Innovation Hub

Growing up, Thanksgivings in Jennet Conant’s house were contentious. The Vietnam War was raging, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, student protests were ubiquitous. But Conant’s family was especially combative. Her grandfather, James B. Conant, a former president of Harvard University, had both supervised the production of poison gas during World War I, and oversaw the development of the atomic bomb during World War II.

Conant’s father argued her grandfather wasn’t a scientist who had served his country, but a mass murderer.

Jennet Conant is the author of a new biography of her grandfather, “Man of the House: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist,” as well other books about war, science, and the intersection of the two. She explains what happens when people use science to create weapons - and the fallout for the scientists themselves.

For more than a 30-year span, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov was nearly unbeatable. But, in 1997, he faced an unlikely competitor: the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. Kasparov lost the final match, which ended up being a turning point both for him and for our understanding of artificial intelligence. We talk with Kasparov about his new book, “Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins.”

Science-fiction is a genre that imagines the future. It doesn’t necessarily predict the future (after all, where are flying cars?), but it grapples with the technological and societal changes happening today to better understand our world and where it’s heading.

So, what does it mean when so much of our most popular science-fiction - The Handmaid’s Tale, The Walking Dead, and The Hunger Games - present bleak, depressing futures? Cory Doctorow might just have an answer. He’s a blogger, writer, activist, and author of the new book “Walkaway,” an optimistic disaster novel.

It’s the holidays, which means you might head back to your hometown, grab a drink at the local bar, and compare yourself with the kids you knew in high school.

Luckily, we’re serving up the perfect show for the status-obsessed. We have stories that look at what makes people popular in school, how your crammed calendar can actually make you more sought after, and why achieving online popularity is trickier than you think.

Do you ever wonder why some people are more popular than others? The foundation for climbing up the social ladder starts early, and it turns out that parents actually have an enormous influence on how well-liked their kids are. Psychology professor Mitch Prinstein explains how popularity develops and why it matters.

At the height of their career, YouTube stars can make millions of dollars. But it’s a rough road to the top for social media stars, if they can get there at all. We talk with author Brooke Erin Duffy and YouTuber Gaby Dunn about the aspirational economy, and how success can take a toll on our personal life.

Don’t feel bad the next time you have to blow off your friends. Being busy is considered a status symbol here in America. Georgetown University assistant professor Neeru Paharia explains why we’re impressed with people who have too much on their plates... though that may a relatively recent phenomenon.

Listen to this one while you heat up your TV dinner. The story behind the microwave.

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

This week on Innovation Hub, we prove Faulkner right. We’ve got stories about how history still affects all our daily lives, in a myriad of different ways.

We start by taking a look at the origin of the debates over human rights. The Declaration of Independence’s second paragraph begins with the immortal phrase: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But when did those rights become self-evident? According to historian Lynn Hunt, the very concept of human rights weren’t really talked about until the 18th century. She explains how the concept began, and why we’re constantly changing our definition of equality.

Then, how our own histories of trauma can affect our present health. Vincent Felitti is a doctor whose research has shown that patients who experienced childhood trauma were more likely to be sick when they grew up. He tells us how clinicians can use Adverse Childhood Experience scores to help people get better.

And finally, a newspaper that changed America. Journalist and author Ethan Michaeli traces the rise of The Chicago Defender, a legendary black newspaper that began in 1905. From the Great Migration, to the desegregation of the military, to the rise of Barack Obama, we’ll learn how its legacy is still felt in American life. Also, as we promised in the show, here are some of Bobby Sengstacke’s photos. Bobby Sengstacke was a photojournalist and the last Sengstacke to edit The Chicago Defender.

We all know Thomas Jefferson’s famous words immortalized in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” But when did the world start thinking about equality? Lynn Hunt, a distinguished research professor at UCLA, and author of the book “Inventing Human Rights,” says we haven’t always recognized basic human rights, and the very concept wasn’t spoken much about until the end of the 1700s.