“Tropical rainforest” conjures images of close-packed trees, dense humidity, a home for plenteous and diverse animal life.

But rainforests in the Congo Basin of west-central Africa also host lesser-known clearings called bais. Some stretch the length of 40 football fields; others only a few hundred feet. Though not widespread, they appear to play a big role in making the rainforest a highly complex, biodiverse habitat, and new research may boost understanding of how and why.

A new study in the journal Ecology provides an unprecedented, detailed overview of bais’ layout, makeup, and abundance across more than 5,000 square miles of conserved forest in Odzala-Kokoua National Park, Republic of the Congo. Culminating more than two years of field study, the work was led by Evan Hockridge, a Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student in the lab of Andrew Davies, assistant professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.  

“This was a huge data collection effort, involving everything from drones to soil measurements to camera trapping to identification of plant species,” Hockridge said. 

Hockridge originally set out to study how large African animals engineer their own ecosystems, but quickly realized megafauna cannot be understood outside the bais they inhabit.

“Animals are extremely attracted to these giant clearings in the middle of the forest, including many endangered animals like the Western lowland gorilla and the African forest elephant,” Hockridge said. “These keystone conservation priority species will spend enormous portions of their lives basically just moving between bais.”

Coming upon a bai after hiking through thick canopies of trees is “stunning,” according to Hockridge, who spent several months of 2021 in Congo collecting data and leading teams.

Without warning, the trees stop, opening into a clearing where forest buffalo often lounge among short grasses and sedges. A stream cuts through the expanse. Flocks of a thousand African green pigeons land nearby to gather salt and other soil nutrients. “It’s like something out of a picture book, but the picture book doesn’t exist,” Hockridge said.

For their study, the scientists developed a technically sophisticated remote-sensing protocol using drone-based Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) and satellites, producing models and maps of bais across the vast landscape of the Congo basin. They found many more bais than anyone had expected — more than 2,000 distinct ones in the national park, as opposed to the informally counted 250 or so.

Yet the total habitat that bais encompass is quite small — less than 0.2 percent of the entire national park, according to the research. Varying in size, they also tend to be clustered together, which could ease conservation efforts, Hockridge said. 

The analysis also unveiled a tantalizing new insight into the biological makeup of bais: stark differences in plant compositions between those frequented by gorillas, versus those frequented by elephants. They’re not sure why. 

“There’s a great need to understand what’s happening with these bais because they’re so important to organisms we’re trying to conserve,” Hockridge said. “Our goal is to understand how animals are interacting with these clearings. Are they making them? How dependent are they on them? Are these clearings stable over time?” Their next study may delve deeper into these questions, Hockridge said.

Paper authors include collaborators Gwili Gibbon, head of research and monitoring at Odzala-Kokoua National Park, and Sylvain Ngouma and Roger Ognangue, research “ecomonitors” at the park who served as the Harvard team’s local experts in the area’s biology and botany. 

“This work would have been impossible without them,” Hockridge said. “They’re the most quintessential partners in the work we do.”

The Congo Basin’s rainforests offer so much more than just the carbon they store, noted Davies, “and we are still just barely scratching the surface of what we know about them.”

“This study helps us understand a little bit more about their functioning, and the treasure trove of biodiversity they hold, which only inspires and excites us to keep exploring and discovering more of their secrets,” Davies said.

Exceptional student athletes, artists, and performers aren’t hard to come by under the bright lights of Harvard’s sports arenas and performance spaces. These images, however, were taken in the dark — a necessary technical requirement to make images using stroboscopic flash.

First pioneered in the 19th century by Eadweard Muybridge to scientifically study the motion of horses galloping, the process also had clear artistic merit, especially as used by the more contemporary Harold E. Edgerton and Gjon Mili.

How we did it

During photoshoots the students and I choreograph a short movement, usually one to three seconds in length. Setting my shutter speed to match this, I place my camera on a tripod facing the student and point my flash unit toward the student’s path of motion. I then turn off the lights and make adjustments to ensure proper exposure of the photos. 

As students perform, the flash unit fires repeatedly, each flash creating another likeness of the person. We continue to take photos and adjust variables until we get an image that pleases us both. As a result, the photos in this project are all created in-camera and are not the result of using Photoshop to put multiple images together. Completing these shoots — all in a completely dark room — provided a collaborative and technically challenging project that yields delightfully unique results.

‘Adela’s House,’ a short story in ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’

Recommended by Laura van den Berg, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program; author of “The Third Hotel”

In “Adela’s House,” a brother and sister enter a derelict house, along with their neighbor, Adela. The house quickly proves to be nightmarish, possessed with its own terrible life force; once inside Adela is never seen again. While the plot summary of “Adela’s House” might sound like a conventional haunted house tale, Mariana Enríquez is after something far more charged. In her translator’s note, Megan McDowell writes that “what there is of gothic horror in the stories in ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’ mingles with and is intensified by their sharp social criticism … most of Mariana’s characters exist in a border space between the comfortable here and a vulnerable there; this latter could be a violent slum or a mysteriously living house, but it operates according to an unknown and sinister rationale, and it is frighteningly near.” In Enríquez’s hands, the house at the center of “Adela’s House” is a conduit for exploring both individual and collective trauma, for showing us just how close at hand the ghosts of the past are.

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Bluebeard

Recommended by Maria Tatar, John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of Folklore and Mythology

A man, a woman, and a house with a chamber, its floor awash in blood, with corpses hanging from hooks in the walls. These are the main features of “Bluebeard,” a horror story in which the title figure tests the obedience of his wife by handing her a key and telling her that she may open any door but the one that key fits. Curiosity gets the better of her, and, once she sees the victims of her husband’s rage, she flees, dropping the key in the pool of blood. Just as Bluebeard is about to execute his wife (he sees the telltale blood on the key), the wife’s brothers come to her rescue.

For many years, the husband’s homicidal history in this folktale took a back seat to the wife’s curiosity, which was inflected morally as sexual infidelity. Today, “Bluebeard” has almost fallen into a cultural black hole, but the story still flashes out at us in Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre,” Richard Wright’s “Black Boy,” and Margaret Atwood’s “Robber Bride.” The Hollywood Dream Factory, which gave us Bluebeard films like “Rebecca” and “Secret Beyond the Door,” has now recycled the old horror story (with a perverse twist) in “Get Out” and “Ex Machina.” Presto! Bluebeard has become a new kind of monster, a seductive femme fatale who has become as dangerous as her folkloric forebear and who reveals to us a host of new cultural anxieties about female intelligence and ingenuity.

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Dark Harvest

Recommended by Steven Schlozman, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard

This book is among the best American horror novels ever written. It mixes Americana with a sense of resigned but terrifying fatalism, adding just a tincture of the occult.

Picture a small New England town, normal in all ways except one day a year when everyone knows that the harvest yields something foul. It combines normalcy and gore, letter jackets and morality, and most importantly, the illusion that you can escape when you never really can.

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Dracula

Recommended by David Scadden, Gerald and Darlene Jordan Professor of Medicine

I study the blood so it has to be Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”

It may not be high art, but it captures the tensions of science and myth, morality and bestiality, the familiar and the foreign with page-turning suspense. Blood embodying both regenerative life and corrupting disease is not just a literary conceit in either the book or, as far as I can tell, in life; it rings true — chillingly true — and is worth thinking about.

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Misery

Recommended by Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology

My reactions to horror fiction spring from my world view as a scientific skeptic who is convinced that mental life depends entirely on an intact brain. That means I’m incapable of experiencing frisson at the antics of ghouls, zombies, demons, curses, dybbuks, and other paranormal mischief-makers — they come across as kitschy, not horrific. At the same time my awareness of human depravity is all too acute, and I can be suitably chilled by the prospect of a character’s ingenuity mobilized in the service of malevolent passions like revenge, manipulation, or sexual jealousy. “Cape Fear” and “Fatal Attraction” are deliciously terrifying, but as a writer I’d have to single out “Misery,” which brings to life the mixed blessing of having devoted fans.

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Strange Practice

Recommended by Samantha DeWitt, Resource Sharing Specialist, Widener Library

This series follows Greta Helsing, an English doctor who treats supernatural beings — “vocal strain in banshees, arthritis in barrow-wights and entropy in mummies.” What could be better? My favorite was a sweet baby ghoul with a fever, who “wouldn’t even touch her nice rat.” (It was an ear infection, of course, an illness ubiquitous to all children.) Vivian Shaw’s storytelling could be gimmicky, but it isn’t. These well-written books are an absorbing and fun escape into a world where the supernatural is routine.

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The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

Recommended by Hannah Hack, University Archives Administrative Coordinator

This book is a whimsical, heartfelt, and at times laugh-out-loud tale of a young, lonely witch trying to find her place. It has an assortment of odd yet lovable characters (including a grumpy librarian and possibly murderous children), lots of magic, and a touch of romance.

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Wuthering Heights

Recommended by Min Jin Lee, 2018-2019 Catherine A. and Mary C. Gellert Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute; author of “Pachinko”

I’m a coward and can get spooked by my shadow, so I avoid stories and any visual media gory or frightening. Not a big fan of Halloween. Life and Washington, D.C., are plenty scary enough. That said, I am very interested in any narrative about a haunting love. I can think of few stories with the kind of obsessive romance that rival “Wuthering Heights” — which has a ghost, forbidden desire, pathological love triangles, class and ethnic prejudices, intrigue, rivalries, and some good old-fashioned anguish. Catherine is kinda bonkers, but Heathcliff has the hots for her, and by gosh, he suffers for it.

Earlier this month Hurricane Milton caused an estimated $50 billion in damage and claimed the lives of at least 14 people, yet didn’t deliver the scale of destruction some had feared.

Preparedness seems to have played a role in Milton’s relatively low death toll, according to a panel recently hosted by Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. This is “good news” according to Satchit Balsari, co-director of the research platform CrisisReady, which uses cellphone data to study the travel patterns of people in disaster zones.

“Warning systems and evacuations and people getting used to those risks and hardening their homes actually make a difference,” said Balsari, associate professor in emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “Evacuation hit 80 percent to 90 percent in some of the key areas.”

Those key areas, concentrated mostly along Florida’s coast, are “mandatory evacuation” zones. Further inland, he said, evacuation rates dropped to around 45 to 50 percent. “So yes, while we’re celebrating that mandates work, about half the population had not evacuated.”

He added that people with pets, elderly residents, or residents living in fortified buildings were likelier to stay put. Another factor in evacuation rate, according to Balsari: whether a population has experienced a disaster in living memory. As recently as 2022, Florida was struck by the deadly Category 4 storm Hurricane Ian.

Balsari also pointed to the Bangladesh cyclones of 1990 and 1994.

“What’s interesting is they were almost the same storm. They had almost the same track, same intensity, made landfall in the same place. In 1990 the cyclone hit in Bangladesh, and 138,000 people died. Three years later, the same storm hits, 350 people died.”

The difference he said, was that by 1994 the government had invested in an early warning system and constructed concrete bunkers across the country where people could ride out the storm.

“Something like 450,000 people sheltered in those bunkers,” Balsari said. “And 350 people died.”

Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 storm which hit the South just weeks before Milton, is tied to more than 200 deaths, with economic losses estimated at $250 billion.

“The storm dropped only 10 inches of rain in western North Carolina, but there are over 250 people dead, still, I think, about 100 missing, and hundreds and hundreds of homes destroyed,” said Daniel Schrag, the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and professor of environmental science and engineering. “They weren’t expecting flooding there. In North Carolina, they weren’t expecting the kind of impacts from the storm.”

Referring to Milton, Balsari added: “A lot of people who died in this hurricane died not because of the hurricane, but because of tornadoes that were spawned by the hurricane.

“So that’s an interesting phenomenon. And it suggests it’s the surprise element [that’s deadly].”

However, no matter how prepared a locale is, there are some things you cannot anticipate. Balsari pointed to an epinephrine shortage in the wake of Hurricane Helene.

“The storm just unleashed tons of bees, and they have such a huge spike in bee stings that a lot of the relief organizations are actually trying to get more epinephrine to North Carolina as soon as possible.”

Balsari cautioned that we’re only starting to understand the full toll of Hurricanes Milton and Helene.

“You lose cellphone coverage, power is lost at home, your nebulizer is not going to work, you cannot refrigerate your insulin, and access to dialysis centers are sometimes interrupted. In the couple of months after a hurricane, people continue to die at a higher rate than expected.”

The 5 million specimens of pressed and dried plants, algae, and fungi in the Harvard University Herbaria’s collection — among the world’s largest — must be celebrated and protected for their own sake, and for their role in deepening our understanding of a changing planet, says newly appointed Director Jeannine Cavender-Bares. 

“Biodiversity collections house the knowledge we have about organisms, their taxonomies, their names, and the whole histories of their discovery,” said Cavender-Bares, a plant ecologist and professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.

The new director has spent her career studying plant biology from the smallest physiological features to sweeping habitats made visible by advances in satellite-based remote sensing. Solving the related crises of climate change and biodiversity loss requires discovery at many different scales, she said.

Cavender-Bares points to a research project she led that mapped swaths of diseased oak trees so they could be culled to prevent spread. On the cellular level, her teams examined tissue of trees stricken with oak wilt disease to understand immune response. Using aircraft, they measured electromagnetic information from affected forests, detecting sick and healthy canopies.

“This is an example of how we’re moving from cells and details of the anatomy of a plant to large, regional remote sensing for management,” she explained.

This and other projects fall under a National Science Foundation-funded Biology Integration Institute based at the University of Minnesota that Cavender-Bares leads, called ASCEND, aimed, in part, at training the next generation of leaders in spectral biology and its many applications.

As a leading expert in spectral biology, Cavender-Bares uses the interaction between light and plant matter to reveal unique, fingerprint-like information about plants’ chemistry, structure, and cellular function. Such information can be gathered from handheld spectroradiometers measuring how leaves reflect light; also from aircraft and satellite sensors, like those planned for NASA’s Surface Biology and Geology mission and the European Space Agency’s CHIME mission, which will capture sweeping hyperspectral information over landscapes for monitoring agriculture practices and soil health. 

Cavender-Bares is initiating an effort toward spectral digitization of herbarium specimens, not only at Harvard but among a network of academic and institutional herbaria worldwide.

“We’re working with other herbaria to get all the protocols worked out and figure out the right way to do this, so that we don’t have 10 different herbaria doing this 10 different ways,” she said.

The Herbaria will soon mark the 100-year anniversary of one of its largest and most important collections, the Farlow Herbarium of Cryptogramic Botany, which contains 1.4 million specimens of lichenized and non-lichenized fungi, bryophytes, and algae. Luminaries in mycological sciences and botany will gather at Harvard to reflect on the collection’s history, and share knowledge about everything from the foundational importance of fungi in ecosystems to the latest science of rusts, which are pathogens that cause plant fungal diseases.

Cavender-Bares hopes events like the Farlow celebration will give the Herbaria a forward-facing outlook and underscore for the public its significance as a hub of scientific knowledge. Biodiversity collections show us where we’ve been and what we could lose, she noted.

“We’re facing choices about converting our forests into solar panels,” she said. “But if we’re not simultaneously thinking about all these other organisms for the functions they provide, for the water they clean, for erosion control, for carbon sequestration — we’re going to lose them, and the potential they harbor for regenerating healthy ecosystems in the face of global change.”

Learn more about the Harvard Herbaria and the Farlow Herbarium anniversary celebration on Nov. 1.

The late Ardis Butler James — an avid quilter and collector of quilts since childhood — and her husband, the late Robert “Bob” James, M.B.A. ’48, Ph.D. ’53, amassed an assortment of quilts that eventually became the largest public collection in the world. In an early example of generosity that would characterize their philanthropy and inspire so many others, Ardis and Bob, both native Nebraskans, donated nearly 1,000 quilts to establish the International Quilt Study Center (now known as the International Quilt Museum) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in 1997. The couple was inducted into the Quilters Hall of Fame in 2011.

The Jameses’ love of quilts — made by piecing together different fabrics to create something beautiful and unified — is a fitting metaphor for their approach to philanthropy. Through their generosity and service to Harvard, the James family has had a profound impact on the entire University community, sewing together the rich variety of Harvard’s constituent Schools and programs to create a unified whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Inspired by the quality of his Harvard education, the couple wanted to give back to the institution that had given Bob so much, making their first donation to the Harvard Business School fund. Shortly after, they made a significant contribution to the School to establish the Robert and Ardis James Fellowship, which offered scholarships for Eastern European students in need. These gifts were driven by their unwavering belief in supporting future generations and initiated a lifetime of transformative support.

Recognizing that leaders and change-makers emerge from every corner of the University, Bob and Ardis expanded their philanthropy beyond HBS and the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the two Schools that Bob had attended. The James family’s generosity began creating a quilt of a different sort, intentionally integrating various aspects of the University and their own passions to strengthen the institution as a whole, embodying the spirit of “One Harvard” long before President Emerita Drew Gilpin Faust championed this idea during her presidency.

A family tradition

Bob and Ardis instilled their values into their children, Ralph James, M.B.A. ’82, and Cathy James Paglia, M.B.A. ’76, from an early age. Together, two generations of the James family have spread their generosity across the University, including gifts to HBS, Harvard Griffin GSAS, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Harvard Art Museums, Harvard Medical School, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Their contributions were pivotal in the recent restoration of HDS’s Swartz Hall, reflecting their belief in the importance of understanding religion to comprehend human motivations and foster a peaceful, just world. Named in the family’s honor, the James Room at Swartz Hall is a new, state-of-the-art space for teaching, learning, and gathering that expands the School’s convening power.

Having grown up when opportunities for women were scarcer, Ardis was deeply inspired by HRI’s mission, particularly the Schlesinger Library, which illuminates the lives of American women past and present. She believed that to impact the future, one must first understand the past.

Outside of their own philanthropic interests, the James family has enduring faith in Harvard’s leadership to address the biggest challenges in the world today.

“My family’s commitment to philanthropy reflects many things,” Ralph says. “The quality and values of leadership really do matter. Execution matters. You can have a fabulous strategy, but it isn’t going to have the impact you want unless it’s executed properly. Across the board, Harvard exhibits these qualities. They check all the boxes.”

Ralph and Cathy have lent their time and talents in support of the University in numerous other ways. Ralph previously served as HBS executive director for external relations, as HBS executive director of executive education, as co-chair of HGSE’s most recent fundraising campaign, and as a member of the HDS Dean’s Council and the HRI Dean’s Advisory Council. Cathy has co-chaired her HBS class reunion efforts every year since her graduation.

Today, Ralph and Cathy honor their late parents by carrying on their legacy, seeking new ways to support Harvard and adding new patches to the family’s meticulously crafted quilt of philanthropy.

“Everything always evolves. Philanthropy continues to change. My parents had a particular way of viewing their philanthropy, and Cathy and I are continuing that tradition,” Ralph said. “They supported what was important to them, and as we grow older, we bring our own perspectives into family philanthropy with the hope that the next generation will do the same. The beauty of Harvard is that whatever you may be interested in or want to accomplish, Harvard is doing it somewhere on campus.”

Simon Rich had a two-book contract from Random House by the time he graduated from Harvard in 2007. Since then, he has written for “Saturday Night Live,” been a showrunner for the cable TV comedy “Man Seeking Woman” (based on his collection “The Last Girlfriend on Earth”), wrote the screenplay for the Seth Rogen film “An American Pickle,” and published numerous pieces in publications such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and McSweeney’s.

 His latest collection of short stories (his seventh), “Glory Days,” follows a hilarious cast of characters, including an old man who tells his great-grandson about romance in the age before post-climate change dystopia, a nostalgic participation trophy buried in a landfill under “four hundred tons of Wow potato chips,” and David and Goliath (who, as it turns out, threw the fight).

Rich spoke to the Gazette about his latest work and offered some insight into his creative process — with some tips for young writers. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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What approach did you take to “Glory Days” and did you feel like it was similar or different than some of your past work?

I would say it’s embarrassingly identical to my last four books, which were all collections of short stories. But thematically, it’s a little bit new for me. The characters are a little older and grappling with higher-stakes dilemmas than some of the protagonists of my previous collections.

When you say, “embarrassingly identical,” what do you mean?

When I was starting out as a writer, I was a lot more experimental in my approach to books. I was still trying to figure out my style and my own sensibility and taste. Around my late 20s, I hit upon a style that I liked, and I think I haven’t creatively grown or changed. It’s safe to say, whatever people thought of the last four books, I imagine they’ll feel very similarly about this one.

You mentioned your protagonists face higher stakes in this collection. A lot of the themes touch on family, parenting, or the pains of getting older. Did you lean into your own experiences to reflect the type of angst your characters encounter?

I think all of my books are really autobiographical, which you wouldn’t necessarily know by reading them. The premises are so surreal; the characters are ridiculous; and their life experiences don’t actually match my own. But on an emotional level, I’m always trying to write stories that that are authentic to what I’m actually experiencing on earth.

My last collection, “New Teeth,” was very much stories about becoming a parent and having children. And this collection is about turning 40 and entering midlife. There are a lot of characters in the book who are grappling with a sense of obsolescence and trying to adapt to a world in which they’re no longer the youngest generation. There are stories about characters who are used to winning, have to come to grips with their own frailty, and hopefully gained a bit of humility.

Let’s talk a little about process. You approach your stories from surprising angles. For example, you’ll take a well-known plot or character and add an unexpected twist, like Mario (from Super Mario Brothers) going through a midlife crisis or the Tooth Fairy being hounded by what sounds like an illegal tooth smuggling ring. When or how do these ideas occur to you?

Since College, I’ve had a family encyclopedia that I’ll flip through for ideas. The one I use now, the Oxford Family Encyclopedia, I’ve owned literally since school, and I would go to Lamont Library and flip through their encyclopedias, magazine collections, and search for evergreen topics that might yield comedic premises.

I avoided newspapers because I didn’t want to do anything too topical; topics were often fraught and had too many satirical associations. I looked at magazines, but eventually landed on children’s encyclopedias because every page is filled with common reference points. So many of my stories have come from just flipping through the pages and being struck by a topic or reference that could be humorously inverted.

Where did you come across this strategy?

It was early freshman year when I was trying out for the Lampoon. I had read an article about The Onion and knew that the way they generated material was by reading the news and taking that day’s headlines and attempting to subvert them. But I knew I didn’t want to do satire. I wanted to pursue more absurdist humor, but at the same time, I didn’t want to be too untethered or unhinged. I was looking for that sweet spot where I could meet the reader in an accessible place but then take them on an interesting journey.

When do you know you’ve landed on something?

The first step is me thinking the concept is funny, but then the second bar it has to clear is: Do I have a funny idea for how to execute it? There are hundreds of premises on my computer that I that I think are intriguing, funny, or interesting, but I don’t actually know how to write them. I don’t know what perspective they should be written from. I don’t have a story. I don’t know who the protagonist ought to be. A lot of times an idea will sit on my computer for many years before I come up with the right narrator, the right point of view, or the right plot.

Was your time at Harvard and writing for the Lampoon a formative time for your development as a writer?

Totally. I wrote my first book in College, and my process was exactly what I just described. I would take my encyclopedia and go to Peet’s Coffee every night and sit at the glass-walled ledge. In longhand, I would write down any premises that occurred to me and then in the mornings go to the Lampoon and write up the ones that felt the most promising.

 I basically wrote that first book at the Lampoon and in the computer room in Adams House. I never took any creative writing classes, but there were writers at the Lampoon that I really looked up to.

My favorite was the recently graduated Danny Chun, who would come back and visit. I read everything he wrote for the Lampoon, including stuff that didn’t get into the magazine. He was probably my biggest comedic influence at the time.

Colin Jost was also really encouraging and supportive of younger writers and would always take the time to read what I was working on and give me feedback.

And to be totally honest, I took a lot of classes for materials, specifically subjects that I thought might yield premises. I was so single-minded in my pursuit of original comedic premises that I would take courses purely for that reason. I remember thinking, “If I get a piece out of this, it’s worth it.’

Do you have any advice for other young writers?

I remember when I was at Harvard, I fell in love with the writer William Somerset Maugham. I just absolutely flipped for “Of Human Bondage” and “The Razor’s Edge,” which I found at The Coop.

So I went to Lamont and realized he’d written about 100 books. I picked a couple off the shelf at random and found they weren’t as strong as the ones that had been consistently in print for 100 years or so.

I had this epiphany: Nobody remembers your bad stuff. Even if it’s egregiously bad, it just kind of evaporates, like it never existed. People only remember your absolute best stuff.

Realizing that set me free to take a lot of risks and try a lot of different genres and mediums because I knew that nobody was really watching. Even if I put terrible stuff into the world, it would be forgotten. That was a real comfort to me as an undergraduate. I took a lot of risks with my writing. In those early days, I wrote in a lot of genres that I had no business writing in and learned a lot from doing it.

What’s next for you?

I’m doing a show on Broadway in December called “All In: Comedy About Love” directed by Alex Timbers and featuring a rotating cast of actors and comedians — like John Mulaney, Andrew Rannells, Richard Kind, and Chloe Fineman — reading my work. It’s a lot of really funny, talented people and the score is by the Magnetic Fields, who were a big influence on my writing. I’m really excited about it.

There is a path forward to peace in Ukraine, according to the country’s former minister of defense. But it will require concrete, mutually agreed-upon terms with Russia, backed up by support from the U.S. and allies to ensure Moscow doesn’t renege. 

Oleksii Reznikov, who served as Ukraine’s minister of defense from 2021 to 2023, paid a visit to the Ukrainian Research Institute on Oct. 16 to discuss the possibility of negotiated peace in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war.

The discussion was moderated by Mariana Budjeryn, a senior research associate with the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. It touched on Ukraine’s requests for more weapons from the U.S. and its allies, the possibility of full NATO membership, and the need for shows of iron-clad Western support as a prod to bring Russia to the table for talks to end to the almost three-year war.

“Crushing Putin’s regime on the battlefield is the best way to launch the transformation of Russia, and that is possible. Ukraine has proven as much,” Reznikov said. “All we need is the sufficient and timely support without six-month pauses — I mean decision in Congress — and without limitation on how weapons are used.”

The U.S. has thus far restricted the use of long-range missiles it has supplied to Ukraine, which wants to strike targets deep in Russian territory. Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that he would consider any such attack to be an act of war by the allies.

The U.S. has continued to provide financial and weapons aid to Ukraine throughout the conflict, most recently in the form of a $425 million security package. However, Reznikov said, Russia continues to dominate Ukraine with the number and sophistication of their weapons, along with disinformation campaigns.

“We need a lot of weapons and trained personnel if you don’t want your people to lose lives,” he said. “This is one of the last, if not the last, war where you will see large manpower in direct conduct. War is increasingly turning into a competition between robotic systems as well as automated control systems.”

Reznikov also mentioned Russia’s use of deep fakes, AI, and cyberattacks to spread propaganda and disinformation.

“We have the experience of defending a democratic country against a strong and highly technological army of an autocratic regime,” he said. “The main challenge is the timely recognition of threats when the enemy is actively employing hybrid sub-threshold acts of aggression and is weaponizing everything from freedom of speech to migration streams, food logistic chains, freedom of navigation in a Black Sea, Caspian Sea, etc.”

And if the two countries get to the negotiating table, Reznikov said there must be two basic components if the talks are to be a success: trust and guarantees, backed by threat of enforcement.

Ukraine has had bad experiences when it comes to trust, he said. For example, the 1994 Budapest memorandum with Russia, the U.S., and the U.K. required Ukraine to give up its then-sizable nuclear arsenal (left behind during the breakup of the Soviet Union) in exchange for security guarantees from the three nations.

“We have given up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, our strategic aviation, and the missiles [once part of Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal, now converted to conventional arms] that Russia is now using to kill our children and women in the cities, far from the front,” Reznikov said. “One of the guarantors of our security, Russia, openly attacked us in 2014 and others stood by and did nothing.”

But “there are also success stories,” he said, of long-running hostilities ended through negotiation.

Reznikov points to the Good Friday agreement between the U.K. and Ireland as an example. The accord ended more than 30 years of conflict between the states and helped develop the current system of government operating in Northern Ireland today.

“It was not easy, and it didn’t solve every problem, but it allowed the parties to proceed past a stalemate and to overcome some obstacles,” Reznikov said. “There was a trust. There were guarantees, and there was a model of coexistence.”

In the case of Russia and Ukraine, Reznikov believes the two countries will need allies on either side of the table to ensure guarantees. One option would be membership in NATO for Ukraine, assuring protection by Western allies against future aggression.

“Another option is a bi- or multilateral deal, detailing direct obligations to support Ukraine, should Russia violate its side of the deal,” he said. “Not promises to hold consultations, but concrete steps, weapons, financial support, closing the sky with the air defenses, crushing sanctions against Russia, etc.”

Without the backing of other countries, Russia will continue to be a source of instability within the region, Reznikov said.

He also noted that concerns by the West over Putin’s thinly veiled threats of nuclear attacks over Ukraine areoverblown.

“Russia is developing policies to increase policies and increase the work force. It is not planning to die in nuclear ashes,” he said. “The moment they encounter resistance, they stop and back down. Therefore, the free world needs to set its anxieties aside.”

Evidence suggests Mars could very well have been teeming with life billions of years ago. Now cold, dry, and stripped of what was once a potentially protective magnetic field, the Red Planet is a kind of forensic scene for scientists investigating whether Mars was indeed once habitable and, if so, when.

The “when” question in particular has driven researchers in Harvard’s Paleomagnetics Lab in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. A new paper in Nature Communications makes their most compelling case to date that Mars’ life-enabling magnetic field could have survived until about 3.9 billion years ago, compared with previous estimates of 4.1 billion years — so hundreds of millions of years more recently.

The study was led by Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student Sarah Steele, who has used simulation and computer modeling to estimate the age of the Martian “dynamo,” or global magnetic field produced by convection in the planet’s iron core, like on Earth. Together with senior author Roger Fu, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences, the team has doubled down on a theory they first argued last year that the Martian dynamo, capable of deflecting harmful cosmic rays, was around longer than prevailing estimates claim.

Their thinking evolved from experiments simulating cooling and magnetization cycles of huge craters on the Red Planet’s surface. Known to be only weakly magnetic, these well-studied impact basins have led researchers to assume they formed after the dynamo shut down.

This timeline was hypothesized using basic principles of paleomagnetics, or the study of a planet’s prehistoric magnetic field. Scientists know ferromagnetic minerals in rock align themselves with surrounding magnetic fields when the rock is hot, but these small fields become “locked in” once the rock has cooled. This effectively turns the minerals into fossilized magnetic fields, which can be studied billions of years later.

Looking at basins on Mars with weak magnetic fields, scientists surmised they initially formed amid hot rock during a period in which there were no other strong magnetic fields present — in other words, after the planet’s dynamo had gone away.

But the Harvard team says this early shutdown isn’t necessary to explain those largely de-magnetized craters, according to Steele. Rather, they argue that the craters were formed while the dynamo of Mars was experiencing a polarity reversal — north and south poles switching places — which, through computer simulation, can explain why these large impact basins only have weak magnetic signals today. Magnetic pole flips also happen on Earth every few hundred thousand years.

“We are basically showing that there may not have ever been a good reason to assume Mars’ dynamo shut down early,” Steele said.

Their results build on previous work that first upended existing Martian habitability timelines. They used a famed Martian meteorite, Allan Hills 84001, and a powerful quantum diamond microscope in Fu’s lab, to infer a longer-persisting magnetic field until 3.9 billion years ago by studying different magnetic populations in thin slices of the rock.

Steele says poking holes in a long-held theory is a little nerve-wracking, but that they’ve been “spoiled rotten” by a community of planetary researchers who are open to new interpretations and possibilities.

“We are trying to answer primary, important questions about how everything got to be like it is, even why the entire solar system is the way that it is,” Steele said. “Planetary magnetic fields are our best probe to answer a lot of those questions, and one of the only ways we have to learn about the deep interiors and early histories of planets.”

A growing body of evidence shows that taking vitamin D supplements does not reduce the risk of cardiac arrest in older adults, according to a new study out of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard affiliate.

Cardiovascular disease is the primary cause of death among adults over age 65 years.

“While multiple observational studies have demonstrated a relationship between low vitamin D and high risk for cardiovascular disease, few randomized controlled trials to date have evaluated the role of vitamin D supplementation on cardiovascular disease,” said lead author Katharine W. Rainer, a resident physician at BIDMC. “Our study decisively showed that vitamin D had no effect on the markers of cardiovascular disease over the 2-year follow-up period, regardless of dose. These results reinforce evidence that vitamin D supplementation is not an effective intervention for cardiovascular disease prevention.”

To evaluate the effect of vitamin D supplementation on the heart, researchers at BIDMC assessed whether higher doses of the vitamin reduced the presence of two specific proteins in the blood known to indicate cardiac injury and strain. The team’s analysis of data from a double-blind, randomized trial — the gold standard of scientific testing that provides the most persuasive results — do not support the use of higher-dose vitamin D supplementation to reduce cardiovascular risk in adults with low blood levels of vitamin D. The study is published in the American Journal of Preventative Cardiology.

Rainer and colleagues analyzed data from a National Institute of Aging-sponsored trial conducted between July 2015 and March 2019. Participants were randomized into one of four groups, receiving either 200, 1,000, 2,000, or 4,000 international units (IUs) per day of vitamin D3 supplementation. Blood levels of the markers of cardiovascular disease were measured at baseline and at three-, 12- and 24-month follow-up visits.

The investigators found that lower vitamin D levels were associated with a baseline elevation in one marker of cardiovascular disease, but failed to reduce either marker of cardiovascular disease over the two-year study period, regardless of dose. The findings were largely consistent regardless of participants’ age, sex, race, or history of cardiovascular disease, including high blood pressure and/or diabetes.

“While much work is needed to understand why vitamin D deficiency is associated with CVD, our study adds to the growing body of evidence that daily or monthly supplementation with vitamin D does not prevent CVD events or reduce markers of subclinical cardiac injury or strain,” said corresponding and senior author Stephen P. Juraschek, research director of the Hypertension Center at BIDMC. “Instead, there may be other factors upstream to vitamin D and CVD (such as outdoor physical activity, for example) that may be a better target for preventive interventions.”

Co-authors included William Earle of BIDMC.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health/National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (grants NIH/ NHLBI 7K23HL135273 and 3K23HL135273S1); the National Institute on Aging (grants U01AG047837 and K01 AG076967); the Office of Dietary Supplements; the Mid-Atlantic Nutrition Obesity Research Center (grant P30DK072488); and the Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translation Research (grant UL1TR003098). STURDY is registered on clinicaltrials.gov under identifier NCT02166333

A new study examining a large sample of privately insured patients with obesity found that use of drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy as anti-obesity medications more than doubled from 2022 to 2023. During that same period, there was a 25.6 percent decrease in patients undergoing metabolic bariatric surgery to treat obesity.

The study, by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in collaboration with researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Brown School of Public Health, is published in JAMA Network Open.

“Our study provides one of the first national estimates of the decline in utilization of bariatric metabolic surgery among privately insured patients corresponding to the rising use of blockbuster GLP-1 RA drugs,” said senior author Thomas C. Tsai, a metabolic bariatric surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Using a national sample of medical insurance claims data from more than 17 million privately insured adults, the researchers identified patients with a diagnosis of obesity without diabetes in 2022-2023. The study found a sharp increase in the share of patients who received glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, or GLP-1 RAs, during the study period, with GLP-1 RA use increasing 132.6 percent from the last six months of 2022 to the last six months of 2023 (from 1.89 to 4.41 patients per 1,000 patients). Meanwhile, there was a 25.6 percent decrease in use of bariatric metabolic surgery during the same period (from 0.22 to 0.16 patients per 1,000 patients).

Among the sample of patients with obesity, 94.7 percent received neither form of treatment during the study period (while 5 percent received GLP-1 RAs and 0.3 percent received surgery). Compared to patients who were prescribed GLP-1 RAs, patients who underwent surgery tended to be more medically complex.

“For now, metabolic bariatric surgery remains the most effective and durable treatment for obesity. National efforts should focus on improving access to obesity treatment — whether pharmacologic or surgical — to ensure patients can receive optimal care,” said Tsai, who is also an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and an assistant professor in health policy and management at Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health.

Tsai notes that while GLP-1 RAs can effectively treat obesity and related conditions (such as diabetes), these medications have been limited by high costs, limited supply, and gastrointestinal side effects that may prompt treatment cessation and subsequent weight regain.

“As patients with obesity increasingly rely on GLP-1s instead of surgical intervention, further research is needed to assess the impact of this shift from surgical to pharmacologic treatment of obesity on long-term patient outcomes,” Tsai said. “With the national decline in utilization of metabolic bariatric surgery and potential closure of bariatric surgery programs, there is a concern that access to comprehensive multidisciplinary treatment of obesity involving pharmacologic, endoscopic, or surgical interventions may become more limited.”

“These results also highlight an opportunity to further expand uptake of surgical and pharmacologic treatments for obesity and related comorbidities,” said co-author Ateev Mehrotra, chair of the Department of Health Services, Policy and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health. “Metabolic bariatric surgery and GLP-1 RAs are both effective interventions for patients with obesity, yet less than 6 percent of patients in our study received either form of treatment.”

Considering these results, the authors encourage clinicians and policymakers to continue to monitor access to effective obesity treatment amid a rapidly evolving landscape of treatment options. In addition, further research is needed to understand the tradeoffs between use of surgical intervention and increasingly popular GLP-1 RAs to treat obesity.

Funding/disclosures: Tsai reported receiving grants from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health to Harvard Catalyst, the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center, and financial contributions from Harvard University and its affiliated academic health care centers.

China has significantly picked up the pace of expanding its nuclear arsenal in recent years, a development that increases the likelihood a new arms race will begin revving up, one that could be more dangerous than the Cold War contest between Russia and the U.S., according to two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Hoffman.

In a talk on Tuesday, sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Hoffman raised the alarm about a “new nuclear age,” with three countries leading the pack and a handful of other countries already developing their own nuclear weapons.

“It’s time for us to wake up,” said Hoffman. “It’s time for us to get over the vacation that we’ve had since the end of the Cold War.”

“Nuclear weapons are political weapons. They’re instruments of threat and of coercion, and they require political will to restrain. ”

David Hoffman

The period of geopolitical tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and their respective allies, began in 1946 and ended in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union. That year, President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which called for both nations to reduce their nuclear arsenals. The initiative to control nuclear weapons was first proposed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. The START treaty will expire in February 2026.

A new arms race poses all the risks for nuclear Armageddon as before and then some, said Hoffman. It will multiply the possibilities for mistakes and misperceptions, and it will take effort to find out whether the other two competitors are U.S. adversaries, he said.

“A three-way race will be infinitely more difficult to negotiate than was the Cold War between two sides,” said Hoffman. “A three-way race with all the different kinds of forces, threats, and possibilities is a bit like a diplomatic Rubik’s cube. It’s not going to be easy to use diplomacy to solve it.”

Hoffman, who won his first Pulitzer for his 2009 book, “The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy,” said he worries about the lack of political will among world leaders to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

“Nuclear weapons are political weapons,” Hoffman said. “They’re instruments of threat and of coercion, and they require political will to restrain. Reagan and Gorbachev for their own reasons summoned up the political will to get rid of these weapons … Now we’re at a time of growing danger, a time when political will is absent, and that’s why I’m alarmed.”

A contributing editor to The Washington Post, Hoffman won his most recent Pulitzer this year for a series of editorials on technologies and tactics used by authoritarian regimes to stifle dissent. He noted that China has 500 nuclear warheads and may reach 1,000 by 2030, according to the Pentagon.

“China seems to be planning to try to match the United States and Russian nuclear arsenals to get to about 1,500 warheads,” said Hoffman. “China is accelerating the arms race, and I think it’s very worrisome that China refuses to enter into negotiations. The Chinese basically say, ‘Wait till we get to be peers with Russia and the United States, and then we’ll talk about that.’’’

The fear of a nuclear war is not unfounded, said Hoffman, not only because there are more nuclear-armed countries — a group that includes France, the U.K., Pakistan, India, North Korea, and Israel — than ever before, but also because of the potential impact of artificial intelligence on early warning systems.

The possibility of a false alarm that could lead to a nuclear attack is real, said Hoffman, who wrote about a series of failures in the U.S. early warning system for ballistic missile defense in his book about the Cold War.

Between 1960 and 1976, there were seven false alarms, and between 1979 and 1980, there were five. In 1983, the Soviet early warning system also registered a false alarm. And more recently, in 2022, India accidentally fired a missile into Pakistan. India later said it was due to a “technical malfunction” during routine maintenance.

“We cannot grow complacent about the possibility of mistake, a misperception or a misunderstanding leading to a nuclear explosion,” said Hoffman. “If artificial intelligence says, ‘We’re under attack,’ would you believe it? Would you not believe it? Would you put the fate of the Earth in the hands of ChatGPT?”

This week’s event was part of the series “Russia: In Search of a New Paradigm — Conversations with Yevgenia Albats,” a prominent Russian investigative journalist and political scientist who received her Ph.D. in political science from Harvard in 2004 and is currently a visiting scholar at the Davis Center.

Although the scenario seems bleak, Hoffman said the U.S. could take actions to prevent a nuclear apocalypse, including strengthening ties with U.S. allies, and working on nuclear weapons risk-reduction measures and robust arms control treaties with both China and Russia.

“American people just have to hear that this looming arms race is coming in,” said Hoffman. “Ultimately, though, it comes back to political will … Because that’s ultimately the way to restrain political weapons … I’d love to see us get back to that Reagan-Gorbachev magic moment.”

Next month’s U.S. presidential election is being closely watched across the world. But do foreign governments have a clear preference for either Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald J. Trump?

According to the Oct. 9 Weatherhead Center for International Affairs forum on the election’s geopolitical stakes, many international observers remain ambivalent on the race. The panel featured four experts weighing in on the global hotspots of China, Russia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is probably inclined toward Trump, according to Timothy J. Colton, the Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies Chair of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. “But the Russians will point out that Trump, in the end, did Russia no favors in his first term,” Colton said. “At least at the leadership level, they’re by and large convinced nothing good is going to come in the election from Russia’s point of view.”

At the moment, Moscow appears less invested in the U.S. election than in the last two cycles, Colton observed. “The Russians have turned away almost every shred of cooperation with the United States of America, and at least verbally and rhetorically they are fashioning a pretty radical new image of where they belong in the world.” As examples, he cited top thinkers in Russia who speak of becoming an Asian country and Putin himself describing it as a civilization state, or a unique culture descended from an empire much like China.

What’s more, Colton added, the Russian establishment sees far more opportunity in countries like Germany, Hungary, and the Czech Republic for undermining support for Ukraine. “It is reasonable to expect the war in Ukraine will come to an end, or at least to a point of suspension, in the next U.S. presidential term,” he added. “But my own sense is the geopolitical outcome will depend more on what happens on the battlefield than on anything that happens in Washington.”

Most pressing in the Middle East is the escalating conflict involving Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran. Ziad Daoud, a senior fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, described a prevailing sense of fury amid another crisis in the Arab world. “This dissatisfaction could multiply if we get a condition in which you have loss of territory in Gaza or in the West Bank or in Lebanon, or you have displacement of people from Gaza or the West Bank or Lebanon,” he said.

For Daoud, the central question is: Which U.S. presidential administration could help secure a favorable resolution for all parties? As a model, he pointed to the “five no’s” offered last year by National Security Council member Brett McGurk: “No forced displacement, no reoccupation, no reduction in territory, no threats to Israel, no besiegement.”

“There are people who say President Trump is averse to war and therefore he’s more likely to end the war,” offered Daoud, who is also the chief emerging markets economist at Bloomberg. “But there are others who say that President Trump may not be as committed to the ‘five no’s’ outlined by the U.S. administration last year. Yes, the ceasefire might be reached but the conditions may not be great, and that might lead to further disruption down the road.”

For countries south of the U.S., the issues of drug trafficking and illegal corridors are far more central than immigration, according the Columbian journalist Diana Durán Nuñez, currently a fellow with Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. “If the U.S. really wants to see a different outcome on immigration, they need to raise concern and interest among their partners in Latin America,” she said.

The former TV news reporter also noted the growing influence of China, highlighting Nicaragua and Venezuela as two of the Asian country’s key allies. But the region’s ever-shifting political allegiances could hold new possibility for U.S. interests. “Latin America is a complex compound of left-wing, right-wing, and authoritarian governments,” Durán Nuñez said, pointing to the U.S. military’s new naval base partnership with Argentina’s right-wing president, Javier Milei. “China was supposed to be the ally for that project — there had already been conversations, and they were quite advanced — but Milei stopped it.”

As for China itself, an obvious concern is U.S. trade policy, given Trump’s proposal of a 60 percent tariff on imports from the country. Rana Mitter, the Kennedy School’s S.T. Lee Chair of U.S.-Asia Relations, emphasized that neither U.S. presidential candidate stands for 1990s-style free trade with China. For example, a Harris administration is expected to pursue more restrictions than the Biden administration on tech investments and intellectual property transfers involving China. “But that lies in contrast with what we are promised by people involved with a Trump II administration,” he said.

Mitter, who recently visited the Chinese capital, noted how closely elites there are following the U.S. presidential race. “The only place where I’ve seen as much interest as there is on, say, CNN, is in some of the think tanks of Beijing,” he said. “Many people, very well informed about U.S. politics, wanted to talk about the subject and gave highly granular accounts of voting patterns in various Pennsylvania and Wisconsin counties.”

But these sophisticated observers favor neither candidate. “The majority view,” Mitter said, “was that it might not make that much difference on the grounds that relations between the U.S. and China will be turbulent for quite some time.”

Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, and Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, are locked in an extremely close race. With Election Day less than two weeks away, many Americans are feeling anxious and overwhelmed.

At the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on Tuesday, journalist Eugene Scott, currently a Fall 2024 Fellow at the Institute of Politics, asked analysts how people who care about politics and the election outcome can remain engaged without harming their mental health.

John Della Volpe, director of polling at the IOP, which conducts the biannual Harvard Youth Poll, noted stress among 18– to 29-year-olds about the state of the world, along with persistent doubt that current political and economic systems will help them.

“Young people today feel this insecurity and instability about the future,” he said. “They feel like all of the problems that older generations have are trickling down to them.”

Across the political spectrum, voters have expressed frustration and exhaustion, said pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson of Echelon Insights.

“It just feels like the stakes are very high,” she said. “And at the same time, people feel powerless. They feel like those who wish to do them harm have been increasing in their power and ability to harm them, and that’s led some people, particularly those who are consuming the most information about politics, to feel the most anxious” about the consequences the election outcome might mean on their everyday lives.

Whether reality-based or manufactured, fear has long been understood to be an effective turnout tool.

“I think in this election, there’s just a lot of selling fear, and that even people who will say, ‘The other side is out there fearmongering,’ then turn around and do it themselves,” Soltis Anderson said. “They catastrophize what the other side taking power would mean.”

Political anxiety, which psychologists now recognize as a discrete condition, has a significant effect on mental health, which in turn deeply impacts physical health, so, “Yes, this a public health crisis,” said Chris Chanyasulkit, former president of the American Public Health Association.

One simple way to reduce election anxiety is to stop “doomscrolling,” said Chanyasulkit.

“Do not go to bed at night with your phone and reading — it’s terrible. Do not wake up first thing in the morning and reach for your phone to see what’s going on. None of that is good because you’re getting inundated” with outrage tailored to keep users on these platforms. “That’s so not healthy.”

Political engagement doesn’t inevitably lead to anxiety; it can have positive and empowering impacts on people. Research has linked voting to better mental health and better health outcomes overall, said Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation.

And political engagement can include other activities beyond voting, like protesting or running for office, Allen said. Where those pursuits can have detrimental effects on mental health is when people don’t feel tightly connected to others while participating, she said.

“There is this kind of tension between conflict and connection, and that really, I think, is at the core of the question of how we process political anxiety,” Allen said. “Are we processing it in mainly a conflict mode or are we taking the opportunity of engagement to connect with others and do positive work for our communities?”

Generation Z, a key voting cohort in 2024, faces mental health stressors shaped by damaging events during their lifetimes, like the recession of 2008-2009, school shootings, and COVID-driven social isolation, Della Volpe said.

Because they don’t get news from traditional sources, Gen Zers often don’t hear about the good things government has been able to accomplish, which fuels a cycle of negativity, anxiety, and hopelessness.

“That’s why I think it’s so important … for all of us … to remind younger people that things do get better,” he said. “Things have gotten better because of younger people.”

Need a last-minute Halloween costume? Or know any local theater-lovers who might want to own a piece of history? The American Repertory Theater is holding its first-ever public costume sale — selling off pieces from its inventory dating back to the 1980s. The sale, which started last week, runs through Saturday. Prices range from $1 to $50.

“I think people who like to vintage shop will find a treasure trove of things here,” said Alycia Marucci, the A.R.T.’s wardrobe manager. “But I also think that a theater-lover might want to look through the labels, because you can see the history of a garment.” 

Many of the clothes for sale contain custom labels noting the show a costume was used for, and sometimes the name of the actor who wore it. Also for sale: a plethora of items that did not make the cut for a production. Some pieces, sourced by wardrobe designers from contemporary stores, still have the tags on them. 

“We have all kinds of different makers, local and not local. And then we do productions like ‘Life of Pi,’ where a lot of things were sourced internationally,” Marucci said. “So we have every sort of option depending on the show that’s coming through.”

Shoppers will find costumes used in productions such as “Finding Neverland,” “Endlings,” “Moby-Dick,” and more.

An impending renovation to the A.R.T.’s storage space at Fawcett Street sparked the sale, Marucci said. 

“We realized how much stuff we really have, and we realized we really don’t have the labor or the resources to go through every garment and clean it and make sure it’s ready and size it and do all those things,” she said. “So the first thing we wanted to do was offer it up to people who might enjoy it or who might use it before we would.” 

Alissa Cardone, an associate professor of dance at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, was one of those people. 

“I’m always looking for things,” she said. “And I need old underwear and pointy boots for a piece I’m working on.”

Holding two long coats in her arms, she said she also found some pieces for herself. She said she heard about the sale from a friend who told her not to miss it. 

“A lot of people appreciate old versus new.”  

Amanda Marcus, a Cambridge resident on the A.R.T. mailing list, was drawn to the many hats on sale.

“Some of the shows I recognize — ‘Gatsby’ was the most recent one,” she said. “And I saw a couple of ‘Gatsby’ hats in there already.” 

Marcus was accompanied by Alasdair Post-Quinn, who added that the pair is always in the market for unique costume items. 

“We are Burning Man people,” he said, referring to the annual music festival. “We both modify our own clothes by sewing and adding things on, adding lights.” 

The shop will reopen from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the A.R.T. Scene Shop at 155 Fawcett St. in Cambridge.

For millions of people every year, depression is not just an illness but a grueling pattern — anguish, meds, failure, repeat.

Supported by a major grant, two Harvard scientists want to break that pattern, each by his own path.

David Walt is operating at a microscopic level, observing cell abnormalities that may contribute to depression. Diego Pizzagalli is taking a bigger-picture approach, using MRIs and other methods to identify potential treatments by tracking activity in key brain regions. Their common aim, backed by the nonprofit Wellcome Leap, is to speed the path from diagnosis to an effective medication for the individual patient.

“We’re concerned that when people go through this trial-and-error approach, they lose hope,” Pizzagalli said. “We’re really interested in evaluating whether by using tools of neuroscience, we can get to the correct treatment faster.”

More than 22 million U.S. adults suffer at least one major depressive episode every year. The experience is lonely, debilitating, and dangerous. As anxiety, insomnia, and other symptoms take hold, patients lose touch with family and friends. Feelings of isolation interrupt one of the greatest sources of happiness and well-being — relationships — and heighten their risk of suicide. The damage also creeps into broader society, including U.S. workplaces, imposing an economic burden of more than $330 billion annually. 

Research shows varying success with subsequent treatments, with as little as 40 percent of patients able to find a drug that works for them by the fourth try.  

