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In our latest Aspen Ideas to Go podcast, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. talks about progress in the black community since the civil rights era. If Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, what would he think of today’s America? Gates tells Aspen Institute CEO Walter Isaacson there have been steps forward and backward. Find the episode on Apple Podcasts, our website, NPR One, Spotify, and listen on SiriumXM Insight, channel 121.

How to Break a Habit

Are you trying to break a habit in the new year? Maybe smoking, nail biting, or your reluctance to go the gym. Luckily, says New York Times columnist Charles Duhigg, we live in a “golden age of understanding the neurology of habit formation.” Scientists now know how habits work in our brains, so it’s possible to “fiddle with the gears” of a habit. In this blog, Duhigg explains how to identify a habit, diagnose what’s driving it, and then find out how to change it.

— WHAT WE'RE READING —

As we consider topics for the 2018 program tracks, here are some stories that have caught our attention:

• What’s your child watching? Disturbing videos sneak past filters on kids app.
• To see what we’ll wear in the future, head to the museum.
• Can animals feel embarrassment or guilt?
• Climate change could awaken Earth’s forgotten pathogens.​