constantly 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....
06.11.2021
Inventing Latinos
On 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...
06.04.2021
What’s The Point of Exercise?
Exercise 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....
05.28.2021
To Crack the Code of Wall Street
Have 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...
05.28.2021
A Goodbye To Language As You Know It
It 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...
05.21.2021
The Man Behind 24-Hour News
It 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...
05.21.2021
The Watch Named Arnold
It 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...
05.14.2021
Why We Can’t Quit Cities
Many 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...
05.14.2021
The Future of Traffic
With 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...
05.07.2021
Why It’s Hard to See that Less Is More
When 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...
05.07.2021
How COVID Has Crushed Working Women
In 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...
04.30.2021
An Invisible Future for American Jobs
Over 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...
04.30.2021
Take a Look at This Photograph
From 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...
04.23.2021
The Made Up World of Money
Money 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...
04.16.2021
The Internet Never Forgets
Do 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...
04.16.2021
International Espionage With a Side of Corn
When 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...
04.09.2021
Should We Dial Back Democracy?
How 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...
04.09.2021
Designing a More Just City
Last 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...
04.02.2021
Secret Life of the Supermarket
There 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...
03.26.2021
Can You Rethink How You Think?
Our 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...
03.26.2021
Your State’s Politics Might Be The Death of You
Policymakers 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...
03.19.2021
Can Capitalism Save Us?
Business 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...
03.12.2021
Walter Isaacson On How Gene Editing Will Change Your Life
Walter 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...
03.05.2021
Email’s Death Grip
Constantly 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....
02.26.2021
Has Coronavirus Cleaning Gone Too Far?
It 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...
02.26.2021
America's Sherlock Holmes
Imagine 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...
02.19.2021
Rethinking the Constitution
The 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 —...
02.12.2021
From the Plow to Birth Control: How Tech Reshapes Relationships
During 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,...
02.05.2021
How to End Child Poverty with Social Security
More 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...
02.05.2021
The True Toll of Loneliness
It’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...
01.29.2021
Society in the Time of Plague
It 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...

What's Innovation Hub about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Innovation Hub episodes:

The People Powering AI Decisions

The Lost Art of Listening

The Evolution of Play

When Romance Meets Ratios

Why Exercise?

How Gay Marriage Won

Will The Future of Work Leave Workers Behind?

How the West Dominated Our Brains

FIXED: Walter Isaacson on How Gene Editing Will Change Life

Sal Khan on Leveling the Playing Field, In and Out of the Classroom

Pandemic Politics Hit the Classroom

Has Cleaning Gone Too Far?

America's Sherlock

Can Capitalism Save Us from Capitalism?

How to Beat Burnout

Climate Migration Is Already Here And It's Going To Get Worse

The Amazon Effect

To Rethink the Constitution

A Learning Revolution for a Post-Pandemic World

The Death Grip of Email

Inventing Latinos

What’s The Point of Exercise?

To Crack the Code of Wall Street

A Goodbye To Language As You Know It

The Man Behind 24-Hour News

The Watch Named Arnold

Why We Can’t Quit Cities

The Future of Traffic

Why It’s Hard to See that Less Is More

How COVID Has Crushed Working Women

An Invisible Future for American Jobs

Take a Look at This Photograph

The Made Up World of Money

The Internet Never Forgets

International Espionage With a Side of Corn

Should We Dial Back Democracy?

Designing a More Just City

Secret Life of the Supermarket

Can You Rethink How You Think?

Your State’s Politics Might Be The Death of You

Can Capitalism Save Us?

Walter Isaacson On How Gene Editing Will Change Your Life

Email’s Death Grip

Has Coronavirus Cleaning Gone Too Far?

America's Sherlock Holmes

Rethinking the Constitution

From the Plow to Birth Control: How Tech Reshapes Relationships

How to End Child Poverty with Social Security

The True Toll of Loneliness

Society in the Time of Plague