Talk therapy can help, and emerging technologies, including neurostimulation, have shown promise. But one of the most common treatments for depression — antidepressants such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, which are often prescribed by a primary care physician — has yielded mixed results, in part because of a grindingly inexact matching process.

“You end up with lots of people who, frankly, need a personalized individualized analysis to figure out the underlying basis of their disease that can be addressed by a particular drug,” Walt said. “It’s just sort of guesswork right now and there is no strong scientific basis for what’s right for each person. It’s, ‘Let’s try this drug and see if it works.’”

The goal of both researchers is to help shape an approach that is more effective for being more precise. “We’ve wanted to convince ourselves — and the field, hopefully — that personalized treatment is possible in depression,” Pizzagalli said. “Persistent symptoms can be very impairing and failed antidepressant treatments are associated with costs to individuals and society, with loss of productivity.”

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Written in the blood

Walt, a professor of pathology and the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Bioinspired Engineering at Harvard Medical School, wants to know whether certain proteins at work in the brain can shed light on how depression develops, allowing scientists to identify potential treatments. He and his team are studying four major cell types, each serving a different function with unique protein molecules.

“The expectation is that the proteins that we capture and measure from these four different cells will be different in individuals who suffer from major depression compared to those from healthy individuals,” Walt said.

One target is neurons, which transmit messages among brain regions. Changes in neurotransmitters such as serotonin can contribute to depression. (SSRIs function by increasing serotonin levels in the brain.) The other areas of focus are oligodendrocytes, microglia, and astrocytes, which influence cell structure, immune response, and metabolic function, respectively.

Any abnormality in these cells can weaken the connections in the brain and leave a person more vulnerable to mood disorders. Past research has suggested that antidepressants can help our brains repair and form new connections among damaged cells.

If investigators can determine which cell types are being affected in patients with depression, then eventually they should be able to target the underlying mechanism responsible for those changes, Walt said. If it’s a neurotransmission problem, then specialists can focus on finding drugs, including SSRIs, that best target neuron growth and regulation. If the issue is related to immune cells, researchers can try to identify drugs that affect the immune system.

Walt has zeroed in on extracellular vesicles — pieces of cells that travel out of the brain and into our blood.   

By comparing blood — which contains less than 1 percent material from the brain — with spinal fluid, he and his team have been able to identify specific markers in these different cell types that allow them to isolate extracellular vesicles in the blood.  

The goal he has in mind would be life-changing.

“If you could identify the right markers in blood, then you could give a drug to somebody, and then have them come back the next week, take their blood, and measure biomarkers to determine if the drug is working,” he said. 

“You may say, ‘This isn’t working, because your markers are exactly where they were last week before you started taking the drug. We need to switch you to a new drug immediately.’ Our goal is to avoid having patients wait six months to see if a drug works. If we can, it means we’re making progress toward helping these patients find the right treatment, compress the timeframe, and reduce the risk of suicide.”

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Watching for a breakthrough

Pizzagalli, a psychiatry professor at the Medical School and director of the Center for Depression, Anxiety and Stress Research at McLean Hospital, has spent his career examining psychological, environmental, and neurobiological factors associated with mood disorders, including major depression.

For the Wellcome Leap project, his lab is probing behavior and brain function for markers that could be used to assess the severity of a patient’s depression and guide treatment choices.

The work builds on a previous study that deployed neurocognitive tests, EEG, and functional MRI to pinpoint biomarkers that could predict a positive response to widely prescribed drugs: the atypical antidepressant bupropion, whose brand name is Wellbutrin, or the SSRI sertaline, whose brand name is Zoloft. That research led the team to imaging methods that in both cases reliably predicted a favorable response. The working premise now is that an MRI might be able to determine whether an SSRI or other medication is the best avenue of treatment.

“Our hope is that individuals with the bupropion markers will do very well when receiving bupropion, and vice versa for the patients with the sertraline markers,” said Pizzagalli, whose team will also weigh personal attributes (age, race, sex, etc.), personality traits, and performance in neuropsychological tests.

The functional MRI is recorded with patients in a resting state. Researchers track activated brain regions.   

“Brain regions become activated with anything that we do: Thoughts, emotions, motivation, and so on,” said Pizzagalli, adding: “It’s not the case that every single brain region is activating in isolation and not communicating with the other brain regions. Information is basically passed from region to region.”

The two regions his team is most interested in are part of the so-called brain reward system. The nucleus accumbens is very deep in the brain and known for its role in pleasure and motivation; the rostral anterior cingulate cortex is located in the frontal lobe and a key intersection of cognition and emotion.

Pizzagalli is exploring the strength of the link between the two regions, which could help a prescriber decide between an SSRI and a non-SSRI.

“What we’re doing is moving from looking at the level of brain activity in a single region to activity across a network,” he said.    

Both Walt and Pizzagalli pointed out that personalized treatment of depression and other brain disorders has been a challenge for reasons that go far beyond the capabilities of any one lab. Cost is a major obstacle, as is the deep individual complexity of the illness. But clarifying that such personalized treatment is possible and worth pursuing would be a major turning point, both for clinicians and their patients.

“The task is on researchers just to show whether these types of approaches can actually dramatically improve the response rate,” Pizzagalli said.

The journey to an answer is in its very early stages, both he and Walt were quick to note. Pizzagalli’s lab expects to finish work on their project in mid-to-late 2025. The first phase of Walt’s initiative is set to wrap this month, but the larger plan will unfold over years.

In the end, the researchers hope to have made major progress toward reclaiming time for patients and families suffering under the sometimes crushing weight of depression.

“It might be a blood test, it might be a blood test combined with imaging, it could be a blood test combined with imaging combined with certain behavioral features,” Walt said. “It could be that all of these tools, or a combination, will be necessary to really do precision diagnostics and be able to identify the right drug for the right person at the right time.”

 If you or someone you know is struggling with a mental health issue, the National Institute of Mental Health has resources that can help. In a crisis, use the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. On campus, help is available through Counseling and Mental Health Services. There is also a 24/7 support line: 617-495-2042.

Surveys have shown that Americans’ faith in the nation’s political system and its institutions has declined, as partisan polarization and civic disengagement has risen. In response, there is a growing consensus that students — and American democracy itself — would greatly benefit from more robust civic education.

Higher education, in particular, has long had an essential role in helping foster a healthy democracy, but are colleges and universities doing enough to meet the moment?

A panel of specialists on public policy and civic engagement considered the many options during a talk last week hosted by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Democratic Knowledge Project at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

During the current period of “incredible turmoil and debate” on college campuses across the country, the question over how higher ed should fulfill that role has become especially salient and important, said Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor, during the Friday event.

Allen is also director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, which focuses on the challenge of how to tune up democratic institutions to ensure they continue operating as intended and to fix components when they falter.

Experts say if we truly want to prepare college students to be fully engaged in civic life after graduation, schools need to insist that appropriate training be part of an undergraduate education. That would include necessary academic work as well as the development of the intellectual and social tools necessary to engage in the kind of vigorous, fact-based debate that living in a healthy democracy requires.

It’s “absolutely essential” that every college student take courses in American government, politics, history, and economics regardless of their concentration or career goals, said John Bridgeland ’82, who chairs Civic Enterprises, a social enterprise firm, and worked on domestic policy initiatives during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

Schools must also expand how students understand democracy — that it’s a cooperative activity all citizens are part of and responsible for maintaining, Bridgeland argued. And they could do more to encourage and facilitate stints in public service, perhaps by linking it to tuition defrayment.

“I think cultivating the spirit not only of individual economic success, but of collective work mutually tied to one another, is the secret sauce our nation needs right now more than ever,” he said.

Allen noted that one of the biggest obstacles schools must overcome to provide “a democracy education” is “ideological self-segregation and an absence of civil discourse across political divides.”

Panelists said there are some strategies that can help.

Schools not only ought to be deliberate in teaching the history and requisite skills of democracy, but also model the behaviors of a democratic society, such as supporting arguments with facts, listening to and considering evidence from other viewpoints, and having sometimes-uncomfortable conversations, said Cecilia Muñoz, a senior White House staffer on domestic policy during the Obama administration.

Beyond dialogue, schools can also bring students from different viewpoints to work together on local, real-world problems so they learn a cornerstone of democracy — how to move beyond ideological differences in order to get things done, said Bridgeland.

Changing attitudes, curricula, and behavior certainly won’t be easy. Still, lots of college and university officials remain eager to see their institutions play a more intentional role “renovating” American democracy and educating its citizenry, said Rajiv Vinnakota, president of Institute for Citizens and Scholars, an organization assisting more than 100 college presidents pushing for better civic preparedness.

Contrary to news reports about ideological clashes on college campuses over the Middle East or presidential politics that might suggest students today are less open to engaging with those from different perspectives, survey data show “that actually isn’t the case,” Vinnakota said.

One major structural challenge that school administrators will need to overcome, however, is that students are often afraid to speak their minds freely because of a fear over “being canceled” by peers and on social media. It’s a “critical” societal problem with no clear solution, he warned.

The world has a plastic problem. Not only are nonbiodegradable plastics clogging oceans and landfills, but they’re also invading our bodies.

“Ingestion is the primary route of exposure, and we are consuming about 5 grams of micronanoplastics per week; that’s the equivalent of a credit card,” said Philip Demokritou, the founding director of the Environmental Health Nanoscience Laboratory and the Center for Nanotechnology and Nanotoxicology at the School of Public Health.

We’re “drowning” in plastic exposure, according to Don Ingber, the founding director of the Wyss Institute and a professor both in the Medical School and School of Engineering. From the synthetic clothes we wear to wildfire smoke, it’s nearly impossible to escape. And our bodies can’t fully break plastics down. This is especially alarming as research has found plastic in nearly every bodily organ.

“These particles … are what we call sustained release vehicles, meaning they’re just sitting there, and every day they’re releasing a little bit for the rest of the lifetime of those cells in your gut or other organs,” Ingber said. “That makes [them] even more dangerous.”

Mary Johnson, a research scientist in the Environmental Health Department of the School of Public Health, said more research is needed to figure out who is at the highest risk of exposure. But all consumers should be trying to minimize their use of plastics — from what they wear to how they furnish their homes to how they prepare food — until better, biodegradable alternatives can be found.

“As a consumer I feel like I can’t wait; I want to minimize my own exposure,” Johnson said.

In this episode, host Samantha Laine Perfas speaks with Demokritou, Ingber, and Johnson about the prevalence of plastic — and what to do about it.

Transcript

Philip Demokritou: Ingestion is the primary route of exposure, and we are consuming about 5 grams of micronanoplastics per week; that’s the equivalent of a credit card.

Samantha Laine Perfas: Our planet is filled with plastic. On average, we produce 430 million tons every year, most of which is used only for a short period of time and then discarded. But plastic isn’t just in the environment: it’s now in our bodies. Microplastics have been found in our bloodstreams, lungs, and other organs, and we’re only recently beginning to understand how this affects our health.

How destructive is our relationship to plastic?

Welcome to “Harvard Thinking,” a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life. Today, I’m joined by:

Demokritou: Philip Demokritou. I’m the founding director of the Harvard Nanotechnology and Nanotoxicology Center at the School of Public Health.

Laine Perfas: His current research focuses on how nanomaterials and particles affect our health and safety. Then:

Don Ingber: Don Ingber. I’m the founding director of the Wyss Institute and a professor both in the Medical School and School of Engineering, as well as Boston Children’s Hospital.

Laine Perfas: He’s also a cell biologist and a pioneer in the field of bionics. And finally:

Mary Johnson: Mary Johnson. I am a research scientist in the Environmental Health Department of the School of Public Health.

Laine Perfas: Her work focuses on immune health and investigates how the effects of air pollution, wildfires, and other environmental exposures affect our bodies.

And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, your host and a writer for the Harvard Gazette. Today, we’ll take a close look at the plastic problem.

I want to start off by asking why are we so obsessed with plastic?

Demokritou: I think plastics have become an integral part of modern life because of their low cost, amazing properties, and they definitely made our life easier. We found one of the very first ads that the industry put together and it starts with, “Plastic is fantastic.” So, I guess we live in the age of disposable living. We are all addicted to plastics.

Ingber: It’s basically our culture’s heroin. It does everything you’d want it to do at incredibly low cost with high fidelity, reproducibility, manufacturability. It’s useful in every way, as Philip was saying. It’s a fantastic product, it’s just getting rid of it is the problem. It’s killing us over time; I mean the whole planet, not just humans. I mean, marine life, animals. In the last 15, 20 years, it’s really reached the point where it’s obvious when you see large expanses of ocean filled with plastic trash, that doesn’t degrade in landfills and so forth, but it was always there. We just weren’t aware.

Demokritou: When we don’t manage plastics in a sustainable way, then it becomes a problem. And that’s the case for every chemical we’re using, every material we’re using. And unfortunately, the modus operandi of our society when it comes to chemicals is, let’s put them out there and we’ll worry and clean the mess 20, 30 years later when scientists like myself, Don, and Mary discover that they are causing harm to the environment and human beings.

Laine Perfas: So I want to talk a little bit about microplastics and nanoplastics specifically. What are they and why are they so concerning to our health?

Johnson: So the plastics are wonderful when they’re being used, but then they decompose. And as they decompose, the microplastics are small plastics, less than 5 millimeters, and they can further degrade into nanoplastics, which are even smaller. And the concern, obviously, is not only is it destroying our environment, a few years ago we found out it’s in our blood, and now we’re finding out it’s in a lot of our organs and tissues and really it’s everywhere. I think that has heightened our concern and our awareness that we really have to figure out a way to prevent this degradation and exposing ourselves to the microplastics.

Laine Perfas: How is it getting into our bodies?

Ingber: I was in meetings 15, 20 years ago when the field of nanotoxicology sort of initiated when people realized that these particles are getting — this was all types of nanoparticles, not just plastics — getting into every organ in the body, and it was hard to understand how this could be happening because we have barriers in our tissues. Maybe 14 years ago we developed devices called organs-on-chips that have human cells oriented in little engineered devices that have hollow channels that could have flow of fluids to mimic blood and air. And we lined it by the lung cells that line our air sac. And we put particles that were some of the more plastic particles in the lung. And what we found is that actually breathing motions increase their absorption enormously, and it’s analogous, I think, to like viruses going across, which are similar size, going across the barrier of these tissues. They’re being picked up the way we pick up other things that are small and transport them. It wasn’t like tearing apart the tissue at all. It really made me think, whoa, I mean, the idea that this can cross all the tissue barriers got really worrisome to me.

Laine Perfas: I mentioned at the top of the episode too that we’re also literally eating them; and I guess that was surprising to me, that from consuming them it was also entering our bodies because like you said, Don, I would have thought that our bodies were able to just digest it. And there it goes. And it’s no longer in us. But that’s not the case. So I’d love to hear more about that as well.

Demokritou: That’s what I call the two I’s in terms of the exposure: inhalation, of course, but also ingestion. Actually, if you look at the human population data, you will see that ingestion is the primary route of exposure, and we are consuming about 5 grams of micronanoplastics per week; that’s the equivalent of a credit card. So ingestion is a major route. And we have a grant from USDA, and we’re looking also at how these micronanoplastics from soil make it to edible plants. And also through the trophic transfer, they can make it through the food chain. Now, I think Don put it nicely, anything in the nanoscale, it’s very clear that they can bypass biological barriers. When it comes to micronanoplastics, especially nanoplastics, they are everywhere. It’s the byproduct of degradation over 50, 60 years that we throw them out there. We have many evidence that these nanoplastics in particular, because of their hydrophobic nature, they can really become systemic. We found them everywhere. Every organ, every week, it’s a study that we found them. In this organ, in that organ. Of course, for those of us that were doing toxicology, we know that the dose makes the poison. So it’s not just the identification in organs, it’s also in certain quantities that they can really cause harm. And that’s the question we’re trying to address right now.

Johnson: I’d like to also bring up microplastics in the air, I think [that] is underappreciated, and we don’t have a standardized method for measuring it, especially on a populational level. And we do research looking at how wildfires, how the smoke impacts your immune system. We know that there’s also microplastics being inhaled with the smoke. But the standardization of measurements isn’t there yet to be able to accurately quantify how much we are inhaling, especially in those special circumstances with increased air pollution or wildfire smoke.

Ingber: I learned that one of the biggest sources of microplastics is tires; as tires run on the road and you’ll see those little black marks, it’s leaching into the air. And then also textiles. We’re just surrounded, we’re bathed in them. The other point I think that’s important, it may not be obvious, is that, when we ingest foods, we digest them, right? We break them down to small molecules that could be absorbed, and those that are not digested usually go out in feces or urine. But plastics are not broken down to their individual links, if you like, we call them monomers. Yes, their small bits are released through breakdown, but that’s more physical breakdown over time and not chemical breakdown. And that’s what makes them really so dangerous.

Laine Perfas: It seems like a study every day is coming out, oh, we found microplastics here in the body, or in this organ, or here. So we know that it’s very commonly present in our bodies. What do we know so far about the health risks, about how that actually is affecting our bodies, and some of the dangers that it can cause?

Demokritou: In public health, usually we use epidemiology to come up with the associations of exposures to whatever disease. And that’s an area that when it comes to micronanoplastics, we don’t have many studies out there. So we need to do more of these kind of studies to link the associations between exposures and diseases. Now, in terms of the toxicology of micronanoplastics, that’s a little bit more mature field. I’ve been studying nanoscale materials and plastics for probably 10 years, especially nanoplastics through the NIH-funded center we had at Harvard. The evidence that nanoscale plastics in particular, that they can bypass biological barriers, I think, that’s very strong. You put them in the lungs, they will translocate, become systemic, they will go to different organs. Also, at the cellular molecular level, we see red flags. We can see them becoming internalized in the gut, for instance, we even found them in the nuclei. We publish a ton of papers on DNA damage, the potential to generate reactive exospecies and interfere with cellular functions. Actually, I’m using one of the organ-on-a-chip platforms that Don developed to understand how they behave in the gut. We have a ton of evidence, but we need to understand mechanistically what’s happening. Not all micronanoplastics are created equal. They have unique properties, different polymers, different sizes, morphologies. So we have a ton of work to do to study potential health effects. We are not there yet.

Ingber: I’m excited to hear you working with intestine-on-a-chip because that would be a great model for this. We’ve also integrated microbiome into these intestine chips. And the microbiome can also modify the plastics, or they can be modified by the plastic. And these plastics can bring toxins along with them, like heavy metals. And that’s a whole area I think that people have explored more in the marine-life area, but it’s probably affecting us as well. In our first paper that I mentioned, where we looked at nanoparticle transport in the lung chip, we could absolutely show activation of inflammation. And inflammation is, you know, at the heart of almost every disease and also even cancer progression. It was the nanoparticles being taken up that drove that.

Johnson: There was a recent study that did come out that I thought was pretty exciting, where they looked at patients who are undergoing carotid endarterectomies, so they were scraping the plaque out of the arteries, and then they analyzed the plaque for microplastics. And they found that those who had microplastics in the plaque, I believe it was at least 50 percent, I think it was more than 50 percent, they were able to associate the microplastic levels with morbidity and mortality three years later. And to my knowledge, it’s one of the first studies that were able to show basically a clinical outcome associated with the presence of the microplastics.

Demokritou: One additional point, Sam. All the plastics that we’re currently using, they are loaded with additives. And those additives have plenty of literature, historical, epidemiological, and toxicological data that they can cause harm. We know the phthalates, that they’re there to make the plastic soft, they’re endocrine-disrupting chemicals. And these micronanoplastics now, when they’re taken up by our cells and the body, they are the carriers of these additives so they can more efficiently deliver chemicals into our body. So, it’s kind of a Trojan horse of delivering chemicals from the plastics themselves. We have a paper now in review that as these micronanoplastics wandering in the environment, they carry other environmental pollutants on their surface because of their hydrophobic nature. And also they can really deliver these environmental pollutants more effectively in our bodies.

Ingber: It’s like the cumulative exposure to chemicals of any type that matters, not just whether you saw it for a short time. And these particles, when they’re ingested, are what we call sustained-release vehicles, meaning they’re just sitting there and every day they’re releasing a little bit for the rest of the lifetime of those cells in your gut or other organs, and so that makes it even more dangerous.

Laine Perfas: That actually gets to a clarifying question I wanted to ask, which is: Is it the plastic itself that’s dangerous, or is it all the additives and chemicals that are in the plastic?

Demokritou: I think it’s a combination of the two. I mean, you cannot rule one or the other. And that is one of the major knowledge gaps that we have in toxicological studies of micronanoplastics. Actually, in my labs right now, we have developed platforms that enable us to simulate what happens to a plastic material across its life cycle as it goes through these stressors, which can be mechanical, it can be weathering, UV photo oxidation, thermal stressors. We can shorten what happens to plastic material over 50 years and we make what we call reference micronanoplastic materials that are environmentally relevant. And those are the ones we use in our toxicological studies.

Laine Perfas: Mary, I actually wanted to ask you, with microplastics, I saw some of your work was actually looking at different communities who are at higher risk of being affected than others. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Johnson: A lot of our research has looked at communities that are disadvantaged and are typically exposed to high levels of chronic air pollution and/or wildfire smoke. We don’t have hard data yet, but within that context, it is thought that those groups would also be more exposed to microplastics. A similar concept would be those who are living next to industries, and those also tend to be the disadvantaged populations, and so those types of vulnerable populations are probably going to fall fairly similar to what we see for those exposed to chronic air pollution and exposure to wildfire smoke. There have been a limited amount of studies, not our own, that have found that, at least in the indoor environment, infants are more at risk for exposure, and the second category would be preschoolers, and as you go up, you become less and less exposed to the microplastics. As we’re able to monitor indoor or outdoor air for actual microplastic numbers, we’ll have a better idea of the different age ranges and vulnerabilities.

Ingber: Do they think that infants and small children have greater exposure because everything that you give to a kid is plastic because it tends to be cheap and safer and they put everything in their mouths? Is that why or something about absorb from air?

Johnson: I do believe that the younger populations are exposed to a lot more plastics, but I believe that particular study was focusing on indoor dust, which is where the microplastics were primarily found.

Laine Perfas: I guess I’m surprised. I would have thought that people who are older, who’ve been on earth longer, would be more at risk.

Johnson: Yeah, I believe it was, they were referring to the inhalation basically of the dust in the indoor home, which makes sense, and the younger they are and they’re on the floors and not washing their hands and crawling and closer to the dust itself in the home. But it’s a very limited amount of research that’s come out so far, looking at those associations. So I do think much more needs to be done looking at which populations are truly vulnerable and we should be targeting to try to prevent exposure as much as possible.

Demokritou: I think it might be worth [discussing] a little bit more what happens on the global scale. There is a very recent paper, came out in Nature, which is the first effort to quantify and come up with an inventory of emissions of plastics around the world. And in high-income countries, generally speaking, we did well, not amazingly well, but we did well in containing and controlling the plastic pollution. That’s not the case in low-income countries. About 50, 60 million tons of plastic waste out of these 250 million metric tons that we’re generating globally, it’s uncontained. And in these countries, you will see open fires and burning plastic. You will see debris everywhere and the populations in those countries are getting exposed at higher levels compared to all of us in the United States, for instance. So we really need to do a little bit more at a global scale because environmental pollutants, they transcend boundaries. So if you put micronanoplastics in the air, they will travel, especially the nanoscale particles. They can go thousands of miles, and they can be everywhere. We need to keep that in mind as we address this global issue.

Johnson: I’d like to also bring up, there was a study that sampled tap water globally and 80 percent of the samples had microplastics in them. It’s certainly another issue that maybe isn’t talked about as much, although there was a study looking at bottled water and levels of microplastics, and it was pretty shocking how high of a concentration that were in the bottles. So many areas, I think that, need to be addressed.

Ingber: It obviously depends on whether you have copper pipes, or nowadays PVC is used all over and actually plastic tubing is used now quite a bit. It probably varies enormously, but it’s hard to escape.

Sam, I think it’s important to note that plastics is a general term that are, you know, materials that can be easily formed and take shapes that you desire and that’s where its initial term came from. In medicine, there are plastics that are biodegradable. That’s very different. Those can be broken down to the individual monomers or links. And so we’re talking about ones that can’t be broken down here, often petroleum industry-based and so forth. There’s a lot of work going on at my institute and other places in terms of both bioplastics, things that are easily even compostable, you can put it in the compost to break it down, or ways to remediate and break down plastics that are all over the place. I think that is really where hope lies.

Laine Perfas: I actually wanted to ask a question about that. How are we doing when it comes to discovering plastic alternatives?

Demokritou: We really need to substitute the non-biodegradable plastics, especially the ones that are single-use. Myself and Kit Parker from Wyss Institute, we have this project trying to extract biopolymers from food waste and then turn them into potential nanofibers to replace food packaging, which is a major source of plastic. And actually most of the food packaging we’re using, it’s single-use. So it will end up in landfills. We developed and we published a paper in Nature, I think a year or two ago, that we developed the first water-soluble, washable plastic material that can be used as an alternative for food packaging.

Ingber: Maybe 10 years ago, we developed a material that was inspired by insect cuticle, right? Think of a lobster, you know, or a beetle, very hard shell, but they’re also flexible. And it turns out that it’s all the same material that’s almost like plywood made up of layers; it’s called chitin in insects. And so we made something we called shrilk, which was the chitin, or breakdown products called chitosan, from shrimp shells, and silk fibroin, from silk. Chitosan is used in medical products for wound healing and silk is in surgical sutures, so it’s safe. And when we recreated the layer-by-layer structure, we actually had material that was optically clear but had the strength of aluminum foil and it could be molded. And so we were really excited about that. The challenges in that world, and I think for even Philip’s technology, is scaling up manufacturing so that you can do this at a cost-effective way.

The other side of this that we’ve had some really exciting recent breakthroughs is breaking down of plastics. And there have been some groups recently published that they can find microbes, bacteria that can degrade one type of plastic. And that’s gotten a huge excitement. We have bacteria that we isolated from the microbiome of a worm that degrades plastic on its own. And it degrades at least four different types of the major classes of plastic, and that’s led to a startup company; that was between my lab and George Church’s at the Wyss Institute. The reason we’re excited about this new startup is that it can work in a complex mixture. It doesn’t need to go through the current recycling pipeline of isolating each bit and then trying to degrade one at a time. And I think that’s the kind of thing that we need.

Laine Perfas: Given what we know and don’t know, are there things that we can do as consumers to reduce our exposure now, while we wait for some of these other changes to happen?

Demokritou: I think we should start from the societal level. We really need to actually come up with a strategy, and this is what we call the “three R waste hierarchy.” So we need to reduce use of plastics. We need to reuse plastics as much as we can. Of course, recycling has to increase, where 9 percent in the United States, it’s very low, and the single-use plastics that will end up in the environment, we need to substitute them, if possible with biodegradable, nontoxic plastics. Of course, we need to get all stakeholders on board. We need to redesign products, which may add to the cost, and it’s also the question of who is paying this add-on cost? Is it the consumer? Those are fundamental questions that we really need to start discussing. And the most effective approach is to do a source reduction. If we reduce the use, if all of us reduce the use of plastics, myself included, I think that can be a really good start.

Ingber: Think about how quickly solar and wind have changed in terms of energy. It required huge political shifts and financial incentives. And I think it’s got to be at that level. I mean, sure, every individual could stop buying plastic water bottles and using plastic bags and use wood cutting boards, but it’s got to be top-down at the same time.

Demokritou: There is this effort by United Nations to put in place a legally binding global plastics treaty, similar to the climate treaty, which is gaining track actually the last couple years; there are already I think 150 countries, signed this treaty. And again, this is at the global level because we need to see the plastic crisis across the board, not only at the local level, and not only at the high-income countries.

Johnson: I guess I would say, obviously, yeah, everything has to be dealt with at a global level, but even so, as a consumer I feel like I can’t wait, I want to minimize my own exposure. And I think having the mindset of when you purchase something, actually knowing what you’re buying helps. Simple examples would be clothing, synthetic clothing versus buying an all-cotton product or an area rug. Synthetic rugs are really cheap and soft. And wool rugs cost more, but you would be reducing the potential amount of microplastics that you’re being exposed to. You mentioned the kitchen. I do try to have nothing plastic used in the kitchen, if possible, it’s not always possible, and avoid, if there is plastic, it being exposed to heat, which can make the chemicals leach out faster. And I think it would be helpful to consumers to have some type of labeling on products, especially until we get these biodegradable plastics, so people are more educated and can make better choices in trying to minimize their exposure to the plastics.

Laine Perfas: So all of these are good suggestions for minimizing future exposure on a global and personal scale. Is there anything that we know of that we can do to remove the plastic that’s already in our bodies?

Ingber: Yeah. I think that’s something we need to figure out.

Demokritou: Another important element, Sam, is, we need better monitoring. Plastics, micronutrient plastics are not in the list of the chemicals that we’re monitoring in terms of biomonitoring. I know some states like California, they’re trying to include micronanoplastics in their plans. And also the reporting is very important. But we need to develop the methods to be able to do it efficiently, the identification and quantification, because it’s not just the identification. It’s not that I found one microplastic in my bottle of water. So it’s the dose makes the poison. We need to quantify our exposures at the human population level.

Laine Perfas: So if I could give each of you a magic wand that you could wave to either speed up the research on something that’s already happening, or to just solve an aspect of this problem, what do you think are the things that would make the biggest difference on this issue right now?

Ingber: You heard Philip say that we want to reduce, replace, reuse. What I’m seeing out there, and I get to see technologies that are really out there coming down the pipeline at the Institute, I really do think this idea of harnessing the way some organisms can break down plastics. And so it is possible. And so what we have to do is not only find ones that break it down, but link it into a cycle so that you have a full remediation, reuse, replacement cycle. And do it in a cost-effective way. It has to be cost-effective, or it will never get anywhere.

Johnson: I guess for my wish, I think having a scalable method to accurately measure the microplastics, whether it’s air or water or in tissue, would be really advantageous, so we can begin to better understand the exposures obviously, but the health impacts.

Demokritou: I think, definitely we need technologies to clean the mess we created, but we really need to start thinking of how we can reduce the use of plastics, because we can’t just throw toxic compounds out there and then develop the technologies to clean the mess.

Laine Perfas: Thank you all for joining me for this conversation. I learned a lot and I really appreciate it.

Ingber: Thank you.

Demokritou: Thank you.

Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening; to find links to all of our episodes and a transcript of this one, visit harvard.edu/thinking. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas. It was edited by Ryan Mulcahy, Simona Covel, and Paul Makishima with additional production and editing support from Sarah Lamodi. Original music and sound designed by Noel Flatt. This podcast was produced by Harvard University, copyright 2024.

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Universities are repositories of fascinating ideas. So why is academic writing so boring? Leonard Cassuto thinks it’s all a matter of keeping in mind that good writing is about keeping the reader interested. (Hint: Be a better storyteller.)

Cassuto, A.M. ’85, Ph.D. ’89, a Fordham English professor and journalist, recently published a new book, “Academic Writing as if Readers Matter.” He said he got the idea for the project while teaching expository writing as a graduate student, helping writers with different backgrounds and interests hone their communication skills, particularly in academic writing.

Cassuto’s desire to help make academic writing more accessible and compelling has dovetailed in recent decades with his participation in ongoing discussions to rethink graduate education. The goal there is to focus more tightly on work that advances society, not just some arcane academic interest — along with being able to better explain that work to diverse audiences.

Cassuto recently spoke to the Gazette about his work. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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You start your book by pointing out that all academic writers begin their careers writing for one person: their teacher. Why does that create problems?

This is the primal scene of academic writing: some student writing some paper for some teacher someplace. It happens again and again and is the process by which we are socialized into the community of academic writers.

The distinguishing feature of that primal scene is one that I think gets very little attention, namely that the reader (in this case the teacher) is being paid. You grow up as a writer where your audience is one who can never be bored or discouraged because they’re being paid to read to the end of it. You’re learning in some sense that the reader doesn’t matter that much and that they’re going to be with you no matter what.

This is inevitably the root of many potential bad habits, which can burst into flower as writers become more and more advanced. One of the core motivations of this book is to encourage writers to recognize this relationship and to try to eclipse it — to write as though the reader is not being paid. The results are going to be much better in every respect.

Academic writing has a bad reputation, particularly among readers who value good prose. Would you say that criticism is deserved?

Increasingly so, and this book serves as both a handbook and an advice book. That’s the book’s beating heart.

But another central objective is to understand academic writers as a community. When we are writing, we’re not just writing for ourselves. If we alienate our audience, individually and collectively, it’s part of a larger problem that we’re all creating.

Academia and higher education have to be a public good. In order for that to happen, we need to be able to communicate in a way that people are going to hear what we’re saying and receive the message. Whether these are scientists writing about how to make semiconductors or whether it’s a professor of politics who’s writing about how we should understand the geopolitical context of an event that’s happening someplace in the world, if academia is going to do its job and take care of the public, then the communication has to be intact. Otherwise it creates disdain for that project and skepticism about what emerges from the academy. It’s the business of the community, collectively.

The tips and the advice about how to become a better writer have to be a collective objective. We have to get better; we have to repair the relation between town and gown so that we can continue to take care of each other productively.

“Too many people in academia think it’s more important to show that you’re smart than it is to communicate with somebody.”

What are some of the most common pitfalls for academic writers?

Here are a few of the greatest hits: One is that too many academic writers don’t understand the importance of story. Stories are how human beings have been communicating with each other since before we could write. Human beings are storytelling animals. We are people who live by story, and every argument is a story, and every story is an argument. If academic writers are most accustomed to thinking of themselves as making arguments, then it needs to unfold in a narrative way. If it doesn’t, it’s not going to be as successful.

Then, academic writing is riddled with jargon. Jargon doesn’t have to be a bad thing; it can be an efficiency, where people are talking to other people who understand the same language. But jargon creates an in-group and an out-group, those who understand and those who do not. If your reader is not necessarily a member of that in-group, then you’re being — simply put — unfriendly. You’re saying, “I don’t really care about you.” That sort of relationship is not productive of collaboration, either in the present or in the future.

And third, too many academic writers don’t understand the necessary relationship between the abstract and the concrete. Without the concrete, the abstract is a bunch of airy-fairy ideas that are floating off in the distance. Every time the reader thinks they’ve got a grasp on them, it turns out they are wisps that drift away. But without the abstract, the concrete is just a pile of bricks, a bunch of facts that aren’t being tied together by anything. We need the abstract and the concrete to coexist. If a writer neglects this necessary connection, the chances are they’re not going to be able to be as persuasive.

You make the case that academic writing can actually be fun. How would making academic writing more fun prove a benefit to a scholar or a student?

I think that if writers remember they are people who are talking to other people, that’s the first step. There is a difference between good and bad scientific writing, and it isn’t just about questions of clarity; good science writing is also animated by sensibility. Sensibility can take many forms.

In this book I use a lot of lively metaphors. They’re designed not only to teach but to also to make the reader smile. There are different ways to communicate a sense of self or a sense of voice. The conventions of a particular discipline might dictate guidelines around that, but you can still have a voice.

Creative writing and academic writing are often seen as being at odds with one another. Can academic writing be creative?

“Creative writing” is a term of art that we use to talk about fiction, poetry, and drama, but if we think about what the words in the phrase actually mean, something that’s creative is original; it has vitality.

You can find a lot of fiction, poetry, and drama that isn’t creative by that definition, because it’s cliched, hackneyed, dead on the page. And inversely, you can find writing that is not fiction — such as academic writing — that exhibits all of these qualities that we attribute to the creative. There’s originality; there’s the vital spark, a sense of life on the page.

All writers should think of themselves as creative writers, that you’re going to do your best work if you try to create something where there wasn’t something before.

Some of these bad writing habits stem from academic anxiety or the fear the writer might be seen as “clodpoll,” as you so eloquently put it. How can writers work through that fear?

Academia as a culture promotes some bad habits of thought and being. Too many people in academia think it’s more important to show that you’re smart than it is to communicate with somebody. In fact, a writer, fearing being called “not smart,” is going to construct all kinds of defenses that inhibit understanding and communication. It tells their reader, “If you work like a sled dog, you might be able to understand it; unless you can’t, in which case, well, that’s your problem.”

I think too many academic readers have had the experience of pushing through academic writing that behaves that way. We’re not taught often enough that writing clearly and crisply is more apt to be seen as smart, more apt to gain respect — and also more likely to communicate learning.

But culture is very persistent. I understand how hard it can be to change culture, and this book is a gesture and a call for us to examine the culture in which a lot of academic writing is produced.

It’s worth noting that public awareness of A.I. — specifically, ChatGBT, which can be used for writing — burst on the scene as you were working on this book. How do you see A.I. helping or hurting academic writing?

A.I. is a tool. We have absorbed the impact of new technology before, and I think we’re going to do it again. A.I. raises legitimate concerns in many areas of our practice, but I think ultimately it will take its place in our tool kit, and we will do what we need to do in order to use it thoughtfully and productively.

I think the great fear that A.I. is going to replace us is overwrought because of the importance of sensibility. We’re still at the very beginning of learning how to use it, but I hope writers will ultimately benefit from having another tool in their kit, particularly if it can help them do their work faster.

What do you hope readers will take away from reading your book?

Writers need to communicate with a reader who is an actualperson. If we understand and appreciate that those people are out there wanting to learn from us as writers, then we can understand and anticipate their needs. We’ll produce better work. That work has a chance to be part of something bigger than us.

Academic writing is an enterprise, and each individual writer should be the best writer that they’re capable of being. We’re in this together, and we have to be able to understand that this community needs good writing in order for us to exist sustainably and productively with the larger society.

Billions of years ago, long before anything resembling life as we know it existed, meteorites frequently pummeled the planet. One such space rock crashed down about 3.26 billion years ago, and even today, it’s revealing secrets about Earth’s past.  

Nadja Drabon, an early Earth geologist and assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, has questions about what our planet was like during ancient eons rife with meteoritic bombardment, when only single-celled bacteria and archaea reigned — and when it all started to change. When did the first oceans appear? Continents? Plate tectonics? How did all of those violent impacts affect the evolution of life?

Her new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences attempts to answer some of these questions, in relation to the inauspiciously named “S2” meteoritic impact of more than 3 billion years ago, for which geological evidence is found in the Barberton Greenstone belt of South Africa. Through the painstaking work of collecting and examining rock samples centimeters apart and analyzing the sedimentology, geochemistry, and carbon isotope compositions they leave behind, Drabon’s team paints the most compelling picture to date of what happened the day a meteorite the size of four Mount Everests paid Earth a visit. 

“Picture yourself standing off the coast of Cape Cod, in a shelf of shallow water. It’s a low-energy environment, without strong currents. Then all of a sudden, you have a giant tsunami sweeping by and ripping up the sea floor,” said Drabon. 

The S2 meteorite, estimated to have been up to 200 times larger than the one that killed the dinosaurs, triggered a tsunami that mixed up the ocean and flushed debris from the land into coastal areas. Heat from the impact caused the topmost layer of the ocean to boil off, while also heating the atmosphere. A thick cloud of dust blanketed everything, shutting down any photosynthetic activity. 

But bacteria are hardy, and following impact, according to the team’s analysis, bacterial life bounced back quickly. With this came sharp spikes in populations of unicellular organisms that feed off the elements phosphorus and iron. Iron was likely stirred up from the deep ocean into shallow waters by the aforementioned tsunami, and phosphorus was delivered to Earth by the meteorite itself and from an increase of weathering and erosion on land. 

Drabon’s analysis shows that iron-metabolizing bacteria would thus have flourished in the immediate aftermath of the impact. This shift toward iron-favoring bacteria, however short-lived, is a key puzzle piece depicting early life on Earth. According to Drabon’s study, meteorite impact events — while reputed to kill everything in their wake (including, 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs) — carried a silver lining for life.  

“But what this study is highlighting is that these impacts would have had benefits to life, especially early on, and these impacts might have actually allowed life to flourish.” 

Nadja Drabon

“We think of impact events as being disastrous for life,” Drabon said. “But what this study is highlighting is that these impacts would have had benefits to life, especially early on, and these impacts might have actually allowed life to flourish.” 

These results are drawn from the backbreaking work of geologists like Drabon and her students, hiking into mountain passes that contain the sedimentary evidence of early sprays of rock that embedded themselves into the ground and became preserved over time in the Earth’s crust. Chemical signatures hidden in thin layers of rock help Drabon and her students piece together evidence of tsunamis and other cataclysmic events. 

The Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa, where Drabon concentrates most of her current work, contains evidence of at least eight impact events including the S2. She and her team plan to study the area further to probe even deeper into Earth and its meteorite-enabled history. 

Harvard University announced today two new professorships in civil discourse and one in artificial intelligence made possible by a gift from alums Alfred Lin ’94 and Rebecca Lin ’94. These professorships are part of a wider donation that will also support these critical areas of work within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The gift comes as the University recently announced a new report on open inquiry, with recommendations for faculty and students on how to debate and disagree in classrooms and within the larger campus community. Edgerley Family Dean Hopi Hoekstra last year launched a Civil Discourse Initiative at FAS, and undergraduates engaged with the Intellectual Vitality Initiative, both of which promote constructive conversations within Harvard College. 

“Alfred and Rebecca’s support will help foster the practice and study of civil discourse in our classrooms and on our campus, as well as advance innovation and discovery in AI,” said Hoekstra. “Their formative experience as students and enduring commitment to Harvard is evident in this inspiring gift.”

The gift marks the Lins’ continued commitment to the University over three decades, and comes in celebration of their 30th Harvard College reunion. The new donation is part of a larger contribution from the Class of 1994, which this year set the record for highest grossing 30th reunion campaign in Harvard College history. A total of 599 members of the class donated more than $200 million.

The Lin gift will endow two Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professorships in civil discourse, and the Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professor in artificial intelligence in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The Lins’ gift will also launch the Edgerley Family Dean’s Innovation Fund for generative AI.

“As I like to say, Harvard students often strive to do ‘both/and’ rather than settling for ‘either/or.’ Alfred and Rebecca have demonstrated that spirit of possibility beautifully with their latest act of generosity,” said President Alan Garber. “By dedicating their support to civil discourse and artificial intelligence, they are both strengthening the foundation of our campus culture and pushing the boundaries of our teaching practices. Progress in these two areas is fundamental to our future as a University. I am deeply grateful for the support of the Lins and their vote of confidence in Harvard.”

“We came to Harvard with strong values. Some of those values were challenged; some of them were reaffirmed; and we believe that it continues to be a special place where dialogue moves important ideas forward,” Alfred Lin said.

“Alfred and I have tried to support Harvard when we could or consistently, but we also believe in supporting Harvard when times are challenging, and we want to help during those times,” Rebecca Lin said.

The Lins hope their gift will help support an environment where people can “disagree and not be disagreeable.” Alfred recalled auditing “Justice,” a government course previously taught by Michael Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, and Harvey Mansfield, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government, Emeritus (and recently renewed by Sandel). He remembers the two professors taking opposing political views on controversial topics in an effort to find truth. 

“They would argue the extreme sides. They were never disagreeable, and they would always make you think,” Alfred said. “We modeled what we learned about social discourse in ‘Justice’ or other classes when we were just talking around the table at Quincy Grille.”

The Lins’ endowment of two professorships on civil discourse builds on these memories. The Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professor of Civil Discourse will recognize, for a five-year term, faculty who have made significant contributions, whether through teaching, advising, or mentoring, to fostering students’ ability to engage in meaningful dialogue. The second Lin professorship will support a faculty member whose research and teaching focuses on civil discourse and dialogue, ethics, academic freedom, and freedom of speech. 

Alfred studied applied mathematics while Rebecca concentrated in physics at the College. The couple’s earlier gifts gravitated toward supporting financial aid for undergraduates pursuing applied sciences and engineering. Their interest in advancing computer science and artificial intelligence is reflected in their new gifts of the SEAS professorship and to the FAS Dean’s Innovation Fund, which is meant to foreground the importance of integrating generative AI tools into teaching and learning.

Alfred is a partner at Sequoia Capital, where he invests in early stage companies in financial tech, robotics, and healthcare, among others. He sits on several boards, including Airbnb, DoorDash, Houzz, and Zipline. Rebecca is an artist with storyboard credits on various Walt Disney Animation Studios television series and on the feature film “Recess, School’s Out.” She serves on the board of trustees at the California Academy of Sciences and the UCSF Foundation. The couple previously worked at Zappos, where Alfred served as Chairman and COO and Rebecca managed real estate.

In April, the University invited all degree-seeking students to participate in the Higher Education Sexual Misconduct and Awareness (HESMA) survey. In a message to Harvard affiliates on Monday, President Alan Garber announced the release of the results.

The HESMA survey, which was conducted by a consortium of 10 universities, was the third in a series Harvard has used to understand and address issues related to sexual assault, misconduct, and harassment on campus. The first two were held in 2015 and 2019.

The new data shows a statistically significant decline in sexual misconduct at the University since the 2019 survey and indicates that a majority of bystanders who witnessed misconduct intervened. The results also show a high level of awareness of the reporting mechanisms and support services offered to those who have experienced sexual assault or harassment. Still, a significant number of students reported that they did not utilize resources following incidents.

These and other survey results will inform sexual assault and misconduct prevention practices and resource allocation.

The Gazette sat down with Peggy Newell, vice president and deputy to the president, and Kathleen McGinn, principal investigator for Harvard’s HESMA survey and Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School, to discuss the findings.

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Why is it important for the University to continue to gather data in this area?

Newell: We know from the research that we cannot rely on individual disclosures of reports of sexual harassment and assault to determine the prevalence of harm that is occurring within our community. Climate surveys, such as the Association of American Universities (AAU) surveys conducted in 2015 and 2019 and the HESMA survey conducted this year, offer important and reliable information that we can then use to develop strategies and resources for responding to this public health issue.

“The survey is long, and the questions touch on very sensitive subject matter, yet our students clearly were seeking to have their voices heard.”

Peggy Newell

What are the most important findings from this year’s HESMA survey?

Newell: As a starting point, we are grateful to our students for taking the time to participate in this critically important research. The survey is long, and the questions touch on very sensitive subject matter, yet our students clearly were seeking to have their voices heard, with over 35 percent of Harvard students participating in the 2024 survey. The overall data show that the prevalence of all forms of non-consensual sexual contact, harassing behavior, and sexual harassment are lower in in 2024 than in prior rounds of the survey.

McGinn: The prevalence of sexual misconduct experienced by Harvard students was lower in spring 2024 than in spring 2019, but our students continue to experience sexual harassment and sexual assault. Even one incident of sexual assault on our campus is too many. In the large majority of incidents, students reported other students as the people responsible for the sexual misconduct. While our students are knowledgeable about support resources available on campus, these data show that very few students who experience sexual harassment or assault seek support from Harvard resources or programs. On a more positive note, students who observe behavior they believe could lead to sexual harassment or assault are very likely to intervene. 

Newell: Having this information creates an opportunity for us to better understand the prevalence of sexual violence at Harvard currently and to use the data to inform our efforts to prevent harm. It is invaluable to be able to compare changes over the past four years to understand where and how our efforts have or have not made an impact. Additionally, it can help us work on lowering the barriers to seeking support when someone has experienced sexual violence. This is an area that the University is committed to exploring further so that we may better understand what resources and support are needed. 

Since the original AAU survey in 2015, there have been many changes to resources at the University, including the formation of the Office for Gender Equity. For example, the SHARE [Sexual Harassment/Assault Resources and Education] Team is made up of trained counselors to offer trauma-informed counseling, groups, and advocacy for students, staff, faculty, and post-doctoral fellows, and has hired a restorative practitioner. We have also maintained a network of local Title IX Resource Coordinators across the Schools and central administration to provide individual supports to community members impacted by sexual harassment or other sexual misconduct to enable them to access their work or studies.

What trends do you see around the circumstances of assault and harassment cases?

McGinn: As in years past, the majority of undergraduate students who experienced sexual assault while at Harvard report that incidents of sexual assault begin either in on-campus housing or at on-campus social events and involve alcohol; the majority of assaults take place in on-campus housing. For graduate students, incidents of sexual assault are more likely to begin in off-campus social settings. We hope raising awareness of the circumstances around sexual assault will increase bystander awareness and reduce the likelihood of sexual assault in these settings.

“We hope sharing and talking about the survey results communicates that every single incident of sexual assault experienced by students at Harvard is serious and unacceptable.”

Kathleen McGinn

How would you want the results from this survey to help the Harvard community?

McGinn: The first priority is to stop sexual assault and harassment. As a community, we need to speak more frequently and openly about sexual assault and harassment to change long-standing cultural factors that normalize unacceptable, damaging behavior.

Newell: A critical part of this communication involves engagement with our faculty and staff. To encourage this dialogue, in the coming weeks we are launching an updated version of the required eLearning course addressing sexual harassment and other sexual misconduct. This course will serve as a supplement to expanded in-person training that we are offering across the community. This is an important conversation for every member of our community.

McGinn: In addition, Harvard needs to do a better job supporting students who experience sexual harassment or assault. One of the top reasons students provide for not accessing support after being sexually assaulted is that they believe what happened to them is “not serious enough.” We hope sharing and talking about the survey results communicates that every single incident of sexual assault experienced by students at Harvard is serious and unacceptable. 

No one at Harvard University should ever have to experience sexual violence, intimate partner violence, sexual harassment, or stalking. If any Harvard community member needs support, there are options. If you would like to reach the confidential SHARE  Team, please email oge_SHARE@harvard.edu or call 617.496.5636. If you would like to reach Title IX, please email oge_TitleIX@harvard.edu. For more information, please visit oge.harvard.edu/options.

When Olha Aleksic came to Harvard as a graduate student from Ukraine, it was to study the history of Christianity at the Divinity School. During an internship in Widener Library’s Slavic division, she discovered her passion for libraries, which then led to a career in collection development and a reference librarianship working with Ukrainian materials.

Nearly 20 years later, it was Aleksic, now Harvard Library’s Ukrainian bibliographer, who greeted the first lady of Ukraine, Olena Zelenska, at the Widener. It was a key stop in Zelenska’s visit to the University, which was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

During the Sept. 24 visit, Aleksic introduced Zelenska to Harvard Library’s Ukrainian collections, one of the largest and most comprehensive outside of Europe. Among the valuable Ukrainian items in Harvard’s collections are Ivan Fedorov’s “Apostol” and “Primer” (1574), the first books printed in Ukraine.

“The first lady specifically chose to visit Harvard Library because libraries are places where history can be preserved,” noted Aleksic.

Zelenska was officially welcomed in the Widener Rotunda by Martha Whitehead, vice president for the Harvard Library and University librarian.

“We see our collections as a vital resource for Harvard’s Ukrainian Studies programs and as a treasure trove for the distinguished visiting scholars who come to work and study at the Ukrainian Research Institute,” said Whitehead. “Our Ukrainian collections will tell the story of Ukraine and its people far into the future.” 

Zelenska noted her deep appreciation for Harvard Library’s contribution to Ukrainian Studies, presenting Whitehead with “Ukraine and Ukrainians,” an art book by Ivan Honchar, to add to Harvard’s collection.

“This is a very important volume that provides in-depth information about Ukraine and Ukrainians. We’re so pleased to gift it to Harvard Library,” Zelenska said.  

Accepting the books on behalf of the library, Whitehead emphasized its longstanding commitment to its global collections and expanding world knowledge.

“We collect and preserve global voices for present and future generations of scholars,” she said. “Our collections are a vital resource for Harvard’s Ukrainian Studies programs, and we want the full range of Ukrainian thought and experience to be represented here.”

Zelenska also gave Harvard Library three war-damaged books: a children’s book by Oleksandr (Sashko) Dermanskyi; a novel translated from English to Ukrainian by Heather Gudenkauf; and an autobiography by Pavlo Belianskyi. The books were rescued from a ruined warehouse of the Faktor Druk printing house in Kharkiv, which was struck by a missile in May 2024.

Conservators at Harvard Library’s Preservation Services are currently creating custom enclosures for the books to preserve and protect them against further damage. Part of Harvard Library’s mission is to preserve knowledge for the future. It has long rescued and preserved books and cultural materials from places where they are endangered.

