Innovation Hub

With the midterms looming, both Democrats and Republicans are sweating out the home stretch in Congressional races across the country. And as in any election, there’s a lot of focus on swing states such as Ohio. In his 2017 book “Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the of the All-American Town,” Brian Alexander returned home to Lancaster, Ohio to write about how the region has changed both politically and economically over the past few decades. He saw many in the industrial Midwest embrace Donald Trump as a candidate during the 2016 election. Recently, Alexander returned to Ohio to look at how politics, jobs and technology are shaping the Midwest on the eve of the 2018 midterms.

When you hear the term “gig economy,” you probably think of Uber or Lyft or Postmates - companies that have used apps to disrupt industries and create an army of 1099 workers. But according to Louis Hyman, a Cornell University historian and author of “Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary,” the gig economy is a lot bigger than Silicon Valley. And it has a much longer history than you might think.

We constantly hear that technology is killing opportunities in the workplace. But reports by the World Economic Forum and Deloitte have shown that automation is creating —   and will continue to create — millions of jobs in fields like sales, IT services, and big data. But to really know how tech is affecting our lives, experts like Daniel Theobald and Melissa Flagg say we need to focus less on the 30,000-foot view of the industry and more on what is going on at the ground level. We talk to Theobald, Vecna Robotics’ co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer as well as Flagg, the Northeast regional lead at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, about how we should be taking a ground-up approach to America’s technological development.

The story of privacy in America is long and fascinating. But suffice it to say,

 What separates a successful movement, like the campaign for same-sex marriage, from

 Too little water in some places. Too much in others. What Texas tells us about the future of water in

Every day, it seems like there’s a new story about privacy: A Facebook hack that puts the private data of millions at risk. A years-long surveillance program of personal communications by the government. Endless concerns about how much of our lives we share on social media.

With all this in the air, it can certainly feel like we have a lot less privacy nowadays. But is that really the case? Well, according to Vanderbilt professor Sarah Igo, author of “The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America,” the answer is actually pretty complicated.

After Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012, activists may have thought that gun control at the federal level was a sure bet. But as the old saying goes, “there’s strength in numbers,” and the size of National Rifle Association’s membership has long outnumbered that of America’s gun reform groups. Leslie Crutchfield, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Global Social Enterprise Initiative, says high membership numbers is a matter of strategy. It doesn’t matter if the message is pro-Second Amendment, pro-gay marriage or anti-smoking. Those who know how to play the game get results. We talk to Crutchfield, who outlines social movement strategy in her new book,  “How Change Happens: Why Some Social Movements Succeed While Others Don’t.”

If you try to imagine what a dystopian future would look like, you might conjure up aliens invading Earth, or robots overpowering humans. But according to author Seamus McGraw, the problems of the future are more down-to-earth than some may imagine. In his book, “A Thirsty Land: The Making Of An American Water Crisis,” McGraw writes about how water scarcity in Texas could turn into a crisis that affects all Americans. And it could happen sooner rather than later.

Take credit for that killer PowerPoint presentation, or for running a 4-minute mile if you want. But at the end of the day, Robert Sapolsky says we don’t have a shred of free will.

Next, corporations have fought tooth-and-nail to gain their civil rights and having the United States Supreme Court as an ally hasn’t hurt.

Then, the Spanish flu of 1918 killed between 50 and 100 million people and, in the process, reshaped the world. Author Laura Spinney says it’s inevitable that we’ll see another epidemic.    

Humanity is simultaneously incredibly kind and incredibly violent. We commit indescribable atrocities, but also acts of incomprehensible compassion. There is both horror and beauty in our history. Which leads to the question… how do we reconcile this inherent contradiction? It all goes back to our biology, according to Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford and author of the book “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.” In fact, all questions about human behavior are, at their core, about biology. 

Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney famously declared that “corporations are people” while on the campaign trail in 2011. The Iowa State Fair crowd jeered him and Romney launched into a stammering defense. But, if you look at Supreme Court cases from the past 200 years, Romney’s assessment wasn’t too far off. Corporations may not be people, but they enjoy many of the same basic rights we do. We talk with UCLA law professor Adam Winkler about his book, “We The Corporations: How American Businesses Won their Civil Rights.”