Stories with The Apple Seed

Guest: Ryan Vogel, JD, Director, Center for National Security Studies, Utah Valley University North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made a secret trip to Beijing aboard an armored train this week. Kim’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping is believed to be his first foreign trip as leader of North Korea. It comes weeks before he’s scheduled to meet with South Korea’s president and then with President Trump. All of this is happening as the Trump administration shakes up its national security and diplomatic team.

Guest: Tanya Menon, PhD, Associate Professor of Management and Human Resources, The Ohio State University You know how, on Facebook, you tend to see posts from the same people over and over again? Well Facebook is feeding us what its algorithms predict we want to see. And it’s a proven thing that we naturally prefer to interact with the same circle – in real life and online. These people tend to be similar to us in thoughts – even in appearance, often. When it comes to getting a job or progressing in life, though, we’d do well to break out of our bubble on occasion. Tanya Menon argues that it doesn’t have to be scary or painful. She’s a professor of Management and Human Resources at The Ohio State University. Her popular TED Talk is called “The Secret to Great Opportunities? The Person You Haven’t Met Yet.”

Guest: Christofer Skurka, PhD Candidate in Communication, Cornell University Comedians like Trevor Noah, Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver and Seth Meyers are more and more a source of information. Their satire and sarcasm provoke viewers to question what’s going on in the world.  How effective is humor in changing people’s minds and behaviors? Researchers at Cornell took a serious look at the power of humor in a study that showed participants a series of videos about climate change. They found both humor and fear had advantages in getting people to climate change seriously.

Guest: Jed Brubaker, Assistant Professor, Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder What would you like to have happen to your Facebook account when you die? Do you want it frozen in time and turned into a digital memorial? Or would you rather it be deleted? You can actually make that choice right now thanks to the work of Jed Brubaker, a founding faculty member in the department of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder. Brubaker worked with Facebook to develop a more sensitive way to handle a person’s profile after death.

Guest: Leigh Fought, PhD, Associate Professor of History, Le Moyne College, Author, “Women in the World of Frederick Douglass” Frederick Douglass, famous escaped slave turned abolitionist and orator, was the most photographed man of his time. He sat for more than 160 portraits that we know of, and yet, there are only two known pictures of his wife, Anna Murray Douglass. But don’t be fooled, says historian Leigh Fought. Anna Murray Douglass’s behind-the-scenes support helped make her husband the powerhouse he was.