“One of our key strategic priorities is preserving knowledge for the future,” said Whitehead. “We have a fabulous team in our Collections Care Lab who will ensure the best care of these books, and our creative librarians will find opportunities to have our users experience their impact.”

Among her other stops, Zelenska also spoke at Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute. To view the video, visit its website.

Billionaires devote vast sums of money to anti-poverty initiatives and green energy reforms. But the world’s wealthiest also cause disproportionate harm to the environment.

A rousing debate, hosted last week by the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, wrestled with the issues of extreme wealth and growing income inequality. Panelists representing fields including philosophy, political economy, and business administration staked contrasting and occasionally unexpected positions on whether the super-rich are a net positive for society.

“The top 1 percent emit the same amount of carbon as 5 billion human beings,” said Tom Malleson, associate professor of social justice and peace studies at King’s University College at Western University in Ontario, Canada. “The best thing you can do is to get rid of those billionaires by redistributing the wealth, particularly if you redistribute it to green technology.”

But billionaires like Bill Gates have invested in poor countries ravaged by climate disaster, argued Jessica Flanigan, Richard L. Morrill Chair in Ethics and Democratic Values at the University of Richmond. Market forces further incentivize the world’s wealthiest to provide jobs and pursue improvements to clean energy infrastructure, she added.

“Those are all presumptive reasons to think that billionaires are helpful toward the global poor and more reliably beneficial to those people than public officials, who are beholden to people in their own political community” who usually are not badly off.

Moderator Christopher Robichaud, a senior lecturer in ethics and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, kicked off the conversation by citing recent reports that Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is poised to become history’s first trillionaire. “What should we think about a world, maybe right around the corner, that has trillionaires?” he asked.

“Could you imagine a society or a set of institutions in which it would be perfectly just for there to be trillionaires?” asked Nien-hê Hsieh, Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. “It probably has features to ensure people’s basic needs are met. It probably has features to ensure that great inequality doesn’t lead to the corruption of public officials, or the breaking of the democratic fabric … Whatever that system is, it is not the system we have today.”

Shruti Rajagopalan, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, noted how few of today’s billionaires inherited their money. Most of the modern era’s richest people earned their fortunes, she emphasized, largely through the stock market.

“There’s a big difference between Genghis Khan and Elon Musk,” she quipped. “And if Elon Musk is getting wealthy, it’s also every single schoolteacher out there whose retirement is invested in one of these funds.”

At one point, Malleson highlighted the role of luck in wealth creation.

“If you have a more productive body — if you have Michael Phelps’ wingspan or Taylor Swift’s voice — good for you,” they said, citing the late Harvard philosophy professor John Rawls’ writings on the arbitrary nature of these traits. “We should think of meritocracy as part of a doctrine of ableism. It’s a prejudice doctrine that says people should be rewarded for factors that are outside their control and others should be punished — particularly disabled people — for their lack of productivity.”

The conversation expanded to cover big business and low-wage workers, with Walmart proving a favorite lightning rod.

“The poorest families in the United States want to shop at Walmart because the prices are going to be the best,” Rajagopalan noted. “Your stereotypical single mother — trying to feed her children, trying to keep very difficult hours at her job — can walk into a Walmart and get all the basics cheaper than pretty much anywhere else.”

But the company “exploits its employees, crushes unions, and takes out dead peasant insurance policies on workers who are going to die,” Malleson countered. “Its products are cheap because they’re made in sweatshops with abysmal conditions.”

The solution is not so easy as taxing Walmart for redistribution to low-income employees and consumers, Rajagopalan said. “Then we’re assuming there’s a bureaucrat or central allocation plan that can provide those same loaves of bread and cans of milk. … That has been done before and hasn’t worked pretty much anywhere in the world.”

Nobody is talking about communist-style central planning, Malleson said. Alternatives include some form of democratic socialism.

“It would mean Walmart has unions,” they said. “It would mean Walmart has co-determination, where workers are allowed to elect half the board like in Germany. It would mean there are basic labor conditions; there are basic rights and regulations that are very common in many parts of the world, particularly the Nordic countries.”

Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the U.S., Flanigan pointed out, because it still has a market economy that generates sufficient wealth for financing its public institutions.

“How do we materially improve the conditions of the worst off? The best thing we have is a market-based society that encourages investment and innovation; that’s it!” she said. “And the kind of society that produces billionaires is the very same society that’s going to improve conditions for the worst off.”

Hsieh chimed in with yet another option for curbing inequality.

“As somebody here at Harvard who is a good Rawlsian, I want to put forward the idea of property-owning democracy,” he said. “There’s an idea where you do allow for market exchange. You do allow for the private accumulation of wealth. You do allow for private capital … but with a much more egalitarian distribution of property.”

The event was part of the Ethics Center’s Civil Disagreement Series, founded in 2019 to engage policy and subject experts on pressing current issues. Attendees included undergraduates from five universities participating in the Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership and well as proctors and tutors from Harvard College’s Houses who were selected for the 2024-2025 Fellowship in Values in Engagement.

In the discussion’s final minutes, Robichaud picked up on one of their questions about what constitutes a minimum standard of living. He asked panelists how each would propose meeting such a standard for all.

“To lift the poor, we shouldn’t just look at taxation,” Rajagopalan said. The world’s poorest 2 billion people are “living in conditions that are entirely unjust. … There won’t be many takers for this politically, but the single best way to improve their lives is to allow immigration to rich countries.”

The media keep calling the 2024 election “unprecedented,” said political historian Jill Lepore. They said the same thing about contests for U.S. president in 2016 and 2020.

“Since, I would say, the [2000] Bush v. Gore election, our political discourse is about falling off a cliff,” Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, told her students recently. “It has a weird torquing effect on how people experience daily life.”

Lepore is one of three well-known scholars teaching the brand-new “HIST 10: A History of the Present” this semester. Co-created with professors Maya Jasanoff and Kirsten Weld, the introductory course uncovers historic concepts and clichés that anchor perceptions of today.

“We’re going to approach the present in this classroom as historians — as people concerned with how individuals and collectives situate themselves in historical time and, most importantly, how they make meaning of it,” promised Weld, a Canadian-born historian of modern Latin America.

Jasanoff, the X.D. and Nancy Yang Professor of Arts and Sciences and Coolidge Professor of History, kicked off the first lecture with some history on the course itself. HIST 10 was once offered as a yearlong survey for actual and prospective concentrators focused on the Western world, especially Europe, she explained. But that framing slowly fell out of favor with students and faculty alike until the course was finally canceled in 2006.

“But we felt, and continue to feel, that history is something we all need to be educated in and conscious of,” said Jasanoff, a historian of the British Empire. “And so the three of us started talking about re-presenting a gateway course to revivify the sense that history is integrated into our consciousness, our lives, our society, our government, and much more.”

They designed a lecture course broken into three modules, each informed by individual interests and expertise. First Jasanoff is interrogating evolving definitions of ancestry. Lepore, who is also a Harvard Law School professor and New Yorker staff writer, will then lead a section on rights. And Weld will wrap things up with a unit on memory.

“What really drew me to the class were these conceptual frameworks,” said Victoria Rengel ’28, a Newark, N.J., native considering a joint concentration in government and history. “As the professors laid out in the first class, most human conflict can be broken down and understood through one of the three.”

Enrolled in the course are about 60 undergraduates, plus a sizeable contingent of auditors. “It’s packed,” observed A.J. Moyeda ’27, a history concentrator with a secondary in philosophy from South Texas. “I never imagined a history course with this many students.”

Mondays begin with scholarly takes on the students’ anonymously submitted questions. Wednesdays feature all three professors engaged with (and often debating) daily news. The first few conversations left Jacqueline Metzger ’27, a joint concentrator in history and in Theater, Dance & Media from the Washington, D.C., area, rethinking how election coverage is packaged.

“I really liked the conversation about things being unprecedented,” Metzger said. “It’s kind of an intimidating term, because it makes you feel we’re unequipped to handle what’s going on.”

Most of Day One was focused on the news cycle — a key tool for making sense of the present. Jasanoff invited everyone to pull out their laptops for some live polling on media habits and current events. Newspapers, social media, and word of mouth/group chats emerged as the go-to sources. Topping a ranking of 2024 issues were “the election,” “political polarization,” and “Palestine.”

Picking up on one of these topics, Weld demonstrated how students might think about the war in Gaza using her module. In the Middle East and elsewhere, perspectives on the conflict are “indelibly and inseparably framed,” she said, by historical memories of two traumatic world events: the Holocaust, when 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis, and the Nakba of 1948, when 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced to create the modern State of Israel.

“How one remembers those events — both within one’s own families as well as politically speaking — makes up a constitutive building block of your interpretations of the present,” Weld said.

The 75-minute session ended with Lepore lending rich historical insight to the 21st century’s confusing swirl of fact, fiction, and information technology. She started with the “long adversarial tradition” between America’s newspapers and its political leaders, beginning in the 1720s with the dogged New England Courant (published by Benjamin Franklin’s brother James).

This year’s candidates for U.S. president are hardly the first to try reaching voters without risking criticism by newspaper reporters. Lepore offered examples that bridge past and present including rallies, political postering, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s direct-to-listener radio broadcasts from the 1930s.

“It’s cool to see that much of what we’re dealing with has happened again and again,” Metzger said. “It’s such a grounded way to understand who we are and where we are in history.”

At one point, Lepore shared an advertising clip from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1956 re-election campaign. It opens with an animated figure anguished over the firehose of political information from TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers.

“I’ve listened to everybody,” he cries. “Who’s right? What’s right? What should I believe? What are the facts? How can I tell?”

“Those are questions we still have,” Lepore emphasized. “They’re endemic to the age of mass communication we have been in for well more than a century. I hope that gives you some comfort.”

The University reported a budget surplus, along with robust endowment performance, and pointed to investments made throughout fiscal year 2024 in key mission-focused areas in its annual financial report released Thursday. Additionally, the report detailed philanthropic giving for the period, which continues to provide the resources to support increased financial aid and a range of academic and research priorities.

The Gazette spoke with Executive Vice President Meredith Weenick, chief financial officer and Vice President for Finance Ritu Kalra, and treasurer Timothy Barakett to learn more about how disciplined planning and sound financial management have positioned Harvard for progress in the years ahead. This interview was edited for clarity and length.

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A year ago, the University had marked a full fiscal year return to post-pandemic normal operations, and we saw a corresponding operating margin that aligned with pre-pandemic performance. How would you describe the University’s financial position for fiscal year 2024, which ended with a surplus of $45.3 million?

WEENICK: Harvard continues to be in a solid financial position, grounded in thoughtful planning and careful stewardship across the University. This year’s surplus reflects the strategic decisions made by leadership across each of Harvard’s Schools. These surpluses are not merely financial metrics; they are vital sources of funds that allow us to strategically invest in educational and research initiatives aimed at tackling some of the most pressing global challenges.

KALRA: Meredith makes an important point about the nature of Harvard’s operating result. It’s an aggregate reflection of the collective results across our Schools and units. These surpluses, plural — and in some cases deficits — are earned and managed locally. That local autonomy allows deans to direct resources to the areas they identify as their highest priorities.

This year, for the second year in a row, our operating expenses grew faster than our operating revenues — 9 percent versus 6 percent. That is not a long-run sustainable path. But the analysis begs an understanding of the nuance behind the numbers. Some of what looks like growing expenses are investments strategically intended to foster future growth. This year, those investments spanned several domains, including developing our technology infrastructure and AI capabilities and renewing our campus facilities to enable types of research that were unimaginable just a decade ago.

Of course, the pace of our recent spending underscores the need for prudence going forward. While it has been purposeful in the short term, it won’t be sustainable without a commensurate growth in revenue over the long term.

BARAKETT: This long-term perspective is essential. The University has investments it must make in the near future, including, for example, increased commitments to financial aid, which are vital to making Harvard and educational opportunities accessible. We must also continue to transform how we generate and distribute energy across the campus to meet our sustainability goals and commitments. At the same time, there are new opportunities we need to be poised to drive forward. For example, the transformative potentials of AI, quantum computing, and the life sciences will be made possible by the work of Harvard researchers across disciplines. In our planning for the years ahead, we must create the financial capacity to make room for these investments.

The academic year 2023-2024 was challenging for Harvard’s community, accompanied by frequent public criticism and scrutiny. Were there any financial impacts on the University?

KALRA: Throughout the year, our most immediate focus was to ensure our students had the resources needed to support their physical and emotional well-being. Senior leaders across the University and its Schools also invested enormous time and energy in cultivating a campus environment that fosters open inquiry and responsible civil discourse as a North Star for intellectual and personal growth. Each of those investments had a financial impact, though finances weren’t the drivers of those efforts.

The impact on philanthropy is less obvious. Across the higher education landscape, neither tuition revenues nor funding for research covers the full cost of an education. At Harvard, philanthropy, in the form of gifts for current use and the investment returns spawned by endowed gifts, is essential to make up the difference.

On both fronts, we are enormously grateful. In fiscal year 2024, current-use giving reached the second-highest level in Harvard’s history, and Harvard Management Company (HMC) generated a 9.6 percent return in the endowment portfolio. The future will be more complicated — both the level of giving and the level of returns may be difficult to sustain — but we remain grateful to our donors for their steadfast belief in Harvard’s academic mission. Their support is vital to everything we do.

WEENICK: I will also add that while we faced a challenging year on and off campus, Harvard never wavered from its commitment to excellence. The arenas in which we achieved that excellence span an astoundingly broad range. Dr. Claudia Goldin received the Nobel Prize in Economics last year, and Dr. Gary Ruvkun just won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Ten of our students were named Rhodes Scholars last year, a record for Harvard and more than double any other school. And let’s not forget that our community excels at the highest levels outside of academics as well. Our student-athletes and alumni took home a record 13 medals at the Paris Olympics.

How will the most recent endowment return of 9.6 percent impact distributions in a way that benefits both current and future generations of students and scholars?

KALRA: The fiscal year 2024 endowment return will provide a welcome boost to distribution growth in the short term. However, as we caution every year, it’s critical to remember that the endowment is not a $53 billion checking account.

The endowment, in reality, is 14,600 different endowments, many of which belong to a specific School or are designated for particular areas of scholarship or programs. The distribution that supports those programs is meant to grow each year to keep pace with inflation, while the endowment itself is meant to last forever. That requires us to spend responsibly from the endowment, as we have to be able to support future generations of students and scholars even if we face periods of lower growth.

Harvard targets an 8 percent return. That accounts for an approximately 5 percent distribution to the University’s annual operations and allows the value of that distribution to grow each year by 3 percent to account for inflation. Under Narv Narvekar’s leadership, HMC’s return has been 9.3 percent over the past seven years, well in excess of the target.

WEENICK: As Narv shared in his letter in the financial report, there are a variety of factors that played into this year’s return, as is the case every year. Since HMC was founded, the endowment’s 11 percent annualized return has allowed distributions to grow dramatically. These funds support critical initiatives, from financial aid and faculty support to professorships and research.

BARAKETT: Harvard derives nearly 40 percent of its annual operating revenue from the endowment, so finding the right balance between return, risk, and volatility is critical. HMC’s performance was suboptimal before Narv’s appointment, and he inherited a portfolio that was overweighted in natural resources and real estate and underweighted in private equity and hedge funds.

Over the past seven years since his arrival, HMC has been restructured, and the portfolio has been substantially repositioned. Given the scale of the endowment, this took some time, and we are now well-positioned. While HMC’s performance is best measured over the long term, the endowment’s performance in fiscal year 2024 is certainly encouraging. It shows we are on the right track.

A challenge of recent years has been rapidly rising interest rates. Yet bonds and notes payable increased from $6.2 billion in fiscal year 2023 to $7.1 billion in fiscal year 2024. Why did the University decide to issue debt at this time?

KALRA: It’s true that interest rates are elevated relative to the decade or so following the global financial crisis. However, that is not an interest rate environment to which we are likely to return, barring an unforeseen crisis. Yet we still need to invest in our buildings and maintain our campus.

There was a window last spring when credit spreads reached historically low levels, offsetting some of the impact of the rise in rates. The rating agencies reaffirmed Harvard’s AAA credit ratings, which reflects confidence in Harvard’s stability, and we took advantage of that market opportunity to borrow at an attractive all-in cost, right around 4 percent.

A portion of our bond issuance will go toward planned future capital projects, and a portion went toward refinancing outstanding debt that carried higher interest rates. Harvard’s overall financial condition remains very strong. We have ample levels of liquidity and ready access to the capital markets for future borrowings as needed.

WEENICK: As you can see from the construction activity while walking around our campuses, whether in Cambridge, Allston, or Longwood, we have a number of long-term capital projects underway. We also have plans for facility renovations and new construction, which are essential for the University’s infrastructure and growth. For example, we are making progress in Allston with the construction of the new home for the American Repertory Theater at the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Creativity & Performance, along with the first University-wide conference center in the David Rubenstein Treehouse as part of the Enterprise Research Campus. This work also includes addressing other campus maintenance priorities and refreshed lab and classroom space to ensure the resilience and accessibility of our buildings.

One of the key themes found throughout this year’s financial report is advancing the public good. How is Harvard using its resources to support teaching, learning, and research priorities aimed at making a positive impact in the world?

WEENICK: Harvard’s commitment to academic excellence is the way we advance the public good. It’s at the core of everything we do. Our students, faculty, staff, and alumni leverage their knowledge and expertise to effect positive change through research, teaching, and community leadership at a global scale. The resources we steward support these efforts.

As a research university, Harvard is a powerful engine of innovation. In fiscal year 2024, our faculty were awarded $1 billion in external grants from government and private partners. On top of that, the University invests an additional $400 to $500 million a year to support research and early stage ideas. The discoveries made here have the potential to improve lives, transform industries, and create tremendous social and economic value. Harvard’s Office of Technology and Development plays a pivotal role in facilitating the translation of these discoveries into useful products and services that benefit society.

The University also serves as an epicenter of teaching, learning, and community service through initiatives like the Harvard Ed Portal, which connects the Boston and Cambridge communities to Harvard’s educational resources. Our partnership with our Harvard Medical School affiliates also provides access to some of the world’s best health and well-being resources.

Additionally, the learning that takes place on our campus also extends beyond the boundaries of the University. For example, in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, our students include mayors from around the country, who return to their communities equipped to tackle challenges that improve their residents’ quality of life.

The University brings together community members worldwide at the start of each academic year for Harvard’s Global Day of Service. These civic engagement opportunities motivate students during their time at Harvard and inspire lifelong commitments to public service.

What is the projected financial outlook for next year and beyond?

WEENICK: While our financial position remains strong, we, along with all of our colleagues in higher education, must be conscious of the challenges in our current climate. As we have cautioned before, traditional revenues in higher education are constrained, and we must be cognizant of the pressures on tuition affordability.

As we move forward, it’s clear we need to prioritize activities that most significantly contribute to our mission, and we need to work efficiently so that more resources can go directly toward teaching and research.

KALRA: Projections are dangerous in a world of persistent uncertainty. Safeguarding the University’s financial resilience is vital in such a rapidly evolving landscape. Our reserves have been built over years through disciplined planning and sound financial management. We need to continue to build the capacity to invest in new programs and pedagogies in order to foster the academic excellence that is both Harvard’s hallmark and its aim.

BARAKETT: We are grateful to our community — faculty and other academic personnel, students, staff, alumni, and donors — for their dedication to the University’s mission. Together, we have ensured that Harvard remains positioned for progress and continues to deliver on its world-changing mission.

On the matter of whether it’s acceptable to stop reading a book before its end, there are two schools of thought: one that says we must finish what we started, and one that declares that life is too short for books we don’t enjoy.  

The Gazette asked librarians, a classics professor, a literature scholar, and a lecturer in English for their views on a subject that triggers fiery debates among book lovers. Although all seven readers interviewed for this story fall on the “life is too short” side of the debate, they differ on when it’s OK to give up without guilt. 

Maria Tatar, John L. Loeb Research Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of Folklore and Mythology, Emerita, said reading a book is a magical confluence of several factors that create a fulfilling experience, and when the delight is not there it can be shattering, if liberating.

“There’s a certain romance to reading, hence the inevitable heartache when you break up with a book,” wrote Tatar in an email. “I need both substance and sorcery, captivating content and magic on the page.”

When that magic is absent, said Tatar, readers should act accordingly, whether they’re 50 or 100 pages in. The reader’s clock is what matters, she said. 

“Now, when I’m not under the spell of a book by page 50 or so, I put it aside,” Tatar said. “And sometimes, halfway through a volume, I realize that I get it and can stop reading. That happens frequently with biographies, for example.”

Reed Lowrie, head of research services at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Libraries, a fan of crime fiction, has no problem abandoning books when authors fall back on cliches or uninspired tropes. 

“The danger of sticking with a book in that genre to the end is that you can be at the mercy of a horrible plot twist that makes reading the preceding hundreds of pages seem like a waste of time (‘Her missing husband was living in a cave near her house the whole time and she had several interactions with him without realizing he was her husband’),” said Lowrie. “You should keep reading a book if you’re enjoying and/or learning from it, but if neither of those things are true, put it down and find something else to read.” 

Alessandra Seiter, community engagement librarian at Harvard Kennedy School, urges readers to follow their gut. “If you feel like you’re not being fulfilled or not being engaged, or it’s not how you want to spend your time, I give you full professional permission to put the book down.”

Whether the reader is put off by the author’s writing style, a weak plot, or the pace, it is OK to drop the book, said Maya Bergamasco, faculty research and scholarly support librarian at Harvard Law School Library. 

“If the book is not working for me, I stop reading it,” said Bergamasco. “I’m kind of ruthless. There are so many books in the world and so little time to read them all. If it feels like a chore, why would you put yourself through that?”

Worry less about reading from cover to cover and focus instead on the experience, said Sophia J. Mao, lecturer on English at the Department of English. 

“Reading, especially today, is never a solitary activity but comes alive in the classroom, on BookTok, at events in public libraries, bookstores, and community spaces,” said Mao. “As a literary scholar and a teacher, I may guide others toward what makes a specific book notable, but I also want to know what other works people are drawn to and why. I’ll never be tired of hearing from others what they find beautiful and moving. It’s what makes reading a pleasure and a challenge to my own perspective on whether a book is ‘worth’ it.” 

When books are picked up on a whim, reading a few pages should suffice, said Mary Frances Angelini, research librarian for the Extension School. “When reading for pleasure, I tend to give the book about 10 percent of the pages to hook me. If it doesn’t work for me, then I move on to the next book.” 

Richard Thomas, George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics, tries to be efficient with his reading and reads reviews to choose nonfiction books, a genre he favors. 

“It’s important to approach a book with some sort of knowledge about it,” said Thomas. “I tend to read a lot of reviews to make sure that the books are going to be worth my while. With recent books that have just come out, there’s obviously a lot of variation in quality, so you’re more likely to not finish your book, and that can be frustrating and alienating.”

Book lovers should not harbor guilt or agony over parting ways with a book although those reactions are plausible, said Thomas.

“Guilt and self-criticism are a natural response,” said Thomas. “I’ve never found guilt a very useful quality, so I don’t know if one should feel guilty for not finishing reading a book.”

Tatar shares that sentiment. Instead of remorse, she said, readers should focus on finding books they delight in and allow themselves to feel sad when a beloved book ends. 

“Guilt?” said Tatar. “None at all, unless you are reading the book with your book club. Then you feel like a delinquent. Or, of course, if you’re reading it for a class. What’s harder for me, and what sometimes fills me with grief is finishing a book, exiting a world in which I was once immersed, living and breathing with the characters.”

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Leslie Valiant, the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the John H. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has spent decades studying human cognition. His books include “Circuits of the Mind” and, most recently, “The Importance of Being Educable.”

Notions like smartness and intelligence are almost like nonsense. We think we know what they mean but we can’t define them with precision. Even psychologists can’t agree on one definition. And intelligence tests don’t tell one very much — they are usually justified in terms of correlations with other things.

How do you recognize whether someone is intelligent? There is not one answer; there are many, and they can be inconsistent. Some, like Howard Gardner, have emphasized that there are many kinds of intelligence. I think we’ve reached the expiration date for the usefulness of the term “intelligence” both for humans and machines. We should be able to do better.

I’m a computer scientist and I take a computational approach to understanding what the mind does. In computer science, the main questions, theoretically speaking, have been: What is easy to compute? and What is hard to compute? Some decades ago, I decided that the secrets of human cognition must also be hidden in this problem — that some things are hard to compute for the brain and some things are easier. The main advantage that computer science offers is that one can express capabilities that are more complicated than ones reasonably implied by conventional phrases, and, at the same time, evaluate their feasibility for the brain. 

I started working on a computational viewpoint on cognition 40 years ago. The fundamental challenge I set myself was to find a useful definition of learning. In “The Importance of Being Educable,” I define the concept of “educability.” My view is that it wasn’t “intelligence” that allowed humans to create civilizations, but educability, which involves three aspects.

The first is learning from experience. The second is being able to chain together the things you’ve learned; it’s a kind of low-level reasoning capability that even the simplest animals have because it’s so essential to life. The third is being able to incorporate knowledge acquired from instruction. This last one is very important for humans because this is how culture spreads and science progresses.

“Computers will not take over the world just because they want to. This will happen only if we allow it to happen.”

Educability incorporates both the ability to generate new knowledge by learning from experience and also the ability to transfer that knowledge directly to others. There isn’t the time or the need for everyone to gain the same experiences, such as repeating difficult scientific experiments.

I’d say that machines can be also made educable, and ultimately, we won’t be able to claim that we’re fundamentally different from machines. Current AI systems are not designed to be educable in the sense I define, but machines will likely become more and more capable in that direction. I don’t see AI as an existential threat; it’s just another powerful technology. Obviously, in bad hands, it can be misused, just like chemistry or nuclear physics. Computers will not take over the world just because they want to. This will happen only if we allow it to happen.

There is a downside of being educable. Educability gives us very powerful ways of acquiring new information — we can soak it all up. But we don’t have comparable abilities to check whether the information we get is true or not. We are not well-equipped for evaluating knowledge, theories, or facts. If someone tells us something, if we believe it, we will incorporate it into our knowledge. This can be dangerous. The only cure is to educate people about what propaganda has done over the centuries and make them aware of this human weakness. To inoculate ourselves against disinformation we need to acknowledge our basic weakness. 

— As told to Liz Mineo, Harvard Staff Writer

Laura van den Berg circled her partner on the mat at a Central Square boxing gym on a recent Tuesday evening, hands raised protectively in front of her face, delivering quick, precise jabs into the training mitts. Others in the class paused for water between exercise intervals, but van den Berg remained in place, bouncing on her toes, keeping loose for the next round.

This past summer van den Berg, senior lecturer in English, embarked on two parallel journeys: publishing her sixth novel, “State of Paradise,” and training for a boxing match that will take place this weekend in Waltham. She believes the practices foster similar useful qualities.

“Writing a novel and training for a fight both require an immense trust in process,” van den Berg said. “There are going to be times when you are really tired, overwhelmed, or defeated, and you have to trust in your program. Whether your program for a writer is writing five pages a day, or your program as a fighter is showing up to your daily training session, you have to trust in the power of cumulative labor over time.”

Van den Berg started writing “State of Paradise,” which was published in July, during the pandemic when she and her husband, Paul Yoon, also a fiction writer and senior lecturer in English, were living in her native state of Florida. It began as a daily practice of writing meditations on aspects of her surroundings: weather, landscapes, or family life.

“I did this for about six months with no expectation that it would turn into a book. Then a strange thing happened,” van den Berg said. “I realized I was writing these meditations in a voice that was like mine but also not mine. And that was the voice of the protagonist stepping forward.”

The novel follows a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author, as her everyday life in humid small-town Florida is disrupted by strange events — extreme weather, sinkholes, missing people, a cult in her living room, and a disorienting virtual reality device — that challenge her perception of reality.

While in Florida writing the novel, van den Berg, who began boxing for fitness and mental health in 2018, started getting more involved in competitive boxing. After her first USA Boxing-sanctioned fight in 2021 (which she lost by decision), she knew she wanted to try again but wasn’t sure she could find the time.

“It can be easy to feel like, ‘Oh, I’ll do it next year when I’m not publishing a book, when I have more room in my schedule,’” van den Berg recalled. “I think I just realized at a certain point that that the ‘chill year’ that I’m waiting for is never going to arrive, and I just need to dive in.”

She began training hard with the help of a coach at Cherry Street Boxing in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She focused on both technique and endurance to prepare for the amateur match, which includes three rounds, each a minute and a half to three minutes in length.

Even during her book tour in July and August, van den Berg kept up her routine, waking early to run up hills in San Francisco, for example, before catching a flight to her next tour stop.

“You know your future opponent is out there somewhere, and you should assume that she’s getting up in the morning, doing whatever she needs to do to be successful on fight night,” van den Berg said. “That motivates me.”

This semester, van den Berg is teaching a fiction workshop, “The Art of the Short Story,” and co-teaching “Reading for Fiction Writers” with Neel Mukherjee, associate senior lecturer in creative writing. She divides her time between Cambridge and her Hudson Valley home in New York state, where she spends weekends, school breaks, and summers. While Cherry Street is her primary gym, she can often be found training at Redline Fight Sports when she is in Cambridge.

She often travels to sparring events around the New England area, seeking out new female boxers to practice with, something that can help prepare her for facing an unknown opponent on fight night.

To document her parallel journeys, van den Berg started a newsletter called “Fight Week,” where she writes about the intersection of writing and fighting. The title refers to the days leading up to a match, following the last hard training session — a time she describes as standing on the edge of a precipice, “about to step off into the air.”

Van den Berg believes writing and boxing both require a certain level of comfort with risk — whether it’s risking failure with a new narrative structure or injury in the ring.

“‘State of Paradise’ is certainly the most personal book that I’ve ever written. There’s a lot of me in there, so it was emotionally risky in a way that my other books really haven’t been,” van den Berg said. “In boxing, the more punches you throw, the more vulnerable you are. There’s risk in going hard.”

As the weekend fight approaches, van den Berg feels confident, embracing the nerves that come with the territory and knowing she’s done everything she can to prepare.

“There’s no way to know for sure what the outcome will be,” van den Berg said. “If you’re 100 pages into a novel, you can’t say for sure what it will be like when you finish. You can’t know for sure what the outcome of a fight will be. You have to have a deep belief in the process and cultivate a tolerance for sitting in doubt and uncertainty and being able to move through those emotions.”

Which is better? The 1996 film adaptation of “Hamlet” starring Kenneth Branagh or a spoof on the Prince of Denmark’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy delivered by Homer Simpson? 

The question was posed last month to more than 800 undergraduates during “Justice: Ethical Reasoning in Polarized Times.” The legendary Gen Ed offering has returned to Sanders Theatre this semester after more than a decade of availability only as a prerecorded offering online. Originally launched in 1980, the course became wildly popular for its format: guided student debate of the hottest issues of the day, informed by study of classic theories on moral decision-making. 

“The first thing I want to know is which one you like most,” announced “Justice” creator Michael J. Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government. Most in the room, dismissing the third option of a WWE body-slam clip, lavished applause on “The Simpsons.” 

But the conversation turned spiky on a second point: “Can we derive what’s higher, what’s worthier, what’s nobler, from what we like most?” Sandel asked. “Or is there a gap between the two?” 

One student stuck with “The Simpsons,” arguing that it was the most pleasurable. Another noted the cartoon excerpt owed its existence to Shakespeare’s worthier source material. Still others characterized the TV show as fleeting pleasure versus the intellectual and even spiritual nourishment of high art.

From the stage, Sandel invited these divergent responses while pressing the room to consider new angles. “It’s an opportunity for students to dive into why they think the way they do,” observed Darlene Uzoigwe ’25, a government concentrator from Brooklyn.

Generations of Harvard graduates, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson ’92, J.D. ’96, and former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara ’90, have cited the impact the course had on their careers and lives. In 2009, a recorded version went on to become the first Harvard course freely available online. 

“It was an experiment in using new technology to open access to the Harvard classroom,” Sandel said in an interview last month. “We never dreamt that tens of millions of people around the world would want to watch lectures on philosophy.” More than 38 million have viewed the course on YouTube, and millions more on foreign language web platforms.

The in-person offering was paused when the political philosopher noticed first-years enrolling despite having watched “Justice” in high school. “I tried for a couple of years to change some of the examples, stories, even the jokes,” Sandel said. “But I found I liked the original version and didn’t want to change everything. So, I decided to let it live online and teach other subjects.”

Most of these courses, including those on technology and globalization, were capped at 200 students. Trevor DePodesta kept trying to get a spot.

“It took me until now to get into one of his classes,” said DePodesta ’25, an Ethical Human-AI Interaction concentrator from San Diego. “I felt like the Harvard experience wouldn’t be complete until I sat in a lecture hall with him.”

As any alum of the course will know, the Homer-Hamlet matchup is really about exploring ideas about high and low pleasures outlined by 19th-century Utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill.

“I didn’t think you could discuss ‘Simpsons’ vs. ‘Hamlet’ for so long,” said Saskia Hermann ’28, a first-year from Germany. “What I’ve learned so far is that you can always look at something twice — once from your initial point of view, and then you can apply a certain philosophical idea to look at it from that perspective.”

Also familiar to “Justice” veterans are course readings by Mill’s Utilitarian predecessor Jeremy Bentham as well as Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls. Bringing the class back to Sanders means Sandel has now updated the ethically charged issues that test the philosophers’ ideas. 

The first weeks of the course, which carries, at times, the fizzy energy of a concert, covered readings and lectures on the philanthropic movement reportedly embraced by former cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted this year on fraud charges. In one hypothetical, Sandel posed whether it was better to solve urgent medical needs in the developing world by becoming a physician or by making a lot of money in cryptocurrency and donating, say, $50 million to Doctors Without Borders. 

“It’s a test of the Utilitarian philosophy underlying the Effective Altruism movement,” he explained.

Later, students will delve into climate change, artificial intelligence, and the polarizing consequences of social media. “From the time the course was first offered in the 1980s we’ve discussed affirmative action,” Sandel added. “Now we continue the discussion in light of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against race-based affirmative action in university admissions.” 

The real motivation for relaunching the course, Sandel said, was student feedback about the strained state of dialogue on campus. “It’s definitely true that there isn’t a lot of civil discourse going on,” said Maia Hoffenberg ’26, a linguistics concentrator from the Washington, D.C., area. “People have become entrenched in their own ideas.”

Sandel has been a supporter of other campus initiatives designed to boost civil discourse and intellectual vitality. Last winter he hosted a one-day session for faculty on cultivating healthy debate and another inviting students to grapple with the tangled ethics of artificial intelligence. At orientation this fall, Sandel offered a primer on engaging with highly disputed but important issues.

Hermann enjoyed the latter conversation so much she dropped a course to pick up “Justice.” “I really liked the way he asked questions and made us get to the point, rather than just lecturing on what he believes,” she said.

“I really liked the way he asked questions and made us get to the point, rather than just lecturing on what he believes.”

Saskia Hermann

Others taking “Justice” have been reading Sandel since high school — and clearly consider themselves fans.

 “Yeah, that’s my boy!” called out one student as Sandel appeared for a lecture last month.

After class, a handful of devotees line up near the podium clutching dog-eared copies of Sandel’s “Justice” (2009) or “The Tyranny of Merit” (2020). “I’ve been able to snag him after class a few times,” DePodesta shared. “He promised that if I come find him outside of class, he’ll sign my books.”

Offering such a large-scale course meant Sandel spent the summer recruiting, interviewing, and hiring an army of “Justice” teaching fellows. A staff of 32 graduate students this fall helms a total of 64 sections, with many scheduled in the early evening at first-year dorms and various Harvard Houses. The goal is to “carry the learning beyond Sanders Theatre,” said Sandel, who won’t teach the course next fall due to a planned sabbatical. 

That encourages students to continue conversations about immigration, abortion, reparations, and extreme wealth — to name a few topics — over dinner. “My roommates and I have these intense debates after every single class,” shared Leverett House resident Hoffenberg. “We get mad at each other, but it’s all very lively and very academic. It’s honestly been one of the best things about taking the class.” 

They may be microscopic, but tardigrades are larger than life.

Called “water bears” because of their plump shape and lumbering movement, the ancient micro-animals are nearly indestructible, able to survive anything from deadly radiation and arctic temperatures to the vacuum of space. 

They can still be found anywhere there’s water today, but the evolutionary history of these eight-legged micro-animals remains relatively mysterious because of their sparse fossil record.

Now, in a new study published in Communications Biology, Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Javier Ortega-Hernández and Ph.D. candidate Marc Mapalo were able to confirm another entry in the fossil record, which now stands at just four specimens. The research represents a significant advancement in the field of paleontology because it offers new avenues for exploring the evolutionary history of one of the planet’s most resilient life forms.

In their study, the researchers examined a piece of amber found in Canada in the 1960s that contains the known fossil tardigrade Beorn leggi and another presumed tardigrade that couldn’t be substantively described at the time. Using confocal laser microscopy, a method usually employed for studying cell biology, the researchers were able to examine the tiny structures of the fossil tardigrades in detail.

Ortega-Hernández and Mapalo’s study provides not only a definitive classification of B. leggi in the tardigrade family tree, but the identification of a new species of tardigrade as well. 

“Both of them are found in the same piece of amber that dates to the Cretaceous Period, which means that these water bears lived alongside dinosaurs,” Ortega-Hernández said. “The images of B. leggi show seven well-preserved claws, with the claws that curve toward the body being smaller than those curving away from it, a pattern found in modern-day tardigrades.”

The second, previously unidentified specimen, had claws of similar length on each of its first three pairs of legs, but longer outer claws on its fourth set of legs. The team named it Aerobius dactylus, from “aero” meaning relating to air — because the fossil appears to be floating on air in the amber — and “dactylo,” or finger, after its one long claw.

The impetus for applying this new technology to known fossils came when Mapalo, a self-described “paleo-tardigradologist,” came across the 2019 book “Water Bears: The Biology of Tardigrades.” 

“In one of the chapters, they had a photo of the oldest fossil tardigrade that was visualized using both normal microscopy and confocal laser microscopy,” Mapalo said. “And that gave me the idea to use that with the fossil that I’m working with right now.” 

That fossil, encased in a piece of amber from the Dominican Republic, turned out to be a new species of tardigrade. Mapalo, along with Ortega-Hernández and researchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, published their findings in a 2021 paper.

In their latest study, both fossils serve as critical calibration points for what’s called molecular clock analysis, which help scientists estimate the timing of key evolutionary events. For example, the latest findings suggest that modern tardigrades likely diverged during the Cambrian Period more than 500 million years ago. 

The research also sheds light on the origin of cryptobiosis, the technical name for the remarkable ability of tardigrades to survive extreme conditions by entering a state of stasis. 

“The study estimates that this survival mechanism likely evolved during the mid- to late Paleozoic, which may have played a crucial role in helping tardigrades endure the end-Permian mass extinction, one of the most severe extinction events in Earth’s history,” Ortega-Hernández said.

“Before I started my Ph.D., there were only three known fossil tardigrades, and now there’s four,” Mapalo said. “Most, if not all, of the fossil tardigrades were really discovered by chance. With the Dominican amber, researchers were looking for fossil ants, and they happened to see a fossil tardigrade there.

“That’s why, whenever I have a chance, I always tell researchers who are working with amber fossils to check if maybe there’s another tardigrade in there, waiting to be found.”

Genes are the control panel for an embryo morphing from a ball of cells into organs, muscles, and limbs, but there’s more involved than just genetics. There’s also physics — the shaping of tissues by flows and forces from cellular activity and growth. 

Two recent studies in Developmental Cell and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shed light on the gene-mediated geometries and forces within embryonic development that give rise to different sections and shapes of the gut, including the large and small intestines. The findings bridge a critical gap between genetic signals and the physical formation of the early gut. 

The Developmental Cell paper, led by former Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student Hasreet Gill, shows how a set of developmental instructions called Hox genes dictate gut formation. For the study, Gill and colleagues traced the gut development of a chicken embryo as a model organism; Hox genes are also found in humans and all other vertebrates.

“I wanted to understand why different regions in the intestine, from the anterior, meaning esophagus, to the posterior, meaning large intestine, end up with different shapes,” said Gill, who co-authored both papers with her Ph.D. adviser Clifford Tabin, the George Jacob and Jacqueline Hazel Leder Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. Gill was a student in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology’s Molecules, Cells, and Organisms program. 

“I wanted to understand why different regions in the intestine, from the anterior, meaning esophagus, to the posterior, meaning large intestine, end up with different shapes.”

Hasreet Gill

The study connected experiment to computational theory through a collaboration with Sifan Yin, a former postdoctoral fellow in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and L. Mahadevan, professor in applied mathematics, physics, and biology in SEAS and FAS. 

Gill’s study built on previous work looking at how Hox genes are involved in organ differentiation. The set of genes, highly conserved throughout animal evolutionary history, was the subject of the 1995 Nobel Prize when they were recognized for their role in segmenting a fruit fly’s body.  

Gill and colleagues discovered that measurable mechanical properties of the tissues that make up the large and small intestines of a chick embryo are directly involved in how they arrive at their final shapes. For example, the tissues that form the villi located in the small intestine, she found, have different stiffness parameters than those that shape the inside walls of the large intestine, which form larger, flatter, more superficial folds. 

To test the consequences of all these mechanical differences, the lab turned to its longstanding collaboration with Mahadevan’s lab, whose members, including Yin, carried out theoretical and computational analysis to define the impact of physical forces generated via differential growth on organ shape. 

It had long been known that Hox genes are the instructions that lay the groundwork for how different organs, including the gut, are sectioned off and shaped. But the detailed “how” of this process had been a mystery. 

To solve it, Gill and colleagues revisited a 1990s-era experiment from the Tabin lab that had investigated this question. In that experiment, they expressed a particular Hox gene in a small intestine and found it took on the characteristics of a large intestine. 

Gill’s team repeated the experiment while running physical tests on the mechanical characteristics of the different parts of the gut, considering things like wall stiffness, growth rate, and tissue thickness. They found that the HoxD13 gene in particular regulates the mechanical properties and growth rates of the tissues that eventually lead to the large intestine’s final shape. Other, related Hox genes may define those same properties for the small intestine. 

Crucially, they also illuminated the role of a downstream signaling pathway called TGF Beta, which is controlled by Hox genes. By tuning the amount of TGF beta signaling in their embryos, they could switch the shapes of the different gut regions. Seeing the importance of this pathway, long known to be involved in fibrotic conditions, was an important basic-science step toward fully understanding gut development in a vertebrate system. 

These insights could lead to new knowledge of conditions for colon cancer and other fibrotic diseases of the gut, Gill said. 

“One possibility is that the disease is co-opting a developmental program that can cause an excessive deposition of extracellular matrix, and this ends up being harmful to the patient,” she said. “Having this developmental context, especially related to Hox gene expression, might prove useful at least for understanding the broader context of why these diseases are happening in people.” 

The complementary PNAS paper, co-led by Gill and Yin, showed how geometry, elastic properties, and growth rates control various mechanical patterns in different parts of the gut.

“We focused on how mechanical and geometric properties directly affect morphologies, especially more complicated, secondary buckling patterns, like period-doubling and multiscale creasing-wrinkling patterns,” said Yin, an expert in theoretical modeling and numerical simulations of active and growing soft tissues. 

Added Mahadevan: “These studies allow us to begin probing aspects of the developmental plasticity of gut development, especially in an evolutionary context. Could it be that natural variations in the genetic signals lead to the variety of functional gut morphologies that are seen across species? And might these signals be themselves a function of environmental variables, such as the diet of an organism?” 

Yin said the two papers provide a new paradigm for studying how genes affect the development of shape, or morphogenesis. 

“Morphogenesis is driven by forces arising from cellular events, tissue dynamics, and interactions with the environment,” Yin said. “Our studies bridge the gap between molecular biology and mechanical processes.” 

Crisper fall weather is descending, signaling the coming end of another mosquito season that this year saw modest outbreaks of West Nile virus and eastern equine encephalitis.

The good news has been that the disease-carrying mosquitoes would rather bite birds than humans, a factor in keeping the maladies relatively rare. The bad news is that a warming world is expected to add months to mosquito season and, worse, that species with a stronger taste for humans are headed north.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says this year there have been just 880 U.S. cases of West Nile, the most common mosquito-borne disease in the continental U.S. EEE is rarer still, with just 13 cases in seven states this year.

That rarity is a good thing because both can be deadly.

Though most cases are mild or asymptomatic, one in 150 cases of West Nile can be severe (as was the recent case of Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and one in 10 severe cases result in death, according to the CDC. The numbers are more sobering for EEE, with most of the cases reported each year being severe and 30 percent, on average, resulting in death. Seven of the known cases this year have been fatal.

The cooler temperatures that come with autumn are beginning to ease the EEE outbreak. In early October, Massachusetts public health officials lowered EEE risk warnings in the worst-hit parts of the state from critical to moderate. The risks for West Nile remained unchanged — high or moderate over large portions of the state — and experts warn that cooler weather alone doesn’t stop transmission. Mosquitoes remain active until killed by frost, which has been happening later in recent years.

In fact, recent studies have projected that by 2050 longer autumns and earlier springs will extend the U.S. mosquito season by as much as two months. Those months are expected to be warmer and wetter, providing more standing water where mosquitoes can breed. The extra time also means more gestational cycles so more biting by females, who must have a blood meal before laying eggs.

“You have more bites, more areas where they’re able to live, more months when they’re active, and more places for them to breed. That means larger populations,” said Matthew Phillips, a research fellow in infectious diseases at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. “All of this is expected based just on changes in climate that affect mosquitoes.”

Evidence of the trends has already been seen, Phillips said. In 2021, during one of the hottest Decembers on record, the CDC recorded 30 cases of West Nile virus. Even at MGH in chilly Boston, the trend has been evident, albeit with diseases spread by hardier insect vectors.

“We were seeing cases of anaplasmosis and babesiosis, diseases that are spread by ticks and can be potentially pretty serious,” Phillips said. “Typically, you’d see them in summertime, but we were seeing those in the middle of winter.”

Experts are also keeping an eye on two invasive species that have already established themselves in the nation’s Southeast and are beginning to spread north. The mosquitoes, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, can carry several viral diseases, including West Nile and EEE. But unlike the mosquitoes currently spreading those diseases, both prefer humans. Estimates by Canadian researchers in 2020 showed the species spreading to the West Coast and the Canadian border by 2080.

Epidemiologists note the two species pose some additional threats. Besides West Nile and EEE, these mosquitoes can carry Zika, which caused 3,500 cases of microcephaly among infants during Brazil’s 2015-16 outbreak. They can also spread the tropical diseases Dengue fever — called “break-bone fever” because of the intensity of its pain — and Chikungunya, a tropical fever with no known treatment or cure. Public health officials in Florida and California reported cases of Dengue fever this year.

Aedes aegypti is more efficient at spreading diseases like Zika and Dengue, but when discussing near-term threats, both Phillips and Flaminia Catteruccia, a mosquito expert at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, point to albopictus as the most concerning. Not only is it hardier, it’s already starting to appear.    

“It’s only recently been seen in Massachusetts and is very good at transmitting viruses,” said Catteruccia, professor of immunology and infectious diseases and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “That’s my bit of worry: If it becomes really prevalent, we might see more transmission. But it remains to be established whether the environmental conditions, especially the long winters here, will be hospitable enough for these mosquitoes to survive.”

Alongside the new threats is the possibility of an older one that may make a reappearance: malaria. In 2023, there were malaria outbreaks in Florida, Texas, and Maryland that could not be traced to someone arriving from a malaria-endemic country. The apparently local acquisition of the disease is concerning because malaria was responsible for more than 600,000 deaths in 85 countries in 2022. It’s also not a newcomer to the U.S. Malaria circulated widely here from Colonial times until it was eradicated in 1951.

Catteruccia said that malaria has an advantage in favor of its U.S. spread: the Anopheles mosquitoes that host the malaria parasite are already widespread here. Counterbalancing that is the fact that those mosquitoes prefer animals to humans. Cold winters also provide a shield.

“Malaria used to be here in the states, so the mosquitoes are around and are potential vectors of malaria,” Catteruccia said. “But malaria has a very complex lifecycle, so especially here in the north, I don’t see this becoming an issue for the time being.”

With shifting disease patterns already happening, Phillips said our understanding of the epidemiology of those diseaseshas to change as well. Physicians who diagnose patients during winter shouldn’t automatically rule out ailments traditionally seen in summer. And those diagnosing in summer shouldn’t rule out ailments from warmer regions.

“One thing that climate change does is it changes the traditional epidemiology of mosquito-borne diseases,” Phillips said. “We’re used to these diseases in the summertime, and they’re showing up in winter. We’re used to them being in the tropics and they’re showing up in temperate climates. These traditional epidemiological associations are breaking down and, as they break down, we need better disease monitoring to know where they’re going and what they’re doing.”

If you’ve ever seen dolphins swim, you may have wondered why they undulate instead of moving side to side as fish do. Though they have a fishlike body, cetaceans, which include whales, dolphins, and porpoises, are mammals that descended from land-dwelling ancestors.

Cetaceans have undergone profound changes in their skeletal structures to thrive in aquatic environments, including the reduction of hindlimbs and the evolution of flippers and tail flukes, resulting in a streamlined body. Scientists still don’t understand how the transition from land to water, approximately 53 million years ago, impacted cetaceans’ backbone, a central element of their skeleton.

A new study in Nature Communications sheds light on how these marine mammals’ backbones were reorganized as their ancestors adapted to life in water. The international Harvard-led team found that, contrary to previous assumptions, the cetacean backbone is highly regionalized, despite being homogeneous in shape along its length. The way in the backbone is regionalized, however, is drastically different from terrestrial mammals.

The team also explored how regions in the backbone correlate to habitat and swimming speed. They discovered that species living farther from the coast have more vertebrae, more regions, and higher burst swimming speed. Species living in rivers and bays, so closer to shore, have fewer vertebrae and regions, but their regions differ more from one another, potentially affording them greater maneuverability.

“When their ancestor went back into the water, whales and dolphins lost their hind legs and developed a fish-like body,” said lead author Amandine Gillet, Marie Curie Fellow in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Manchester. “But that morphological change also means the vertebral column is now the main part of the skeleton driving locomotion in an aquatic environment.”

The vertebral column of terrestrial mammals moving on land must provide support to help the legs carry the body weight. When cetaceans transitioned from land to water, the forces of gravity shifted from air to buoyant water, releasing the pressure to carry body weight. The new body structure and movements needed to move through water meant the backbone of these animals would have to shift in some way to fit their new environments.

Previous studies have looked at the backbone from a vertebral morphological view. In a 2018 Science paper, co-authors Stephanie Pierce and Katrina Jones explored the complex evolutionary history of the mammalian backbone using a novel statistical method first developed to study the backbones of snakes. Pierce and Jones revised the model to fit their study, which allowed them to demonstrate that the vertebral column of terrestrial mammals is characterized by numerous, distinct regions in comparison to amphibians and reptiles.

“It’s a challenge to understand how the regions of a terrestrial mammal’s backbone can be found in whales and dolphins, and one reason is because their backbone looks very different in terms of morphology, even though they evolved from them,” said Pierce, a professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and senior author of the study. “They lost the sacrum, a fused string of vertebrae bracing the hind legs, and a critical landmark needed to distinguish the tail from the rest of the body.”

The vertebrae of cetaceans are further complicated in that they became more homogeneous in their anatomical features. So the transition from one vertebra to another is gradual compared to the extreme transitions found in terrestrial mammals, making it more difficult to identify regions.

“Not only do they have very similar vertebrae, but certain species, in particular porpoises and dolphins, have many more vertebrae than terrestrial mammals, with some species having close to 100 vertebrae,” said Jones. “This makes it really challenging to translate regions found in terrestrial mammals to the backbones in whales and dolphins.”

Traditional statistical methods used to identify regionalization patterns require the exact same number of elements across specimens. The statistical method Pierce and Jones implemented (called Regions) allowed them to overcome this issue by analyzing the backbone of each specimen individually. While the method worked well for the constrained backbone of terrestrial mammals, it proved computationally challenging for the high counts of vertebrae in cetaceans. Gillet collaborated with the Data Science Services team at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science to rewrite the code, allowing the program to obtain results within minutes. The researchers made the new program, called MorphoRegions, publicly available for the scientific community as a computational software R package.

“This is definitely one of the biggest advances of our study,” said Pierce. “Amandine spent months refining the program so that it could analyze a system of high repeating units without crashing the computer.”

Gillet applied the MorphoRegions method to the data she had previously collected during her Ph.D. work. She visited six museums in Europe, South Africa, and the U.S. gathering information on 139 specimens from 62 cetacean species, two-thirds of the almost 90 living species. In total, Gillet measured 7,500 vertebrae and ran them through the analytical pipeline.

“Our large data set allowed us to demonstrate that not only does the organization of the cetacean backbone differ from terrestrial mammals, but also that the patterns vary within cetaceans as we identified between six and nine regions depending on the species” said Gillet, “We then worked from there to find commonalities across regions and identified a pattern common to all cetaceans, which is summarized by our Nested Regions hypothesis.”

The hypothesis proposed by the team introduces a hierarchical organization of the backbone in which a precaudal and a caudal segment are first identified. The two segments are then each divided into several modules common to all cetaceans: cervical, anterior thoracic, thoraco-lumbar, posterior lumbar, caudal, peduncle, and fluke. Next, depending on the species, each module is further subdivided into one to four regions, with a minimum of six and a maximum of nine post-cervical regions along the backbone.

“Surprisingly, this showed us that, compared to terrestrial mammals, the precaudal segment has less regions, whereas the caudal area has more,” said Pierce. “Terrestrial mammals use their tails for a variety of different functions, but not usually for generating propulsive forces, like cetaceans do. Having more regions in the tail may allow for movement in very specific regions of the tail.”

With a better understanding of the organization of the cetacean backbone, the researchers plan to next tackle understanding how these morphological regions correlate with function using experimental data on the flexibility of the vertebral column collected in the lab. These data collected on modern taxa should allow the researchers to infer swimming abilities of fossil whales and help inform how the backbone shifted from a weight-bearing structure on land to a propulsion-generating organ in the water.

Xi Jinping has managed to maintain his grip on power in the People’s Republic of China for longer than a decade. What will unfold when the 71-year-old president eventually steps down?

“I think it’s almost certain that he will choose a weak … successor,” said Yuhua Wang, a professor of government and one of three experts to participate in a symposium hosted by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

“The People’s Republic of China at 75” kicked off two months of lectures, discussions, and film screenings organized by the center to mark the anniversary of revolutionary leader Mao Zedong’s proclamation of a new Communist state. Moderator and Fairbank Center Faculty Director Mark Wu, the Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law, got the event started by inviting panelists to offer reflections bridging past, present, and future. The theme of leadership transition rose to the fore as Xi struggles with a wobbly post-COVID economy.

Wang, author of “The Rise and Fall of Imperial China” (2022), rang a note of optimism by first underscoring the PRC’s resilience by historic standards. Over 2,000 years, the average Chinese dynasty lasted 70 years by his calculations. “If you think about comparative communist regimes, the Soviet Union lasted for 69 years,” Wang added.

But he quickly pivoted to commonalities between Imperial China and the PRC. The quality of governance during the Imperial period depended solely on leadership — never on the health of China’s institutions, Wang emphasized. And the PRC, despite its collectivist ideologies, has failed to break that cycle.

The comparative political scientist went on to cite “the crown prince problem,” a concept that explains why strong emperors usually select heirs who threaten neither power nor life. It played out again and again in Imperial China. And it also happened following Chairman Mao’s death in 1976, Wang argued. “What I worry most in the next 25 years is exactly this succession,” he said.

The Kennedy School’s Anthony Saich, Daewoo Professor of International Affairs and director of its Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia, highlighted a few of the Chinese Communist Party’s consistent threads from its founding in 1921 to today. “One inheritance has been the inability to deal with leadership succession,” offered Saich, whose “From Rebel to Ruler: 100 years of the Chinese Communist Party” was released last year.

Xi, who also serves as general secretary of the party and commander of the armed forces, ascended to the presidency in 2013. In 2018, just ahead of his second five-year term, he mobilized the National People’s Congress to abolish term limits enacted by former leader Deng Xiaoping amid an era of reform in the 1980s. In effect, Xi’s move returned China to the one-ruler cycle that prevailed under Mao and the centuries of emperors before him.

“Xi’s decision to extend his rule pushes succession into a very uncertain and unpredictable future,” Saich declared.

Boston University’s Joseph Fewsmith, a professor of international relations and political science, grappled in his remarks with the contested legacy of Mao himself. Fewsmith highlighted a resolution on China’s history, implemented by Deng in 1981, that was pretty tough on the PRC founder. “It made no doubt that the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward were very serious mistakes,” said Fewsmith, co-author with Nancy Hearst of the 10-volume “Mao’s Road to Power.”

More than 15 years later came proposed revisions that put a more positive spin on the Maoist period. Moves to formally adopt this version of events were blocked in the late ’90s. But Xi formally accepted them in 2013, Fewsmith noted. “We have been living with this interpretation of the Maoist period ever since,” he said.

How did things go in the intervening years, as Xi consolidated power and ensured his own longevity? Fewsmith pointed to slowing economic growth, the devastation of COVID-19, and a rising tide of nationalism over Maoist political thought.

Later in the conversation he challenged characterizations of Xi as a strong leader, citing as just one bit of evidence delays to the recent Third Plenum meeting of top party officials amid urgent economic concerns.

“I think we have a very rough future in China,” Fewsmith concluded. “And I would highlight succession as probably the most critical.”

Next up, on Oct. 25, JFK Jr. Forum – A Conversation with Ambassador Kevin Rudd. On Oct. 30, New York Times correspondent Edward Wong will discuss his new book, “At The Edge of Empire,” which blends family history and his own reporting on military efforts to maintain control over China’s border regions. For a complete lineup, visit fairbank.fas.harvard.edu.

For centuries, questions have loomed about two of Euripides’ lesser-known tragedies, “Ino” and “Polyidus,” with only a smattering of text fragments and plot summaries available to offer glimpses into their narratives.

Now, in a groundbreaking find, two Harvard alumni have identified and worked to decipher 97 lines from these plays on a papyrus from the third century A.D.

Yvona Trnka-Amrhein ’06, Ph.D. ’13, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, was the first to identify part of the text as an excerpt from “Polyidus,” a scene in which King Minos of Crete confronts a seer, demanding he resurrect his son. Trnka-Amrhein and colleague John Gibert, Ph.D. ’91, identified the remaining text as lines from “Ino,” a scene that probably depicts the title character boasting victoriously after orchestrating the deaths of her stepchildren. Their research was published this month in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, or the Journal of Papyrology and Epigraphy.

The papyrus was discovered in 2022 in a burial shaft at the ancient necropolis of Philadelphia, Egypt, by a team from the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities. In June, Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies hosted a conference with Trnka-Amrhein, Gibert, excavation team leader Basem Gehad, and 12 other scholars from around the world to compare research, including Harvard Professor of the Classics Naomi Weiss. Classics Ph.D. candidate Sarah Gonzalez also participated.

“It’s arguably one of the most significant new finds in Greek literature in this century,” Weiss said. “I don’t expect there to be another find like this in my lifetime, in my particular field of expertise. For Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies to host the first public investigation into this material was really exciting.”

Weiss, whose research focuses on ancient Greek performance culture, especially classical Greek drama, discussed the significance of the finding. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

---

Tell me about your experience at the New Euripides Conference?

That was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a scholar of Greek tragedy. To be one of 15 scholars worldwide who got to see this stuff for the first time was really incredible. There was a core group of people there who were literally going through the fragments word by word and discussing whether Yvona and John’s readings of each part of the papyrus were correct. Some of it is hard to read, so individual words are contested.

What are your early takeaways from the new fragment of “Polyidus”?

It quite clearly seems to be a dialogue between King Minos of Crete and Polyidus the seer, where Polyidus is saying, “It’s wrong to demand that I revive your son from the dead, that goes against all laws of nature,” and Minos is basically saying, “Well, I’m king and what a tyrant asks for has to happen.” The passage seems to be really concerned with questions of tyranny and the extent of human power and free will, and how those can jostle against each other. How far can human power go, how far can human knowledge and skill extend? Even to the point of reviving someone from the dead? The fact that Polyidus does end up reviving the dead son is an example of how Euripides liked to play with plot twists and “happily ever after” endings. At the same time, he was deeply engaged with contemporary intellectual questions.

“These fragments are unusual because they’re relatively long and give us a lot of information about plays that we previously knew less about. ”

Naomi Weiss

And the new fragment of “Ino”?

If the editors’ reconstruction is correct, then “Ino” is the only surviving fragment that has a dialogue between the two wives: Ino, the king’s first wife who was long presumed missing and has returned in disguise; and Themisto, the second wife. Each wife has two children. Themisto tries to kill Ino’s, but Ino tricks her into killing her own instead. Themisto commits suicide and then the king mistakenly kills one of his sons by Ino, and she walks into the sea with the other. In this excerpt, the meeting of the two wives brings to the fore the doubleness and repetition running throughout the play and it in turn makes us better appreciate quite how excessive this tragedy was, with multiple wives, multiple children, multiple deaths, multiple suicides.

Does this change anything about our understanding of Euripides?

“Ino” is a really gruesome tragedy. The only person left at the end is the king, and he’s lost all his wives and all his children. This seems like tragedy on steroids. It’s the sort of experimentation with how far you can push a tragic plot that may remind us of later plays of Euripides. “Ino” may well be a significantly earlier play — there seems to be a reference to it in a comedy by Aristophanes that was produced in 425 B.C. If that is a reference to “Ino,” we know the tragedy was performed before this date. We tend to think of Euripides’ super experimental plays as being from the last decade of his career, where he’s just going all out and questioning the very form of tragedy. If we are right in dating this earlier, then that changes our understanding of how tragedy developed through the fifth century.

Who might have written the excerpts on this papyrus, and why?

We don’t know. It’s a really open question. At the conference, one of the questions that kept coming up was, is it significant that these two plays, which have something to do with the death of children, were found in a pit grave where there were buried — at different times — the body of an older woman and the body of a child? But it’s very hard to make any reliable conjectures about that connection. Some people at the conference thought that these extracts may be part of what’s called the “anthology tradition”: Maybe someone was teaching Euripides’ plays or hoping to draw from them in their own compositions and compiled a set of useful passages from each tragedy. Another scholar at the conference thought that maybe these were written out to be part of a performance, essentially like a script for actors. All of these questions remain and will be debated.

How much do we know about Euripides’ work as a whole?

When we think of Greek tragedy, we tend to think of the “big three”: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who all wrote tragedies in the fifth century B.C. Of these three tragedians, we have much more surviving of Euripides. While we have seven full plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles, for Euripides, we have 19 full plays and 18 of those can reliably be said to be his. Then we have a lot of fragments. The fragments of plays are preserved across different media — a lot of them are quotations that come up in other authors, but we also have papyri. This is the latest find of tragedy on papyri. These fragments are unusual because they’re relatively long and give us a lot of information about plays that we previously knew less about.

In the wake the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks and subsequent pro-Palestinian protests around the U.S., many Jewish Americans have been grappling with their own identities in relationship to Israel.

In a packed talk at Harvard Law School, Noah Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, and Derek J. Penslar, William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History, marked the anniversary of the Hamas-led massacre by detailing the historically close ties between American Jewry and the state of Israel today. In separate remarks, each underscored why the majority of Jews in the U.S. have felt profoundly betrayed over the past year.

Penslar, author of “Zionism: An Emotional State” (2023), also co-chairs the University’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias. He began by outlining the historic processes that helped Jews integrate into American society and achieve a sense of political empowerment. 

During the 19th century, Jews residing in North America and western Europe experienced increased economic mobility and social integration. Soon they were openly appealing for political interventions on behalf of persecuted Jews in North Africa and the Russian Empire.

During the 20th century, optimism took root among those living in the U.S. “Jews came to feel themselves to be not unusual or exceptional, but rather exemplary citizens of the republic,” said Penslar, who is also director of the Center for Jewish Studies. “And by that argument, antisemitism was not just bad for the Jews. It was bad for everybody. It was un-American.”

Among American Jews, the movement to create a Jewish state became widely popular during World War II as the Nazis murdered two thirds of the Jews in Europe.  But American proponents departed from the tenets of Zionism’s central and eastern European founders, who stressed the importance for Jews to prepare for new lives in historic Palestine.

“American Zionism was not about moving to Israel,” Penslar said. “It was a Zionism that was fundamentally optimistic about Jewish life right here in the United States.” 

This dual faith in the U.S. and the state of Israel underpins the betrayal experienced by many American Jews today. “They’re feeling more vulnerable than any time since the Second World War,” Penslar noted.

The reaction is especially acute among Jewish Americans on the left who saw their political allies justify the Hamas-led killings of 1,200 people in Israel, Penslar said. But for the majority of Jewish Americans, he added, “you see it largely in the way people are talking about what’s happening in the universities.” 

For one, said Feldman, author of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People” (2024), the demonstrations were the opposite of the “post-9/11-style condemnation” that Jewish Americans had expected following Oct. 7. But they also represented a possible “ground shift” in political attitudes and moral discourse on Israel.

“The long process by which American Jewish identity came to be primarily bound up in Israel meant that for Jews to hear the view expressed that Israel’s very existence is morally problematic, or maybe wrongful, is sincerely experienced as antisemitic,” Feldman said. 

As an additional consequence, Feldman argued that bipartisan support for Israel is now at stake. 

“A core strategic accomplishment of the American Jewish community in its Zionism,” Feldman said, is ensuring the American political system’s support for Israel “no matter which party is in power.” 

Evidence that a realignment is underway can be seen in Muslim American voters rejecting a staunchly pro-Israel President Joe Biden during Michigan’s Democratic primary last winter or in former President Donald Trump’s more recent appeals to Jewish voters as Israel’s “protector.” 

“The big historical question of what did the spring’s conflicts and protests and encampments and responses mean, with a capital m,” Feldman said, “is really going to depend on what happens in November.”

Excerpted from “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health” by Marty Makary, M.P.H. ’98. Used with the permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury.

“Hi, my name is Chase, and I’ll be your waiter. Does anyone at the table have a nut allergy?”

My two Johns Hopkins students from Africa, Asonganyi Aminkeng and Faith Magwenzi, looked at each other, perplexed.

“What is it with the peanut allergies here?” Asonganyi asked me. “Ever since I landed at JFK from Cameroon, I noticed a food apartheid — food packages either read ‘Contains Tree Nuts’ or ‘Contains No Tree Nuts.’ ”

Asonganyi told me that even on his connecting flight to Baltimore, the flight attendant had made an announcement: “We have someone on the plane with a peanut allergy, so please try not to eat peanuts.” And on his first day at Johns Hopkins, a classmate invited him to dinner. The invite went something like this: 1) Would you like to come over for dinner; and 2) Do you have a peanut or other allergy?

“What’s going on here?” Asonganyi asked with a big smile. “We have no peanut allergies in Africa.”

Faith, who had flown in from Zimbabwe, nodded in agreement.

I looked at them and smiled. “In Egypt, where my family is from, we don’t have peanut allergies either,” I said. “Welcome to America. Peanut allergies are real and can be life-threatening here.”

Their observation reminded me of when my friend’s school banned peanuts from the campus. School administrators actually inquired with security authorities if metal detectors could detect a peanut. And then one day there was an “emergency.” A peanut was found on the floor of a school bus. It was like discovering an IED in Iraq. The kids were ordered to quietly exit the bus single-file until someone arrived to “decontaminate” the bus. Luckily, the peanut did not detonate and harm the public.

How did we get here?

In 1999, researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital estimated the incidence of peanut allergies in children to be 0.6 percent. Most were mild. Then starting in the year 2000, the prevalence began to surge. Doctors began to notice that more and more children affected had severe allergies.

The 1990s was the decade of peanut allergy panic. The media covered children who died of a peanut allergy, and doctors began writing more about the issue, speculating on the growing rate of the problem. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) wanted to respond by telling parents what they should do to protect their kids. There was just one problem: They didn’t know what precautions, if any, parents should take.

Rather than admit that, in the year 2000 the AAP issued a recommendation for children zero to three years old and pregnant and lactating mothers to avoid all peanuts if any child was considered to be at high risk for developing an allergy.

The AAP committee mimicked what the UK health department had recommended two years earlier: total peanut abstinence. The recommendation was technically for high-risk children, but the AAP authors acknowledged that, “The ability to determine which infants are high risk is imperfect.” Having a family member with any allergy or asthma could qualify as “high-risk” using the strictest interpretation. And many well-meaning pediatricians and parents read the recommendation and thought, Why take chances? Instantly, pediatricians adopted a simple mnemonic to teach parents in their offices: “Remember 1-2-3. Age 1: start milk. Age 2: start eggs. Age 3: start peanuts.” A generation of pediatricians was indoctrinated with this mantra.

I did a close read of that 1998 UK health department recommendation to see if it cited any scientific study to back up the decree. I found one sentence stating that moms who eat peanuts are more likely to have children with peanut allergies. In other words, it blamed the moms. The report cited a 1996 British Medical Journal (BMJ) study. So I pulled that up and took a close look.

I couldn’t believe it.

The actual data did not find an association between pregnant moms eating peanuts and a child’s peanut allergy. But that didn’t matter: The train had left the station.

How could “experts” make a recommendation citing a study that did not even support the recommendation?

Bewildered by how the study seemed so badly misconstrued, I called its lead author, Dr. Jonathan Hourihane, a professor of pediatrics in Dublin. He shared the same frustration and told me he had opposed the peanut avoidance guideline when it came out. “It’s ridiculous,” he told me. “It’s not what I wanted people to believe.”

I specifically asked him how he felt about his study being used as the source to justify the sweeping recommendation. “I felt crossed,” he responded, using a little UK slang for feeling betrayed. He had not been consulted on the national guideline.

The 2000 AAP guideline was published in the specialty’s top journal, Pediatrics, activating many pediatricians to evangelize mothers when they brought their babies in for a checkup. Doctors and public health leaders had their new marching orders. Within months, a mass public education crusade was in full swing, and mothers, doing what they thought was best for their children, responded by following the instructions to protect their children.

But despite these efforts, things got worse. By 2004, it was clear that the rate of peanut allergies was going the wrong way. Peanut allergies soared. More concerning, extreme peanut allergies, which can be life-threatening, became commonplace in America.

Suddenly, emergency department visits for peanut anaphylaxis — a life-threatening allergic swelling of the airways — skyrocketed, and schools began enacting peanut bans. By 2007, 18 percent of Virginia schools had banned peanuts altogether. And in 2016, the Parkway School District in Missouri, reported 957 students with documented life-threatening food allergies, most of which were to peanuts. The rate had increased 50 percent from just six years prior, and more than 1,000 percent from a prior generation.

As things got worse, many public health leaders doubled down. If only every parent would comply with the pediatrics association guideline, they thought, we as a country could finally beat down peanut allergies and win the war. The dogma became a self-licking ice cream cone.

But the groupthink could not have been more wrong.

Swimming against the current

Stephen Combs is a salt-of-the-earth pediatrician in rural East Tennessee. At one point, the other pediatricians in Combs’s group noticed something unique about his patients. None of them had peanut allergies. This despite the fact that his colleagues were seeing more and more kids with peanut allergies in their practices. What was going on?

I was curious to learn more about his impressive track record, so I traveled to the beautiful rolling hills of Johnson City, Tennessee, to visit him. (I often learn a lot when I get outside of the bubble of my urban university hospital.)

I discovered that all the pediatricians in Combs’s group were as impressive as he was: making house calls, staying late to see patients, and educating parents on how to raise healthy children. They all practiced pediatrics the same way.

Except for one thing.

Combs had never followed the AAP guideline for young children to avoid peanuts. The reason for his defiance was simple. Combs did his residency at Duke Medical Center in North Carolina, where he trained under world-famous pediatric immunologist Rebecca Buckley. When the AAP guideline came out in 2000 with a big splash, Buckley recognized that it violated a basic principle of immunology known as immune tolerance: the body’s natural way of accepting foreign molecules present early in life. It was like the dirt theory, whereby newborns exposed to dirt, dander, and germs may then have lower allergy and asthma risks. Buckley confidently told her students and residents, including Combs, to ignore the AAP recommendation, and in fact, to do the opposite. She explained that peanut abstinence doesn’t prevent peanut allergies, it causes them.

Her explanation turned out to be prophetic.

Since his training with Buckley, Combs has consistently instructed parents to introduce a touch of peanut butter (mixed with water to avoid a choking risk) as soon as a child is able to eat it. To this day, the thousands of children in East Tennessee lucky enough to have Combs as their pediatrician do not have peanut allergies.

Extrapolating the principle to other potential allergens, Combs also encouraged the early introduction of eggs, milk, strawberries, and even early exposure to dogs and cats. As a result, the children in his practice rarely developed an allergy to these things, and when they did, it was mild.

An embarrassingly simple study

Buckley and her trainees were not alone in bucking the AAP’s guidance. In fact, many experts in immunology had long known of mouse studies showing that avoiding certain foods triggers allergies to those foods. But the laboratory immunology community was largely disconnected from the clinical allergist and the pediatric community.

Gideon Lack, a pediatric allergist and immunologist in London, challenged the UK guideline. It “was not evidence-based,” he wrote in The Lancet in 1998. “Public-health measures may have unintended effects … they could increase the prevalence of peanut allergy.”

Two years later, the same year the AAP issued their peanut avoidance recommendation, he was giving a lecture in Israel on allergies and asked the roughly 200 pediatricians in the audience, “How many of you are seeing kids with a peanut allergy?”

Only two or three raised their hands. Back in London, nearly every pediatrician had raised their hand to the same question.

Startled by the discrepancy, he had a Eureka moment. Many Israeli infants are fed a peanut-based food called Bamba. To him, it was no coincidence.

Lack quickly assembled researchers in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to launch a formal study. They found that Jewish children in Israel had one-tenth the rate of peanut allergies compared to Jewish children in the UK, suggesting it was not a genetic predisposition, as the medical establishment had assumed. Lack and his Israeli colleagues titled their publication “Early Consumption of Peanuts in Infancy Is Associated with a Low Prevalence of Peanut Allergy.”

However, their publication in 2008 was not enough to uproot the groupthink. Avoiding peanuts had been the correct answer on medical school tests and board exams, which were written and administered by the American Board of Pediatrics. Many in the medical community dismissed Lack’s findings and continued to insist that young children avoid peanuts. For nearly a decade after AAP’s peanut avoidance recommendation, neither the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) nor other institutions would fund a robust study to evaluate the recommendation, to see if it was helping or hurting children.

But things were getting worse. The more health officials implored parents to follow the recommendation, the worse peanut allergies got. The number of children going to the emergency department because of peanut allergies tripled in just one decade (2005–14). It spread like a virus. By 2019, one report estimated that one in every 18 American children had a peanut allergy. Schools began to ban peanuts and regulators met to purge peanuts from childhood snacks as EpiPen sales soared. Pharma exploited the situation by price-gouging the desperate parents and schools. Mylan Pharmaceuticals jacked up the price of an EpiPen from $100 to $600 in the U.S. (It’s $30 in some countries.)

The AAP recommendation had created a vicious cycle. The more prevalent peanut allergies became, the more people avoided peanuts for young children. This, in turn, caused more peanut allergies. Tunnel-vision thinking had created a nightmare scenario for which the only possible solution seemed to be the total eradication of peanuts from the planet.

As things got worse, a dissenting Lack decided to conduct a clinical trial randomizing infants to peanut exposure (at 4-11 months of age) versus no peanut exposure. He found that early peanut exposure resulted in an 86 percent reduction in peanut allergies by the time the child reached age 5 compared to children who followed the AAP recommendation. He blasted his findings to the world in a New England Journal of Medicine publication in 2015, finally proving what immunologists like Buckley had known for decades: Peanut abstinence causes peanut allergies. It was now undeniable; the AAP had it backward.

I reached out to Lack and had breakfast with him when he was traveling to Washington, D.C., for a medical conference in 2024. He told me that his initial hypothesis had been based on an early observation as a pediatrician that kids who got their ears pierced sometimes developed a nickel allergy around the piercing. But kids who had orthodontics didn’t. He realized that kids with orthodontics had prior exposure to nickel in the braces, making them immune. This observation was consistent with the concept of “oral tolerance” that he’d studied in mice experiments conducted at the University of Colorado in the 1990s.

He had an interesting observation from his childhood that reminded him that conventional wisdom can change. His grandfather had a heart attack, which doctors treated with strict bed rest — a recommendation that was eventually replaced with cardiac rehab exercise. As a 6-year-old, Lack recalled that his grandfather was not allowed to leave his bed. The family members had to take him his meals. His doctors managed his damaged heart by weakening it further.

“In science, we tend to get in a rut and then dig in,” he told me. “We have to be open-minded.”

Lack is now recognized as a hero in the field of allergy. But when he did his big study, he was heavily criticized.

It would take the AAP two years after Lack’s randomized trial was published to reverse its 2000 guidance for pediatricians and parents. It would also take two years for the NIH’s NIAID division to issue a report supporting the reversal.

Did they really need two years? Where was the sense of deep remorse? The affected families deserved to have the medical establishment move with a sense of urgency to correct their recommendation immediately following Lack’s definitive study. Hugh Sampson, another trainee of Rebecca Buckley, led the NIAID report that undid the recommendation. He told me that working with the government agency was frustrating. Sampson is one of the country’s leading allergists. When I asked him what he thought about the entire saga, he told me, “The food allergy community has been appropriately chastised [for getting the peanut recommendation wrong].”

An entire generation — millions of children — had been harmed by groupthink, and many still are feeling the effects. Now, at least the faucet of bad advice was turned off.

Copyright © Ladner Drysdale LLC, 2024.

Millions of Americans, from hourly retail staffers to corporate vice presidents, wrestle with the demands of work while parenting young children, caring for a sick spouse or aging parent — or both.

That juggling act is made even tougher by rigid practices and rules set by employers, such as inflexible or unpredictable work schedules, and employers’ failure to grasp how employees are struggling and to provide them with support, according to a new Harvard Business School report.

That disregard harms both workers and companies. Care-related issues are the single most common reason employees leave the workforce. Companies also pay a price, both directly and indirectly, often in waysthey don’t fully understand, the report found.

The Gazette spoke with its author Joseph B. Fuller ’79, M.B.A. ’81, professor of management practice and co-chair of the Managing the Future of Work project at HBS, about the problem and what companies can do. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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There are 50 to 60 million caregivers in the nation. They make up the largest portion of a cohort you study known as “hidden workers” — those who want a job or more hours but are thwarted by employer policies. Who is in this group and why do they leave the workforce?

They are people who have some significant care obligations within their household. Those range from things that would strike people as very ordinary — a two-parent household with kids — or it could be something much more exotic — they have a chronically ill child or spouse. An apogee group is what we call the “sandwich generation,” where they’re caring for dependent children, from a newborn to a teenager, but they’re also caring for one or more seniors — a parent, an in-law.

Well over 50 percent of workers report they have some caregiving obligation. The question becomes: Do the terms and conditions of their employment and the nature of that obligation mesh? A lot of traditional expectations of employers, but also coworkers and even customers, don’t always jibe with the cadence of care.

We can see this in things like work schedule. If I have a child with a chronic condition, anything from severe asthma to a behavioral issue, stuff happens. And if I have to go see the principal of the school tomorrow because of a disciplinary problem or it’s a bad air-quality day and my child really shouldn’t be outdoors, I’m going to keep them home from school. As a normal working adult, I don’t have money to hire a service, so I’m going to miss a day of work.

Fifty percent of women who have left the workforce and say they would have preferred to remain working left because they could not reconcile the obligations of the career path they were on with caring for kids.

Caregiving, along with higher education and healthcare delivery, has among the highest real-dollar increase in cost in the last 10 to 15 years. Childcare is more expensive than it’s ever been in real dollars. If you’re paying $1,200, $1,300 a month for full-day childcare, for an average American job, that would be equal to the average after-tax, discretionary income that a worker is left with at the end of the month. So, economics underlies many people’s considerations. But it’s also a combination of career considerations and the specific caregiving needs of the family.

You found that hiring processes used by employers have contributed to the difficulties caregivers face when trying to return to work after some circumstance forces them to leave the workplace for a time. Why is that?

Unfortunately, several things start happening if your work history gets interrupted. The first is something that virtually every employer uses to assess candidates called the continuity of employment filter, which is used in an AI-powered tool called an applicant tracking system. It asks an employer: If someone has a gap in their work history, how should I treat that? If there’s a gap of more than six months, 50 percent of employers will drop a person from the candidate pool.

How does the struggle to manage work and caregiving typically manifest on the job? Do most employers even realize some workers are having a hard time?

First of all, employees in most companies only go to their boss or to their company to discuss a caregiving issue as a last resort. Their concern is: If I bring this up, I’m certainly not going to be a candidate for promotion. It’s going to affect my performance evaluation. They fear they’ll be viewed as less committed, that they’re going to be suspect.

The biggest two effects of having caregiving responsibilities that are hard to reconcile with your job are absenteeism and presenteeism. Either you’ll miss work, or you’ll be so distracted while you’re at work you won’t get much done.  

For a lot of frontline lower-wage jobs, companies have a rule that if someone is late to work three times in a month or has an un-preplanned absence three times in a quarter, by rule you’re just fired. And that’s completely understandable. They’re running complicated operations; they can’t let every store manager make their own decisions, not only because it would be chaos, but also because if somebody in Topeka is getting fired, but a person who did the same thing in Toledo is being kept because the store managers made different decisions and it all ends up in court, the company loses.

And companies, especially human resources functions, hate administering exceptions. Walmart employs a million people. If all of a sudden everything is customized, they’d be out of business in 6 months.

One thing my early research showed is that caregiving concerns are endemic. They affect roughly 80 percent of the workforce some of the time, most of the time, or all of the time. But the way working relationships have been structured by employers for a century rests on propositions like “I’m paying you and providing a decent place to work. I don’t want to intrude on your life, and I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Besides concerns about fairness, administrative logistics, and lost productivity, there are costs for failing to address the caregiving needs of employees, costs many companies don’t realize they’re paying. What are some of those?

First, there’s a very substantial cost of replacing a worker. It doesn’t matter if they’re fired, or they quit. Even for low-wage workers, the cost is between 25 percent and 35 percent of annual compensation. That’s a good proxy for how much it’s going to cost to replace that worker.

Second, people who have some tenure with the employer have lots of knowledge based on that experience, which makes them more productive. Say they join your company at age 24 or 25 and then after four or five years, they decide to start a family. They’ve got five years of work experience; they have a network inside the company; they may know customers; they know how you do things. But they conclude they can’t stay given the requirements of the job.

“There’s a very substantial cost of replacing a worker. Even for low-wage workers, the cost is between 25 percent and 35 percent of annual compensation.”

Unless employers assist them so they can stay in the job, they give up a productive worker. Their replacement is an unknown quantity. Employers constantly make speculative bets on new employees based on pieces of paper and a couple of interviews to replace a worker the company has a huge amount of data on from personnel files, performance evaluations, etc.

When they replace the worker who leaves because of caregiving conflicts, they incur the direct costs, but they also absorb indirect costs, what we call “tacit knowledge” — how we do things around here. And say that worker is on a team and they’re the glue on that team. Another team member has been thinking about quitting, too. We know from psychological research that person will feel psychological permission to quit if another worker quits.

What my research shows is the more senior you are, and the more money you make, the more likely you are to leave a job because of a caregiving obligation. Employers are always surprised by that. They assume a worker is more likely to leave if they’re low-paid.

A worker in the top quartile of compensation is more likely to leave a job because of a caregiving conflict by a factor of two than a bottom-quartile worker. And that 25 percent to 35 percent cost of replacing a worker goes to 100 percent or more of annual compensation if you’re talking about a top-quartile worker — middle management, upper-middle management, all the way to the executive ranks.

All those things add up. Unfortunately, employers historically aren’t very good at connecting those dots. They don’t understand their own economics.

Why aren’t they better at seeing the full picture of these costs?

Unfortunately, the lack of connection between managers and supervisors of workers, and their lived experience, and the human resources function is really quite surprising. HR, particularly in big companies, just tends to see data. They’re not talking to supervisors who say, “My best workers are leaving regularly and here’s why.” A lot of companies don’t do exit interviews, so they don’t connect data about why somebody leaves in performance reviews. They don’t say, “Is there anything that’s causing you to think about leaving the company?”

What should employers do to remedy this situation?

The first is to realize there’s a big pool of talent out there that’s been marginalized because of caregiving responsibilities.

Employers should review how they search for talent and what conditions they’re putting on applicants in the applicant tracking system and adjust them to include more candidates. There’s this big pool of workers that is being structurally obliged to end up in part-time, low-wage work because of these “disqualifying” factors. I’m not going to say those standards are arbitrary, but they contribute to an artificial shortage of qualified candidates that employers complain about despite policies creating that shortage.

A second is, understand that all your employees are past, current, and future caregivers and that their circumstances will change. Their life path affects their productivity and their propensity to quit or to behave in a way that causes you to fire them.

Understand the care demographics of your workforce. Make their caregiving lives outside work something that’s discussable with their supervisor. There’s a tremendous return on loyalty and engagement from workers who hear from their supervisors.

Do exit interviews, add to your performance review questions like “Have you thought about leaving? What would cause you to do that?” Find out what’s driving absentees and resignations? Look at your own data.

Just invest in having a more sophisticated understanding of your own economics. Because if you do, you’ll make better decisions.

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Celebrating 40 years of progress in the field of dental implant surgery, the Harvard School of Dental Medicine honored Daniel Buser — University of Bern Professor and Harvard visiting lecturer — with the Paul Goldhaber Award on Monday. While accepting the honor, the most prestigious granted by the Dental School, the renowned dental surgeon gave an address that spanned both his academic career and the advances in the field, four decades “of pioneers and big breakthroughs.”

Since 2000, Buser said, dental implant surgery has become both “routine” and “highly successful.” Nearly 3 million American have dental implants, a number that is growing by 500,000 annually, according to the American Academy of Implant Dentistry. Despite a trend toward older patients, with good hygiene (and a warning to “not smoke too much”), the procedure has success and survival rates of 95 percent and 98 percent. “Much better than conventional prosthetics,” said Buser. “Better than hip replacement.” He added the field has cut the number of surgical interventions, decreased pain and morbidity, and shortened healing and treatment times.

Over his career, Buser saw a “paradigm shift” in the surfaces of surgical dental implants. While the earliest implants were anchored by a smooth, polished titanium screw (known as the Brånemark surface after Swedish researcher Per-Ingvar Brånemark), the field trended toward “micro-rough” surfaces after research found that they reduced average healing time and failure rates.

Dental implants have success and survival rates of 95 percent and 98 percent. “Better than hip replacement.”

Daniel Buser

The next big breakthrough, explained Buser, was guided bone regeneration, which uses barrier membranes to direct the growth of new bone around an implant. In Bern, he said, the first clinical case, involving the extraction of a premolar replaced by an implant, “worked very nice.”

The technique did have complications, however. Collapse of the membranes and difficulties in healing set off a search for better materials. With research on miniature pigs, “We learned very quickly we needed something to support the membrane.” The answer? Two different fillers, the so-called composite graft, which has now become standard.

Further research has revealed that the placement of the implant has an impact, as does the so-called micro-gap, the space between the various components of the implant. Looking at “possible ways to minimize or eliminate inflammation,” said Buser, “you want to either decrease or eliminate the micro-gap, seal it, or you can physically move the micro-gap up,” higher on the jaw, which reduces the chance of inflammation and bone loss.

Another advance has been bone conditioning, which uses a patient’s own bone chips. Bathing the chips in a mix of the patient’s blood and an isotype bath known as Ringer’s solution to avoid clotting prompts the bone chips to release a growth factor. “We have seen that two of the most important growth factors can be detected very quickly,” he said, opening up more options for healing.

Such advances have been aided by the introduction of cone-beam-computed tomography, a volumetric scanning machine that provides 3D models and serves as a diagnostic tool. Now routine, “this gives us so much information.”

With so many options — such as whether to do immediate implant placement after an extraction or to wait — the current challenge is “all about case selection,” said Buser, noting that each case should dictate an individual approach. Adding that most complications are caused by poorly trained practitioners, he stressed the importance of the kind of teamwork that encourages both research and personal growth. “You have to have lifelong learning. You have to go to conferences to be updated.”

Speaking to a full house as well as an online audience, Buser also touched on being a mentor, a role shared by the late Goldhaber, who served as the dean of the Dental School for 22 years. 

“For an academic career, you must have a good mentor,” said Buser. Naming such luminaries in the field as the late André Schroeder, professor of operative dentistry and endodontics at the University of Bern; Robert Schenck, whom Buser recruited to oral and maxillofacial surgery from his original field of orthopedics; and Ray Williams, P.D. ’73, a 2013 Goldhaber honoree and former associate dean for postdoctoral education and head of the Department of Periodontology at HSDM, he encouraged young academics to seek out those who could help them.

He also stressed that such collaboration is a two-way street. “You must be a good team player.” Noting the lessons learned from his own participation in the 1980 Swiss champion Bern handball team, he said, “You achieve much more with a good team.”

Researchers found people with wide-ranging long COVID symptoms were twice as likely to have SARS-CoV-2 proteins in their blood, compared to those without long COVID symptoms, according to a study out of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Commonly reported long COVID symptoms included fatigue, brain fog, muscle pain, joint pain, back pain, headache, sleep disturbance, loss of smell or taste, and gastrointestinal symptoms.

Results are published in Clinical Microbiology and Infection.

Specifically,  the team found that 43 percent of those with long COVID symptoms affecting three major systems in the body, including cardiopulmonary, musculoskeletal, and neurologic systems, tested positive for viral proteins within 1 to 14 months of their positive COVID test. But only 21 percent of those who didn’t report any long COVID symptoms tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 biomarkers in this same period.

“If we can identify a subset of people who have persistent viral symptoms because of a reservoir of virus in the body, we may be able to treat them with antivirals to alleviate their symptoms,” said lead author Zoe Swank, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Pathology at BWH.

The study analyzed 1,569 blood samples collected from 706 people, including 392 participants from the National Institutes of Health-supported Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative,  who had previously tested positive for a COVID infection. Using Simoa, an ultrasensitive test for detecting single molecules, researchers looked for whole and partial proteins from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They also analyzed data from the participants’ long COVID symptoms, using electronic medical chart information or surveys that were gathered at the same time as the blood samples were taken.

It’s possible that a persistent infection explains some — but not all — of the long COVID sufferers’ symptoms. If this is the case, testing and treatment could aid in identifying patients who may benefit from treatments such as antiviral medications.

A condition with more than one cause

One of the questions raised by the study is why more than half of patients with wide-ranging long COVID symptoms tested negative for persistent viral proteins.

“This finding suggests there is likely more than one cause of long COVID,” said David Walt, a professor of pathology at BWH and principal investigator on the study. “For example, another possible cause of long-COVID symptoms could be that the virus harms the immune system, causing immune dysfunction to continue after the virus is cleared.”

To better understand whether an ongoing infection is behind some people’s long COVID symptoms, Swank, Walt, and other researchers are currently conducting follow-up studies. They’re analyzing blood samples and symptom data in larger groups of patients, including people of wide age ranges and those with compromised immune symptoms. This way, they can also see if some people are more likely to have persistent virus in the body.

“There is still a lot that we don’t know about how this virus affects people,” said David C. Goff, a senior scientific program director for the RECOVER Observational Consortium Steering Committee and director of the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of NIH. “These types of studies are critical to help investigators better understand the mechanisms underlying long COVID — which will help bring us closer to identifying the right targets for treatment.”

Goff added that these results also support ongoing efforts to study antiviral treatments.  

The SARS-CoV-2 blood test developed by Brigham and Women’s researchers is also currently being used in a national study, called RECOVER-VITAL, that is testing whether an antiviral drug helps patients recover from long COVID. The RECOVER-VITAL trial will test the patients’ blood before and after treatment with an antiviral to see if treatment eliminates persistent viral proteins in the blood.

The idea that a virus can stay in the body and cause ongoing symptoms months after an infection isn’t unique to COVID.

“Other viruses are associated with similar post-acute syndromes,” said Swank. She noted animal studies have found Ebola and Zika proteins in tissues post-infection, and these viruses have also been associated with post-infection illness.

Funding for this work came from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Barbara and Amos Hostetter.

Many nations around the globe appear deeply divided, with dissatisfaction over democracy on the rise. The central issues are rooted in the “very real failings” of liberal democratic institutions today, according to Daniel Chandler.  

“It’s surprisingly hard to find a coherent vision of what a truly just society, grounded in [classical] liberal principles, would actually look like,” said Chandler, an economist and philosopher at the London School of Economics, during a talk Monday with Eric Beerbohm, director of the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard.

The pair discussed Chandler’s new book, “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society,” in which he defends the ideas of the late John Rawls, the renowned 20th century Harvard political philosopher, and attempts to apply them to the economic and political issues of today.

The book offers a full-throated defense of liberal egalitarianism, as Rawls outlined it, and then tries to “bridge the gap between Rawls’ quite abstract, high-level principles and a whole range of practical policy questions,” Chandler said. 

Rawls was a deeply influential political, moral and legal philosopher who taught at Harvard from 1962 until his death in 2002 and is best known for his 1971 opus, “A Theory of Justice.”

His theory of “justice as fairness” envisions a society in which every person has an equal right to the basic liberties and opportunities, and where inequalities exist, those with the least power or advantage should be prioritized. And he begins with a thought experiment: Would we design a more just society if nobody knew in advance whether they’d be among the most powerful or the most vulnerable? 

Chandler was first inspired to explore this question while he was at Harvard in 2008 on a one-year Henry Fellowship. He wondered why economics and political theory appeared to have drifted apart for progressives since Rawls’ heyday and whether he could find a way to reunite them. 

One objective of the book, he explained, was to offer an accessible summary of Rawls’ ideas to a non-academic public and to address some of the common criticisms and misunderstandings about him.

“I think one of the reasons Rawls hasn’t had as much influence as he might have had on public policy is that he said so little about the practical implications of his ideas,” he said. 

“I particularly wanted to bring out some of the communitarian aspects of Rawls’ thinking, and to emphasize how his account of economic justice is much richer and also much more radical than his commons.”

“I particularly wanted to bring out some of the communitarian aspects of Rawls’ thinking, and to emphasize how his account of economic justice is much richer and also much more radical than his commons,” essentially his views on sharing of societal resources.  

In Rawls’ view, economic justice involves more than how wealth is distributed, but about the balance of power between workers and business owners and the importance of having a sense of financial independence and opportunity. 

A secondary goal was to respond to critics of classical liberalism, which embraces individual freedom as a primary value, and try to “rehabilitate” it as a progressive public philosophy. 

“I think in popular discourse, particularly on the left, liberalism has come to be associated with the neoliberal ideas of thinkers like [Friedrich] Hayek and [Milton] Friedman,” with their faith in the markets and singular focus on economic growth. 

That kind of thinking has come to dominate political discourse and economic policy since the 1980s, Chandler notes in his book. It has left progressives without a solid philosophical mooring for their thinking and policies.

Whereas President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher could look to Hayek and Friedman in the 1980s for a source of intellectual coherence and direction, it’s not as obvious today where progressives look for similar inspiration, he added. 

“The long-term failure of mainstream progressive parties, like the Democrats here [in the U.S.] and the Labour Party in the U.K., to develop a coherent political vision of their own” is not merely an intellectual problem, but it deeply undermines the parties’ chances for ongoing electoral success, Chandler said.   

Rawls, Chandler believes, offers a useful framework for weaving an array of different policies together in a coherent way and provides an intellectual and ethical clarity about why we should pursue progressive policy ideas like workplace democracy or universal basic income or various forms of participatory democratic politics.

Not everyone will agree with Chandler’s point of view, but for politicians and others looking for justifications of certain policies, that clarity could have significant practical value. “Being able to explain why we support different policies is important, and Rawls can help us do that.” 

A new book by Daniel Chandler, “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society,” offers a vision for democratic change inspired by the work of John Rawls, the towering political philosopher who joined the Harvard faculty in 1962 and maintained ties to the University until his death in 2002. Rawls’ 1971 magnum opus, “A Theory of Justice,” has influenced generations of philosophers and legal scholars.

In a conversation that has been edited for clarity and length, Chandler, an economist and philosopher at the London School of Economics who studied at Harvard under Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, explained why Rawls’ ideas speak to the present day. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Which of Rawls’ principles offer the best framework for envisioning change?

The fundamental idea of Rawls’ philosophy is that society should be fair, and he developed a famous thought experiment called the “original position” for thinking about what that might actually mean. If we want to know what a fair society would look like, we should imagine how we would choose to organize it if we didn’t know what our position in that society would be, whether we would be rich or poor, gay or straight, Black or white, as behind what he called a “veil of ignorance.” It’s a very intuitive way to think about fairness, similar to the idea that someone might cut a cake more fairly if they didn’t know which piece they were going to end up getting.

“It’s a very intuitive way to think about fairness, similar to the idea that someone might cut a cake more fairly if they didn’t know which piece they were going to end up getting.”

He uses this thought experiment to identify two fundamental principles, to do with freedom and equality respectively — hence the title of my book — that we can then use to think about how to design the basic institutions of a democratic society: what the Constitution should look like, how to organize the political process, the broad outlines of our economic system, including the role of markets, the nature of property rights, the scope of government intervention, and so on.

Rawls’ first principle is what he called the “basic liberties” principle. That’s the idea that everyone is entitled to a set of truly fundamental freedoms, including both personal freedoms, such as freedom of speech, religion, sexuality, but also political freedoms — not just the right to vote, but all of the freedoms that we need to play a part as genuine equals in the political process. 

His second principle has two parts. The first is what he called “fair equality of opportunity.” That’s not just the absence of discrimination but the idea that everyone should have a genuinely equal chance to develop and apply their talents and abilities in life. Equality of opportunity is sometimes seen as the less radical partner to equality of outcome, but it’s really a very demanding ideal, one that countries like America and the U.K. fall far short of today. 

The second is the “difference principle” — the idea that we should organize our economy so that the least well-off are better off than they would be under any alternative economic system. So, some inequality can be justified because it’s necessary for markets to function well, and higher pay gives people incentives to work hard and innovate, but we need to make sure the benefits are widely shared, and that isn’t something we can just leave to markets. 

One of the things that I think is most interesting and important about Rawls’ economic thinking, but has often been overlooked, is that when he’s talking about inequality and economic justice, he’s not only talking about the distribution of financial resources. He’s concerned with how our society distributes power and control, like the balance of power between owners and workers, and also what he calls the “social bases of self-respect,” which include having a sense of independence, of being able to stand on your own two feet, social recognition from our peers, and opportunities for meaningful work.

Historically, one critique of Rawls is that his ideas, while important, are not very pragmatic and don’t offer a roadmap for change. How might the kind of change you propose come to fruition?

I think that’s a fair criticism. You know, although Rawls is really the unrivaled giant of 20th-century political philosophy, his ideas haven’t had much impact on popular debate or public policy, at least not compared to Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek. I think it’s this lack of practical application that helps explain this gap. I’ve tried to pick up where Rawls left off and flesh out how we could put his ideas into practice. 

In terms of how change can happen, there aren’t easy answers. But we can be pretty certain that change won’t happen unless political parties and the people who shape our public debate are able to articulate a positive and unifying vision of where they want society. The starting point for making the quite deep changes that America needs, to both its political and economic institutions, is to be able to articulate that positive vision.

Some commentators have suggested a binary choice — liberal principles on one side, authoritarian ideas on the other — in the coming presidential election. You say we should reject that idea. 

It’s not that I don’t think that choice exists; it’s that I think it’s possible and necessary to try to appeal to people across the spectrum. What I’m rejecting is the idea that society is divided into two fixed camps who can’t speak to one another anymore. It’s still the case that large majorities support liberal freedoms, the existence of a democratic political system, and an economy that is broadly market-based, but genuinely works for everybody. The divide is much more tied to party identification rather than to issues. So, despite how divided things seem right now, I think it’s possible to build a broad-based coalition around these kinds of ideas, and I hope my book provides people with the ideas and arguments to try to do that.

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At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Oct. 1, 2024, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Robert Rosenthal was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Robert Rosenthal, one of the most influential psychologists of the past 60 years, died on Jan. 5, 2024, in Riverside, California. He was 90 years old. Rosenthal conducted landmark social psychology experiments on interpersonal expectancy effects, which showed that people can unwittingly convey how they expect others to behave, thereby subtly inducing them to act in accordance with expectation.  Such effects, he found, occur with teachers, supervisors, and psychotherapists with their pupils, employees, and patients.  He was also a major contributor to statistical and methodological advances in the behavioral sciences.

Rosenthal was born in Giessen, Germany, on March 2, 1933, and was the son of Hermine (Kahn) and Julius Rosenthal.  He spent his early years in the town of Limburg, where his father co-owned a dry goods factory.  The factory was seized by the Nazis in 1938, and the Rosenthal family fled to Cologne, seeking to conceal their Jewish identity in the anonymity of the big city.  Although they had obtained a quota number enabling them to immigrate to America, someone stole it.  Fortunately, Julius Rosenthal’s brothers were living in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia.  They helped the family escape to Africa, obtain a visa, and then settle in New York City in 1940.

Julius Rosenthal moved his family from Queens to Los Angeles, where he opened a department store and where Robert Rosenthal finished his final year of high school.  Robert Rosenthal then enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he majored in psychology.  He received his B.A. in 1953 while also taking graduate courses in clinical psychology, enabling him to obtain his Ph.D. in 1956.  After completing his clinical training, he was appointed Assistant Professor, then Associate Professor, and became the Director of clinical training in the Ph.D. program in clinical psychology at the University of North Dakota, where he taught for five years.  He spent the next 37 years at Harvard University, first as a lecturer on clinical psychology and then as a professor of social psychology.  He chaired the Department of Psychology (1992–1995) and was appointed Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology (1995–1999).  He retired from Harvard and began working for the University of California, Riverside, in 1999, where he was Distinguished Professor and University Professor until his retirement in 2018.

Although trained as a clinician, Rosenthal’s research soon evolved in the direction of social psychology.  In the 1960s, he and Kermit Fode discovered the Experimenter Bias Effect.  In one study, he informed student experimenters that one group of rats had been bred to be very proficient at learning to navigate mazes, whereas another group had not.  Although both groups were indistinguishable, the “maze-bright” rats outperformed the “maze-dull” ones, apparently because students unintentionally handled them especially well.  Rosenthal’s work on the Experimenter Bias Effect encouraged psychologists to conduct their experiments in a double-blind fashion whereby neither the subjects nor the assistants testing them were aware of the hypothesis under test.

Pygmalion in the Classroom was among his most famous experiments, conducted with Lenore Jacobson, an elementary school principal.  They told teachers that the (bogus!) Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition had revealed that certain students, but not others, were about to exhibit a growth spurt in measurable intelligence over the course of the school year.  Follow-up intelligence tests indicated that students whose teachers expected intellectual growth did, in fact, exhibit an increase in measured IQ greater than did students whose teachers had no such expectation of them. Apparently, teachers favorably interacted with the students whom they expected to excel, thereby encouraging the very progress supposedly forecast by the test.

Rosenthal also made many contributions to the related field of nonverbal behavior.  In 1993 Nalini Ambady and Rosenthal won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Prize for Behavioral Science Research for their work on thin slices of behavior. They found that brief — usually less than one minute — slices of audiotaped or videotaped expressive behavior (e.g., manners of speaking, gestures, and facial expressions) enabled raters to make judgments regarding a person’s competence, likability, and other attributes that were as accurate at predicting, for example, a person’s success as a teacher as comprehensive student evaluations.  Brief audiotapes of physicians interacting with their patients distinguished those who had been sued versus those who had not.

In parallel with his work in social psychology, Rosenthal published many articles and books on statistics and methodology. Often collaborating with Donald B. Rubin or Ralph L. Rosnow, he was instrumental in developing meta-analysis, a procedure for summarizing the results of many studies.  As co-chair of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Task Force on Statistical Inference, he helped shape guidelines for best practices, such as focused contrast analyses and effect size estimation.

Rosenthal was the recipient of many honors, including the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (1996), the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award from the American Psychological Society (2001), and the Samuel J. Messick Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution from the APA’s Division 5 (Quantitative and Qualitative Methods) (2002). He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Giessen in 2003, 70 years after he was born at the university’s medical center.

Rosenthal’s wife of 59 years, Marylu (Clayton), passed away in 2010.  He is survived by his daughters, Virginia (Ginny) Rosenthal Mahasin and Roberta Rosenthal Hawkins; his son, David Clayton Rosenthal; and six grandchildren.

Rosenthal was a wonderful colleague and the beloved mentor of many students. His personal warmth, kindness, and ever-smiling, down-to-earth manner were as memorable as his curiosity, enthusiasm, and brilliance.

Respectfully submitted,

Jill M. Hooley
Ellen J. Langer
Mark F. Lenzenweger (Binghamton University)
Donald B. Rubin
Richard J. McNally, Chair

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Oct. 1, 2024, the following tribute to the life and service of the late David Gordon Mitten was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Have you seen the Attic black-figure vase in the Harvard Art Museums depicting Herakles playing the kithara and coping with his lionskin at the same time?  Or the early Byzantine weighing machine, with its bust-shaped weight depicting an empress?  Or the medallion portrait of the comic playwright Menander, uniquely inscribed in antiquity with his name and, therefore, invaluable for identifying uninscribed copies elsewhere?  If so, you owe the fascination of seeing these objects at Harvard to David Gordon Mitten, curator, teacher, and archaeologist.

Mitten was born in Youngstown, Ohio.  New World archaeology at the University of New Mexico and in the Smithsonian Institution’s River Basin Surveys provided his early training in fieldwork.  In 1957 he was awarded his B.A. in Classics at Oberlin College and, in 1962, his Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology at Harvard, where he spent the rest of his career.  His participation in the University of Chicago’s Isthmia excavations in Greece yielded his doctoral dissertation on the terracotta figurines from the Isthmian sanctuary of Poseidon, which he wrote under the direction of George Hanfmann.  As an excavator, Mitten’s most significant contribution was the discovery of a synagogue from the Roman era at Sardis, the capital of the fabled kingdom of Lydia in western Anatolia, where the Harvard–Cornell Archaeological Exploration of Sardis started annual excavation in 1958.  He was an associate director of the Sardis excavation for 40 years.

Upon completion of his Ph.D., Mitten was appointed Instructor in the Fine Arts and, in 1964, Francis Jones Assistant Professor of Classical Art.  In 1968 he was appointed associate professor with tenure (a short-lived concept at Harvard), and, the following year, he received a full professorship as the James Loeb Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology in the Department of the Classics.  In 1974, succeeding his teacher and mentor, he was appointed Curator of Ancient Art; in 1996, to his humble delight, the position was endowed as the George M. A. Hanfmann Curatorship of Ancient Art.

Until his retirement from the curatorship in 2005, an occasion on which he was celebrated at an international symposium of friends, colleagues, and former students, Mitten acquired a rich array of ancient objects in all media for Harvard, especially bronzes and coins but also marble sculptures and pottery.  In 2010 he retired from his professorial chair, having taught generations of students — in the Harvard Divinity School, where he offered a renowned seminar on the archaeology of the New Testament with Helmut Koester; the Division of Continuing Education; the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; and, with special enthusiasm, Harvard College, where his course Images of Alexander the Great was a legend in the Core Curriculum.

Mitten’s major contributions in print comprise two catalogs, “Master Bronzes from the Classical World,” co-edited with Suzannah Doeringer and published to accompany an exhibition that traveled from Harvard in 1967–68 to the City Art Museum of St. Louis and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and “The Gods Delight: The Human Figure in Classical Bronze,” co-edited with Arielle P. Kozloff and published to accompany an exhibition that traveled from the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1988–89 to, once again, the Los Angeles County Museum and then to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  His special interest in bronzes left Harvard a legacy of important acquisitions, including small objects of personal attire (fibulae, the ancient equivalent of the safety pin) and some larger pieces ranging from elegant Picasso-esque figures of the Greek Geometric period to a Roman statuette of a goddess wearing a bird-shaped headdress.

Mitten’s love of ancient objects benefited not only the Harvard Art Museums, through 30 years of passionate curatorial acquisition, but also generations of students, whom he charmed and enthused with hands-on demonstration of the intricacies of craftsmanship residing in the humblest of objects.  Far from protecting these pieces from the hazards of human touch, he would hand round gloves at the beginning of every class and teach his students how handling an object is key to understanding it.  He believed in the capacity of fragments to tease students’ imagination and test their connoisseurship, and, alongside glamorous purchases like an Etruscan black-figure amphora depicting the ambush of the Trojan hero Troilus by Achilles, he created a valuable teaching tool by gathering ostensibly trivial fragments of red- and black-figure pottery.  Intermittently during his career, he published articles on objects in Harvard’s collections, thereby making them known beyond the confines of the Yard.

Just as Mitten could make an inert object come alive as he cradled it in the palm of his hand or held it up to the light to illustrate a particular swirl of drapery or carefully shaped lock of hair, so, too, could he enthrall an audience with tales of excavating at Sardis or a detective story tracing the pedigree of a new acquisition.  He took an intense interest in other people, both their dreams and their challenges, and sought opportunities to further their ambitions.  The legacy of his passion for ancient coins was secured with the appointment of Harvard’s first curator of coins, Dr. Carmen Arnold-Biucchi, in 2002.  Students of the civilizations adjacent to Greece and Rome also benefited from acquisitions that he made, such as two groups of cylinder seals intricately carved in Mesopotamia long before the Greeks and Romans came to dominate the Mediterranean world.

Mitten was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1976, the Petra Shattuck Teaching Prize from the Harvard Extension School in 1988, and the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 1993.  In 2009 he received the Faculty of the Year Award from the Harvard Foundation.  Having accepted Islam during his excavations at Sardis in 1969, he became a faculty advisor to the Harvard Islamic Society; he practiced Sufism and frequently delivered the homily at Morning Prayers in Appleton Chapel.  He is survived by his wife Heather Barney; two daughters from his first marriage, Claudia Hon and Eleanor Mitten; his stepdaughter, Sophia Barney-Farrar; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Respectfully submitted,

Amy Brauer
Susanne Ebbinghaus
Ioli Kalavrezou
Kimberley Patton
Kathleen M. Coleman, Chair

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Oct. 1, 2024, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Daniel Albright was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Daniel Albright, the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard from 2003 until his untimely death at the age of 69, was a prolific and ingenious analyst of literary modernism, lyric poetry, the challenging early 20th-century intersections of music, science, literature, and art, and the larger theory of aestheticism across the arts.  His 16 books, along with his amusing and wide-ranging lecture courses on modernism at Harvard and his always warm and lively conversational manner, defined a place where learning, whimsy, a photographic memory, amusing side glances, a drawling eloquence, mischievous formulations, exact timing, and theatrical pauses delighted his listeners and readers while offering a precise and detailed analytic account of those moments of aesthetic experience that define our personal and exhilarating encounters with works of art.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, on Oct. 29, 1945, Albright attended Rice University, where he majored in mathematics until he switched abruptly to English literature.  At Yale University, he completed his Ph.D. in three years with a thesis on the poetry of William Butler Yeats.  His first book, “The Myth Against Myth: A Study of Yeats’s Imagination in Old Age,” was published at once by Oxford University Press.  After Yale, Albright taught for 17 years at the University of Virginia, where he was promoted to full professor and published five books on lyric theory, Yeats, Tennyson, and the modernism of Thomas Mann, Beckett, Nabokov, Schoenberg, and Woolf.  While at Virginia, Albright married Karin Larson, with whom he had a son, Christopher.

In the middle third of his academic career, Albright taught for 16 years at the University of Rochester with an affiliate appointment in musicology at the Eastman School of Music.  While at Rochester, his many publications on music and the relations between early 20th-century modernism in music and literature began his search for a wider aesthetics of modernism across the arts.

Once at Harvard, the final third of Albright’s career unfolded.  In his later books, he developed a theory that he called panaesthetics, a challenge to the notion that each art has not only a specific medium but also unique limits and central preoccupations.  Albright’s popular General Education course, Putting Modernism Together, reflected the expanding vision of this phase of his career.

In Albright’s many books, lectures, and articles, he developed a broad interdisciplinary account of modernism, while setting that interest within his account of a lyric tradition that includes Yeats, Tennyson, and the larger theory of lyric poetry.  He situated literary modernism within early 20th-century music and science, above all within music because both its lyricism and its experiments with form provided strong analogues with literary modernism.

As a literary and musical interpreter, Albright is characterized by a demonic attentiveness, by learning, by a fanciful mind, and by brilliant writing.  Drawn to the artistic extremity of Schoenberg, Beckett, and Nabokov or the collaborative work of Gertrude Stein, Albright took modernism to require, in part, difficulty, and he saw that it involved elaborate and playful engagement with language.  His was an empirical, speculative, text-based criticism.

Albright’s first book on Yeats’s imagination in old age could not, with all its attention to the language of poetry and myth, have predicted his second, two-part project on modernism: “Personality and Impersonality: Lawrence, Woolf, Mann” and “Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov, and Schoenberg.”  Each of these books set out to isolate a core feature of representation within modernity.  In “Representation,” Albright, in his always paradoxical way, worked out the costs of creating an extreme fictive world, an abstract world established by means of the details of the real, a collapsing project always pushed too far in order to work at all.  The earlier book on expression and personality started from the opposite direction, studying fictive worlds that express the writer’s personality and biography by means of the central figure of the artist.  Here too Albright worked in the direction of paradox since each of these three careers required a swerve into the abstract, the allegorical, and the impersonal after a certain exhaustion of the artistic resources of personality.

Albright’s work in the second half of his career moved this ambition to a larger terrain.  Literary modernism itself is now configured and expressed through the competing and companionable modernisms of art, music, and science.  These ambitions define Albright’s two major mid-career books “Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism” and “Untwisting the Serpent,” his first attempts at large-scale aesthetics of modernism across the arts.  Albright resisted Lessing’s strong argument for the separation of powers within the different domains of art in order to isolate, for our attention, small-scale shared aesthetic features common in the 20th century to music, drama, poetry, and opera.  Gestus, or gesture, is one of those small aesthetic units.  Opera — with its ambition to unify all of the arts within a performance where words, music, gesture, presence, story, and the visual effects of costume and spectacle are all drawn together — is certainly at the heart of Albright’s idea of the dream of modernism.

From Albright’s earliest work on Yeats to his all-embracing final work on panaesthetics, his career was that of a pathbreaker who moved on to ever newer enlargements of the domain within which we pose our questions about the central works and artists of modernism and its aftermath.

Albright was named a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow in 1973, a Guggenheim Fellow in 1976, and a Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2012.  He died suddenly on Jan. 3, 2015, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He is survived by his domestic partner, Marta S. Rivera Monclova; his son, Christopher Albright; and his ex-wife, Karin.

Albright will be remembered for a style that is that of an aesthete: savoring words, ideas, juxtapositions, and the discoveries of his own brilliant mind and polymath learning.  Uniqueness, a rich, high style, a challenging comedy of intellect in the manner of Nabokov, a seriousness about beauty and invention — these are the traits that defined Albright’s intellectual performance.

Respectfully submitted,

John T. Hamilton
Christopher Hasty
Elaine Scarry
Philip Fisher, Chair

The idea of sea monsters has captivated us for centuries. Could there really be something scary lurking in the dark depths? Folklore and popular culture say yes, yet science urges us to dive a little deeper.

“Sea Monsters: Wonders of Nature and Imagination” is a new exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, one of the four Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, which investigates the mystery and lore behind some of the ocean’s most fascinating creatures. It was inspired by a popular course taught by Peter Girguis, guest curator and Harvard professor of organic and evolutionary biology.

“This course is really a survey of humankind’s relationship with the ocean, from ancient mariners to current political affairs,” he said. “What’s been most rewarding is seeing the students realize how important the ocean is to humanity and how we often apply monstrosity to things we simply don’t understand.”

Sea monsters are a universal phenomenon, appearing in the myths and legends of cultures around the world. However, many of these exciting stories come from real creatures hidden in the deep. In the exhibition, visitors will ask themselves: Do sea monsters exist? And if so, what do they tell us about ourselves and our connection with the ocean?

Ancient mythology depicts the sea as a realm of chaos, filled with fearsome creatures like the Greek Hydra. Hindu mythology conjured the Makara, a sea monster that symbolizes protection and good fortune. In African folklore, creatures like the Mngwa and the Inkanyamba are feared as evil water spirits. However, with modern science and technologies, we better understand the lives of the real creatures behind these legends. For instance, the New England-based Scituate Sea Monster was ultimately identified as a decaying basking shark; the Kraken in Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” is likely the enigmatic deep-sea giant squid.

Visitors will discover the existence of sea creatures whose real lives are often more astonishing than the fantastical beings we may have imagined. Visitors can see these creatures firsthand when peering into displays of specimens from the Museum of Comparative Zoology’s extensive collections, such as a viperfish, the tentacle and beak of a giant squid, and a Megalodon shark tooth.

The exhibition features historical illustrations of these fabled monsters and detailed ancient mariners’ maps. Ancient maps held important cultural knowledge, often revealed through depictions of mythological creatures that served as warnings of dangerous and uncharted waters. Also on display is a Peruvian ceramic pot made by the ancient Moche people, which shows a crab with human-like features losing a battle with a god. A two-foot Gregorian reflecting telescope made around 1750, decorated with two sea serpents, also appears in the gallery.

Tentacles and teeth are frequently associated with monsters of the sea. In reality, tentacles are important and adaptable tools used to sense the environment, catch food, and for protection. Surprisingly, the viperfish’s needle-like fangs feel more like toothbrush bristles than daggers. And while the deep-sea anglerfish may look scary, most are just a few inches long and only eat small fish and shrimp. Many of these creatures are captured in eerie and stunning deep-sea photography by Solvin Zankl and others.

The exhibition explores how ocean ecosystems are threatened by creatures such as the crown-of-thorns starfish which feeds on coral polyps and Sargassum seaweed which is growing out of control in some places due to agricultural-nutrient runoff, creating dead zones in the ocean and overwhelming beaches. Even more monstrous than these invaders are the pressures we humans place on the ocean. Plastic pollution and human-influenced climate change are endangering marine life and ecosystems. These are the real sea monsters and the exhibition shows that we have the chance to work toward sustainable solutions that protect our oceans for future generations.

The exhibition is open to the public through June 26, 2026.

The 26th annual Harvard Powwow was a family affair for renowned American Indian scholar Tink Tinker of Osage County and his great-niece Lena Tinker ’25, Osage Nation.

“I so appreciate Lena. I’ve watched her grow up,” he said. “We knew when you were little that you were smart. Now you’re almost a Harvard graduate.”

Lena smiled as she remembered her uncle supporting her decision to come to Harvard. “Now getting to have him here my senior year is very special,” she said. “It’s good to have family here.”

Despite the generational differences, the Tinkers were happy to connect with other Natives at the Sept. 28 gathering. “I like the element of thinking back on the powwow history that we have in this country as this place where we come together to gather in community,” Lena said about this year’s theme, “In My Powwow Era.”

Tink, a professor emeritus at Iliff School of Theology, attended the powwow ahead of the first of four trips to campus as visiting Indigenous Spiritual Leader. The four-week residency, part of a collaboration between the Memorial Church and the Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP), will see Tink working with students, collaborating with faculty and staff, and publicly presenting his work.

“It feels good,” he said of the powwow. “It feels like Indian Country. For me, coming from Denver and being Osage from Oklahoma, I’m hooking up with relatives here. I can hear their voices at the microphone and in the songs. I can see them in their dance steps.”

Following in her great uncle’s service-driven footsteps, Lena has been an active member of the Native community on campus. As a first-year, she joined Natives at Harvard College (NaHC) and now serves as co-president of the student group.

“My first memory of meeting Native people on campus was on the steps of Widener Library on a beautiful, sunny day,” she said. “I remember that first year wondering what the Native community was like here and slowly getting to meet everyone over the course of my four years here.

“For a lot of us, NaHC is home on this campus and those people are like family. It’s a space that feels special and different from anywhere else at the University,” she added.

While reflecting on their favorite memories of the student group, Lena and classmates brought up those who had graduated, affectionally called their NaHC elders. “We hold that memory in the stories we share with each other on campus,” she said.

Karen Medina-Perez ’24, who has ancestral connections to the Lambayeque and Caxamarca region in the Andes and Afro-Indigenous ancestry from Aroa, Yaracuy, is one such NaHC elder who returned for the powwow to reconnect with old friends and “celebrate our existence.”

In the days leading up to the powwow, HUNAP hosted several community-building events. Students gathered to work on regalia, specifically ribbon shirts and skirts, friendship bracelets, and even took lessons on social dancing from Kabl Wilkerson of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a doctoral candidate in the History Department.

For the elder Tinker, the power of powwows is their ability to bridge the gap among generations of Native people. “That’s the Indian world,” he said. “Far back as I can remember, the social event meant all generations were present, from the littlest to the oldest, and especially the in-betweens.”

“Harvard Powwow is a moment for our community to come together and celebrate,” said Jordan Clark of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah, acting executive director of HUNAP. “When we think of community that word is all-encompassing. It spans the University, the region, and generations.”

For more than 30 years, photographer Wendel White has dedicated his craft to documenting Black lives throughout American history. In his latest project, “Manifest: Thirteen Colonies,” White turned his lens to African American materials held in collections throughout the 13 original U.S. colonies.

Among White’s 235 subjects are hair clippings from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, a Civil War-era brogan-style shoe, as well as photographs, diaries, and documents.

He came across the Civil War-era leather and wood-soled shoe at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh. While the shoe does not have a known connection with Black or white individuals, White said it made him realize how his work is not “really just about Black life, but how Black life is defined by virtual whiteness.” The collection in North Carolina held particular significance for White, who shared that his great-grandfather escaped enslavement and joined the Union Army in North Carolina.

In an intimate conversation with curators and scholars of Black history and visual arts on Sept. 26, White launched his new monograph, “Wendel A. White: Manifest | Thirteen Colonies,” which accompanies his exhibition at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology.

“I am increasingly interested in the residual power of the past to inhabit material remains,” White said. “The ability of objects to transcend the moment suggests a remarkable mechanism for golden time, bringing the past and the present into a shared space.

“These artifacts are the forensic evidence of Black life and events in the United States,” he continued. “The photographs form a reliquary and a survey of the impulse and motivation to preserve history and memory.”

Faculty of Arts and Sciences chief campus curator Brenda Tindal, who moderated the conversation at the Geological Lecture Hall and contributed an essay to White’s book, kicked off the hourlong discussion by crediting the photographer for helping to inform and visualize Black history and culture. 

“I’ve been sitting with this work for several months, and in some ways, this tome has become a bit of a prism through which the identity and the quotidian contours of Black life and culture come into such sharp relief,” Tindal said.

White and Tindal, who was recently appointed co-chair of the memorial committee for the Harvard & Legacy of Slavery Initiative, were joined by fellow contributors Cheryl Finley, Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective; Leigh Raiford, University of California, Berkeley; and Deborah Willis, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. 

While the conversation largely focused on White’s latest project, audiences also learned about his process and attention to detail. Raiford said she was struck by “the way the objects are made to dance” in White’s photography and “the way that they’re held in this warm light that reminds us to have a certain kind of reference for the past and for history.” It was a sentiment echoed by fellow panelists, who praised White for his ability to help viewers reimagine the lives of Black people in the past.

“There seems to be this really sort of subjective narration of Black culture and life, and it’s often through this very narrow contour from slavery to segregation to civil rights. That narrative really situates Black life and culture within this really over-determined domain of struggle,” Tindal said, before asking the panel how archives of African American material culture in public collections help transform the historical perception and understanding of Black history.

Willis pointed to how White frames objects in his project to help uncover stories about love, protection, and respect, and thus move away from the narrow view of Black history.

Special attention was also given to White’s artistic choice to blur part of his photographs. While many of the objects photographed for the project sharply contrast to the black velvet they are placed on, certain areas of each item are blurred.

“One of the things that was helpful for me is that I felt like the blur held back some of the violence of the archives,” said Tracey Hucks, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, from the audience.  

White began this project in 2021, after being named a Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography. The Peabody grants the annual fellowship to a photographer to document the human condition around the world. Forty-six images of White’s latest work are on display at the Peabody in an exhibition through April 13, 2025.

Harvard community members, some holding signs calling for the release of hostages held by Hamas, gathered on the steps of Widener Library Monday evening during a memorial vigil co-hosted by Harvard Chabad and Harvard Hillel. The event was held to “honor those lost and stand together in solidarity, unity, and hope” on the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Speakers offered prayers and shared stories about friends who perished or were taken hostage. Some sang songs in memory of lost loved ones. The names of all the hostages were read.

A year ago, a terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas sparked the war in Gaza, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives and recently begun to spread to Lebanon and Iran. What happens next?

Scholars at the Harvard Kennedy School came together Monday to discuss the risks of further escalation in the Middle East in a panel led by Meghan O’Sullivan, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at HKS.  

“It is a day of remembrance for many who lost loved ones a year ago today in the terrorist attacks by Hamas and those who lost loved ones in the many, many deaths that have occurred since that time,” said O’Sullivan, who is also Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs. “It’s a day of mourning for many people who are still losing members of their families and loved ones.”

A major point of discussion revolved around the role of Iran, a longtime opponent of Israel, in the ongoing conflict. Last week, Iran launched a major ballistic missile attack on Israel — only the second time the country has been directly attacked by Iran. Iranian officials said the action was in retaliation for the killing of a Hamas leader by Israel in Tehran in July. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the death.

The missile attack was widely viewed as an escalation between Israel and Iran, which has long actively supported Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and smaller militant groups in the West Bank in conflicts with Israel.  

“We’re facing a Middle Eastern crisis,” said O’Sullivan, who served in the George W. Bush administration as deputy national security adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan. “We have moved away from a decade-long war between Israel and Iran by proxy to a place where now Israel and Iran are in conflict with each other directly.”

The panel featured Edward Djerejian, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and current a senior fellow at Harvard’s Middle East Institute; Gidi Grinstein, an Israeli entrepreneur and former peace negotiator under Prime Minister Ehud Barak; Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian-American policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Omar H. Rahman, senior fellow with the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.

For more than an hour, the panelists discussed Israel’s strategy as the dominant military power in the region, Iran’s involvement, and what America’s role is — and may become.

“What [Israel] has done in terms of degrading Hamas’ capabilities and decapitating Hezbollah’s leadership, these, in my eyes, are brilliant tactical victories,” Djerejian said. “But what about the day after?”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his goals are to demilitarize and de-radicalize the opposition in Gaza, but his actions don’t align with those aims, Djerejian said.

“He’s defined the Israeli military movements in Lebanon to change the balance of power on the northern border of Israel. But these are not a strategy. These are mostly tactics without resolving the key issues.”

Rahman was tougher in his assessment of Israel’s actions.

“You’re creating a bottomless pit of despair, trauma, anguish, anger, all the things that will feed the resistance for generations,” he said of the situation in Gaza. “And so Hamas is not going anywhere as an organization. Hezbollah is not going anywhere as an organization.” 

He argued that the U.S., which has provided almost $18 billion in aid to Israel in the last year, must reconsider its role in the conflict.

“Does America want to continue underwriting an indefinite Israeli war on the region? Is that something we want to do with our taxpayer money and our support at the cost of our national interest, our credibility, on the international stage?” he said.

Grinstein said that the conflict could end immediately if Hamas were to surrender. 

“I do want to say and acknowledge that our tragedy creates a challenge of compassion,” he said. “To look at the other side and feel their tragedy as well, because there is an unimaginable tragedy happening in Gaza. Here could be an easy solution for this war, which is for Hamas leadership to leave Gaza and end the war.” 

As for the likelihood of Iran relenting, Sadjadpour said that it’s unlikely. 

“I don’t think we’re ever going to see meaningful peace and stability in the entire Middle East until you have a government in Iran, I won’t say democratic, but whose organizing principle is not the revolutionary ideology of 1979 but the national interest of Iran.”

For more information, including a transcript of the event, visit the Belfer Center website.

The crowd broke into song at Sanders Theatre last week as the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research honored LeVar Burton with the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal.

“Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high. Take a look, it’s in a book, a Reading Rainbow!” the crowd sang amid applause for the beloved host of the PBS series “Reading Rainbow” that ran from 1983 until 2006. The iconic actor, director, producer, podcaster, and education advocate is also widely known for his roles as Geordi La Forge in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and Kunta Kinte in “Roots.” 

Burton beamed as he soaked in the audience’s adoration at the Oct. 1 ceremony and took a moment to honor his mother, Erma Gene Christian, for the influence she had on his education. The actor went on to invoke Fredrick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin. “I am, by definition, a storyteller,” he said. “I am a storyteller, walking in the tradition of storytellers that have informed and enlightened humanity since before the spoken language.”

While sharing his appreciation for the award, Burton also thanked Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center, for his “eminent wisdom and patience.” He continued: “You have changed my life and the way I see myself as a citizen of this country.”

The W.E.B. Du Bois Medal is the highest honor given in the field of African and African American Studies at Harvard.

“We come together today to honor those who embody the goals of unifying rather than dividing, respecting rather than disparaging, engaging thoughtfully rather than dismissing out of hand,” Gates said. “Each year here in glorious Sanders Theatre, we honor profound contributions to Black society and culture with the distinguished Du Bois event named in honor of Harvard’s first Black Ph.D.”

Along with Burton, medalists included former Harvard women’s basketball coach Kathy Delaney-Smith; director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem Thelma Golden; African entrepreneur and philanthropist Strive Masiyiwa; civil rights advocate and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, J.D. ’84; and the human-rights and environmental activist Vice President of Colombia Francia Elena Márquez Mina. Special readings from Du Bois’ work were given by Provost John F. Manning ’82, J.D. ’85, and Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Previously announced recipients filmmaker, writer, producer, and professor Spike Lee and musician, songwriter, producer and actor Ice T were unable to attend the event but sent their regrets.

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey ’92 joined the event to help present the award to Delaney-Smith, who coached Healey during her undergraduate years in the College.

“One of the things that W.E.B. Du Bois said was, ‘Young people learn more from what you are than what you teach.’ I think Kathy Delaney-Smith embodies that statement,” Healey said. The governor shared Delaney-Smith’s many accolades while highlighting her work as a “force for positive social change.”

At the age of 21, Delaney-Smith began working as the girls’ basketball coach at Westwood High School and saw firsthand the inequities that existed in girls’ and women’s sports. In response, she began filing lawsuits under Title IX to get what her team needed. She continued her tireless work at Harvard.

Fellow honoree Crenshaw, a law professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, was welcomed back to Harvard for her impactful work. Crenshaw is credited with being a founder of critical race theory and popularizing the theory of intersectionality.

“I am overwhelmed with pride to accept this medal from the Hutchins Center, from my alma mater, and from Skip Gates,” she said. “It’s exceptionally meaningful for any race scholar to see one’s own name in the same sentence as the foremost scholar, activist of the 20th century, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois.”

Márquez Mina, an activist and lawyer who became Colombia’s first female vice president of African descent, was celebrated as the first Du Bois Medal recipient from Latin America.

In a speech delivered in Spanish, the Colombian vice president recognized Gates for strengthening “the heritage that we are building in Colombia,” and Alejandro De La Fuente, the director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center, for playing a fundamental role in shaping the agenda of people of African descent in the Americas in the struggle for social justice.

Past honorees include basketball Hall of Famer, activist, and writer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (2022), hip-hop artist and actor Queen Latifah (2019), boxer and activist Muhammad Ali (2015), and Civil Rights activist and longtime Congressman John Lewis (2014). 

Gary Ruvkun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a Mass General researcher, was the center of attention Monday among Harvard and hospital colleagues after receiving the 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his role in the discovery of microRNA.

Ruvkun, who shared the prize with his longtime collaborator Victor Ambros, formerly of Harvard and today a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, waved to fellow researchers and cracked a few jokes during a news conference at Mass General, not too far away from his lab at the Richard B. Simches Research Center.

“It’s been a good morning,” he said.

Ruvkun was born in Berkeley, California, in 1952, and earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1973. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1982, and became a principal investigator at Mass General and at the Medical School in 1985. Ruvkun and Ambros were Harvard colleagues when they began to collaborate on studies of the role played by two genes, lin-4 and lin-14, in regulating abnormal development in the roundworm C. elegans.

In work conducted at Harvard and published in 1993, Ambros cloned C. elegans’ lin-4 gene and found that it did not code for a protein, as most other genes did. Instead, it encoded a very small strand of RNA, just 22 bases long. Next, Ruvkun discovered a tiny RNA string with the ability to bind to lin-14’s messenger RNA, large molecules that carry genetic information from the gene to the cell’s ribosome, where the information gets translated into protein. By disrupting this process, the microRNA disrupted the gene’s expression and affected development.

Seven years later, Ruvkun’s lab found a second microRNA, called let-7, that also blocks the expression of its target gene, again altering development. But it was the subsequent discovery of let-7 in a range of living things, from worms to fish to humans, that illustrated that its role is fundamental enough that it has been conserved over millions of years of evolution. That finding sparked an explosion of interest in the role of microRNA in regulating development. Today, more than 1,000 human genes for microRNA have been discovered. These genes play roles in normal and abnormal development and in heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, and other conditions.

Ruvkun received the call informing him of the prize at 5:30 a.m. Monday

“The phone rang and we don’t get middle-of-the-night phone calls,” he said. “We answered it and it was the secretary of the Nobel committee and it sounded real. We’ve received awards for this and it’s always been wonderful. It’s a big deal.”

During the news conference, Ruvkun thanked Mass General for supporting his work and that of other microbiologists. Even after 40 years, there’s no end in sight to his research, he said. C. elegans has some 20,000 genes. There are thousands he knows nothing about.

“The surprises are what keep you young in science and I’m constantly surprised,” Ruvkun said. “My ignorance is bliss.”

Harvard President Alan M. Garber extended his congratulations to the new Nobel laureates, praising their pioneering research.

“Nobody who knows Gary or his work could be surprised by this recognition for his research on microRNA,” he said. “A brilliant investigator, his curiosity has led him to one remarkable insight into fundamental biology after another. The implications of discoveries like Gary’s and Victor’s aren’t always obvious at the outset. With promising medical applications of microRNA research on the horizon, we are reminded — again — that basic research can lead to dramatic progress in addressing human diseases.”

Speakers at the news conference celebrated Ruvkun’s achievement and, like Garber, noted that his work demonstrates the power of basic science.

“We celebrate with the entire world your incredible achievements — we celebrate the power of science, the power of brilliant minds,” said David Brown, president of academic medical centers for Mass General Brigham and the Mass General Trustees Professor of Emergency Medicine at HMS. “I’m thrilled to welcome you as Nobel laureate Dr. Gary Ruvkun — and that has a nice ring to it. Dr. Ruvkun and his colleagues have pushed the boundaries of science on our understanding of life on this planet.” 

Dean George Q. Daley of the Medical School echoed Brown’s praise.

“The revelation of microRNA regulation is absolutely a shining example of how curiosity driven research can be turned into actionable knowledge that will advance human health for the betterment of humanity,” he said.

At first it looked almost as if Wang Dongling was sweeping the floor with one hand, using a brush about a yard long. The graceful strokes trailed compacted, staccato black lines and sweeping curves on a rectangular white sheet the size of a living-room rug.

The artist, dressed in black, his dark hair collar-length with streaks of gray, has been creating large-scale calligraphic works for decades. On Friday, in front of an eager crowd gathered in the courtyard of the Harvard Art Museums, he did it again in “Flying Flowers and Scattered Snow: Wang Dongling’s Calligraphy of Su Dongpo’s West Lake Poems.”

Drawn with calligraphy ink on paper, Dongling uses his own brand of “chaotic script” (luan shu 亂書) to reproduce ancient texts “that have been written down thousands of times before,” Sarah Laursen, the Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art at the Harvard Art Museums said. 

His style, she said, “could be seen as a descendant of the ‘wild cursive script’ of the Tang dynasty. However, he also draws inspiration from Abstract Expressionism, choosing to layer his characters on top of each other, and integrating physical performance into his practice — elements that have never been used in combination before.”

At Harvard, Dongling recreated the “West Lake” poems of Chinese poet, calligrapher, and essayist Su Dongpo. The poems depict the ornate scenery of the lake located in Hangzhou, China. 

“It’s in the city where he has lived for decades,” said Shining (Christina) Sun, a doctoral student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Sun is part of the team that helped organize Wang’s visit and served as his translator on campus. 

“He’s bringing that experience of his hometown, through these poems, all the way with him to Harvard,” she said. 

Onlookers gathered on both the ground and balcony levels to watch Dongling in action. Making swooping, inky strokes, the almost 80-year-old artist got lost in the work — placing characters in a way that looked almost predetermined, despite the improvisational nature of his process. 

“He’s really focused when he does it,” Sun said. “He can either do it in isolated tranquility or among a huge crowd. But there’s an atmospheric interplay always going on.”

Dongling, through Sun, recounted a recent performance at the Belgian Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He said he totally blocked out the crowd and forgot anyone was watching until people started clapping. 

That seemed to happen with the Harvard spectators as well, who watched intently through the nearly 30-minute performance. Polite applause broke out after the artist announced he was finished.

And despite his clear connection to the ancient, Dongling has begun exploring combining calligraphy with modern technology. 

“He actually has works where he uses Virtual Reality to create a 3D installation,” Sun said. “He has done not only VR but also projective technologies, where he projected art on top of another piece of words, like Matisse. So he creates that palimpsest between the ancient and current.” 

Hosted in conjunction with the Harvard Art Museums Materials Lab, or M/Lab, the demonstration was part of an effort to facilitate interactions between the public and experts in the art world. 

“My co-organizer at the M/Lab, Francesca Bewer, and I were also very excited that the performance could take place in the Calderwood Courtyard, with its vantage points on every floor. This took many hands behind the scenes, from facilities and collections management to the director’s office,” Laursen said. 

The Art Museums are in the process of formally acquiring the artwork created last week, as well as the brush used to create it. Once they have entered the collection, they will be available for students and other researchers to view in the Art Study Center by appointment and may be used in future exhibitions.

Laursen added that for those interested in seeing some of Dongling’s inspirations, works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Joan Miró are currently on view on the first floor of the museums. 

“In particular, I would encourage readers to visit Jackson Pollock’s “No. 2” (1965.554) in Gallery 1200 and think about the energetic but controlled physical movement of the artist as he created the work and the rhythmic balance of light and dark,” she said. 

The museums are open and free to the public Tuesday through Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

ChatGPT’s debut in November 2022 caused a near-instant sensation. It gave most users their first opportunity to try out a new type of artificial intelligence that uses existing data and published materials to create content known as generative AI. 

Once the initial buzz faded, economists were eager to find out who was using the technology and how often, what they were doing with it, and whether they used it at work, at home, or both. How quickly and robustly the public adopts a technology is widely thought to predict its economic impact.

As of August, nearly 40 percent of U.S. adults aged 18-64 had used generative AI, according to new survey research. Of those employed, 28 percent used it at work, while nearly 33 percent used it away from work. That pickup rate is significantly faster than the public embrace of the internet (20 percent after two years) or the personal computer (20 percent after three years, the earliest researchers could measure). 

The Gazette spoke with David J. Deming, the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, and professor of economics and education at Harvard Graduate of Education, about what he and co-authors Alexander Bick, an economic policy adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and Adam Blandin, assistant economic professor at Vanderbilt University, found and what it could mean for business. Interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

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Why is it important to measure how quickly Americans have embraced generative AI tools like ChatGPT relative to PCs and the internet?

For a new technology like this, it’s really important for us to have some baseline understanding of how much it’s used and by whom, and what are they using it for. To do that, you need a high-quality, nationally representative survey. So, we recreated all of the question wording and the structure of the Current Population Survey (CPS), which is the big survey that produces the unemployment rate every month. It’s the main source of labor market data in the U.S. 

The CPS, back in 1984, started asking questions about usage of the personal computer at home. In 2001, it started asking questions about internet usage. And so, we took the same question ordering, replacing those technologies with generative AI, so we could directly compare it to the speed of adoption of other technologies, asking the same people the same questions. 

That’s how we are able to show the usage rate in our data, which is 39.4 percent, is actually higher than both personal computers and the internet at the same stage in their product cycles. 

In which specific tasks is AI most useful at work?

In which specific tasks is AI most useful at home?

Were you and your team surprised by these findings? 

I personally was surprised at the high rate of usage. Whenever I tell colleagues about this, I always ask, “What do you think we found?” before I tell them. Most of my colleagues are aging academics like me, so we tend to underestimate generative AI usage. When I ask my graduate students or undergraduates, they tend to estimate numbers that are higher than the actual number we found. And I think that really tells you something about it. We found that young people are using generative AI at much, much higher rates than older people, which is very common across other technologies. 

I didn’t come into this thinking this is what we’re going to find. I just was interested in the answer because I’d read a lot of things suggesting it was mostly hype, and I read a lot of things suggesting it was the Next Big Thing. And so, we wanted to know where the truth was.

What accounts for such swift adoption?

I can give you some informed speculation. One is that generative AI is built on top of those previous two technologies. You could think about the fact that people have computers in their home, and they have access to the internet, as base layers that allow you to easily adopt some new technology like generative AI. The personal computer, when it was released, was big and expensive and not everyone had it at home. The internet was less expensive, but we built this incredible grid that allowed people to be connected. Without those two things, you wouldn’t have generative AI. I think one of the reasons why it’s been adopted quickly is because the base level technologies were already there, and you could, in some sense, think about generative AI as a complementary innovation to the internet.

Demographic differences in AI use at work

Adoption is not uniform across demographic groups. Men, younger people, those with a college or graduate school education, and people in white-collar jobs are more likely to use generative AI and more often. What accounts for the usage gaps? 

The bit about younger people and more educated people adopting a technology is actually common to almost every new technology. In studies of the adoption of personal computers, people found the same thing. The one thing that was different, relative to PCs, was gender. Women used PCs at work more than men in the 1980s largely because the job of administrative assistant or secretary, and office jobs in general, skewed very female and they were using computers whereas generative AI is not as concentrated in occupations. It’s everywhere. We find higher usage in STEM and management careers and those do skew male. 

I don’t think access is explaining it because a lot of people use computers on the job. We found very, very broad adoption across occupations. It’s highest in STEM jobs and management, but 22 percent of blue-collar occupations were using AI. And usage rates were above 20 percent in every category of occupations except personal services, so it’s really common across places. 

If you look at how many companies say they’re using it, it’s actually a pretty low share who are formally incorporating it into their operations. People are using it informally for a lot of different purposes, to help write emails, using it to look up things, using it to obtain documentation on how to do something. I think a lot of variation reflects the fact that some people like to tinker, and companies aren’t telling you don’t use it, but they’re not necessarily formally requiring you to use it.

This is something we’re really interested in tracking. We’ve already started our discussions about the next wave, and we’ll try to update the data over time and ask more questions about usage and dig into some of the threads that were left hanging. 

AI use at work by occupation

AI use at work by industry group

This is the first-ever national survey on this subject. Should business and tech executives consider acting on any of these findings? 

I would say most definitely yes. Another way to think about this is if you were to go back to 1984 and tell people, “Hey, there’s this new thing called the personal computer. I have a crystal ball. Twenty years from now, everybody’s going to have one of these and every single new technological development and every single new product is going to be using it as the base.” Knowing that now, what would you do differently? You would change a lot. You could make billions and billions of dollars. 

I think this survey is saying, “We don’t have a crystal ball, but it sure looks like generative AI is going to be on that scale.” And so, the spoils will go to people who can figure out how to harness it first and best. So yes, I think they should be paying attention. I think a lot of them are already. 

Much like the internet was a base layer for a lot of other technologies, you’ll see that the people who figure out how to use this technology that’s so versatile, that can do so many things well, but doesn’t yet have a killer app — the people who find that killer app, who build something on top of it, are going to really, really profit and benefit. I think that’s what the next five or 10 years will be about. 

These companies are about trying to build human-level intelligence. That’s fine, but there are a lot of commercial applications that don’t require that. They need to be built with this thing as an input into it, rather than this being the product itself. So, I think you’ll see a lot of that in the next few years, and it’s going to be really exciting. 

The woman came in crying. She was disheveled and pregnant, and appeared to be intoxicated. She had a 5-year-old girl in tow and was looking for help from the crisis center where Anna Shchetinina volunteered.

The mother got the help she needed. She sobered up, left her abusive partner, and eventually started a career in the medical field. Still, 15 years later, Shchetinina can’t stop thinking about the kids.

“I didn’t realize then that the mother’s drinking was probably going to impact her children’s whole lives, but now I understand that every decision matters, especially during sensitive and critical periods,” she said. “Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is a very unique condition. It is 100 percent preventable, but it’s incurable and has very drastic consequences: cognitive, behavioral, and physical.”

In April, Shchetinina published a study in the journal PLOS One examining the prevalence of alcohol use disorder among pregnant and parenting women. The work has provided a foundation for her doctoral studies at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she’s examining the lifelong risks associated with prenatal alcohol exposure. Among the potential consequences is fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, whose most severe form is fetal alcohol syndrome.

In the worst cases of exposure, the mother loses her pregnancy. When the baby survives, the effects often go unnoticed until school age, when performance, behavior and even routines that children typically carry out independently — getting up in the morning, making the bed, putting on clothes — become a challenge. Over time, damage wrought by prenatal exposure to alcohol can affect memory, self-control, emotions, attention, and problem-solving.

“It’s usually diagnosed later, about when the child starts school and by that time it can be difficult to address,” Shchetinina said. “Diagnostics aren’t easy when so much time has passed. We might not get a good, clear history of the pregnancy. Mothers might not remember everything they did during those nine months if it’s been six years since then. Also, some of the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure are similar to the impacts of other adverse experiences, like abuse or neglect. It gets trickier and trickier to diagnose as more time passes.”

The first widely read scientific paper on the risks of drinking during pregnancy was published in 1973, Shchetinina said. Research on the lasting effects remains scarce. In her Harvard work, she is using data from three large studies — two in the U.S. and one in Europe — to cast light on long-term consequences. 

“There are a lot of unknowns in this field,” she said. “We are still just beginning to understand what its effects are on adult health: When people with prenatal alcohol exposure mature, what happens to them?”

She might have gone her whole life without asking the question, never mind enrolling at Harvard, if it wasn’t for the mother she met at the crisis center in her hometown of Petrozavodsk, a Russian city about 260 miles from St. Petersburg. “It was just heartbreaking,” said Shchetinina, who at the time was a law student. “I started learning more and more about the topic and I got more and more interested in it.”

The crisis center had ties to a Minnesota nonprofit, today called the Proof Alliance, that focuses on fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Representatives of the organization visited Petrozavodsk to discuss the dangers of drinking during pregnancy. Shchetinina listened, learned, and eventually decided to make a break with lawyering and focus squarely on public health. She came to the U.S. under the Fulbright program, an educational exchange sponsored by the U.S. government, and earned a master’s degree in public health at the University of Minnesota. Her next stop was the Chan School. 

Shchetinina expects to graduate in 2026 and continue her research, likely in the U.S. due to dramatic changes in Russia since she left. The crisis center closed after the invasion of Ukraine and Shchetinina’s dissent about the conflict potentially puts her in danger, she said. 

For the April paper, Shchetinina and her doctoral adviser, Natalie Slopen, an assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences, looked at alcohol use among reproductive-age women in the U.S. Using data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health 2015-2021, they examined responses from 120,000 women aged 18 to 49. Three percent were pregnant, half were parenting at least one child but not pregnant, and the rest were neither pregnant nor parenting.

The responses showed that about 13 percent of the women not pregnant and without kids had drinking habits that met the definition of alcohol-use disorder, but only 4 percent of them were receiving treatment. The disorder was about half as common among the pregnant and parenting group, ranging from 6.3 percent to 6.6 percent, but a significant treatment gap remained, with just 5 percent of the women in treatment.

The research, Slopen said, brought specialists up to date on the pandemic years, when surveys showed that drinking among women increased. It also explored barriers to treatment, a first step toward increasing access. Treatment was higher among those with insurance — Medicaid or private insurance — and respondents indicated that financial barriers were a hurdle to accessing care. Others said that treatment was not a priority, which Shchetinina thinks might have been an effect of stigma attached to alcohol use among women, especially while pregnant. 

Said Slopen: “It’s important to characterize the need for treatment and the barriers that exist for individuals who may be experiencing alcohol use disorders and need treatment. This is important both for public health efforts directed toward those who are pregnant and those who are not but who may be pregnant in the future.”

Shchetinina agreed, adding that the findings also highlight a need for better interventions for non-pregnant and non-parenting women, who had higher rates of alcohol use disorder. She pointed out that the results showed that women who were arrested or had a history of arrests were in treatment more often. That could be an indication that the biggest obstacle exists at gateways to care. 

“We saw that women who had a history of arrest had higher odds of getting treatment, meaning that getting arrested might have provided an entry into the treatment system,” she said. “However, the judicial system serving as an entry point to health care is problematic and should not be the easiest path to getting help. Providers need to be more proactive and society needs to be more supportive.” 

Nearly 400 Harvard Extension School degree candidates and guests gathered at Memorial Church on Sept. 20 to celebrate convocation, marking a moment of unity and achievement for this global network of students.

This was the fifth convocation for HES degree candidates. For some, it was their first time visiting Cambridge, with many meeting classmates in person after only seeing them through online classes.

Among those experiencing this milestone was Jean Michael Lif, a Master of Liberal Arts candidate in international relations, who flew in from the Dominican Republic specifically for the event. Having only been on campus twice before, Lif expressed his joy at finally connecting with his peers face-to-face.

“It’s something really beautiful,” he shared, reflecting on what initially felt like a daunting commitment. Lif began his HES journey while working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Dominican Republic as the financial coordinator for European markets. Lif said he needed a master’s degree that provided both academic rigor and flexibility and he saw HES as the perfect fit. Now, he manages a media company dedicated to elevating the image and culture of his country and eventually hopes to return to a role in government.

Suzanne Spreadbury, HES dean of academic programs, welcomed the group. “Harvard Extension School degree candidates put challenging academics at the center, not the margins, of their lives,” she said.

Spreadbury highlighted the extraordinary projects undertaken by past graduates, from partnering with NASA scientists to evaluate satellite data to collaborating with the North American Blackfeet Nation tribe on a wetland restoration project.  She remarked that while these accomplishments are noteworthy, they are also quite ordinary for HES graduates, emphasizing the academic rigor and support from staff that propels students.

Dean of the Harvard Extension School and Continuing Education Nancy Coleman closed the ceremony by addressing the group. Coleman acknowledged the unique challenges that many students have experienced in their pursuit of education.

“We cannot deny that our world is facing extreme challenges, many of which we’ve never seen before,” Coleman began. “We know what they are because we live them every day — in the media, in social media, and maybe around our kitchen tables.” Yet amidst these obstacles, Coleman praised the students for choosing to pursue their academic goals, particularly at a place as rigorous as Harvard. “You have challenged yourself in the pursuit of something bigger, and that is optimism,” she added.

Coleman encouraged students to harness this optimism, to use the knowledge they’ve gained at HES to push through difficulties and make meaningful changes in their communities. “Each and every one of you has the power to ask the difficult questions, to courageously change the course of your history, and the optimism to succeed.”

White, working-class voters have been defecting from the Democratic Party for more than six decades in the nation’s heartland.

In her new book “How the Heartland Went Red,” Stephanie Ternullo tracks the evolution of three predominantly white cities in the post-industrial Midwest to understand the shift. The assistant professor of government detailed her findings at a campus talk. 

“I wanted places that at once shared the same demographics, and still do, but took different political trajectories,” she said of her project, which helps illuminate the roles of race, class, and religion in the change. One city remains solidly blue. A second has been dominated by Republicans since the 1960s, and a third was split until Donald Trump won them over with his 2016 candidacy.

Ternullo’s work follows decades of what the political scientist calls an “explosion” of scholarship on the relationship between social identity and partisanship. “The classic account,” she explained at the event last month hosted by Harvard’s Center for Race, Inequality and Social Equity Studies, “is that voting is essentially a group experience.” 

The Great Depression and World War II represented the height of class politics, Ternullo said. Between 1932 and 1944, a total of 467 predominantly white, working-class U.S. counties lined up behind President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, according to her analysis. Voters in these municipalities favored the New Deal Democrat four elections in a row.

Then came re-orderings along racial, religious, and socioeconomic lines. “About two-thirds of the counties turned right after the racial realignment of the 1960s,” Ternullo said, gesturing to transformations set in motion by the civil rights movement. “Another 11 percent turned to the right with consolidation of the religious right in the early 2000s.” 

Along the way came deindustrialization and the decline of organized labor, a cornerstone of the New Deal coalition. The transformation was all but complete with the arrival of the Tea Party and former President Donald Trump, both documented by social scientists as capitalizing on status threats felt by white, working-class voters. By 2016, 96 percent of the original “New Deal” counties were solidly on the right. 

Ternullo’s book returns to this important subset of Roosevelt’s historic voting bloc. She conducted more than a year of intensive field work in a trio of Upper Midwestern cities. All three, pseudonymized in the book, have overwhelmingly white populations numbering between 16,000 and 28,000 people today. All three boasted strong industrial economics at mid-20th century. Today, each is aging faster than the larger U.S. population. 

The book’s outlier is a city Ternullo calls Motorville, Wisconsin. It retains many of the same unionized, private manufacturing employers that operated in the 1950s. Residents are, however, scarred after decades of mergers and layoffs. What really sets it apart, Ternullo argued, is the fact that it retains a local labor council, or a community-specific unit of the AFL-CIO. 

“This is exceedingly rare in the 21st century,” she noted. “If you go to a labor council meeting, you’ll see the postal workers there. People representing supermarket clerks are there. The IBEW is there. And they’re talking about issues relevant to local politics and community life.”

Lutherton, Indiana, is the Republican stronghold in Ternullo’s book. Residents there carry the generational memory of losing the city’s largest employer in the 1970s. Anchoring its economy today is a unionized auto parts manufacturer that was later lured by the local economic council. Of the three case studies, Lutherton is the only one to gain population since 1980.

Union membership in the city remains strong, though organized labor lacks a politically mobilized presence. “But the city does have a set of well-resourced churches and nonprofits that coordinate a private problem-solving network that jumps into action anytime new social problems emerge,” Ternullo said.

The largest employer in Gravesend, Minnesota, burned down in the 1990s and opted against rebuilding. Of the three cities, Gravesend has the lowest percentage of unionized workers today. It also counts the highest share of service sector jobs.

At one point, Gravesend enjoyed the active presence of unions and churches. They were never as robust as those in Motorville and Lutherton, and they ended up declining with the town’s manufacturing sector. “That leaves people feeling like their community is dying, and they have no coherent leadership telling them how to resolve it,” Ternullo offered. 

The book digs into the economic and political histories of all three communities, completed with the help of archival research, social media analysis, and interviews with community leaders. But the recent talk focused largely on the role unions and churches can play in an era of nationalized politics. 

“My argument is that people make sense of local economic conditions and national politics from within these organizational contexts,” said Ternullo, who emphasized that the effects extend even to neighbors without direct group membership. 

Motorville is in this way a bit of an anachronism, with residents viewing the Democrats as strongly representative of working-class interests. Voters in Gravesend, on the other hand, described a sense of betrayal by the party they supported not long ago. As one 60-something Gravesender put it: “… the Democratic Party has gotten for more of a giveaway thing. You know, by letting all these illegals in and all this kind of stuff.”

Local forces are especially powerful for what Ternullo called “cross-pressured voters,” or those whose loyalties to different social groups are contested with every election. In recent decades, she noted, they include not just working-class white voters but also U.S. citizens of Asian and Latin American descent. 

“Place can help make certain social identities more salient than others,” Ternullo said. “It can help prioritize certain interpretations of politics over others, and ultimately lead people to find a home in one party.”

MANAUS, BRAZIL — Students were hours into exploring the Amazon rainforest when their guide caught the glint of something special.

Thiago G. Carvalho, a staff zoologist with Museu da Amazônia (Musa), removed the caterpillar-like creature from a tree branch and raised it on the pads of his fingertips like an offering. He wanted the group to appreciate this fuzzy little insect patterned with greens and golds.

“We have to learn as biologists to see beauty in all kinds of life,” Carvalho said, noting that he couldn’t be sure of the exact genus in an area so rich with biodiversity. “And this little guy is beautiful.”

The find was one of thousands during a recent teaching and research intensive organized by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS). The Harvard Amazon Rainforest Immersion explored the region’s intricate ecosystems as well as urgent threats to its economic security, environment, and public health. A primary goal was expanding partnerships with scientists and other innovators who work in a place of central importance to the global climate. But the 10-day course also served a more fundamental purpose.

“Most Brazilians don’t know what the Amazon is,” said Marcia Castro, the Andelot Professor of Demography at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and chair of the DRCLAS Brazil Studies Program. “And for those outside Brazil, it’s even bigger … the information they get is filtered. Sometimes it’s biased. Other times they think they have the perfect solution to solve all the Amazon’s problems.”

Speaking at the immersion’s kickoff in this city of 2.3 million, Castro pressed the students, professors, and young academics to bring a different mindset. “Be curious, listen — don’t judge,” she said.

A few hours later, the group toured Musa, a 250-acre reserve at the city’s edge veined with outdoor exhibits and walking trails. As Carvalho plucked dragonfly larvae and other life forms from the forest, the visitors grew more observant, focused. The Brazilian state of Amazonas, where invertebrates account for the majority of biodiversity, proved full of inviting detail.

Soon a trio of students were staring at a boa constrictor in a tank. Another set of visitors crouched to inspect a young tarantula Carvalho spotted. Others paused over the line of leaf-cutter ants soldiering by.

“I love studying ant colonies! They’re so interesting!” cried David Caleb Brown ’25, an applied math concentrator from Alabama currently investigating how high-altitude remote sensing balloons can be used to fight deforestation in the Amazon.

Co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, the multidisciplinary experience was organized by the DRCLAS Brazil Office with help from Amazonas State University (UEA) and Academia Amazônia Ensina. Twenty-one students and academics represented the College and four Harvard graduate Schools as well as universities across South America in fields that included the sciences, romance languages, public policy, and law.

All are engaged in research that impacts the Amazon, from fighting the rise of illegal gold mining to promoting sustainable agriculture and limiting government corruption. But for many, the immersion marked their first visit to the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

“Being here and seeing everything around me is a childhood dream come true,” shared Dariana González-Aguilar ’25, an integrative biology concentrator with roots in North Carolina and central Mexico who hopes to work on conservation in Brazil.

“The whole idea is to give people a chance to get to know this extremely important biome,” said Castro, a Rio de Janeiro native who has studied malaria in the region since 1999 and teaches a three-week course in Brazil every January (the 2024 iteration was set in the Amazon). “I hope in the end everyone goes back to Harvard, or goes back to their homes in Brazil, transformed but above all inspired to continue their work.”

Deep dive into the Amazon basin

For three days, participants immersed themselves in the vast topaz of the Amazon basin, home to nearly 20 percent of the world’s river waters. Boarding the Victória Amazônica with the group was Scot Martin, the Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, who has deep ties to the region known as Amazonia.

Martin first visited in 2007 and now travels to Manaus regularly. He has picked up Portuguese, started following World Cup soccer, and partners with UEA researchers on various projects. “The Amazon is a place that inspires in every regard,” he said as the boat traveled a quiet stretch of the Rio Uatumã.

In a lecture, Martin charted the inner workings of the Amazon watershed, with its famous system of “flying rivers.” Trees act as the rainforest’s “water pumps,” he explained, taking in H₂O and gradually releasing it skyward via a process called evapotranspiration. That’s why deforestation means lower river levels across the Amazon basin and less rainfall far beyond.

“I had imagined the deforestation was driven by cattle ranching,” said Chun-Yu Su ’27, a sophomore from Taiwan concentrating in integrative biology. “But Professor Martin pointed out there’s heterogeneity in terms of geography, because the Amazon is about two-thirds the size of the continental U.S.” In some areas, the land was deforested for large-scale ranching and soybean fields. In others, it was driven by smaller-scale agriculture, including subsistence farming.

Consequences include extreme drought, increased wildfire risk, and crop loss in the Amazon and its neighboring “breadbasket” regions, Martin said. Future implications could include water rationing and power shortages  across Brazil, a nation heavily dependent on hydroelectric. “And then you have one that was big last year,” he added, noting that water levels would be even lower in the last months of 2024. “The only way to get to most towns in the State of Amazonas is by river navigation or air. When the drought hit, these communities were really cut off.”

Martin also outlined one of his projects with UEA collaborators, this one involving a team that monitors water quality in area rivers. Specifically, the team is investigating the source of high mercury levels across the Amazon basin, where communities are at heightened risk of exposure because residents consume so much fresh-water fish. Co-leading this research is Martin’s SEAS colleague Elsie Sunderland, the Fred Kavli Professor of Environmental Chemistry and a global expert on mercury contamination.

One culprit is illegal gold mining, on the rise in Amazonia since the early 2000s. It’s a “messy business,” Martin explained, with mercury used to isolate gold from river sediment. The mercury-gold amalgam is then roasted, releasing toxic fumes into the atmosphere while leaving behind the prized metal. In parts of the northern Amazon where illegal mining is highly prevalent, widespread mercury poisoning has been found in some Indigenous communities, he said.

On a still evening, a team from UEA demonstrated how their partnership with Martin works. They ferried the group in a fleet of small motorboats across a remote stretch of the Rio Uatumã, speeding past cow pastures before settling near the shoreline.

“I do a lot of mapping of the Amazon,” remarked Nicholas Arisco, M.S. ’18, Ph.D. ’23, a postdoctoral fellow from Connecticut studying health and populations at the Chan School. “I didn’t expect the rivers to be this big.”

Collected samples were transferred to the floating laboratory UEA recently built to test water for contaminants such as bacteria and phosphorus. Analyzing for mercury is done in Sunderland’s lab at Harvard.

Back on Victória Amazônica, UEA biotechnology Professor Rafael Lopes e Oliveira underscored the logistical challenges of performing this work. The Amazon basin vacillates between drought and downpour, a challenge to researchers as well as those residing in rural communities, he explained through a DRCLAS translator. If you want to study biochemistry or microbiology, he said, you need to understand culture and interpersonal relationships, because access depends on local communities.

‘Social construction of ignorance’

Joining the immersion for their first visits to the Amazon were Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science, and Scott V. Edwards ’86, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and chair of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology as well as curator of ornithology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

“I’m part of a small group of scientists talking about a field called agnotology, or studying the social construction of ignorance,” Oreskes explained one afternoon, speaking to the group sitting cross-legged in the boat’s air-conditioned dining room.

Her insights on “market fundamentalism” — the idea that free markets can solve all of society’s problems — proved especially pertinent to Amazonia. Reviewing ideas explored in 2010’s “Merchants of Doubt” and 2023’s “The Big Myth,” Oreskes underscored the “negative externalities” of business ventures that drive climate change — essentially, taking profits from activities that damage the environment but leaving costs of cleanup and environmental rehabilitation to communities.

“We’ve had many lectures on deforestation and science,” said Peruvian Lucero Beatriz Reymundo Dámaso, a master’s candidate in anthropology at Brazil’s Federal University of Santa Catarina. “I appreciate that Naomi came in and said, ‘Wait — there’s also this cultural component.’”

The river trek featured several stops in the Uatumã Sustainable Development Reserve, where residents have banded together to fight exploitive development. André Vianna from the Manaus-based NGO Idesam outlined the initiative’s purpose of bridging conservation goals with marketing and supply chain supports for small, rural producers. Today, the area is zoned by the state of Amazonas for ventures that conserve the rainforest.

Furnituremaker Elizângela Cavalcante introduced the group to the São Francisco das Chagas do Caribi community of artisans, planters, and “extractivistas” (or those who harvest the rainforest’s abundance sustainably). She walked participants past the community’s tiny gift shop, where açaí beaded jewelry and elegant wooden bowls were available for purchase, and charmed visitors with stories of marriage, work, and family life.

“For me, it was remarkable to learn how women are leading business development and taking care of sustainability,” said Vinícius Prado, Ph.D. ’27, a former program officer for the United Nations Population Fund from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, who is studying population health sciences at the Chan School. “They already are overburdened with their work on caregiving added to their economic activities … and yet they are concerned about the environment and creating a better world for future generations.”

The group also met with José Monteiro, keeper of the Pousada Mirante do Uatumã inn and a 30-acre agroforestry plot launched in 2008 with support from Idesam. Monteiro had previously deforested his land in favor of cattle ranching. Today, the family property yields shade as well as farm-fresh eggs and Brazil nuts.

“It was really interesting because I asked him: ‘How are you doing? Are you earning a better living?’” Oreskes said. “He said they weren’t; it’s about a wash. But the life is so much better.”

It was a reminder for Oreskes that green transitions seldom trigger immediate financial rewards. “This is true even in the United States, with putting in solar panels or installing better windows on your house,” Oreskes said. “Often there’s an upfront investment, but you get it back in the long run.”

The mixed blessing of roads

Heat and humidity challenge those conducting research in Amazonia, but the lack of reliable roads serves up additional impediments. From the Victória Amazônica, traveling to the next stop required one hour on a speed boat and another four hours by bus. At a rural meeting point, groups of three or four transferred to heavy-duty trucks, some of the only vehicles capable of navigating the final stretch of watery and deeply rutted roadway.

Located 70 miles north of Manaus, Camp 41 is a reservation and research station established in 1979 by the late Thomas E. Lovejoy III, a George Mason University ecologist and Amazon preservationist. It was part of an initiative to protect pristine rainforest fragments as roads, developers, and cattle ranchers moved in. The site has since served as a base for scientists tracking diverse species of birds and butterflies as well as monkeys.

Welcoming the group there this summer was Massachusetts-born ornithologist Mario Cohn-Haft, a member of the ecology faculty at the Brazilian National Institute for Amazon Research (INPA) in Manaus and a top authority on avian life in the Amazon. He traced his own involvement with the camp to a 1987 bird-monitoring internship.

“I ended up moving my whole life down here,” Cohn-Haft said. “I married a Brazilian. I conduct my life in Portuguese, teach graduate students in Portuguese. And it’s all thanks to this project.”

A series of tin-roof pavilions where tight rows of hammocks can be tied for overnight stays populate the camp. After one restful night, evolutionary biologist Edwards draped a sheet from one of these structures for his slide presentation. Using a tree branch to underscore key points, he addressed the evolutionary roots of Amazonia’s enormous spread of plant and animal life, which accounts for 10 percent of biodiversity worldwide.

A highlight concerned the Amazon’s ties with the Caribbean. “The Amazon River used to flow west,” marveled Edwards, showing a map of ancient Lake Pebas that stretched north from where the Andes Mountains eventually formed 20 million years ago. As evidence, he cited everything from fossilized mollusks found throughout the western Amazon to the region’s famous river dolphins, including the beloved boto (or pink dolphin).

“Some of the plants in western Amazonia are more adapted to what you might see in an estuary or a delta,” said Edwards. “These are possibly relics of species there when this lake system was still present.”

Two nights at Camp 21 left plenty of time for experiencing this biodiversity up-close. Day treks brought glimpses of blue morpho butterflies and views of an overstuffed harpy eagle nest. Venturing out by night yielded varieties of spider, lizard, and frog through the beacon of a flashlight.

“I was looking at a book yesterday with an image of a gecko,” recalled Evanna Jaramillo, a master’s candidate in tropical ecology and conservation at Ecuador’s University San Francisco de Quito. “I thought, ‘I wish I could see a gecko.’ And it came true that night! It was tiny, and I don’t know how I even saw it because everything here is inconspicuous. You have to turn over every leaf!”

The forest proved a comfortable place to wander. Despite extreme humidity there were no mosquitoes, and temperatures hovered near 80°F. During a morning bird walk, Cohn-Haft talked about the interplay between these conditions and the rainforest’s extraordinary biodiversity.

“One of the secrets behind there being so many species in the tropics is that many are highly specialized,” he explained. All that specialization evolved with help from the equator’s environmental constancy, with the forest’s understory offering an additional degree of stability.

“And the more specialized you become, in some ways, the better competitor you are. You can survive in your own little world just fine. But any kind of change and suddenly you’re screwed,” Cohn-Haft continued. “So climate change is a killer for tropical forests and highly specialized organisms.”

Tapping knowledge of regional specialists

Manaus is a hub for scientists studying biodiversity and those addressing threats to Amazonia. With the city as their base, immersion organizers took the opportunity to program lectures with respected specialists and stops at influential institutions.

“The thinking is, how can we increase our presence in the Amazon? How can we provide opportunities to that student looking for a passion project?” offered Tim Linden, associate director of the DRCLAS Brazil Office. “We want to deepen collaborations with local institutions like Amazonas State University. And there are other organizations of scientific excellence like INPA. There are innovative sustainable development projects led by entrepreneurs in the region and different NGOs.”

One of the biggest names on the itinerary was Philip Fearnside, a biologist and prolific researcher with INPA. “He’s a person I cite in all of my papers,” said Kathryn Baragwanath, a Chilean political economist and 2023-24 Academy Scholar with the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies who just started as a University of Melbourne senior lecturer. “I was very excited to be in front of him.”

Fearnside’s presentation underscored the stakes for the region — and the world. The Amazon captures huge amounts of carbon. Its destruction would trigger an immediate spike in greenhouse gases and global temperatures. In addition, failing to curb emissions worldwide means the eventual collapse of the Amazon biome.

Other high-profile experts leaned into solutions to Amazonia’s challenges. They included Gersem Baniwa, Indigenous philosopher and University of Brasilia anthropology professor, Virgilio Viana, Ph.D. ’89, Sustainable Amazon Foundation director, and Izabella Teixeira, Brazil’s former Minister of the Environment, who played a key role in negotiating the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

“We’re here to listen and learn from individuals who have been guardians of the Amazon for so long,” said Eduardo Vasconcelos ’25, a double government and economics concentrator from Brasília whose senior thesis investigates how local policymaking can better preserve the ecosystem. “I’m inspired to conduct my research in a way that supports those on the frontlines.”

Tasso Azevedo, a social entrepreneur based in São Paulo, outlined for the group his widely cited MapBiomas project, which relies on satellite imagery to track land use changes throughout South America and even Asia. Castro and Martin have already published research that draws on Azevedo’s Brazilian data, along with at least three immersion participants studying the country’s environment, health, and government.

“If we want to achieve sustainable development goals, and we don’t have much time left … we need all these disciplines working together,” said Castro, who also chairs the Chan School’s Department of Global Health and Population.

And Ivo Makuxi, a young lawyer from the neighboring state of Roraima who lectured before slipping into the role of immersion participant, spoke to the complexities of Brazilian political history and constitutional law as they relate to Indigenous land rights.

The global community should care about the issue, he explained, because Indigenous peoples have historically proved excellent stewards. While 20 percent of the Amazon has already been deforested, just 1 percent of rainforest that falls within Brazil’s Indigenous territories has been cleared.

“The Amazon is a special place for a lot of people,” Makuxi, who takes his last name from the Indigenous community to which he belongs, said in an interview at Camp 41. “People say it’s the lungs of the world. What we say is it’s our home.”

“Navigating the Amazon,” featuring Harvard faculty and undergraduates who conducted recent research in the Amazon Rainforest, 4-6 p.m. Oct. 8, Harvard Kennedy School.

CAMP 41, Brazil — The Harvard Amazon Rainforest Immersion reminded Nick Kowalske of the dangers of complacency.

Over the 10-day research and teaching intensive hosted this summer by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS), the senior integrative biology concentrator spotted and identified 121 species while exploring the Brazil state of Amazonas. Highlights include a toco toucan, red-billed pied tanager, and neotropic cormorant, all documented on eBird.org.

As a long-time birder, he knew it was easy to get spoiled by the abundance of avian life. “I frequently catch myself saying, ‘Oh, it’s just a cormorant,’” said Kowalske, who completed a DRCLAS biodiversity internship earlier in the summer at Instituto Terra Luminous near São Paulo. “But I try to remain excited about the common things.”

With a sharp eye and an even sharper mind for the region’s biodiversity, the Dallas native’s knowledge proved an asset to anybody with binoculars. Some of it was acquired while volunteering in Ecuador a few summers ago. And some came from studying up on the Amazon’s bird life before the big trip.

His ecological education, however, began much earlier. “It started when I was 4 or 5 years old,” Kowalske said. “Every night I would make my mom sit and read the ‘Encyclopedia of Animals’ with me.”

Co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, the August immersion was organized by the DRCLAS Brazil Office with help from Amazonas State University (UEA) and Academia Amazônia Ensina. Twenty-one students and young academics from Harvard and universities across South America explored the world’s most diverse biome while learning from locals about the Amazon’s beauty and climate, economy, and public health challenges.

Bird lovers were pleased from Day One, which brought the group to the top of a 138-foot observation tower at the Museu da Amazônia (Musa), a sprawling natural history museum and rainforest reserve on the outskirts of Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas.

“Looking down into the canopy and seeing toucans and macaws flying everywhere was just ridiculous,” said Nicholas Arisco, M.S. ’18, Ph.D. ’23, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who fell hard for birding during the immersion.

Also memorable was the two-night stay at Camp 41, a far-flung research station and preserved rainforest fragment located about 70 miles north of Manaus. For ornithologist Scott V. Edwards, professor and chair of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, the trip’s best moment concerned a yellow-headed vulture that perched itself above the dining shed.

“I’m not so much into the rarity of things,” explained Edwards, who also serves as curator of ornithology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. “I’m more into getting a good view.”

Camp 41 proved especially prime for fans of birdsong. “It’s a lot harder to see stuff here in the woods, but it’s fun to just listen,” said ornithologist Mario Cohn-Haft, the group’s host at the site as well as a member of the ecology faculty at the Brazilian National Institute for Amazon Research (INPA) in Manaus.

Participants gathered at picnic tables one morning before dawn, with Cohn-Haft immediately recognizing the low-pitched hoot-hoot of a blue-crown motmot. As the sun rose, the chorus grew to include a black nunbird, red-billed woodcreeper and chestnut-rumped woodcreeper, among many others Cohn-Haft identified by ear.

“I’m sure we’ve heard well over 50 species of birds today,” he said that night.

At Camp 41, Kowalske added more than 40 species to his tally, including three varieties of manakin, a swallow-tailed kite, and a whiskered flycatcher with its baby in their nest. “It’s great to see Nick in his element,” Edwards said. “I’ve been very impressed.”

For Kowalske, the best birding was found at São Francisco das Chagas do Caribi, a small community of eco-friendly artisans and planters on the Rio Uatumã. “We saw red-and-green macaws at eye level in short palms between the houses,” Kowalske recalled. “It was an absolutely fantastic view of a magnificent bird.”

His biggest surprise unfolded next to a rural schoolhouse near Camp 41. Kowalske and Arisco moved in for a closer look at some açaí trees with a flock of toucans, including a few green aracari and one channel-billed toucan.

Then Arisco pointed to a far more diminutive creature in the treetops.

Kowalske shrugged it off at first when asked what it was. “I said ‘Oh, it’s another flycatcher,’” he recalled with a grin. “I didn’t even really look. And complacency is evil … so don’t do that.”

When he zoomed in with his Nikon DSLR, Kowalske recognized it was a rare and “legendary sighting” called a dusky purpletuft. The bird was last spotted around Camp 41 by Cohn-Haft in 1987 when he first arrived for a bird-monitoring internship.

“These birds are known primarily from the Guyanas and Suriname, but their range, we now know, extends farther south,” Kowalske rattled off. “It was super cool to see — even if it was just a little bird in the canopy.”

“It is time to normalize the existence of the climate emergency,” said Luisa Neubauer, opening her talk “Defending Democracy and Safeguarding Our Planet: A Dual Imperative.” Instead, she said, “In every single household in the country, someone is asking: ‘Are you going to the climate strike? Shouldn’t we be angry? Shouldn’t we be active?’”

As Germany’s leading youth climate activist and organizer of the “Fridays for Future Germany” protests, Neubauer presented a holistic approach to the climate crisis that stressed individual engagement in what has become a battle for how we define ourselves.

The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies event last week was co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.  George Sarrinikolaou, the institute’s executive director and assistant provost for climate and sustainability, gave opening remarks, noting that “at a time when the climate is deteriorating and … a time of war in the Middle East, Ukraine, and Sudan,” Neubauer is “mobilizing millions of people to advocate for science-based climate measures.”

Neubauer, who is a John F. Kennedy Memorial Policy Fellow at CES and author of several books on climate activism (most recently “Beginning to End the Climate Crisis: A History of Our Future”) then explained her address as a bit of “thinking out loud” about how to be “more effective as a movement.”

“The discourse has gotten so discouraging,” she said. Exhibiting a slide showing the increasingly early flowering of cherry trees in Kyoto, Japan, she pointed out the undeniability of the science. “What we’re seeing right now is a climate change that exceeds our modern understanding of a changing climate,” she added.

All that data hasn’t counted for much, however, she said. Instead, she cited as “a stupid mistake, the idea that the presence of all that science would be our best argument for changing something.”

A new approach is necessary, she stressed. Instead of simply focusing on the data, we need to understand how fossil fuels are woven into our culture. Quoting President George H.W. Bush at the 1992 Earth Summit that, “The American way of life is non-negotiable,” she explained how decarbonization has been presented as a threat not only to prosperity but to happiness.

“The power of pop culture has led us to normalize our idea of what is a good life,” she said. Noting Western societies’ love of automobiles and the so-called freedom they offer, she pointed out that we live in “a cultural arena that has inhaled the very fossil fuel idea of a good life into every single aspect” — a culture, she added, where “a car would be safe, but I wouldn’t be.”

Fracking, for example, has become accepted by both presidential candidates as essential to our short-term vision of prosperity. “We’ve gotten to the point where the mainstream political understanding is that if you really love a country, you love it to the point of destruction.”

Living in a world where our biggest fear may be “Are they going to take away my car?” presents a particular challenge to anyone who cares about the climate crisis and longer-term issues.

“We need to understand these irrational historical connections,” said Neubauer.  Outlining how climate change is presented — or ignored — in popular culture and how fossil fuels are presented as part of “the good life,” she encouraged the audience to see how widespread the battle is. “When we talk about the climate we never just talk about the climate,” she said. “We talk about everything in the room.”

To counter this, Neubauer said, we need to “widen our understanding of what is a climate discourse” to encourage people to “think deeply about the complexity of wealth.”

“If decarbonizing our democracy means ending with so many old ideas of what is a good life, then I would very much believe we need some good proposals.” Burrowing down to specifics, she said, “If people have spent their lives of dreaming of their own house, then people need new dreams.”

Changing societal goals is a huge task, she acknowledged. This can lead to cynicism and hopelessness. However, she encouraged activists to also embrace the human instinct to nurture and to heal. With this in mind, she discussed the nature of hope.

“Hope is very realistic,” she said. “Hope isn’t a goodie bag to take home. Hope is work. Hope is our promise to the world to look for possibilities. It doesn’t mean we’re going to get everything, but we’re daring to believe in what is possible.”

To mobilize that hope, she said, “Someone will have to start, and everyone is someone.”

The problem is huge, but, “we understand the assignment,” she said. Facing “a crisis that was produced by millions of people living their lives and dreaming their dreams,” we all must take action not only to educate others about climate change but to share awareness about how our culture has been built on fossil fuels and about how unsustainable such a lifestyle is for the Earth.

“A vast part of the environmental degradation is produced by very normal people every day,” said Neubauer. “We have long understood that tackling the worst catastrophes will not rely on this handful of people, institutions or tech billionaires, but rather the opposite.

“Humankind is quite capable of collaboration,” she stressed. “When tackling the climate crisis we have this huge advantage of we know what we’re fighting against. We know what we want.”

Sometimes all it takes is one small brush with the arts to change a career trajectory.

Kevin Lin ’12 knows this as well as anyone. An Organismic and Evolutionary Biology concentrator at Harvard, Lin was preparing for a career in biology when he made a spontaneous decision junior year to volunteer for an American Repertory Theater production. One A.R.T. internship and one Harvardwood 101 trip later, Lin found himself applying to intern in the theater department of Creative Artists Agency after graduation.

“I figured that, for one last hurrah before going to grad school for biology — which I had already applied to — I might as well do an internship in theater,” he told an audience of students gathered in the Agassiz Theatre last week. Now Lin is an agent, representing theater artists like Leslie Odom Jr. and Darren Criss, Columbia Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Olympic diving champion Tom Daley.

“It was very clear to me that I’m not going to be a writer, I’m not an actor, I’m not a director, but I want to be surrounded by people who are extraordinary,” Lin said. “In my position now, my day is filled with insanely talented people who inspire me on a daily basis.”

Lin was one of the keynote speakers at the inaugural Creative Careers Conference co-hosted by the Office for the Arts at Harvard, the Harvard Alumni Association, and the Mignone Center for Career Success. The conference brought together current students interested in the arts with alums working in the field for a panel discussion and networking reception. The event concluded with a reimagined student performance of “The Human Comedy” (1983), the result of a weeklong musical theater residency with alumni that included Broadway producer Jack Viertel ’71, director Sammi Cannold, M.A. ’16, and arranger Ian Chan ’23.

“I think there are so many extraordinary jobs in the arts that are not super visible,” said Fiona Coffey, director of the Office for the Arts. “When you can see how people have forged these very unique and specific careers, it opens up students’ minds to what’s possible. It gives them permission to dream in a similar way.”

Alumna composer-lyricist and novelist Julia Riew ’22, the other keynote speaker, started at Harvard on the pre-med track. Although she had always loved musical theater, she was intimidated when didn’t see many other Asian American students pursuing the field.

“From freshman fall through junior year I knew I had this theater passion, and I knew that it felt impractical,” Riew said. “I’d literally go home and cry after class every day. I’d be writing musicals in the back of Life Sciences 1B, not listening to the lecture.”

Ultimately Riew decided to jointly concentrate in music and Theater, Dance & Media. Now, she is represented by Lin, and working on projects in musical theater, literature, film, and TV. Riew emphasized to students the importance of using their time as undergraduates to explore their craft.

“There’s this opportunity to make bad theater and put it onstage. I was like, ‘When else, other than College, am I going to be able to write a show and have it go up onstage and not have to spend a dime of my own money?’” she said.

James Caven ’22, a writer’s assistant on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” spoke on a panel alongside fellow alumni Abraham Rebollo-Trujillo ’20, a dramaturg and actor, Veronica Leahy ’23, a musician and composer, and current junior Gabby Anderson ’26, a guard on the women’s basketball team and artist and entrepreneur who makes customized sneaker art.

Caven, who was involved in the Harvard Lampoon and the Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club while being an Integrated Biology concentrator, spoke to students about the fast-paced realities of comedy writing, which involves producing a new show every day between first pitches at 9 a.m. and the show taping at 5 p.m. Caven said he was encouraged to apply for his position by a fellow alumnus also involved with the Lampoon.

Anderson said balancing her art career with being a student is definitely time-consuming, but she makes it easier by combining the two whenever she can, sometimes submitting paintings (and accompanying essays) for econ class projects.

“I find myself very inspired, not only when I play basketball, but taking courses. Even econ sometimes makes me think, ‘Oh my gosh, I need to make this huge painting about the economic state of the U.S. right now,’” Anderson said. “Because my hobby is also my career, I’m more passionate about it, which motivates me. I’m having fun so it doesn’t necessarily feel like work.”

Students in the audience asked alumni about a range of topics, from how to self-advocate and how to navigate family approval around a career in the arts to how to decide which creative projects to accept or decline.

Leahy, who entered Harvard believing she would study math, was a TDM and music concentrator in the Harvard-Berklee Joint Studies Program. She told students, who were curious about networking, that many of the performance and directing opportunities she has now are a direct result of professional and social connections she made on campus.

“Truly the people that you are making art with now are the people that you might be making art with for the rest of your life, or definitely for the next couple of years,” Leahy said. “Just enjoy it, appreciate it, and really take advantage of being here with all these talented people.”

Political polls underestimated the support for Donald Trump and overstated the backing for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Four years later, the polling correctly anticipated Joe Biden’s win over Trump, but both national and statewide polls saw a much wider edge than he ultimately received.

A task force report by the American Association of Public Opinion Research called the 2020 race the profession’s biggest misfire since 1980, when polls forecast a close race and instead Ronald Reagan beat incumbent Jimmy Carter by a landslide.

The Gazette spoke with John Anzalone, Biden’s chief pollster in 2020 and a Resident Fellow at the Institute of Politics this fall, about what happened in the past two elections and how the field has tried to make adjustments amid shifts in the nation’s political dynamics.

A co-founder of The Wall Street Journal poll, Anzalone also worked for the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton (2016) and Barack Obama (2008 and 2012). His firm, Impact Research, has conducted polls for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, but he is not involved in that work. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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What went wrong in the last two elections, and has the industry made any course corrections?

What’s really important is that we differentiate what professional pollsters who work for campaigns do, and what the public media polls do, because it’s very, very different. You’re not seeing campaign polls.

I’m not saying that there wasn’t error. There was, especially in ’16. But there are not many media polls that are spending a lot of money like we do to do daily interviews the right way, using multimodal methodologies, doing quotas, etc. We get branded by the fact that there are now dozens and dozens of cheap media polls that I think are a problem.

In 2016, there were a lot of legitimate concerns about polling error. What we found internally, in a group of pollsters, is that we weren’t getting the right proportion of non-college-educated voters. We were getting too many service-oriented, non-college-educated voters. We weren’t getting enough people who work with their hands or work in the factory or in agriculture, drivers, and things like that. We also saw that a lot of our small-town rural interviews were in the county seat, not in the rural areas. And so, we changed up a lot in terms of how we’re getting our interviews and quotas with non-college-educated voters.

You have to acknowledge that Trump so changed what’s going on in the political dynamics in America. And there was no way to model out who was coming out in 2016. There just wasn’t. We saw a little bit of that in 2020, as well.

I think the challenges have a lot to do with modeling who’s going to turn out. That has been an absolute mystery in the Trump era. I couldn’t tell you who’s going to turn out now.

What metrics do pollsters find best gauge who will turn out to vote?

We do an enthusiasm level, and we do a likelihood, but most of what we’re doing is message development and strategy. Most of what media polls do is the big number/little number, the head-to-head, the traits, the job ratings, etc. Pollsters who are in the political space to help campaigns are message development strategists. Everything that we do goes into a TV ad or a digital ad or a speech. Yes, the head-to-head is important, and we want to get that right, but media polls have turned every pollster into a prognosticator, and that’s a misread of what we do.

Many who were on the fence about voting when it was a Biden versus Trump matchup now say they plan to vote. How does polling capture this new, still-changing electorate?

All you can do is try to guess what percentage of your sample should be “new voters.” You have the voter history of 2022, 2020, 2018, and 2016, and you have new registrants. That’s not a perfect science. Who says that this cycle will be the same as past cycles, where you have to be up a certain percentage nationally to win the battleground states?

This is a tough industry on a good day. It has been a more difficult challenge during the Trump years figuring out how we can get hard-to-reach voters. Now we know there’s a universe that doesn’t want to take a live call or doesn’t trust a live call, so we’ve corrected for a lot of that. We’re constantly going to have to evolve, and we’re going to constantly have to correct and do better because of all of the challenges that we have.

But I’m proud of our industry, and I’m proud of the fact that, professionally, what we do — which you don’t see — we do really well. Polling is really expensive, and most media outlets don’t spend the money necessary to do it right.

What kinds of things might both the Trump and Harris campaigns want to know from their internal polling at this point in the race?

Presidential campaigns, whether you’re Democrat or Republican, are going to test both positive messaging based on the strength of issues and character traits, and they’re going to test all of the contrasts. There’s nothing each side hasn’t tested in terms of positive frames on each and negative frames on each. It’s September, they’ve been polling for eight months.

What every campaign does is they dial-test their convention speeches, and they dial-test their debates. [That is, monitor responses of sample audiences to get their immediate response to words, phrases, and ideas in real time.] So, they’re seeing what hits with swing voters. The convention speeches for both of them, you can guarantee they dial-tested, and that helped refine some of the things that they would say in the debate. And then, they’ll dial test the debates because they’ve got two months of rallies, two months of speeches, and they have TV ads, so the more data, the better. They have the foundation of their research on message, development, and contrast, and now, it’s all about refinement.

You say most media polls aren’t very reliable. Which are the better ones?

The Wall Street Journal is the gold standard, without a doubt, because it’s multimodal. I think that Pew Research Center is the gold standard of online polls because they’ve built their own online database. And then, I think the NBC poll is really good because you have a Democratic firm and a Republican firm running it, like The Wall Street Journal poll.

Fans of Clementine, the cat who recently captivated TikTok with her rare eye color, should take note.

The piercing golden gaze of cheetahs, the striking blue stare of snow leopards, and the luminous green glare of leopards are all traits that can be traced to one ancestor, an ocelot-like feline progenitor that roamed Earth over 30 million years ago. 

In a new study published in iScience, Harvard researchers say this ancestral population likely featured felines with both brown and gray eyes, the latter paving the way for the rapid and wide diversification of iris color seen in cat species today.

“When I started this study I asked, ‘What do we know about eye color?’ And the truth is, very little, as there are basically almost no phylogenetic evolutionary studies on eye color,” said lead author Julius Tabin, a Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. 

Most studies focus on the distribution of eye colors in a species, or on the genes involved in making eye color in humans and domesticated animals. Studies on eye color in animal populations are rare due to the challenges of preservation and lack of diversity — most animals have brown eyes. 

While eye color in humans is likely a result of sexual selection, and in domesticated animals a result of artificial selection, Tabin wondered what spurred the wide diversity in wild Felidae. Without fossil preservation to rely on, Tabin took a novel approach analyzing digital images from sources such as iNaturalist to identify and categorize the varied eye colors in 52 felid taxa.

Tabin and co-author Katherine Chiasson, a master’s student at Johns Hopkins University, created an algorithm to map iris colors onto a phylogenetic tree of Felidae.

“Most species have a singular eye color with no variation. So, it’s really surprising that once you get into the cats — lions, tigers, panthers, etc.— we see all these different eye colors.”

Julius Tabin

“We found a lot of variability of color between species,” said Tabin, “but shockingly, we also found a lot of intraspecific variability. Most species have a singular eye color with no variation. So, it’s really surprising that once you get into the cats — lions, tigers, panthers, etc.— we see all these different eye colors. There are actually very few Felidae species that have only a singular eye color in their population.”

Equipped with the colors mapped onto the phylogenetic tree, the researchers set out to reconstruct the ancestral state. They found that early, pre-felid lineages (the ancestor of felids and their closest relatives, the linsangs) had brown eyes only. However, after the linsang species branched off, gray-eyed felines appeared alongside brown-eyed ones.

“It’s likely this happened due to a genetic mutation that drastically decreased the pigment in the eye,” Tabin said. Melanin can be either eumelanin, which is brown, or pheomelanin, which is yellow. To go from a brown eye to a gray eye would require a decrease of eumelanin. That decrease would lead to an eye that is not fully brown and not fully gray, but a brownish gray color, which is what the researchers found.

Those gray-eyed felines opened the door to a burst of greens, yellows, and blues, providing an anchor between brown eyes and the new colors. 

“Blue eyes require carefully balanced low levels of pigment and are likely recessive in felids. A wild population would probably not be able to maintain blue eyes in a population with only one blue-eyed individual among a sea of brown eyes. It’s probable that you would need something lighter than brown, but not as light as blue, to be the mediator. And that’s what you see: In every single cat species with blue eyes, they also have gray eyes,” said Tabin. 

Tabin and Chiasson also observed that brown eyes and yellow eyes rarely coexist in a species. They said they were surprised to find a positive correlation between yellow eyes and round pupils, and a negative correlation between brown eyes and round pupils.

The researchers found no significant correlations for activity mode, zoogeographical region, habitat, and uniformity of eye color, which leaves the adaptive benefit of having varied eye colors an open question to pursue.

The researchers not only reconstructed the general eye color types present at each evolutionary node, but they were also able to predict the exact color of each ancestor’s eye. 

“Being able to reconstruct color quantitatively is one of the paper’s greatest strengths, because it means we are the first animals to see the color of these eyes since these felids were alive millions of years ago,” Tabin said.

“The fact that rigorous studies like ours can be done by anyone with an internet connection and some curiosity is indicative of a field-wide revolution that is increasing the accessibility of science around the world.”

Katherine Chiasson

For Chiasson the study was special in part because all the resources they used are freely available online. “The fact that rigorous studies like ours can be done by anyone with an internet connection and some curiosity is indicative of a field-wide revolution that is increasing the accessibility of science around the world.”

The study opens opportunity for more investigation of the evolutionary importance of gray eyes, as well as eye-color evolution in natural populations, Tabin said. “I’m still riding high on the excitement of knowing that the felid ancestor had both brown and gray eyes, because that’s something I didn’t go in expecting or even thinking about.”

Some may be surprised to learn that academic and other intellectual breakthroughs and art spring from the same source.

Both begin with hard questions, and even when they lead to many answers or no answers at all, they should be pursued to advance knowledge and understanding, said artists and scholars during a panel discussion last Friday on how writing and art can stir the public imagination.

The interdisciplinary panel of writers included two novelists, a computer scientist, a journalist, a visual artist, and a scholar of race, all Radcliffe fellows. The discussion was part of the festivities marking the 25th anniversary of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and was moderated by Claire Messud, Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Senior Lecturer on Fiction at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

In her opening remarks, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the institute and the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, highlighted the distinctive aspect of the institute she leads.

“True to Radcliffe’s interdisciplinary mission, fellows represent a broad range of scholarly, professional, and creative fields. They come to Radcliffe from different types of institutions and at various stages of their careers,” said Brown-Nagin, also a professor of history at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “Pulitzer Prize recipients and National Book Award winners work alongside promising artists and scholars in the early stages of the careers. Filmmakers, visual artists, musicians, and novelists exchange ideas with historians, biologists, physicists, social scientists, physicians, lawyers and more.”

Panelists agreed that the only way to push the boundaries of what we know is by asking new questions or finding fresh ways of looking old ones.

“Every book that I write, every article begins with a question, and I try to answer it using all the bibliographies, but also the methods that are at my disposal,” said Imani Perry, Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies.

Novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge RI ’19, author of the novels “Libertie” and “We Love You, Charlie Freeman,” agreed. During her Radcliffe year, Greenidge faced many questions while working on “Libertie,” her second historical novel.

“With an artistic project, oftentimes the point is that you’re asking a question that doesn’t have an answer or that could have multiple answers at once,” she said.

For Sharon Weinberger RI ’16, national security and foreign policy editor at the Wall Street Journal, the hardest part is to come up with the initial question but also decide whether it is important enough to pursue.

“First of all, it may not be answerable,” she said. “And if you could answer it, maybe it’s not that important. And that’s where I think the interdisciplinary part is helpful. Having colleagues who say, ‘Is that an interesting question?’ ‘Would you want to know the answer?’’’

Computer scientist Francine Berman RI ’20, faculty associate at Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, said being surrounded by fellows from different disciplines allowed her to examine the social and environmental impacts of technology on people’s daily lives and the ways in which technology could be used to further the common good.

“Radcliffe is a great place to ask big questions,” said Berman. “For me, the big questions really have to do with how we thrive in a technological world and what strategies we can use to reduce the risk of the technologies we deal with every day, and that certainly includes AI, and to promote the benefits.”

Messud quoted the novelist Vladimir Nabokov (“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist”) in asking panelists to talk about the role of imagination in their intellectual ventures.

Clarissa Tossin RI ’18, interdisciplinary artist, said imagination is central to her art.

“Imagination, for me, is everything,” said Tossin. “I do research to do my work, but then I have to do that extra leap, which is where the imagination enters to guide me where I can go because it’s not just a scientific or scholarly inquiry.”

For writers, imagination helps create stories, characters and entire worlds, they said. And scholars said they benefit from learning storytelling techniques to make their writing more vivid and reach a broader audience.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, Perry said imagination works in both scholarship and nonfiction. Scholars might be constrained by the facts, she said, but imagination intervenes to help put all the facts together to tell a story that would resonate with readers and to envision possible futures.

“It’s the work of the imagination,” said Perry, “but the undercurrent of all the work is getting closer to a just and good world. And that absolutely requires the imagination, to get us toward something that we have not yet fully seen.”

In a study that included 2 million older adults who sustained a traumatic injury, 10.6 percent of patients who experienced a fall were subsequently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Falls also increased the risk of a future dementia diagnosis by 21 percent, according to researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Results are published in JAMA Network Open. 

The researchers analyzed Medicare Fee-for-Service data from 2014 to 2015, which included 2,453,655 older adult patients who experienced a traumatic injury, as well as follow-up data for one year after the initial fall. The researchers found that half of the patients in the study received their injuries in a fall, and that these patients were significantly likelier to be diagnosed with dementia within one year after their injuries. 

“The relationship between falls and dementia appears to be a two-way street,” said senior author Molly Jarman, assistant professor in the Department of Surgery and deputy director of the Center for Surgery and Public Health at the Brigham. “Cognitive decline can increase the likelihood of falls, but trauma from those falls may also accelerate dementia’s progression and make a diagnosis more likely down the line. Thus, falls may be able to act as precursor events that can help us identify people who need further cognitive screening.”  

More than 14 million older adults, or one in four, report falls each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and falls are also the leading cause of injury in older adults. These injuries can have long-lasting or permanent consequences, including declines in functional status, overall loss of independence, or risk of death.

To improve the early identification of dementia, the researchers recommend implementing cognitive screenings in older adults who experience an injurious fall that results in either an emergency department visit or admission to the hospital. 

The research suggests that completing cognitive screenings in older patients after a fall could help detect dementia sooner. However, this is easier said than done, particularly in light of disparities in access to primary care among older adults. 

“One of the biggest challenges we face is the lack of ownership in the process of follow-up screening for cognitive impairment, because there may not be adequate time for these screenings in an emergency department or trauma center setting,” said Alexander J. Ordoobadi, the first author of the study and a resident physician in the Department of Surgery at the Brigham. 

“Ideally, after an injury, older adults should receive follow-up care with a primary care provider or geriatrician who can monitor their cognitive health and long-term functional recovery after the injury, but many older adults don’t have a regular primary care provider and lack access to a geriatrician,” he added. 

The study results additionally highlight the need for more clinicians who can provide care for older adults, including cognitive assessments after fall injuries. 

“Our study highlights the opportunity to intervene early and the need for more clinicians who can provide comprehensive care for older adults,” said Jarman. “If we can establish that falls serve as early indicators of dementia, we could identify other precursors and early events that we could intervene on, which would significantly improve our approach to managing cognitive health in older adults.” 

 
This study was supported by the National Institute on Aging and the National Institutes of Health under award number K01AG065414. 

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In April, President Alan Garber and Provost John Manning announced a faculty working group to examine how community members experience Harvard classrooms and the broader campus environment and to make recommendations on how the University can most effectively nurture and reinforce a culture of open inquiry, constructive dialogue, and the free exchange of ideas.

The Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group, which released its report on Tuesday, was initiated to address concerns that members of the community feel constrained in their ability to share their views, with some students, faculty, and staff members expressing hesitancy to discuss controversial issues out of concerns about peer judgment, social media criticism, professional or reputational damage, and the potential for complaints about bullying and harassment. The working group conducted surveys and held extensive listening sessions across Harvard’s campuses and found that among students, 55 percent of respondents said they are comfortable engaging in discussions of controversial issues inside the classroom, with 45 percent indicating that they are reluctant to share their views about such topics.

Among Harvard faculty members and instructors, 59 percent of survey respondents reported that they are comfortable pursuing research on a controversial topic; 49 percent reported that they are comfortable leading a classroom discussion about controversial issues; and 32 percent reported that they are comfortable discussing such issues outside of class. The working group underscored that, while these findings are not unique to Harvard, the reluctance of community members to discuss controversial topics demands attention. The report thus highlights activities and pedagogical best practices already in place across the University and makes recommendations to nurture open inquiry across its campuses.

The Gazette discussed the report with the co-chairs of the working group: Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law, and professor of history; and Professor of Government Eric Beerbohm, faculty dean of Quincy House.

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The working group faced what seems a difficult task, assessing an emerging cultural problem at odds with strongly held beliefs about the nature of the educational experience at Harvard. How did you tackle this issue?

Brown-Nagin: We engaged a broad cross-section of the Harvard community over a period of several months. As co-chairs, we met with faculty representatives of every Harvard School. We conducted 23 listening sessions with more than 600 Harvard affiliates, including faculty, instructors, students, staff, and representatives of the Harvard Alumni Association. We also surveyed undergraduates, graduate, and professional school students from all of the Schools as well as faculty, instructors, and staff. I found the conversations with so many different members of our community fascinating. One could really appreciate the cultural differences and the wide variety of disciplines, backgrounds, and viewpoints that are represented across the Schools.

Were people eager to talk about this?

Beerbohm: Implementing Chatham House-style norms during our listening sessions really made a difference. It created a space where people felt safe to open up about their hesitations around discussing contested topics. Students, staff, and faculty shared their fears about being misunderstood or misrepresented, whether in class or outside it. One student said something that really stuck with me: “I want to speak freely, but I’m constantly worried that if I say the wrong thing, I’ll end up all over Sidechat or TikTok and be labeled forever.” That captures a key concern we highlighted in our report — many students are reluctant to share their views because they’re afraid of peer judgment and social media backlash. But what’s encouraging is that our discussions often pointed toward solutions. Many participants expressed a hunger for tools to help them disagree more constructively.

Did anything surprise you in these conversations?

Brown-Nagin: We often think of Harvard in terms of the whole instead of the parts, and this was an assignment that brought to the fore both the whole and the parts. In speaking to the different groups across the University, I was impressed by the hunger for engagement about the issues at hand, the unified commitment to excellence in teaching and learning, and support across the University for learning communities in which everyone can thrive. Students, faculty, instructors all want the tools and the policies in place that will enable the kind of intellectually engaging community that people arrive on this campus to pursue.

Coming from the Law School, where we teach about an adversarial system, there’s comfort with disagreement and an expectation that arguments can be made in support of many different positions. The same is true for my understanding of the history profession, which also involves the interpretation of evidence. So, one thing I did find surprising was the extent to which some across campus do not necessarily welcome debate and disagreement. To me, they’re a big part of the point of higher education. Becoming a professional in any field should mean learning how to be persuasive, how to marshal evidence in support of an argument, how to reason.

What did the committee find through its work?

Brown-Nagin: A majority of Harvard students — including 55 percent of survey respondents — reported that they are comfortable engaging in discussions of controversial issues in the classroom. However, other students, including 45 percent of survey respondents, reported that they are reluctant — some very reluctant — to share their views about charged topics. We also identified key drivers of this reluctance to talk about controversial issues. The first is concern about peer judgment. Harvard students respect one another. They respect one another’s talents and positions, and they’re very concerned about what others think about them. There is reluctance because of worries about criticism on social media. There is unease about potential reputational damage from speaking out. We also noted some concern about potential bullying and harassment complaints being made against them as a result of comments in class. The other thing we found is that this reluctance is not confined to students. There are many faculty and instructors who also expressed a reluctance to teach about controversial topics. I should note that this concern is greatest — as one might expect — among untenured faculty or non-ladder instructors.

It is critically important to appreciate that the reluctance to speak about controversial issues is hardly unique to Harvard or to the higher education sector, generally. It is a widespread problem across American society and institutions. However, given our mission of excellence through the pursuit of truth and the creation and dissemination of knowledge across generations, the difficulty in speaking openly and respectfully is especially harmful in higher education.

Beerbohm: It’s a significant challenge and not unique to Harvard, but I think Harvard is uniquely placed — with our full immersion system of undergraduate life, in particular — to tackle it. I think we can learn a lot and share a lot with broader higher education.

“Our findings show that Harvard is already home to a wide range of best practices that, if expanded and systematized, could foster a more robust culture of open inquiry.”

Eric Beerbohm

Are there substantial best practices already in place that might lead us toward a community-wide answer to this challenge?

Brown-Nagin: Absolutely, there are people all over our campuses who are already engaged in doing the work of promoting constructive disagreement. But we still have work to do. The point of the report’s appendix is to showcase some of the models and resources that are already available and suggest to readers that although we are reporting on challenges, we also have tools available to move toward remedies.

Beerbohm: Our findings show that Harvard is already home to a wide range of best practices that, if expanded and systematized, could foster a more robust culture of open inquiry. Many of our faculty are employing innovative classroom techniques designed to foster constructive disagreement. This involves creating spaces for respectful, good-faith dialogues where participants are genuinely curious about each other’s perspectives. One promising practice is the use of anonymous polling at the start of discussions, which allows students to see the diversity of views within the room and feel more comfortable sharing their own perspectives. In my own teaching, I’ve started to use large-language models to identify and engage students who hold outlier views. I’ve found that hearing these students’ voices, in particular, can expand the space for ideas and arguments.

A cross-section of our courses already focus on the skill of constructive disagreement, and this is something we could expand across the University. Take Michael Sandel’s course, “Justice: Ethical Reasoning in Polarized Times.” It engages about 700 students in some of the most contested issues of our time. What’s great is that some sections meet in the Houses, with follow-up discussions in our dining halls. This creates a spillover effect — a kind of co-curriculum that engages with students who aren’t enrolled in the course.

We envision the Bok Center for Teaching, the Harvard Initiative for Teaching and Learning, and the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics developing required teaching modules that, early on, foster the intellectual virtues necessary for productive discourse — qualities like humility, fairness, and curiosity. We can also reward faculty who excel at navigating difficult discussions and share successful practices across Harvard’s different Schools. Our professional Schools have some of the leading experts in facilitation and negotiation, and we hope to tap into their expertise as we build community-wide solutions. The real challenge is creating consistency so that these modules aren’t just one-off experiences but become a defining part of our students’ time here.

“We have to agree that rigor, debate, and disagreement are elements of an excellent education.”

Tomiko Brown-Nagin

Let’s talk about the recommendations. Is there a particular thread that ties them all together?

Brown-Nagin: What we are suggesting through the recommendations is that there is an imperative for the University and the Schools to take steps to ensure that everyone is aware of what is expected of us. We have to broadly appreciate lively classroom interactions, disagreement, a spectrum of viewpoints in order for us to move toward a realization of our goals of open inquiry and constructive disagreement. We have to agree that rigor, debate, and disagreement are elements of an excellent education. Another overarching theme in the recommendations is that the capacity to engage in challenging conversations can be taught and learned. These are challenges on which we can make progress. There are many different Schools that are committed already to making progress and my hope is that the report can galvanize greater commitment to the goals of the working group and to the tools necessary to achieve them.

Beerbohm: We’re recommending what you might call a “full stack” solution — one that doesn’t stop at orientation but runs throughout a student’s entire experience at Harvard. This means cultivating these skills from the moment students set foot on campus and reinforcing them through every aspect of University life — from the Yard and the Houses to student organizations, and of course, within the classroom itself.

Our report emphasizes that this culture of empathetic curiosity has to be immersive. It’s not just about isolated events or courses; it’s about embedding the norms of open inquiry across curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular spaces. This includes creating environments where students and faculty alike are encouraged to engage with views they profoundly disagree with. We stress the importance of modeling these practices ourselves. That means faculty demonstrating what my colleague Ned Hall calls “collaborative disagreement”—bringing students and alumni into these discussions, and creating spaces where diverse perspectives can be explored without fears of conversations going viral on social-media platforms. The goal is to make these ideals — of open-mindedness and big-heartedness — central to our students’ experience.

The report makes several recommendations. Are there ones that you think particularly important?

Brown-Nagin: I would cite the recommendations about confidentiality of classroom discussions and responsible social media usage as absolutely key to making progress on some of the challenges that we identified. So many different people expressed concerns that statements made in class might be disseminated in ways that could be harmful to the speaker’s reputation; that fear is obviously detrimental to open inquiry and constructive dialogue. Several of our Schools have mandated the Chatham House Rule of non-attribution of classroom statements that we cite in the appendix and that we hope will be more widely adopted to mitigate fears about communicating in class and to build trust in the classroom. The reluctance to freely communicate inside and even outside of class is strongly related to concerns about reputational damage from social media postings. There is a widespread concern about being attacked on social media and it, too, is highly detrimental to open inquiry and constructive dialogue. Fortunately, there are many people on campus who are well acquainted with these and who can help us find ways to both promote responsible usage and ensure the freedom of expression absolutely also vital to achieving our goals.

Beerbohm: There’s a kind of collective action problem when it comes to open inquiry. Members of our community seek challenging dialogue but many report hesitation in initiating it. As faculty, we can play a crucial role in breaking this stalemate. Through case studies, simulations, role-playing, in-class games, and debate, we can signal our commitment to creating a learning environment where students feel safe to disagree — with each other and with us. It’s important to set clear classroom norms that encourage critical thinking and respectful debate, making it explicit that diverse perspectives are not only welcomed but are essential for intellectual growth. This isn’t virtue signaling but a deliberate effort to reshape classroom norms to foster trust and openness, giving our students the permission to stick their necks out and experiment with ideas and arguments. One student shared with us, “I sometimes feel there’s an invisible script in class that I’m expected to follow, and if I deviate from it, the atmosphere goes cold.” Our challenge is to counteract this by demonstrating that there is no script — that the most valuable contributions come from genuine engagement and independent thought, not from echoing presumed viewpoints.

Is that moment when the classroom goes cold also the moment when the faculty member should step in and open up the conversation? Is there an element of faculty skill-building needed here?

Beerbohm: Absolutely. When the classroom atmosphere goes cold — when we sense that students are starting to bite their tongues — it’s a signal that we need to create structures that allow the conversation to reopen. This might mean assigning roles for students, running a simulation where each student knows they are advocating for a position, even if they disagree with it. The ability to argue a point you personally don’t hold is a cardinal take-home skill, not just in law school but across disciplines. It’s Socratic at its core. We’re also envisioning faculty workshops where we can share best practices, techniques that have been successful in keeping classroom discourse open and constructive. This doesn’t mean a one-size-fits-all approach, but it is our pedagogical responsibility to establish this ethos early in our syllabi and in the first weeks of class. The norms of how we respond to and harness disagreement need to be clear and practiced from the start. Our report highlights the need for a carefully worked-out pedagogy around disagreement, and this is where skill-building among faculty and graduate students can make a real difference.

How does norm-setting happen?

Beerbohm: We take a pluralistic approach to norm-setting. Some of our colleagues co-create a compact with their students on the first day of class, defining how discussions should unfold in ways that are both rigorous and respectful. Others provide a set of guidelines for dialogue and invite students to discuss and refine them. There are also faculty who don’t formally set out rules but instead model the behavior from the outset, allowing students to observe and internalize these norms through experience. We were careful not to prescribe one particular method in our report. Each of these methods — whether co-creation, guided discussion, or modeling — can be effective, depending on the instructor’s style and the classroom dynamic. The key is to ensure that students — through a pedagogy inside and outside the classroom — embrace norms of constructive dialogue grounded in empathy and curiosity.

How will mastering this ability to have conversations across differences help students when they leave campus?

Brown-Nagin: In addition to pursuing truth and creating knowledge, the University and certainly the College explicitly aspire to educate leaders who can contribute to broader society. And our view is that learning to thrive on a campus that includes many identities, experiences, and viewpoints is excellent preparation for living in a democratic society committed to pluralism and opportunity for all.

How does your work intersect with the Presidential Task Forces on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, and on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias?

Brown-Nagin: I think our community is eager to imagine how open inquiry could move us toward a better way of talking about the kinds of issues that are being tackled by those task forces. Few of us have been unmoved by the events of the past year. In our listening sessions, we heard from a wide range of students about experiences inside and outside the classroom that touch on the charges of those task forces. Some of the most gripping stories came from Israeli and Jewish students whose attempts to engage in dialogue were rejected by other students, who have disavowed talking to Zionists on the assumption — mistaken in many cases — that all of those students agree with whatever premises are being ascribed to Zionism. We also heard from Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students who had been called “terrorists” on the assumption that anyone who cares about or stands up for the rights of the Palestinian people supports terrorism. Some reported that criticisms of Israeli government policy were wrongly conflated with a challenge to the right of Israel to exist.

So there very much is an intersection between the goals of open inquiry and constructive dialogue and the imperatives of those task forces. These are very complicated, painful issues. But if we are to live up to our expectations, our aspirations to open inquiry and constructive dialogue, we have to be able to engage across those differences. Open inquiry is for everyone, for all backgrounds and identities, and I hope that this work can be a part of an effort to create opportunities and spaces for community members to connect across those particular boundaries.

Beerbohm: I’d like to add that our report aligns with the important work of our sibling Working Group on Institutional Voice. That report raises concerns about how, when University leaders speak on certain issues, they might inadvertently pre-empt individual speech and, in some cases, hinder open inquiry. The fear is that official statements can close off debate by signaling an institutional stance that may discourage the diverse and rigorous exchanges essential to the pursuit of truth.

Our report offers a vision for how a university that speaks less as a collective entity can foster a vibrant dialogue among its members. We emphasize our responsibility is to create an environment where differences are not only tolerated but welcomed. The goal isn’t to prescribe viewpoints but to support a culture where people are encouraged to engage with the sources of each other’s disagreements and, through that engagement, uncover new insights. Taken together, the reports present a unified vision: a commitment to open, rigorous dialogue. It’s a vision in which intellectual diversity is embraced as part of the search for truth — which is what unites us as a community.

Three Harvard presidents and two Nobel laureates gathered with Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin last Thursday to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

During the celebration, Brown-Nagin reflected on the institute’s “unique legacy and remarkable impact” and noted the many important contributions made by Radcliffe pioneers, including Mary Ingraham Bunting, a microbiologist and the college’s fifth dean, which ultimately led to the institute’s founding and success.

“Bunting was one of the main trailblazers. She was also acknowledging the many women who were educated at Radcliffe as students who went on to become leaders in many different fields, along with prior administrators going back to Radcliffe College who, in their own way, pushed/supported the idea of what eventually became the institute as we know it in 1999,” she said. 

Brown-Nagin also announced the launch of a new three-year initiative on academic freedom and a project by Schlesinger Library to digitize its substantial collection of archival material from Radcliffe College’s own 120-year history.

The Radcliffe Institute was established in 1999 following Radcliffe College’s formal merger with Harvard.

At its heart is the fellowship program, which promotes interdisciplinary exposure for participants, with a particular focus on lending a hand to female scholars, who, for years, were very much in the minority in their departments and institutions and at a distinct disadvantage when it came to financial and professional support.

“The goal was twofold: to encourage and catalyze women’s scholarly and creative work and to discover the conditions that best supported women’s endeavors in the face of persistent societal barriers,” Brown-Nagin said.

During the celebration, Harvard President Alan M. Garber spoke with distinguished economists Claudia Goldin and Oliver Hart about their careers, the interdisciplinary nature of their work, and how today’s technology might have reshaped their prior research.

They were each awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Goldin in 2023 and Hart in 2016.

Both laureates spent a year as Radcliffe fellows and recalled being challenged and inspired by their experience engaging with other fellows whose expertise was outside of economics — arts and humanities, hard sciences, and the law — and how they were able to use the fellowship’s time and resources to pursue research that informed their later work.

Goldin, a labor economist who is currently researching the many giant steps women have taken economically over the last several decades and “why women won,” talked about how she was able to collaborate with former fellow Claudia Olivetti, a young economist who became a valued colleague, co-author and, eventually, her best friend for the last 18 years.

“It was truly magical,” said Goldin, a 2005-06 fellow, of her time at Radcliffe.

Hart, an economic theorist and a 2020-21 fellow, said he’s most excited about what he’s working on now, research that builds on his earlier scholarship by forging an alternative approach to the traditional way legal contracts are constructed. “I think it may be, in the long run, my most significant,” he said.

Garber, an economist and physician, was appointed provost in 2011 by the then-President Drew Gilpin Faust, before stepping in earlier this year to serve as interim and now president. He recognized Brown-Nagin for her deep involvement in key University initiatives in recent years.

As a legal scholar and historian, she chaired the group that produced the Harvard Legacy of Slavery report in 2022, which made recommendations to the University about redressing harms that occurred during its 400-year history.

Brown-Nagin currently co-heads a University working group on fostering “open inquiry and constructive dialogue” that Garber said would soon issue its own report.

Gilpin Faust, president emerita of Harvard and the institute’s founding dean, presented a Radcliffe medal to Neil L. Rudenstine, the University’s president from 1991 to 2001, in recognition of his leading role in reimagining the former women’s college into a robust center of independent and interdisciplinary scholarship at Harvard.

Accepting this rare award, Rudenstine recalled the daunting challenge before them in those early days and the worry “whether we could possibly live up to the idea of a truly distinguished Advanced Institute worthy of both Radcliffe and Harvard” that would flourish like Radcliffe College had over the previous century.

Today, “the institute embodies, in my mind, exactly what we hoped it would do,” which was to sustain and embolden intellectual achievement and imagination, said Rudenstine.

“It’s done so much to bring Harvard as well as Radcliffe to the fore in ways we never could have imagined 25 years ago.”

Meredith Goldstein did not leap at the chance to host an after-show conversation about the American Repertory Theater’s production of “Romeo and Juliet.”

It is, after all, one of Shakespeare’s best-known and most-performed plays. Besides the live performances of the 16th-century classic staged around the country and the world each year, there have been scores of interpretations, adaptations, and send-ups on television and film. Could there possibly be anything new to say?

But as The Boston Globe’s relationship columnist and podcaster watched the new A.R.T. production it occurred to her that there are a lot of themes worth talking about — and new ways to talk about them — which she did with the audience after last Thursday’s performance.

“I was reminded of the great humor — I laughed so much more than I thought I would,” Goldstein said. “I really wanted to talk about [younger people]. In writing an advice column for 15 years, I’m constantly shocked by the lack of empathy for young people with problems.”

The event, called “You’ve Got to Be Kidding Me With These Two: A Post-Show Talk about Young Love — and How We Change,” featured a conversation between Goldstein and Christine Ahanotu, a producer of independent films and The Globe writer’s “Love Letters” podcast.

The pair discussed with the audience their previous encounters with “Romeo and Juliet” and what struck them differently about the story during A.R.T.’s production.

For both Goldstein and Ahanotu, people’s ability — or inability — to change was worth noting.

“Our ability to change is influenced greatly by our age,” Ahanotu said. “The things that seem like huge decisions when we are teenagers … It’s easy as we age to forget that newness and the novelty, but it’s a really real thing.”

Our brains don’t really settle until we’re 25, sometimes even older, Goldstein said. Romeo and Juliet are teenagers. While their behavior seems outlandish at times, even foolish, it’s also a pretty accurate portrayal of how younger people might act. One thing that was missing in their lives was good advice.

“Having counsel and help is really important, and I think this play shows how terrible adults can be about that and how sometimes they can’t see beyond their own priorities,” Goldstein said.

Directed by Tony Award-winner Diane Paulus and choreographed by two-time Olivier Award winner Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the production stars Rudy Pankow (“Outer Banks”Netflix series) as Romeo and Emilia Suárez (“Up Here” Hulu series) as Juliet.

The cast portrays the roles with nuance, staying true to Shakespeare’s language but bringing an updated approach to movement, delivery, and staging that made their characters feel more contemporary.

Audience members observed the selfishness of the adults, pointed out how much of the plot is driven by the irrationality of teenage hormones, and wondered how things would have turned out if the characters had practiced better communication.

“As much as things change is as much as they remain the same,” Ahanotu said. The play is full of class, race, social, age, and gender divisions — with characters constantly taking sides. “Why is it that we allow [those divides] to affect the people that we love?”

Toward the end of the conversation, Ahanotu and Goldstein talked about how Romeo’s behavior might be described in the social-media-inflected language of today. Was he “love-bombing” Juliet, showering her with immense positivity all at once? Was he “monkey-branching,” having spent the whole beginning of the play confessing his heartbreak over Rosaline and just like that, “Juliet is the sun”?

One audience member asked how Goldstein thought Romeo would have performed on today’s dating apps. Would he be considered a menace?

“I think he would be the absolute worst, but I understand why everyone would swipe right,” Goldstein said, eliciting laughs. “Talk about a pickup artist … It’s brilliant and terrible.”

Romeo and Juliet will be running until Oct. 6. For showtimes and to purchase tickets, visit A.R.T.’s website.

Online scams are on the rise. Last year, American consumers lost $12.5 billion due to cybercrime, which represents a 22 percent increase over the previous year, according to a report by the FBI. Cybercriminals use psychological trickery to dupe victims into giving up their money, and their tactics are becoming more sophisticated. They post fake ads on social media platforms, send emails with phishing links or malware, and recently in the Boston area, solicit payments for unpaid tolls via text message. 

The Gazette asked cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier, an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, what the government, tech companies, and consumers can do to prevent online scams. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Many people think only older adults can be conned. Is there anyone who is free from falling for a scam?

It’s not a function of intelligence, or education, whether you’ll fall for them. Scams affect people regardless of age, income levels, education, and IQ. In some ways, people who are smarter become victims precisely because they think it can’t happen to them. They say, “I’m too smart, I would never fall for that,” and they do because maybe it catches them on a bad day. Author and cyberspace activist Cory Doctorow wrote an essay about how he got scammed with a fake message from his bank the same day he was having a bank problem. Or remember the 2016 phishing email John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, clicked on, which led to the DNC email hacking leak? It can happen to anyone. 

How has the scammers’ modus operandi changed with the rise of technology?

It’s not different from the way it used to work in the past, where a con artist would bump into you on the street and start talking with you. The difference is that online they can do it millions of times. The speed and the scale are what has changed, but if you read about the big scams of the 1920s, they were just as profitable.

According to the FBI, consumers lost $12.5 billion to cybercrime fraud last year.

It’s hard to know if the numbers are accurate. A lot of people don’t report because it’s embarrassing to be the victim of fraud. You feel terrible because you were tricked, you were fooled, and you’re out a lot of money. I have sympathy for scam victims.

Will AI make online scams harder to detect?

We’re starting to see AI-generated phishing emails, AI-generated fake videos, and AI-generated fake phone calls. And there are more targeted scams, where scammers target the CFO of a company pretending to be the CEO. If you ask me how to prevent it, the answer is I don’t know. 

Cryptocurrency seems to be of the most common payment methods for scams. Why is that? 

It is an easy way to move money around. Online scams have been made easier by cryptocurrency, which allows instantaneous transfer of wealth in a way that can’t be taken back. Scammers often ask their victims for a Bitcoin payment. You could track the rise of both ransomware and online scams to cryptocurrency.

The banking system is better equipped to block suspicious transactions. If you try to wire money to Russia, the bank is going to call you and say, “What are you doing?” But if you send money to a scammer in Russia via cryptocurrency, nobody notices. More regulation would be valuable, just to make it harder for a regular person to buy and sell cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is a disaster in so many ways. I wrote an essay about it. 

Should a request for a Bitcoin payment be a red flag?

Yes, but by the time the person who has fallen for the scam hears that a Bitcoin transaction must take place, they had already bought the scam, and what is normally a red flag isn’t a red flag. The whole point of a scam is emotional trickery; a scam works because it works with emotions; and that’s why it’s hard to regulate or prevent it.

What’s the responsibility of social media companies to screen fake ads that can lead to scams? 

It would be great if Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram would screen fake advertisements. They don’t do a good job because fake ads generate the same revenue as real ads. Why should they screen it? It’s profitable.

When we talk about the responsibility of social media companies, we must understand that the customers of Facebook are its advertisers. Us, the people using Facebook, are the product. Does Facebook have any responsibility to their customers? They certainly do, and they do well by their customers because they give them money. Do they do well by us, the product? We hope they do, but there’s little economic incentive. 

Surveillance is the business model of the internet. Facebook and Google make money spying on you. They use your personal information to manipulate you, and they sell the right to manipulate you to ad companies. What a crappy business model that is. We could declare that business model illegal, but that is very unlikely, because it would involve a rethinking of how tech companies make money. But there are lots of alternatives. You can imagine requiring companies to be subscription-based or requiring advertising that’s not personalized. Today, when you see an ad, it’s a targeted ad that is sent to you based on the information tech companies have on you by tracking your searches and your posts.

Should the government regulate social media companies and ask them to screen for fraud?

I don’t know of any regulation that will reduce online scams because if someone sends you a text message, and you start chatting with them, and they tell you about an investment opportunity, and you start giving them money, what new regulation can prevent that? It’s already illegal. 

Yet, I would like to see more screening on the part of the companies. I think comprehensive privacy regulation in the United States is important, but several bills have gone nowhere. Europe has General Data Protection Regulation, which includes privacy protections and penalties for companies that don’t comply. It’s good but it’s still not great. Already there are several states in the country that have GDPR-like legislation. In the class I teach every year, I pull a map of states that have privacy regulations, and every year, more states are following the trend. 

Do you have any advice on how to avoid falling for an online scam? 

I don’t have any special advice to avoid falling for an online scam but the one you’ve gotten all your life: If it seems too good to be true, it is. 

Coming up with tips is hard because when you’re in a vulnerable moment, you’re not going to remember them or even listen to them. Scams target human psychology and like offline scams throughout history, they try to convince you of something that isn’t true and get you to give money for something that isn’t what you think it is. There is nothing new there. What is new is the scale and that they’re made easier through cryptocurrency. But like offline scams, online scams can involve romance, investing, charity, and all sorts of things where human emotions can get the best of you; where suddenly you’re not thinking, you’re emoting, and you do something that turns out to be, in retrospect, stupid.

You must have a good bullshit detector, but even if you do, you’re going to make mistakes. I think I have a good bullshit detector, but I also think I’ve been lucky. I’m not going to say, “I would never fall for it,” because the next week something might happen.

Layla Alsheikh and Robi Damelin know the never-ending pain of losing a child.

Each had a son who died in the decadeslong deadly conflict between their communities in the Middle East. Through intention and a long process of healing, these women are now friends and travel the world advocating for peace, a mission made more urgent by the current fighting. The two spoke during a Harvard Divinity School event Monday.

“Today, we are privileged to have with us two people — one Israeli and one Palestinian — who are willing to share with us their experiences of loss so that we might be reminded of what is truly at stake at war and how none of us wins,” Marla Frederick, dean of the Divinity School and John Lord O’Brian Professor of Divinity, said during the discussion.

Alsheikh’s 6-month-old died of complications following a teargas attack on their village by Israeli forces in 2002. Damelin’s 24-year-old son David, a member of the peace movement, was killed by a Palestinian sniper during his mandated military service in the Israeli armed forces that same year.

The losses remain profound and fresh.

“Every time [I thought about what happened] I felt there’s a piece of my heart and my soul under the ground,” Alsheikh said. “It was so hard for me.”

“There’s nothing worse than losing a child,” Damelin said. “Somebody comes and slashes your heart, and it’ll never be the same.”

For both Damelin and Alsheikh, there’s been a desire to untangle the longstanding hate and pain of both sides of the conflict. Empathy has been key.

“I’ve spent such a lot of my life trying to understand why,” Damelin said at the discussion, done in partnership with American Friends of the Parents Circle — Families Forum (PCFF). “Why a young man who grows up in Gaza could do the things he did on the 7th of October?”

Sixteen years after her son died, Alsheikh was approached by a friend who wanted her to attend a meeting of PCFF, an Israeli-Palestinian nonprofit group of bereaved families seeking reconciliation instead of revenge by modeling constructive dialogue.

 At the meeting she connected with the other Palestinian women, but still felt distrustful of the Israeli families there, all of whom had lost a close loved one. She decided to share her story with the group.

“Please don’t pro-Israel and please don’t pro-Palestine: pro-peace. This is what we need.”

Layla Alsheikh

When she broke down in tears, an Israeli woman stood up, apologized, and said, “I didn’t hurt you, but the people who hurt you are from my own people. I’m a mother too. I can understand your pain.” The women embraced.

“That was the first time I thought someone cared about me or could understand me,” Alsheikh said.

She continued to work with the organization and share their message of reconciliation. But it’s been a hard road.

A few years ago, an Israeli man in one of her meetings shared that he had been an officer in the army in the region where she lost her son.

At the time, he routinely stopped Palestinian families from receiving medical care — an experience Alsheikh had while caring for her son. It wasn’t until his own child became sick and he was stopped by guards that he realized the pain he had caused other families.

He quit the military, was jailed for refusing to serve, and eventually founded a nonprofit where former combatants from both sides work together for peace.

“I looked at him and I said, ‘This is so hard for me to listen to you. But at the same time, I want to thank you. Because if you hide that part of your story, I will never forgive you,’” she said. “‘But I will forgive you, because you have the courage and honesty to speak in front of me.’”

That was a major moment of reconciliation for her.

Damelin agreed that peace work is painful. But she also believes that preventing other people from experiencing the kind ofloss she has is worth it.

“One of the first things that I said [when David was killed was], ‘You can’t kill anybody in the name of my child,’” she said.

Years after her son was killed, three soldiers knocked on her door. They told her that they had caught the man who killed her son. She didn’t sleep for months.

“You can go around the world talking about peace just like I did … But then there’s a case that comes along [that tests you],” she said. “I couldn’t do this work in integrity if I wasn’t willing to walk the talk.”

She decided to write a letter to the man’s family, telling of her son David, the pain of her loss, but also of her desire to reconcile. She had the letter delivered by Palestinian friends.

Named a 2015 Woman of Impact by Women in the World, Damelin has continued to travel globally advocating for reconciliation and peace on behalf of the PCFF.

Recently, the group partnered with Georgetown University to create an online dialogue program called Listening from the Heart, which provides tools for participants and facilitators to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its complexity.

At the end of the event, Teddy Hickman-Maynard, associate dean for Ministry Studies, asked the two women if they had any final thoughts for the community.

“Please don’t pro-Israel and please don’t pro-Palestine: pro-peace. This is what we need,” Alsheikh said. “If you fight all the time, that won’t help us in any way. But if you are pro-peace, that will help us more than you think.”

Being a “weekend warrior” is just as effective as regular weekly exercise in reducing the risk of developing more than 200 diseases, according to a new study out of Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.

Results of the study are published in Circulation.

CDC guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week for overall health. Among people who meet these recommendations, those who exercise 20-30 minutes most days of the week experience benefits equal to those who go five to six days between longer exercise sessions.

The team analyzed information on 89,573 individuals in the prospective U.K. Biobank study who wore wrist accelerometers that recorded their total physical activity and time spent at different exercise intensities over one week. Participants’ physical activity patterns were categorized as weekend warrior, regular, or inactive, using the guideline-based threshold of 150 minutes per week of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity.

The team then looked for associations between physical activity patterns and incidence of 678 conditions across 16 types of diseases, including mental health, digestive, neurological, and other categories.

The investigators’ analyses revealed that weekend warrior and regular physical activity patterns were each associated with substantially lower risks of 264 diseases compared with inactivity. Associations were strongest for cardiometabolic conditions such as hypertension (23 percent and 28 percent lower risks over a median of six years with weekend warrior and regular exercise, respectively) and diabetes (43 percent and 46 percent lower risks, respectively). However, associations also spanned all disease categories tested.

“Because there appears to be similar benefits for weekend warrior versus regular activity, it may be the total volume of activity, rather than the pattern, that matters most.”

Shaan Khurshid

“Because there appears to be similar benefits for weekend warrior versus regular activity, it may be the total volume of activity, rather than the pattern, that matters most,” said co-senior author Shaan Khurshid, a faculty member in the Demoulas Center for Cardiac Arrhythmias at MGH.

“Future interventions testing the effectiveness of concentrated activity to improve public health are warranted, and patients should be encouraged to engage in guideline-adherent physical activity using any pattern that may work best for them,” he added.

Authorship: Shinwan Kany, Mostafa A. Al-Alusi, Joel T. Rämö, James P. Pirruccello, Timothy W. Churchill, Steven A. Lubitz, Mahnaz Maddah, J. Sawalla Guseh, Patrick T. Ellinor, and Shaan Khurshid.

Disclosures:  Ellinor receives sponsored research support from Bayer AG, IBM Research, Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer, and Novo Nordisk; he has also served on advisory boards or consulted for MyoKardia and Bayer AG. Lubitz is an employee of Novartis as of July 2022 and received sponsored research support from Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Fitbit, Medtronic, Premier, and IBM, and has consulted for Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer, Blackstone Life Sciences, and Invitae.

This work was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health (K08HL159346, K23HL159262-01A1, 1RO1HL092577, 1R01HL157635, 5R01HL139731, 18SFRN34230127, 961045, R01HL157635, T32HL007208, K23HL169839-01., the Walter Benjamin Fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (521832260), the Sigrid Jusélius Foundation, the American Heart Association (19AMFDP34990046, 18SFRN34230127, 961045, 18SFRN34250007, 2023CDA1050571), the president and fellows of Harvard College (5KL2TR002542-04), the European Union (MAESTRIA 965286). 

Promising new research focusing on the sea robin, an unpromising-looking fish that scuttles around the ocean floor on “legs,” may lead to new insights in trait development, including in humans.

“Sea robins are an example of a species with a very unusual, very novel trait,” said Corey Allard, a postdoctoral fellow in Professor Nicholas Bellono’s lab in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology who came upon his research subjects in a 2019 chance encounter at Cape Cod’s Marine Biological Laboratory. “We wanted to use them as a model to ask, ‘How do you make a new organ?’” 

Allard’s ensuing deep dive led to a collaboration with Stanford researchers studying the fish’s developmental genetics and culminated in back-to-back papers in Current Biology, co-authored by Bellono and Amy Herbert and David Kingsley at Stanford University, and others. Their research provides the most comprehensive understanding to date on how sea robins use their legs, what genes control the emergence of those legs, and how these animals could be used as a conceptual framework for learning about other evolutionary adaptations. 

It turns out sea robin “legs” are actually extensions of their pectoral fins, of which they have three on each side. Allard first sought to determine whether the legs are bona fide sensory organs, which scientists had suspected but never confirmed. 

He ran experiments observing captive sea robins hunting prey, in which they alternate between short bouts of swimming and “walking.” They also occasionally scratch at the sand surface to find buried prey, like mussels and other shellfish, without visual cues. 

The researchers realized that the legs were sensitive to both mechanical and chemical stimuli. They even buried capsules containing only single chemicals, and the fish could easily find them. 

Serendipity led to another chance discovery. They received a fresh shipment of fish mid-study that looked like the originals, but the new fish, Allard said, did not dig and find buried prey or capsules like the originals could. “I thought they were just some duds, or maybe the setup didn’t work,” joked Bellono, whose lab investigates sensory biology and cellular physiology of many marine animals, including octopuses, jellyfish, and sea slugs. 

It turned out the researchers had acquired a different species of sea robin. In their studies, they ended up characterizingthem both — Prionotus carolinus, which dig to find buried prey and are highly sensitive to touch and chemical signals, and P. evolans, which lack these sensory capabilities and use their legs for locomotion and probing, but not for digging. 

Examining the leg differences between the two fish, they found those of the digging variety were shovel-shaped and covered in protrusions called papillae, similar to our taste buds. The non-digging fish’s legs were rod-shaped and lacked papillae. Based on these differences, the researchers concluded that papillae are evolutionary sub-specializations. 

Allard’s paper describing the evolution of sea robins’ novel sensory organs included analysis of specimens from the Museum of Comparative Zoology to examine leg form and structure across species and time. The digging species are restricted to only a few locations, he found, suggesting a relatively recent evolution of this trait. 

Studying sea robin legs wasn’t just about hanging out with the unusual animals (although that was fun too). The walking fish are a potentially powerful model organism to compare specialized traits, and to teach us about how evolution allows for adaptation to very specific environments. 

About 6 million years ago, humans evolved the ability to walk upright, separating from their primate ancestors. Bipedalism is a defining feature of our species, and we only know so much about how, when, and why that change occurred. 

Sea robins and their adaptation to living on the ocean floor could offer clues. For example, there are genetic transcription factors that control the development of the sea robins’ legs that are also found in the limbs of other animals, including humans. 

Allard’s study co-authors included Italian physicist Agnese Seminara and biologist Maude Baldwin from the Max Planck Institute in Germany. 

The second study that was focused on genetics included the Kingsley lab at Stanford and comprehensively examined the genetic underpinnings of the walking fish’s unusual trait. 

The researchers used techniques including transcriptomic and genomic editing to identify which gene transcription factors are used in leg formation and function in the sea robins. They also generated hybrids between two sea robin species with distinct leg shapes to explore the genetic basis for these differences. 

“Amy and Corey did a lot to describe this animal, and I think it’s pretty rare to go from the description of the behavior, to the description of the molecules, to the description of an evolutionary hypothesis,” Bellono said. “I think this is a nice blueprint for how one poses a scientific question and rigorously follows it with a curious and open mind.” 

The research was sponsored in part by the Harvard Brain Initiative, the National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the National Institutes of Health.

Sarah Lewis was deep into archival research for her latest book project when she stumbled upon an unusual set of images that made her question everything she thought she understood about race. The photographs, from the late 1800s, showed female performers in a P.T. Barnum sideshow known as the “Circassian Beauties,” who looked, as Lewis described, “like Angela Davis, but were billed as exemplars of white racial purity from the region of the Caucasus.” It was a show that proved influential even in political life, and had consequences for liberation practices and the early Civil Rights movement.

“What the performance did was skewer our idea of race,” explained Lewis, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies. “I was confronted with this moment when Americans could see the fiction underneath the entire system of racial hierarchy, and fashioned a new regime through which to keep it stable and to keep that fiction in place. I was compelled by this untold story in American life.”

In her new book, “The Unseen Truth,” Lewis uses Americans’ fascination with the Caucasus region — and the incorrect association of the term “Caucasian” with whiteness — as a case study for examining how the fiction of a racial hierarchy was strategically stabilized. She sat down with the Gazette to talk about this hidden history, her extensive research, and how the project changed her. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

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What led you to take on this project?

It was really understanding the depth of fascination about the [Caucasus region] on the part of Woodrow Wilson that made me write the book. It begins and ends with the federalization of segregation and the use of racial detailing as a form of instantiating the unspeakable in American government, and in American life. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot has said, “There comes a point when we must decide if something belongs to history or if it belongs to fiction.” We’ve never looked squarely at the idea of the term “Caucasian” and called it a fiction out loud. We’ve covered it up and found other ways to keep it to maintain a system. America’s racial divide is built on a lie. Black clerks working in Wilson’s administration, who were early, unsung Civil Rights leaders — like Swan Marshall Kendrick and Freeman Henry Morris Murray — saw that. They knew. We all live with the regime that was created in the face of that moment. I think part of what makes racial domination so difficult to dislodge is that it’s predicated on a regime, a complex system of assembling narratives to justify the unspeakable. The reason to write the book was to make clear the legacy that covering up these fictions have spawned.

Where did American’s fascination with the Caucasus region come from?

The Caucasian War takes place and ends at the same time as the American Civil War, and there were parallels between them that made the Caucasian War topical for embattled American nation. One was the associations with slavery (white slavery for the Caucasus). Both were southern, seceded nations. But the main reason had to do with the instability of racial formation. To see the region that’s been seen as the homeland of whiteness effectively obliterated provoked nervousness for the American public on both sides.

Did this fixation with the Caucasus region end?

The way history has been framed to date, the answer has been yes. Yet what the primary documents in the archives reveal is, in fact, the answer is no. There was sustained curiosity about the region, and that curiosity had implications for the racial regime we live with today. Woodrow Wilson, as late as 1919, requests a report about the look of women from the Caucasus region, when he likely should have been doing anything else. Langston Hughes, as late as the 1930s, goes to the Transcaucasus region and finds himself stunned that the people there look nothing like this image of whiteness he’s been given and instead are, as he describes, “brown as russet pears and dark as chocolate.” You have these serial examples, buried beneath the seemingly fixed racial order. There was a conscious questioning about whether race really rests on a foundation of data. The Caucasian War does end. There are other terms used when the idea of the Caucasus region is understood to be a fabricated source for the idea of whiteness: Aryan, Anglo-Saxon, and so on. However, this foundational fiction remains a source of concern with consequences for how we secured this racial regime, and that is what has not been addressed before.

Much of this book is about the ways we are conditioned not to see. Can you explain that idea? 

It’s nearly a maxim now: Images help us see and shore up ideas about race. An example of this is the geyser of stereotypes circulating through racist caricatures in the 19th and 20th century. But what’s really important to understand is that the use of race itself as a structuring force in American society altered, quite literally, how we see, how we make sense of what’s in front of us. It is why our debates about monuments are about more than the sculpture and the material and the location. We have come to understand this racialized world through how we visually constructed it. This book is deeply invested in what we fail to discuss often, which is how race changed how we see. 

You end the book with a moment when the research suddenly became very real. Could you describe that?

I had a researcher’s dream and nightmare take place at once. This group of Circassians — a group from the Caucasian diaspora — came to a work-in-progress talk I gave at NYU. Afterward they sent me a flash drive as a way of thanking me for the research. On it were articles and maps they had found about this cleavage between the Caucus as a geography and the Caucusian ideal as a racial concept. I held my breath as I looked, because I had spent 10 years trying to amass that myself. I stopped and nearly rewrote the whole book, not because they had located things I hadn’t, but it raised the stakes. The idea of race is like a photograph without a negative; there’s no factual basis for the idea of racial domination or supremacy of any kind. And to have the very people from the Caucasus region tell me that they know, and urge me on to de-mythologize the region, did make me go back into the text and ensure that the point was clear.

Are you looking forward to having this research out in the world? 

Well, the process of writing the book itself is the reward. I’m grateful that I trusted the archive and the evidence that I found, and I hope I did justice to the untold stories, as I believe they’re critical for our current understanding. There are lies about American life and the use of race in society that are just hidden in plain sight. It is an intense historic era we’re in today and I have such belief and love for global society and the country I’m in. My hope is that this book shows how you can also love this country without lying about it. And hopefully it shows where those lies are.

A drug-free nasal spray that forms a gel-like matrix that captures and neutralizes germs may offer another layer of protection against respiratory infections, according to a study out of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Based on preclinical studies, researchers at BWH say the broad-spectrum nasal spray is long-lasting, safe, and, if validated in humans, could play a key role in reducing respiratory diseases and safeguarding public health against new threats. The results are published in the journal Advanced Materials.

Most viruses enter our system through the nose. When we catch an airborne infection like the flu and COVID, we breathe out tiny droplets of fluids that contain the pathogen. Healthy people around us breathe in these pathogen-containing droplets, which attach inside their nose and infect the cells that line the nasal passageways. The pathogen replicates and can be released back into the air when an individual who is sick, whether they know it or not, sneezes, coughs, laughs, sings, or even just breathes.

Vaccines against these viruses can be beneficial, but they’re imperfect. Vaccinated people still get infected and spread the infection to others. Masks are also helpful but aren’t perfect, either — they can leak, and many people wear them improperly or choose not to wear them at all.

“The COVID pandemic showed us what respiratory pathogens can do to humanity in a very short time. That threat hasn’t gone away. Not only do we have the flu to deal with seasonally, but we now have COVID, too,” said co-senior author Jeffrey Karp, distinguished chair in anesthesiology at BWH.

The new study details the research team’s efforts to create a nasal spray to defend against airborne respiratory illness.

“The spray, called Pathogen Capture and Neutralizing Spray (PCANS) in the paper, was developed using ingredients from the FDA’s Inactive Ingredient Database (IID), which have been previously used in approved nasal sprays, or from the Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) list of the FDA,” said co-senior author Nitin Joshi, an assistant professor of anesthesiology at BWH. “We developed a drug-free formulation using these compounds to block germs in three ways — PCANS forms a gel-like matrix that traps respiratory droplets, immobilizes the germs, and effectively neutralizes them, preventing infection.”

The researchers did the experiments detailed in the study under laboratory settings. They have not studied PCANS directly in humans. The researchers developed the formulation and studied its ability to capture respiratory droplets in a 3D-printed replica of a human nose. They showed that when sprayed in the nasal cavity replica, PCANS captured twice as many droplets as mucus alone.  

“PCANS forms a gel, increasing its mechanical strength by a hundred times, forming a solid barrier,” said primary author John Joseph, a former postdoctoral fellow at BWH. “It blocked and neutralized almost 100 percent of all viruses and bacteria we tested, including Influenza, SARS-CoV-2, RSV, adenovirus, K Pneumonia and more.”

Experiments in mice showed that a single dose of the PCANS nasal spray could effectively block infection from an influenza virus (PR8) at 25 times the lethal dose. Virus levels in the lungs were reduced by >99.99 percent, and the inflammatory cells and cytokines in the lungs of PCANS-treated animals were normal.

“The formulation’s ability to inactivate a broad spectrum of pathogens, including the deadly PR8 influenza virus, demonstrates its high effectiveness,” said co-senior author Yohannes Tesfaigzi, AstraZeneca Professor of Medicine in the Field of Respiratory and Inflammatory Diseases at BWH. “In a rigorous mouse model study, prophylactic treatment with PCANS demonstrated exceptional efficacy, with treated mice exhibiting complete protection, while the untreated group showed no such benefit.”

While the study’s limitations include the lack of human studies of PCANS, it provides a strong foundation for future research to explore the full potential of PCANS in a broader context. The researchers are exploring whether PCANS can also block allergens, opening a potential new avenue for allergy relief.

For authorship and disclosures, visit the BWH website.

This study was supported by funding from the Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Cellphones have become a major problem in schools.

“We have been living with this incredibly seductive technology for several years and what is finally coming to light is that constant exposure to social media and games and other tech products is actually phenomenally distracting and harmful,” said Susan Linn, the author of “Who’s Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children” and a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

More and more schools are banning or restricting cellphone use in the classroom. Not only are schools taking on this issue, but states and cities — like Florida, New York, Los Angeles, and Indiana — have made moves to limit use as well. In light of the surgeon general’s warning of the profound risk that technology poses to youth, it just makes sense.

“Just finding ways to get that harm out of teen hands during the school day might be another way that we can protect teen mental health,” said Laurie Santos ’97, Ph.D. ’03, a professor of psychology at Yale University and host of “The Happiness Lab” podcast. At the end of the day, Joy McGrath ’96, the head of school at St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware, says the focus should be on what students gain from not having their phones, not what they lose.

“My hope, of course, as an educator, is that students who’ve had those experiences are able to go on to their next context and share some of these tactics or skills that help other people put their phones down and have some meaningful connection,” McGrath said.

In this episode, host Samantha Laine Perfas talks with Linn, Santos, and McGrath about what we all stand to gain by limiting cellphone use in the classroom.

Transcript

Laurie Santos: Often we get so focused on the education that happens within the classroom that we’re forgetting about the incredible education that happens in schools, in the hallways, at the dining room table, on the playground, and so on. And I really worry that might be the spot where we’re losing the most educational opportunity for having these devices around us.

Samantha Laine Perfas: There’s a growing movement to ban cellphones in schools. And some states, like Florida, Indiana, California, and Minnesota, have passed or introduced legislation restricting cellphone use in the classroom. Both parents and students have pushed back, citing safety concerns or not being able to reach each other during the day. Yet schools say the removal of phones eliminates distractions and fosters face-to-face interactions that students themselves have come to appreciate.

So, what would it look like to take phones out of classrooms?

Welcome to Harvard Thinking, a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life. Today we’re joined by:

Joy McGrath: Joy McGrath. I am the head of school at St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware.

Laine Perfas: St. Andrew’s is a boarding school serving Grades 9 through 12 and has had a longstanding ban on students’ cellphones on their campus. Prior to becoming head of school, Joy worked at Yale University as chief of staff to Yale’s president. She graduated from Harvard College in 1996. Then:

Santos: Laurie Santos. I’m a professor of psychology at Yale University and host of “The Happiness Lab” podcast.

Laine Perfas: She received her doctorate in psychology at Harvard and has written extensively about the link between technology and our well-being. And finally:

Susan Linn: Susan Linn. I’m the author of “Who’s Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children.”

Laine Perfas: She’s also a psychologist, a research associate at Boston Children’s Hospital, and a lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, your host and a writer for The Harvard Gazette. In this episode, we’ll discuss efforts to ban students’ cellphones in schools.

Why is this happening right now?

Linn: I think that we have been living with this incredibly seductive technology for several years and that what is finally coming to light is that constant exposure to social media and games and other tech products is actually phenomenally distracting and harmful. The research tells us that 97 percent of students have a phone and, according to the National Education Association, 83 percent of teachers think that we should ban cellphones.

Santos: Yeah, and I agree with Susan completely on this. Common Sense Media, which is this organization that looks a lot at kids’ use of tech, finds that over 50 percent of tweens and almost 70 percent of teens say that their phones distract them from schoolwork during the school day. They’ve also done some work showing that, on average, teens get over 200 notifications a day, a quarter of which happen during the school day, right? I mean, when you think about that kind of level of distraction, that’s just unheard of in the human species. But I think there’s another piece of it too, which is that there’s growing worries that technology and social media in particular might have some real costs for teen mental health. It’s important to be balanced about this, right? Technology has both benefits and costs when it comes to teen mental health, but overall, folks like the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, another Harvard grad, have been talking really carefully about the fact that there’s a profound risk of harm that comes with some of these technologies. And so just finding ways to get that harm out of teen hands during the school day might be another way that we can protect teen mental health. And then I’m curious what Joy has to say about this, but I think there’s also just an educator piece where it’s a pain in the butt for teachers to have to enforce this kind of thing. I think there’s lots of dramas and headaches from phone misuse in classrooms. So it becomes another sort of enforcement issue on top of the things that teachers have to deal with all the time, just something else they have to worry about and police.

McGrath: One of the things maybe we can unpack later in the conversation is this word “ban” that we’re using, because I think ban may conjure different notions in different people’s heads. But certainly it is true that sensible guidelines and significant guardrails are needed to protect the development of children: their psychological development, their social development, their intellectual development, all of those things. Social media and the smartphones that carry social media are all about distraction and time; and the time in particularly my school, is Grades 9 through 12, so I’ll talk about adolescence. That time is so incredibly precious and, Laurie is really the expert in this, but what is happening in the human brain in that age group is incredibly important. And that time is still childhood. When families come to look at our school, which people are opting in here to our program, including our cellphone restrictions, and in many cases we find they’re looking for it; they’re shopping for that, including people who work in the tech industry and in Silicon Valley who want to get the social media and the phones out of their children’s hands. And I think it’s partly what Laurie was just alluding to, that it is very hard for teachers to put these guardrails in place unilaterally. It is also very hard for families to put them in place unilaterally because the devices are connecting children to children. And so if you’re the only family at the school or in the classroom or on the block that is putting sensible restrictions in place for your child, that can be a very difficult row to hoe for a parent.

Linn: I just want to point out that it’s not just teenagers who use phones all the time. Ever-younger children are getting smartphones and bringing them to school. I think that’s really important.

Laine Perfas: Actually, I had a situation this past weekend. I have a son who’s about to be 3, and there was a little girl and she kept asking me all these questions, and then out of nowhere, she went, “I’m 5. I have a cellphone. Does he have a cellphone?” And I was like, “No.” And she was like, “Oh, when are you going to give him one?” And I was like, “When he’s 20.” And the look on her face! She was appalled and really questioning my parenting skills, but I was actually quite surprised that a 5-year-old would be having their own cellphone. So it is, I think it’s a good point that it is getting younger and younger.

Santos: And I think that’s something that comes up as we think about bans or maybe a less strict word of restrictions. We need to think about what’s developmentally appropriate, right? The kind of ban or kind of restrictions we might put on a senior year high school classroom is going to look totally different than the ban that we might put in preschool or kindergarten, in the case that you’re talking about. And so I think it’s really important to understand psychologically what’s developmentally appropriate.

Laine Perfas: Yeah, Joy brought up a good point about unpacking the word ban. What do we mean when we talk about bans?

Santos: I think there are different ways to talk about it, right? There’s a kind of full ban: Never bring these things into the building. There might be a situation where during some points in the school day, phones are secured. That’s tricky because it often involves schools that require the resources to hold everybody’s phone securely and to have someone there to distribute phones back during the periods of time when students need them and things. But they’re also just specific-use kind of restrictions that teachers and administrators might put in classrooms. For example, no social media use during the classroom, but you’re able to use your devices to go on, for example, Wikipedia, or to use a tech-focused app that we’re using in the classroom. And so I think when we think of banning phones, often we don’t mean these things can never come into the building and they’re gone for all age groups and so on. Often what we’re talking about is, what’s an educationally appropriate restricted use that we can have?

McGrath: For us, we’re a boarding school at St. Andrew’s, so our students are here around the clock. So we have to think about it the way parents might think about it. Our 12th-graders are permitted, if they wish, to have their phones in their rooms overnight because they’re going to be going to college and they need to learn to regulate that. Our values, as you say, are, first of all, that education is to foster independence. If we’re going to have those developmental opportunities for independence, we have to have those opportunities to play, to form good social relationships, to interact in person, to study, to sleep, to do those things.

And then we’ve been thinking a lot about what happens when kids leave our school. Because when I visit our alumni who are freshmen in college, and I’ll often say, “What in college were you least prepared for?” And probably the most frequent answer I get now about what they miss most about St. Andrew’s is the other students in college form friendships and socialize with their phones in their hands. Essentially our students are forming friendships in a manner of what now seems like ancient history and that pre-device time, because we don’t have our phones around the schools.

Linn: I think that limiting certain things that kids can do on their phones while allowing them to have their phones in class — I think that’s problematic. Once you get on your phone, it’s really hard not to do other things. When I got my smartphone, I stopped wearing a watch. And then I realized that every time I’ve checked the time, I also checked my email, and I checked my texts and, things like that. So, I think that it’s really best for the students and the teachers and their education and their mental health to make sure that phones are not part of the active school day. Yes, technology is certainly part of our lives, but part of being able to live with it and to live a productive, healthy life is to be able to know when to use it and when not to use it. And so I’m wondering, if your students, when they tell you this, are they telling you this because they’re distressed that they didn’t have phones during the school day? Or no, it sounds to me like it’s something they’re looking back on and they’re really thankful.

McGrath: They’re thankful for it and they’re innovating solutions in their college context that are making that situation better. So one student, a young woman, told me that she took an Amazon box very early in her time in college, decorated it, put it in a room, and when kids come in a room to hang out, all the cellphones go in it and they put them under the bed for that hangout time. Everybody’s happier and she feels really good about that. My hope, of course, as an educator, is that students who’ve had those experiences are able to go on to their next context and maybe share some of these tactics or skills that help other people as well put their phones down and have some meaningful connection.

If you think about your cafeteria or your dining hall, that is a really important place to preserve that for kids, that human interaction time around meals; that is an ancient human way of forming relationships and overcoming the boundaries we may draw between ourselves and what today we would call polarization in society. And so I think we think about classrooms as a knee-jerk for a quote-unquote ban, but I always advocate for if you’re going to do it in one place, think about that dining hall or that cafeteria.

Santos: Yeah, Joy, I love that you’ve brought that up because this is something I’ve seen as a psychologist, right? There’s a growing amount of work just showing how little we socially interact just when our devices are around us. The psychologist Liz Dunn, incidentally, also a Harvard undergrad graduate, she’s a professor at UBC now, and she’s done some lovely work just looking at what are the kind of social costs to having your phone around you, even if you’re not looking at it, right? It’s just out on the desk or it’s out on a dining hall table, and what she finds is that people smile at one another 30 percent less when their phones are around. Because part of your brain is, and part of your attention is, getting picked up by this phone.

But your comment about the dining hall resonated for me in a different way. For a long time, I was a head of college on campus, what Harvard used to call master and is now called faculty deans, this is a position of a faculty member who lived at Yale in the colleges, but at Harvard in the Houses with students. And so, I would eat with them in the dining hall and one of the things I was expecting when I first became a head of college was for the dining hall to be, you know, the loudest place on the planet with everybody talking to one another and so on. And it’s different than when I went to Harvard back in the ’90s; right now you have a lot of students with these big Bose headphones on and they’re looking at a screen and they’re just not interacting with one another. This opportunity cost of face-to-face in-real-life social connection with, you know, the smartest people around you, including people whose identities might differ and might have different political opinions than you and so on. But I think we’re not paying attention to what’s lost. I love your comment, Joy, because often we get so focused on the education that happens within the classroom that we’re forgetting about the incredible education that happens in schools, in the hallways, at the dining room table, on the playground, and so on. And I really worry that might be the spot where we’re losing the most educational opportunity for having these devices around us.

Laine Perfas: I really appreciate that because as I mentioned earlier, when you hear the idea of a ban or a restriction, it feels like something’s being taken away. But if we look at it as an opportunity to protect students during such a pivotal time in their development, it provides a totally different way of looking at it and I think that can be really helpful as we go through this transition as a country. I also mentioned earlier, there’s a growing number of states, cities, districts that have enacted or introduced policies that restrict phone use in some way. I am wondering how that’s been going and, in the places where it’s not been going particularly well, what’s happening there.

Santos: My understanding of when it doesn’t go well is when a policy is just rolled out without explanation, without community buy-in, whether that’s from parents or the students themselves or teachers. I think the best way to do this would be at a school-by-school level and to really involve everybody and having a conversation about your community norms when it comes to digital tech use. You know, as you said, these things aren’t going away. We all see the benefits of these as well as the drawbacks. That’s true for our students, too. I think one of the things that’s striking is pretty much every survey that’s been done with teens or even tweens, they find that they see the benefits of technology, of course, but they also see a lot of the drawbacks, right? And I think for the most part, they want some help about how to navigate these sorts of decisions. And so I think, the more stakeholders we can bring to the table to have this honest conversation about, how can we as a community co-create these norms, right? And in fact, how can we co-create norms that the adults in the school will have to follow too? Even in the Yale classroom in my “Science of Happiness” class I talk a lot about the problems of social media and being on technology and distraction and I’d occasionally see students in my courtyard who’d be like, “Dr. Santos, like, you’re on your phone now. I thought you told me it’s distracting,” right? And so I think finding norms that the adults can say, “Hey, I agreed to these too. I’m committed to modeling these kinds of norms and values for my students or for my own kids in my own home” — I think those kinds of co-created values wind up being much more powerful than what seems like somebody from on high kind of coming up with this decision.

Linn: The Phone-Free School Movement, that organization has created just a fabulous tool kit for school administrators to help them create policies around phones that really benefit students and not tech companies. And I think one of the things that we’re facing is that the tech industry has huge amounts of money and does huge amounts of lobbying. We’re facing this enormous industry whose interest in teenagers and children is not to promote their well-being, but to promote the company’s own profits. And so I think that’s why, if this is difficult, that’s a huge reason.

McGrath: I just wanted to pick up on something Susan said and then something Laurie said and tie them together, because it is true that apps and social media are targeting young people and that they have a lot of power and a lot of money. But the reason that they’re targeting young people is the same reason that advertisers have targeted young people forever, which is young people have an incredible amount of power. And everybody who works with young people believes that and knows that is true. And Laurie was talking about how important developing shared community norms would be in a process of instituting sensible restrictions on phones in a school setting, and I will say I’m the beneficiary at St. Andrew’s of a school where we did not impose these restrictions. My predecessor was very slow to put Wi-Fi in our dorms. Students started out with flip phones and they weren’t very interesting so they didn’t carry them around the school, so what happened was there was a rule that flip phones should stay in the rooms. And then, just the rule never changed. But the rule never changed because of a really slow-moving process of discussion among the students of continuing to embrace this policy. So we have what I would say is a student-led phone culture. It’s really led by the kids and every year our seniors who do a lot of leadership in the school rearticulate to the younger students, whom they lead and they supervise in the dorms, why this matters and why this is so important at St. Andrew’s.

Santos: I agree completely and I think one of the ways that we educate students is to actually tell them about the kinds of things that Susan was talking about, right? There was a lot of really early work on persuasion that took place in the cigarette industry. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, you know, lots of kids smoked and there was a question of, how could we get teens to realize the danger of this? Some of the most effective educational campaigns actually told teens about what cigarette industries were doing. They basically said, “Hey, they put these chemicals in there to try to hook you and they want to get you early. This is their plan,” right? And I think the same kind of educational approach can be incredibly powerful with social media; when kids start to learn how these algorithms hook them in and how people are making money off their privacy and their identities and their preferences; just like adults, teens tend to get a little pissed about that, right? And so I think part of our digital citizenship education can be a deep dive into how these algorithms work, how companies are hooking your reward structures, how other people are trying to control you in these ways.

Laine Perfas: It makes me wonder in what ways students can be part of the solution and why they should be. I’m seeing a lot out there about regulations being created, but I’m not seeing as much about how students have been involved or not involved in creating those regulations.

Santos: As we think about best practices, I think it’s really important to make sure that whole communities are involved, but especially the students are involved, for a couple reasons. One is that survey after survey show that they care a lot about what these norms are. They’re worried, and they want some guardrails on the kind of technology use they have in all kinds of settings. And so I think getting them involved in the conversation is really important. But that’s also critical because the students themselves are the ones who know how they’re using these technologies, right? Like, they know which apps are active. They often know a lot of the threats that people are facing because they’ve seen some of the sort of digital drama and bullying and these things happening. And so I think whenever possible, getting students to the table to think about what these best practices are winds up being really critical. It’s also a fabulous way to get student buy-in. Because if you’re going to roll out a new policy, you definitely want it to be one that students feel like they had some say in and that they’re actively excited about. This is the technique that I’ve used in some of my own work, not just with cellphones at the college level, but also other new technologies that everyone’s worried about. I was teaching my seminar recently when Chat GPT emerged and I had to have a conversation with our students to ask, “Hey, what do we think our communal values are when it comes to using this technology? What’s an appropriate use case? What would you feel like was maybe inappropriate or made things unfair in terms of your participation in this class?” And we had a fabulous discussion where we co-created some norms about what was going on. That was so much more effective than if I just came down and say, “Hey, you can’t use this AI tool in this way,” right? Students would get around that.

Laine Perfas: One of the things I want to talk about is some of the pushback. And the tech industry makes sense. They’re looking out for their bottom line. I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that they’re pushing back against some of these regulations. But one group that’s been surprising and was one of the reasons we wanted to talk about this in this podcast is actually parents have been pushing back a lot against these bans to the point where they’re actually a major player in some states and schools deciding not to institute restrictions. What is happening there? If we know that phones are so damaging and we know that social media is damaging, why are parents so resistant?

Linn: I think that’s part of a larger issue around being a parent today. And parents are marketed fear a lot. Fear is profitable. And parents are more fearful for their kids. They’re more anxious about them. They’re more worried about their safety. It’s like the person whose hypochondria was complicated by illness. Parents’ fears are complicated by school shootings, and it’s not like there are huge numbers of school shootings, but they’re in the media so much. And stranger kidnapping hasn’t changed in 25-30 years, but parents are more worried about it today. So the message is, “We live in a dangerous world, I have to be able to contact my child at all times.” And so I think that’s part of a larger concern and worry about parent-child relationships today. But my understanding is that one of the things that parents say, “I want to be able to contact my child if there’s an emergency.” But what the school security people are saying is that actually cellphones can contribute to the problem if there’s some kind of emergency and that really kids are safer without them in that situation.

Santos: I think, again, it’s helpful for parents if we get away from a focus on a ban completely and more, how can we more safely use these devices, which we know have benefits, but in a way that causes the least harm? And I know I mentioned Vivek Murthy before, the surgeon general, but he has this lovely analogy that I find quite powerful and also quite optimistic. He talks about how back in the ’60s and early ’70s, there were a lot of child deaths in cars, and folks kind of had the same responses we have for social media like, well, you know, it’s really dangerous and it caused all this harm. But we need our cars. What are we going to do? And Vivek said, no, what we decided was we needed seat belt laws, right? We needed to put in car seats for really young children. We put in the regulation to engage with this new technology we had, driving around in a way that was a little bit safer, in a way that protected kids. And I think this might be the best way to think about what we want to do with cellphones, is not necessarily to ban them completely, but to make sure we restrict them in the moments where they’re harming kids; when they’re harming kids’ education in the classroom, when they might be harming kids’ social interactions, on the playgrounds, and the dining halls, and so on. We might want to put boundary conditions, for example, on how much usage that we allow kids to have. Governments can publish best practices about what we should do.

Linn: The other thing is that for schools implementing safety regulations around phone use, I think that it’s going to be hard in the beginning, and then it’s going to get easier because for the parents coming into the school it will already be a school rule, so they’ll know. What’s going to be hard is for the students and the parents and the teachers and the administrators who are there now. That’s when it’s going to be difficult and then I think it’ll just be part of what schools do and schools have all sorts of rules about what kids can and can’t do. I think that ultimately this will just be another one of those, but it’s going to be bumpy in the beginning.

McGrath: The other thing that I always think about is parenting is this terrible conundrum. You’re given this little being who is the most precious thing in your life, and your job is to keep it safe and yet make sure that it doesn’t need you someday. So there’s this real cognitive dissonance in parenting. I’ve, as a head of a boarding school, the meeting I have on drop-off day with all the new parents who are leaving their kids at school for the first time and driving away until family weekend, six weeks later, and I have to say, all of our experience shows it would be really great if you don’t make a lot of contact in the first two weeks. My predecessors said that 40 or 50 years ago to parents when they were leaving the school because it was just still true. There’s just this incredible tool we have to be in constant touch with our kids. And so it is a conundrum, and I think we need to continually break down this notion that the phones are part of some kind of safety program for children. They are not. We haven’t mentioned Jon Haidt’s book that came out last spring, “The Anxious Generation,” but that’s certainly one of the reasons why this debate about phones in schools is kicking off again. And we can see in the data presented in that book all of the possible risks to health and safety and even life of young people in some cases. And so I think I constantly want to both acknowledge that conundrum that’s very real for parents as they’re preparing their children for independence, but of course we know it’s so important for young people, if they can, to have really healthy relationships with their families and have those familial connections.

And so, how do we balance that? And that is just, it’s a matter of practice and having common-sense restrictions in place, but also, when a child really has a need to be in touch with their parent, making that happen also, right? And I think it’s important to reassure parents that if they need to change their pickup time or if something happens that there is a way to do it and schools need to implement that way. So parents can get messages to kids through the office or through some central location or something. So it’s not interfering with what’s going on in the classroom or the playground or the cafeteria.

Laine Perfas: One of the things that I think can really ground this debate/conversation is remembering that the goal of some of these restrictions is to help students to connect with themselves, connect with each other, their teachers while they’re at school, and maybe lay a foundation for them into their futures. So knowing that, what questions should everyone involved in this conversation be asking themselves to figure out the policies that would be beneficial for them to adopt?

Santos: I think an important one is really just to ask how digital technologies, phones, but digital technologies broadly, fit into a school’s values. How they connect with learning, how they connect with social connection broadly, how they connect with safety. These are the kinds of important questions that I think all schools should be asking and I think, how can we train our students for the digital world that they face?

Linn: One of the things that’s really, I think, confusing for parents is that starting when kids are babies, parents are marketed all these devices and all these screen products that are claiming to be educational and beneficial to young children, when there’s no research showing that they are beneficial or helpful. I’ve had conversations with parents who say, “My child has to use an iPad because otherwise my child’s not going to be able to get a job if he doesn’t have or she doesn’t have tech skills.” What people aren’t being told is that the technology is going to change so much that giving a young person an iPad is not going to help them get a job. What’s going to help them is what they learn through interacting with other people and engaging with the world around them. That’s what’s really going to be beneficial.

McGrath: Yeah, and I think the questions to ask really are the basic ones. In the United States, educators have always talked about what is the best education to raise citizens for our democracy in the future. I think that’s still one of the questions, right? How are we going to put together an educational program in our school that best supports the development of students in every way; their social development, their intellectual development, their physical development, and how are we going to create the time to do that? How are we going to build an education that fosters independence and in students the ability to think for themselves?

Laine Perfas: Thank you for joining me for this really awesome conversation.

Santos: Thanks so much for having us on the show.

McGrath: Thanks for having us. It’s been really fun.

Linn: It’s my pleasure.

Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas. It was edited by Ryan Mulcahy, Simona Covel, and Paul Makishima, with additional editing and production support from Sarah Lamodi. Original music and sound design by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University. Copyright 2024.

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Lauren Scruggs returned to campus for her senior year after carving her name in the history books this summer at the Paris Olympics. 

The foilist not only won gold with Team USA in the women’s team event but became the first American Black woman to score a fencing medal when she captured silver in the individual event. 

“It was a super surreal moment, I couldn’t believe it was happening to me,” Scruggs said about winning the silver. “It was far beyond what I expected to happen to me that day.”

Scruggs’ victories helped fuel the most successful Games in Harvard’s history. Crimson student-athletes from the U.S., Great Britain, and Germany combined to win 13 medals, the most since the modern Olympics began in 1896. Harvard’s 13 medals led all Ivy League schools, and the Crimson also led the Ivies in gold medals with eight.

In the lead-up to the Summer Games, Scruggs balanced an internship with Bank of America with a rigorous training regimen. She said the office work allowed her to stay grounded.

“It gave me something to keep my mind away from fencing for a little bit,” Scruggs said. “If you’re solely focused on the sport, the lows hit harder. It helped me stay focused and have a distraction. I thrive when I have a healthy balance between fencing and my regular life.” 

After winning two early rounds, Scruggs faced three-time world champion Arianna Errigo of Italy. The bout was a turning point for Scruggs, who pulled off a thrilling upset to advance to the semifinals. 

“I knew it was going to be a challenging bout. My main goal was to leave it all out there.”

“I knew it was going to be a challenging bout. My main goal was to leave it all out there,” Scruggs said. “I looked up to her to help me develop my fencing style when I was growing up. It was a full-circle moment.”

Moving to the semi-finals, Scruggs defeated Canada’s Eleanor Harvey, securing a historic silver medal. The achievement in Paris was a landmark moment for USA Fencing, as she became the first Black female American fencer to win an individual medal at the Olympic games. 

After a day of photo shoots and interviews with national and international media outlets, Scruggs turned her attention to the team competition. Scruggs, along with teammates Lee Kiefer, Jacqueline Dubrovich, and Maia Mei Weintraub, prevailed, bringing the U.S. its first-ever gold medal in a team fencing event. 

“It was a culmination of the past four years and all the hard work we put in,” Scruggs said. “We were ready, we all felt good that day. I was shocked that I was able to get that last touch for the gold medal.” 

Scruggs said the success marked an outstanding moment for fencing in America that she hopes will spread more awareness of the sport.

“I hope the accomplishments make more people take notice of the sport,” she said. “It’s cool that I was able to do all that just being myself.”

There are more than 7,000 rare and undiagnosed diseases globally. 

Although each condition occurs in a small number of individuals, collectively these diseases exert a staggering human and economic toll because they affect some 300 million people worldwide. Yet, with a mere 5 to 7 percent of these conditions having an FDA-approved drug, they remain largely untreated or undertreated. 

Developing new medicines represents a daunting challenge, but a new artificial intelligence tool can propel the discovery of new therapies from existing medicines, offering hope for patients with rare and neglected conditions and for the clinicians who treat them.

The AI model, called TxGNN, is the first one developed specifically to identify drug candidates for rare diseases and conditions with no treatments. 

It identified drug candidates from existing medicines for more than 17,000 diseases, many of them without any existing treatments. This represents the largest number of diseases that any single AI model can handle to date. The researchers note that the model could be applied to even more diseases beyond the 17,000 it worked on in the initial experiments.

The work, described Wednesday in Nature Medicine, was led by scientists at Harvard Medical School. The researchers have made the tool available for free and want to encourage clinician-scientists to use it in their search for new therapies, especially for conditions with no or with limited treatment options.  

“With this tool we aim to identify new therapies across the disease spectrum but when it comes to rare, ultrarare, and neglected conditions, we foresee this model could help close, or at least narrow, a gap that creates serious health disparities,” said lead researcher Marinka Zitnik, assistant professor of biomedical informatics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS. 

“This is precisely where we see the promise of AI in reducing the global disease burden, in finding new uses for existing drugs, which is also a faster and more cost-effective way to develop therapies than designing new drugs from scratch,” added Zitnik, who is an associate faculty member at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University. 

The new tool has two central features — one that identifies treatment candidates along with possible side effects and another one that explains the rationale for the decision.  

In total, the tool identified drug candidates from nearly 8,000 medicines (both FDA-approved medicines and experimental ones now in clinical trials) for 17,080 diseases, including conditions with no available treatments. It also predicted which drugs would have side effects and contraindications for specific conditions — something that the current drug discovery approach identifies mostly by trial and error during early clinical trials focused on safety.

Compared against the leading AI models for drug repurposing, the new tool was nearly 50 percent better, on average, at identifying drug candidates. It was also 35 percent more accurate in predicting what drugs would have contraindications.

Advantages of using already approved drugs 

Repurposing existing drugs is an alluring way to develop new treatments because it relies on medicines that have been studied, have well-understood safety profiles, and have gone through the regulatory approval process. 

Most medicines have multiple effects beyond the specific targets they were originally developed and approved for. But many of these effects remain undiscovered and understudied during initial testing, clinical trials, and review, only emerging after years of use by millions of people. Indeed, nearly 30 percent of FDA- approved drugs have acquired at least one additional indication for treatment following initial approval, and many have acquired tens of additional treatment indications over the years.

This approach to drug repurposing is haphazard at best. It relies on patient reports of unexpected beneficial side effects or on physicians’ intuition about whether to use a drug for a condition that it was not intended for, a practice known as off-label use. 

“We’ve tended to rely on luck and serendipity rather than on strategy, which limits drug discovery to diseases for which drugs already exist,” Zitnik said. 

The benefits of drug repurposing extend beyond diseases without treatments, Zitnik noted.

“Even for more common diseases with approved treatments, new drugs could offer alternatives with fewer side effects or replace drugs that are ineffective for certain patients,” she said.

What makes the new AI tool better than existing models

Most current AI models used for drug discovery are trained on a single disease or a handful of conditions. Rather than focusing on specific diseases, the new tool was trained in a manner that enables it to use existing data to make new predictions. It does so by identifying shared features across multiple diseases, such as shared genomic aberrations.  For example, the AI model pinpoints shared disease mechanisms based on common genomic underpinnings, which allows it to extrapolate from a well-understood disease with known treatments to a poorly understood one with no treatments. 

This capacity, the research team said, brings the AI tool closer to the type of a reasoning a human clinician might use to generate novel ideas if they had access to all the preexisting knowledge and raw data that the AI model does but that the human brain cannot possibly access or store.

The tool was trained on vast amounts of data, including DNA information, cell signaling, levels of gene activity, clinical notes, and more. The researchers tested and refined the model by asking it to perform various tasks. Finally, the tool’s performance was validated on 1.2 million patient records and asked to identify drug candidates for various diseases. 

The researchers also asked the tool to predict what patient characteristics would render the identified drug candidates contraindicated for certain patient populations. 

Another task involved asking the tool to identify existing small molecules that might effectively block the activity of certain proteins implicated in disease-causing pathways and processes.

In a test designed to gauge the model’s ability to reason as a human clinician might, the researchers prompted the model to find drugs for three rare conditions it had not seen as part of its training — a neurodevelopmental disorder, a connective-tissue disease, and a rare genetic condition that causes water imbalance. 

The researchers then compared the model’s recommendations for drug therapy against current medical knowledge about how the suggested drugs work. In every example, the tool’s recommendations aligned with current medical knowledge. 

Moreover, the model not only identified medicines for all three diseases but also provided the rationale behind its decision. This explainer feature allows for transparency and can increase physician confidence.

The researchers caution that any therapies identified by the model would require additional evaluation for dosing and timing of delivery. But, they add, with this unprecedented capacity, the new AI model would expedite drug repurposing in a manner not possible until now. The team is already collaborating with several rare disease foundations to help identify possible treatments.

Co-authors included Kexin Huang, Payal Chandak, Qianwen Wang, Shreyas Havaldar, Akhil Vaid, Jure Leskovec, Girish N. Nadkarni, Benjamin S. Glicksberg, and Nils Gehlenborg.

This work was supported by National Science Foundation CAREER award (grant 2339524), National Institutes of Health (grant R01-HD108794), U.S. Department of Defense (grant FA8702-15-D-0001), Amazon Faculty Research, Google Research Scholar Program, AstraZeneca Research, Roche Alliance with Distinguished Scientists, Sanofi iDEA-TECH Award, Pfizer Research, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, John and Virginia Kaneb Fellowship at HMS, Biswas Family Foundation Transformative Computational Biology Grant in partnership with the Milken Institute, HMS Dean’s Innovation Awards for the Use of Artificial Intelligence, Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University, and Dr. Susanne E. Churchill Summer Institute in Biomedical Informatics at HMS.

The act of taking offense signals neither vulnerability nor sensitivity, according to Emily McTernan, an associate professor in political philosophy at University College London. Instead, she says, it’s an important tool for protecting status and enforcing social norms.

McTernan focused on this distinction in a talk titled “On Taking and Giving Offense” Thursday at the Barker Center. The event was sponsored by the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics.

McTernan started her lecture with the story of a professor who made a joke at the World Conference for Science Journalists in South Korea. “Let me tell you my trouble with girls,” he began. “You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you. And when you criticize them, they cry.”

“Perhaps, unsurprisingly,” said McTernan, who published “On Taking Offence” last year, “his joke caused offense and hit social media with widespread condemnation.”

The reaction followed a familiar pattern, she added.

“Someone says something that offends, the offending remark goes viral, causing offense well beyond its original audience,” said McTernan. The culprit apologizes, explaining that the remark was thoughtless or misinterpreted. Others come to the offender’s defense, and so on.

In a world where these incidents seem increasingly common, McTernan posed the question: “What exactly is to take offense? What’s going on with these apologies and recriminations?”

Too often, she argued, the reaction of the offended person is dismissed as “hurt feelings.” In some cases, taking offense is seen as stifling free speech.

Both responses, she said, fall short of the truth. Instead, the offended party experiences “someone ignoring or mistaking [their] standing or dismissing and attacking it.”

This is a departure from what little philosophical work there is on taking offense, in which it is defined as a reaction of disgust or annoyance, McTernan said. Her approach has more in common with the ideas of sociologist Erving Goffman, who argued that status is formed in part through social interactions and that it can always change.

“This standing is up for negotiation,” McTernan said. “I present myself in a certain way,” and that is either accepted or rejected by the other people in the interaction. “If I attack, dismiss, or fail to recognize some aspect of yourself that you take to have value, that can be a threat to the way you want to represent yourself.”

This definition clarifies why we can take “such profound offense” at personal attacks, she said, particularly about “moral commitments, career, or religion.”

Describing herself as “not a fan” of public shaming, McTernan acknowledged that taking offense acts as a “social sanction.”

“It’s terribly effective at shaping what we can and cannot say.”

Still, she argued, taking offense is not censorship, even when it includes making your reaction public. “There’s been a misconception of what free speech is,” McTernan said. “You have no right to a receptive audience. To take offense is not to stop conversation; it’s a move in the conversation.”

There are exceptions and nuances, she noted. “There is a threat to free speech when institutions and employers weigh in. The risk of losing your job is a very strong social pressure.”

McTernan also examined apologies, including the ways a bad one can exacerbate harm. One such misstep is the apology that insists the effect was unintended. Because giving offense is an affront to standing, she said, trying to say that the affront was not intended only makes matters worse. It reveals the joker’s lack of understanding. It pushes blame onto the listener. A good apology, on the other hand, takes full responsibility for a joke’s insensitivity.

During the Q&A portion of the event, McTernan was asked if the act of taking offense is a way to claim social power.

“Absolutely,” she responded. “If you are very powerful it is very easy for you to signal offense and get uptake for it. The raised eyebrow of the eminent professor is going to do a lot of work, whereas the student might need to signal offense more virulently.”

She added: “The only thing I want to resist is the thought that if you’re not at the top of the pecking order you have no power. Because of the nature of our self-representation, the fragility of the ways we present each other, the vulnerabilities to nicks to our self-image, it gives everyone a bit of power to take offense and to have it be effective.”

Marc Goodheart announced on Tuesday that he plans to conclude his service as vice president and secretary of the University following Commencement ceremonies in May.

Believed to be the longest-serving secretary of the governing boards in recent Harvard history, Goodheart has held the role since 1998, serving as chief administrative officer for both the Harvard Corporation and the University’s Board of Overseers. A member of senior staff in the president’s office since late 1991, Goodheart will continue to serve as a senior adviser to President Alan M. Garber and other University leaders after stepping away from his Loeb House position next spring. He is expected to assume a wide range of duties drawing on his extensive experience in areas relating to institutional policies, presidential priorities, and planning of major University events.

“I came to Harvard as a student in 1977, and I’ve considered myself a Harvard student ever since — perpetually learning about an institution whose ecosystem is as dynamic, whose people are as talented, and whose mission is as essential as any I know,” wrote Goodheart ’81, J.D. ’85, in a message to Harvard colleagues. “What has kept me here longer than I’d ever imagined is not simply the allure of the University’s mission, not simply the devotion and resilience of the people devoted to advancing it, not simply the University’s inexhaustible capacity to serve up novel and intriguing issues, but the recognition that there is always, inevitably, a gap between Harvard’s ambitious ideals and their fulfillment. It has been and remains a privilege to work with dedicated colleagues on ever-evolving efforts to understand and narrow that gap.

“I look forward to a productive final academic year supporting the work of Harvard’s boards,” he added, “helping assure a smooth transition, and planning ways to serve constructively in the time beyond.”

Garber praised Goodheart for his commitment to Harvard and its mission. “Everyone who knows Marc recognizes that he always puts the interests of the institution first, seeking to preserve those aspects of Harvard that are its heart and its soul while exploring new avenues for excellence and growth. Where there have been gaps between where we are and where we want to be, he has endeavored to narrow them in his customarily unassuming fashion, enriching deliberations with his matchless understanding of history and precedent. From helping to reform our governance structures to guiding efforts to make our community more inclusive — and countless contributions in between — Marc has made the University better.”

Goodheart, who was executive editor of the Harvard Law Review while a student at Harvard Law School, served as the original associate attorney in Harvard’s Office of the General Counsel in 1986-87 before going into private practice. He returned to Harvard in December 1991, dividing time between the OGC and the Office of the President, becoming assistant to the president on a full-time basis in 1992. He became secretary of the University in 1998, while remaining a member of president’s senior staff. Over nearly 33 years, he has served with Presidents Neil Rudenstine, Larry Summers, Derek Bok (during his interim year), Drew Faust, Larry Bacow, Claudine Gay, and Garber. He has also supported five senior fellows of the Corporation, 27 presidents of the Board of Overseers, and more than 175 members of the governing boards in all.

Harvard introduced some of the most consequential governance reforms in its history in 2010-11 while Goodheart served as secretary, including a rough doubling of the size of the Corporation and the launch of an array of new committees essential to the Corporation’s fiduciary role.

Joking that “I have reached a time in life when hardly a day goes by when my mail at home doesn’t include at least one advertisement for a Medicare plan,” Goodheart said he is looking forward “to days ahead when I can continue doing what I can to help [Harvard] navigate an exceptionally challenging time,” while also “looking forward to days ahead with more time to be the family member and friend I pride myself on trying to be.”

Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, thanked Goodheart for his service to the governing boards.

“Marc Goodheart’s integrity, selflessness, and deep devotion to Harvard and its enduring values are at the heart of all that he does on behalf of the institution and have made him an essential adviser to me, four other senior fellows, and scores of members of the governing boards over the years,” said Pritzker. “Throughout his 26 years of service as secretary — in times of challenge and of opportunity — he has supported the governing boards as a wise and trusted steward of the University’s mission, and I am delighted he will continue to support Harvard as a member of the Mass Hall team in the coming years.”

Vivian Hunt, president of the Board of Overseers, also praised Goodheart.

“With a steady and skillful hand, Marc Goodheart has helped all of us on the governing boards better serve an institution that we and he love,” she said. “His commitment over almost three decades as secretary demonstrates an extraordinary dedication to Harvard and we thank him sincerely for his service to the University and to the governing boards.”

​Goodheart is a magna cum laude graduate of both the College — where he concentrated in physics, served as president of The Harvard Independent, and hosted a jazz show on WHRB — and the Law School. Early in his career, he worked briefly for both The Miami Herald and The American Lawyer, was a law clerk for Judge Stephen Breyer at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and spent four years at the Boston law firm Hill & Barlow.

A search for a new secretary will begin soon.

Othello

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Richard II

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The Taming of the Shrew

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Henry IV

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King Lear

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Love’s Labour’s Lost

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Measure for Measure

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Boys from Syracuse

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As You Like It

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REFERENCE:

Plotkins, Marilyn J. The American Repertory Theatre Reference Book: The Brustein Years. Praeger, 2005.

Have you ever wondered how your dog feels about you, sees the world, or is trying to communicate? A new Netflix documentary, “Inside the Mind of a Dog” — featuring Harvard evolutionary biologist Erin Hecht, along with canine experts from Duke, the University of Pennsylvania, and others — sheds light on research that is starting to solve these mysteries. We asked Hecht, director of The Canine Brains Project, to weigh in on questions drawn from the documentary so readers can test their own knowledge.

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Go deeper

You’ve taken the quiz and watched the documentary — how can you learn more? Hecht recommends the following books:

• Dog Behaviour, Evolution, and Cognition
• Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution
• The Social Dog: Behavior and Cognition
• The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behavior and Interactions with People

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The Pulse Survey on Inclusion and Belonging, launching Tuesday will provide a snapshot of feelings of inclusion and belonging among members of the Harvard community.

The survey “is an important tool for assessing our ongoing efforts to build a culture of inclusion across the University that empowers individuals to realize their academic and professional goals,” President Alan Garber wrote in a message to the Harvard community. “Responses to the Pulse survey will inform recommendations and shape future initiatives related to inclusion and belonging, helping to ensure that our work in this important area is guided by the personal experiences and insights of members of our community.”

The survey should take a few minutes for participants to complete and is open to all members of the more than 50,000 people at the University, including all faculty, staff, academic personnel, postdocs, and students. The effort, which is led by the Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, stems from the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging’s report in 2018.

Designed to be held every few years, the Pulse survey enables the University to track the community’s climate of belonging over time. The survey was piloted in 2019, and the 2024 survey will provide important benchmark data for the tracking of progress in future Pulse surveys.

“Everyone in the University community is invited and encouraged to participate in the survey, which will help us find signals of how important fostering a community of belonging is for the University,” said Sherri Charleston, chief diversity and inclusion officer. “Using the survey responses from all participants, we can make specific, data-informed decisions to improve the culture of belonging at Harvard moving forward.”

For example, data from the 2019 survey was instrumental in sharpening the University’s focus on building community to promote a sense of belonging, according to Charleston.

A core set of questions from the 2019 survey are also included in this year’s survey, a strategy that allows researchers to look at trends over time and identify which efforts have been most successful and what areas may need more attention.

“If you care about improving, then you care about measurements over time,” said Andrew Ho, the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education, faculty adviser for the Pulse survey, and a former member of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. “This isn’t a flash in the pan. It’s a sustained commitment across the University and over time, from President Faust through President Bacow, President Gay, and now President Garber. And it’s across all communities within Harvard.”

The survey is administered by the Office of Institutional Research & Analytics (OIRA) with guidance from Ho. According to Drew Allen, associate provost of OIRA, the Pulse survey uses the same kind of software that academic researchers at Harvard often use to study very sensitive topics. All responses will be confidential.

“We have a data-management protocol in place that ensures the confidentiality of all responses,” says Allen. “Only the members of our research team who are directly involved in administering the survey will have access to the raw data that are collected.”

According to Allen and Ho, reported results will not be able to be linked to an identifiable participant or to any small group due to sociodemographic information or office location. The de-identified data will be analyzed by OIRA and will be publicly shared in late spring of 2025, giving everyone in the Harvard community the opportunity to see the results.

“There’s a commitment to transparent reporting, so University leadership and all of us at Harvard will be able to see and use the results to improve belonging,” said Ho.

Cats meow at each other. So Jonathan Losos always viewed a cat meowing to him as a kind of compliment. It was as if he was being saluted as a peer.

Not so, it turns out. Rather, it’s all the better to manipulate you, my dear.

Evolutionary biologist Losos ’84, a former Harvard faculty member, entertained a feline-loving crowd at the Harvard Museum of Natural History last Saturday. Talking about his new book, “The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa,” the William H. Danforth Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis mixed research with stories about his own pets.

Losos pointed out this book, and the science behind it, is a bit of a departure for him. Despite a childhood love of cats, Losos became an eminent herpetologist, largely from a desire to study lizards, another childhood passion, and one that could be more easily observed in its natural state.

“I was also under the impression that there was no interesting research on domestic cats,” said Losos, who was nattily clad in a shirt adorned with black cats. “I was wrong.”

While researching a first-year seminar on cats (which he correctly predicted would be popular), he connected with a number of researchers and ongoing studies. One was on the meow.

The work proved his belief about meowing wrong — and more. While all species of small wild cats, such as cervals and ocelots, vocalize at each other, and some larger ones, such as cheetahs, do too, he shared research that shows how the signature sound of the “meow” has evolved.

Cornell University graduate student Nicholas Nicastro had recorded large cat vocalizations at the Pretoria Zoo in South Africa and compared them with the mews of ordinary house cats. The wild cats’ meow, Losos explained, “comes across as much more urgent and demanding. The domestic cat is much more pleasant to our ears, higher pitched. What that suggests is that during domestication cats evolved a difference in their meow that is more appealing to us — and lets them manipulate us more.”

“When cats live in high-density areas, they behave like lions.”

A similar change was observed in purrs. While all small species of wild cat also purr, domestic cats have distinct “contentment” and “solicitation” purrs. The solicitation purr, he noted, reaches higher pitches, similar to the cry of a human baby, which we innately relate to.

Losos also covered how cats communicate with each other at the event, co-sponsored by the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture and the Harvard Museum of Natural History. A raised tail, for example, appears to signal that a cat is friendly and approachable. Studies using silhouettes of cats with tails raised and tails down appear to confirm this.

And while the studies only worked for a limited time — the cats quickly learned the silhouettes weren’t other cats — they did respond at first. If the silhouette had its tail up, “they stick up their own tails and approach. Tail down and the cats approach much less quickly, and they didn’t raise their own tails.”

While this is seen as a trait that evolved with the domestication of cats, it isn’t unprecedented: Lions, which live in social groups, also signal approachability and amiability with raised tails.

Lion social groups, or prides, consist of related females who will groom each other, hunt together, and even nurse each other’s cubs, he went on to explain. Domestic cats can also be highly social, especially with other felines with which they have been raised. “When cats live in high-density areas,” such as urban cat colonies, fishing villages, or farms, “they behave like lions.”

The one major difference? “Lions hunt collectively and can bring down much larger prey this way. Fortunately, domestic cats don’t do this.”

The evolutionary biologist then moved on to how our house cats came to be, tracing domestic cats from the earliest feline, proailurus lemanensis, some 30 million years ago, up through the separation of saber-toothed and conical-toothed cats, from which all our current cat species descend.

Losos summarized genetic research that traces domestic cats back to, most likely, North African wild cats, between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago. This meshes with the beginnings of agriculture, and Losos outlined the common theory that wild cats were drawn to the rodents that fed on grain stores — and that humans welcomed these predators in.

“People would see the advantage of having these cats around and would put out a bowl of milk or let them into the hut where it was warm and dry,” he said. “The next thing you know, you have the domestic cat.”

Their dispersal around the world (to every continent except Antarctica) was aided by their new human friends, including, it seems, Vikings. DNA sequencing of a cat found at a burial site in the Viking village of Ralswiek, now in Northern Germany, has revealed a striking similarity to that of Egyptian cats.

Presumably, Vikings picked up and helped disseminate these domestic creatures as they sailed around Europe, Iceland, and possibly North America, while travelers along the sea routes to India and overland along the Silk Road to China did the same.

Still, Losos pointed out, there are currently only 75 species of domestic cat, while there are at least 200 of dogs. “Cats,” he concluded, “need to catch up.”

The lecture was sponsored by the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture.

Nearly a half-century after the end of the Vietnam War, more than 200,000 Vietnamese soldiers remain unaccounted for. Finding answers about their fates is a race against the clock for researchers with the Unseen Legacies of the Vietnam War Project.

As the U.S. and Vietnam normalized relations in the 1990s, the countries began to build a relationship around the legacy of the conflict. “The war remains an emotional and painful topic on both sides,” says Tony Saich, Daewoo Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School and director of the Rajawali Foundation Institute. “Yet, both countries have been able to turn tragedy into a pillar of trust over the years.”

Vietnam has assisted in the discovery and return of American remains for more than 50 years. The Unseen Legacies of the Vietnam War Project, launched in 2021 with support from the U.S. Department of Defense, is part of the first bilateral effort to identify Vietnamese who were missing and killed in action.

The work of the project is made possible by a captured archive of personal effects taken by U.S. and allied forces from the National Liberation Front, the southern communist forces commonly referred to as Viet Cong, and North Vietnamese soldiers. Seized for their intelligence value, these documents — letters, journals, rosters, certificates, etc. — were collected until the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces in 1973. The archive was declassified in 1979 but remained largely untranslated and unorganized until the Unseen Legacies Project began its work.

“There’s a trove of information waiting to be discovered,” Hai Nguyen, director of the project, said. “Archives make it sound like we’re dealing with ancient history, but time is of the essence. In many cases, we start with captured documents from the war and then rely on further investigations, including insights from living veterans, to truly understand what happened.”

A talented writer who often thought of his daughter

Phan Kế Toại enlisted in the People’s Army of Vietnam in 1959 and journeyed to the south in 1967 — writing in his diary along the way. He often penned missives about his family, father, and brother. He worried that his young daughter wouldn’t remember him.   

On January 1, 1970, a regiment of the Australian army found his diary alongside two dead bodies.

It wasn’t until this year that his writing would resurface when researchers found it in the archive. “We were immediately taken by the vivid and warm words,” recalls Giang Trinh, the Project’s lead researcher. “We were determined to get the diary and any new information back to his family.”

However, the diary proved a challenging case. Aside from the author’s name and his daughter’s name, there was no information about Phan Kế Toại’s family or previous address. The team found their first clue in a letter from a soldier in the same unit. They traced the letter back to the fellow soldier’s family, who in turn pointed them toward an enlistment district. It was there that the team finally found information about Phan Kế Toại’s daughter and wife — both still alive and living in Hanoi.

The inquiry from the Unseen Legacies Project was the first time Phan Kế Toại’s family had heard anything about the circumstances of his death. Today, the family is searching for his remains. They are starting at the location where his diary was found, his likely burial site — now a plum garden.

A foot soldier, waiting to be married

Bùi Văn Thụy carried photos of his family, friends, and fiancée with him on his journey with the People’s Army of Vietnam to the south.

It was in his notebook that the Unseen Legacies research team found information about his hometown. With the assistance of local authorities, the team was able to find his brother and his former fiancée, who is now 75. All these years later, she recalled the affection they had for one another: “We truly loved each other, sincerely, from high school.”

In the years following the war, the letters Bùi Văn Thụy wrote his fiancée and other memorabilia were lost or damaged. The return of his notebook and photos, handed over during a ceremony hosted by the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi in May, was an emotional moment for the family amid their ongoing search for Bùi Văn Thụy’s gravesite.

A medic marked missing

In 1965, 18-year-old Nguyễn Thị A (whose name is changed to protect her family’s privacy) enlisted in the NLF as a medic. Years later, when she was marked missing in action, there was little hope of determining her fate — that is until Unseen Legacies researchers showed up on her family’s doorstep this past spring.

Nguyễn Thị A wrote in a journal until her final hours — when a fellow soldier picked up the pen and jotted down the date of her death. The diary revealed Nguyễn Thị A’s hometown but little else. When the trail went cold, researchers reached out to a group of local medical division veterans. Two of these veterans, Ba Thanh and Ba Hải, helped the team find the family of Nguyễn Thị A. From there, additional information and another long car ride led to a veteran who served in the same unit and was there when Nguyễn Thị A died.

With verified details about her death, the missing-in-action case came to a close.

A lost diary returned

Many investigations unearth new information or lead to a fallen soldier’s family, but in some rare cases, the Unseen Legacies team reconnects veterans with their personal effects.

When Phan Xuân Diệu lost his diary in combat, he never expected to see it again. However, the hometown information he included in his notes was enough for researchers to track him down. He was reunited with his journal at the May U.S. Embassy ceremony.

The mission continues

To date, Unseen Legacies has developed and provided reports on thousands of fallen soldiers and more than 2,000 potential grave sites to the Department of Defense through the defense attaché office, Hanoi, which works with Vietnam’s National Steering Committee 515 — a group charged with identifying the remains of fallen soldiers. The project has also assisted in returning tens of documents from the archive to families with the support from the U.S. Embassy and DAO in Vietnam.

“We have developed a reliable protocol to gather, analyze, verify, and provide high-value information with a rigorous investigative process in every single report,” said Nguyen. “We know that this new information is often an important step toward healing for families.”

The Unseen Legacies Project is also dedicated to ensuring that the information it uncovers contributes to the history of the war for years to come. The team is creating an archive that will contain scores of new documents, first-hand accounts, and information from the captured documents and other battlefield records, alongside the project’s analysis.

“We take tremendous pride in the role this work plays in providing closure for families,” says Saich. “As a historian, I also know how important it is to expand access to these materials, especially as some stories have been long left out of the narrative of the war.

“We want to bring these hidden stories to light, both for the sake of families and for our collective understanding.”

When Wendel A. White first encountered a lock of Frederick Douglass’ hair in an archive, the direction of his work took a radical shift. White had been concentrating on photographing landscapes as a way to explore Black history, but this discovery turned his attention to what he describes as “a remarkable reliquary of artifacts.” Venturing into archives, libraries, museums, and historical societies, he has sought to “excavate Black history through material culture.”

White photographed African American materials housed in private and public collections throughout the 13 original U.S. colonies and Washington, D.C., for his project “Manifest: Thirteen Colonies.” His subjects are both rare, singular objects — such as a twisted fragment of stained glass from the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing — and everyday material such as diaries, documents, photographs, and souvenirs.

Some images are related to famous historical figures such as Malcolm X (a tape recorder he used), James Baldwin (his inkwell), Phillis Wheatley (her book of poems), and Zora Neale Hurston (manuscripts including “Their Eyes Were Watching God”).

Some are connected to unknown figures, such as the owner/maker of a shoe, perhaps an African American Civil War soldier. Others speak to slavery and empowerment. “These artifacts are the forensic evidence of Black life and events in the United States,” White explains.

As the 2021 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography, White’s work is on view at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology through April 13, 2025, in the exhibition “Manifest: Thirteen Colonies.” The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph, “Wendel A. White: Manifest | Thirteen Colonies,” (Radius Books/Peabody Museum Press, Summer 2024), which includes text by Deborah Willis, Cheryl Finley, Leigh Raiford, Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Chief Campus Curator Brenda Dione Tindal, and Peabody Museum Curator of Visual Anthropology Ilisa Barbash. Book contributors will be on hand for a book launch and conversation Sept. 26 and a related free ArtsThursdays event on the same evening.

White’s use of shallow focus refocuses the gaze we expect to have on objects, writes Barbash. “He artfully draws out those qualities he feels are particularly meaningful and emotionally impactful. And in compelling us to reckon with these insights, he reanimates these objects into vital components of our present.”

One image that carries echoes from the past into our present is of two dolls, identical in every way except their skin color. Not just any dolls, these were part of the famous 1940s “Doll Test.” Psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark asked African American children ages 3–7 which doll they preferred. When a majority of the children selected the white doll, the Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination, and segregation” gave the children a sense of inferiority and hurt their self-esteem. The Supreme Court cited the Clarks’ research in its groundbreaking desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education.

At Harvard, White selected a few items, including W.E.B. Du Bois’ Ph.D. thesis, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1871.” He also chose a printing plate with a portrait of civic leader and journalist Roscoe Conkling Simmons, and one of White’s favorite things, a chart created by Radcliffe anthropologist Caroline Bond Day. Her book was published by the Peabody Museum in 1932 and offers a glimpse of the little-known Black scholar’s extraordinary research into the genealogies of Black American families in the 1930s.

Reflecting on the emotional reactions his images may provoke, White says, “Sometimes the things that I select are not things that everybody wants to look at or think about in both the white community and the Black community.” He references Isabel Wilkerson’s book “Caste”: “When you live in an old house, you may not want to go into the basement after a storm, to see what the rains have wrought. Choose not to look, however, at your own peril.”

A recent study by epidemiologist Eva Schernhammer found that women physicians face a 24 percent elevated risk of suicide compared to the general population.

It’s a sobering figure, but a significant improvement over what the adjunct professor of epidemiology at Harvard Chan School discovered two decades ago. Then female doctors had 76 percent higher odds. Schernhammer first embarked on the research after losing close colleagues.

It has been known for some time that suicide rates for male doctors were higher than the general public — and Schernhammer’s 2004 analysis found a 5 percent higher rate of risk. But the level for women was stunning then — and remain so now.

The Gazette spoke to Schernhammer about her research and what can be done to make further improvements. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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The scale of the problem for women physicians seems obvious. Why wasn’t more known about it sooner?

It’s been known for quite long that physicians experienced higher rates of suicide than the general public. The fact that male physicians had a higher risk of suicide has long been noted in papers, but not systematically evaluated until the early 2000s. 

There was a lot less data for female physicians. This is because women entered the field of medicine not that long ago. But today, they make up more than 50 percent of medical students in the U.S. When my meta-analysis was published in 2004, it got more attention because of the consolidated evidence. And back then, the suicide risk was so much higher for women than for the men. It led to a lot of thought on what could be contributing to this.

What were some of the factors contributing to higher rates of suicide among female physicians?

Colleagues in the field have pointed to things like the double burden for women who work as physicians: balancing their work with the household. There’s stress, burnout at work; these things apply to both men and women, but perhaps because of the added pressure on women it had a higher effect. 

Additionally, sexual harassment was a big topic 20 years ago because there emerged some recent data showing that three-quarters of all women experienced some form of harassment in their job from their male colleagues. 

Then in general, things like mental health: It’s been known or observed — systematically or unsystematically — that physicians tend to be more critical about themselves, more prone to perfectionism, and thus perhaps not able to live up to those expectations. This can lead to constantly being frustrated with themselves. It’s been noted that there are higher rates of depression in certain jobs, in particular in the medical field.

“It’s been noted that there are higher rates of depression in certain jobs, in particular in the medical field.”

And finally, there is a really interesting case to be made regarding drug abuse, access to drugs, and being able to use those drugs more effectively. To me, it’s always been most compelling to look at the rate of suicide attempts compared to that of actual suicides. 

Women physicians have a much higher completion rate than women in the general population who attempt suicide and tend to use different means if they commit suicide. Unlike men, female physicians are more likely to use poisoning, and they are much more knowledgeable about what exactly they need to do to effectively kill themselves that way.

Those are some of the explanations that have been put forward when looking at this gender discrepancy.

This current study is an update to the study that was done in 2004. How did it compare to your expectations?

Even back then, we were seeing that the suicide rates among the women were starting to trend down. So 20 years later, an obvious question was: Has this trend persisted? Would we now see lower rates among women?

With more than 50 percent of physicians now women, one could speculate that some of the shortcomings or problems they may have encountered back then have been alleviated to some extent by this influx of more female colleagues. Our primary hypothesis was to see these higher suicide rate ratios had come down a little bit. And that is what we found. The ratio has indeed decreased.

Were there any limitations to this study? One that was mentioned was the demographic of women in the study, who were predominantly from the U.S. and Europe. 

The demographic one is important. If you think about India, we just heard more recently about how physicians are being attacked and harassed, particularly female physicians. Maybe some of the lessons we’ve learned in the U.S. and Europe — that as women get more equal rights, enter the medical profession, and these issues become more widely talked about — these suicide risks may be alleviated. Maybe there are lessons to be learned for other places that are still catching up and just now getting to a point where there will be better working conditions for women physicians. 

I think it’s going to be important to have this data from other places in the world and being ready to accept that we may still see similarly high rates there, as we did 20 years ago in the U.S. and Europe, for example.

But in general, it would be great to have bigger numbers, to have bigger studies.

It’s helpful to do a comparison to other professions of similar socioeconomic status, which we attempted and could only do for the men, comparing male physicians to other male professions that are highly educated with high incomes. It was clear that the male physicians — even compared to these types of population groups — had higher rates of suicide. 

So doing these types of studies for women would be desirable in the future, as well as exploring more of what else could be contributing to the higher risk, including future studies of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. If the added attention and ensuing suicide prevention measures in the past 20 years contributed to a decline in suicide rates, then keeping up these efforts and extending them in particular to the women would be beneficial. 

“Improving strategies for doctors’ mental health is crucial as well as creating supportive environments, combating gender discrimination, and to include mental health in training.”

Improving strategies for doctors’ mental health is crucial as well as creating supportive environments, combating gender discrimination, and to include mental health in training. We want to make sure that physicians know that this is a topic they can speak up about and that there are prevention efforts and guards in place that can help them deal with any mental health issues they may have to reduce that burden.

Your most recent study showed that the gap between men and women physicians has been reduced, but that female physicians still have a 24 percent elevated risk of suicide. What has helped and how can we further reduce the gap?

This can only be speculation, but I think the fact that so many more women are now in the health profession is probably an important factor. Because if you think about the numbers that 75 percent of all women had experienced some form of harassment just 20 years ago, I do think that these numbers have come down.

I also think that to some extent, we have made progress on the sort of double burden in families, if that has been a contributing factor. This is probably a contentious topic, but it does seem there is a bit more workload sharing among couples today than a couple of decades ago, so women may feel a little less double burdened. Additionally, strategies to create supportive environments and to combat gender discrimination may have been put in place and helped.

I also think that work hour reductions for physicians have taken place, triggered by studies showing that if physicians don’t sleep enough, they make more medical errors. Studies by Chuck Czeisler from the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School have helped shift the regulations around work hours.

All of these things I would suspect reduced the burden for these women. We always have a delay when you look at data from a couple of years ago, right? But I think we are probably getting closer to a point where the gap will continue to close if we keep up the efforts that are now in place in hospitals.

How do you feel we can best help our doctors?

Talking about your health or mental health in an environment where you feel free to share with your colleagues is important, but we also need to be able to seek help outside of your professional sphere.

“I think the more that is written about the topic, the more awareness is raised about it and the more people will think about it and feel it’s less of a stigma if they are experiencing it.”

I think the more that is written about the topic, the more awareness is raised about it and the more people will think about it and feel it’s less of a stigma if they are experiencing it. Whether it’s depression or a drug addiction issue, they can know that they’re not the only ones; there are many others who have struggled and that they can talk about this.

A story that that I have really kept close to my heart is one from after the publication of the 2004 meta-analysis. A few years after it was released, I received an email from a male physician in the United States who told me he was a resident in oncology. He felt burned out and was just hitting a wall but felt like he had to keep going. 

He came across this study, and it turned his life around. He said he became aware that he can change his circumstances. He left the residency, he changed jobs, and he said he thinks that the decision saved his life. It was simply the recognition that he’s not the only one, and that this is something that’s not his fault that gave him hope.

Throughout his life, painter, filmmaker, folklorist, and musicologist Harry Smith sought to find universal patterns. Compiling a folk music anthology, collecting string figures from around the world, and conducting ethnographic research were some of the ways he attempted to identify common connections across people and cultures. 

The result is an exceedingly eclectic body of work, produced and lost over the span of five decades: films, paintings, poetry, sound recordings, photographs, and collections of items, some of which are currently on display at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. The exhibition, titled “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith,” will be at the Carpenter Center through Dec. 1. 

“He’s one of these figures who has touched many different parts of American underground and avant-garde culture. That impact has had a ripple effect into popular and mainstream culture,” said Dan Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director of the Carpenter Center.

The exhibit, which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art last fall, traces Smith’s path from a Depression-era childhood in the Pacific Northwest to a counterculture youth of psychoactive drugs and intellectualism in 1940s Berkeley, California, and dabbles with jazz and experimental cinema in San Francisco.  

“I jokingly referred to him as the Forrest Gump of avant-garde culture. He was always around at all the right times and was connected to the right people.” 
 

Dan Byers

“There were a lot of different factors to balance when thinking about how people would experience the work,” Byers said. “Working with artist and co-curator Carol Bove, we had to come up with spaces and forms that could contain, on the same wall, psychedelic moving images alongside drawings, documentary photographs, collected objects, and the sound components.” 

A polymath and radical nonconformist, Smith avidly collected a variety of objects including records, paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter eggs, Seminole textiles, pop-up books, tarot cards, and audio recordings. He spent decades in New York, living in the Chelsea Hotel, and befriended underground culture-makers such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith.  

“I jokingly referred to him as the Forrest Gump of avant-garde culture,” Byers said. “He was always around at all the right times and was connected to the right people. We would come across pictures of certain important artists in a gallery, and there’s Harry Smith with them.” 

Smith’s lifelong interest in research and collection began as a teenager growing up in Washington state, where he regularly rode his bike to visit the nearby Lummi and Swinomish reservations and document Indigenous songs, ceremonies, languages, and artistic traditions. 

Philip Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History, said Smith’s engagement with native communities remains something of a “paradox,” as his later work on native communities wasn’t nearly as sensitive or committed as his teenage work, and centered his own voice rather than his subjects’. 

“His young man’s pursuit seems so engaged, he had a kind of ethnographic sensibility that might have been ahead of its time,” Deloria said. “But the way that he dealt with Indian people later makes you rethink that entire story. Was he an extractive ethnographer in the ways that many folks in the 20th century had been, taking advantage of people in ways that ethnographers sometimes did? It’s hard to know how to make sense of it.” 

Smith, who died in 1991 at the age of 68, was among the first to make abstract animated films, and would often apply layers of paint, stencils, and images to the film by hand. Among the Smith films on display at the Carpenter Center are the 66-minute “Film No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic Feature” (1957-62) and the 35-minute “Film No. 16: Oz: The Tin Woodman’s Dream” (1967). 

“At this point in the ’50s, abstract film was still really new and coming into its own. He was on the formative end of painting directly on film,” said Brittany Gravely, publicist at the Harvard Film Archive, and an experimental 16 mm filmmaker. “Later on, he was always thinking really big and ambitious for the possibilities of film: He thought about multiple screens, he thought about images, he would sometimes project frames around the film screen, which nobody was doing at the time.” 

Smith frequently abandoned or destroyed his own work, meaning much of his art, films, and collections have been lost. At the Carpenter Center, two of Smith’s “lost” pieces, from a 1940s series where he painted a visual “transcription” of jazz music, are projected via a 35 mm slide of the original. The exhibition also includes a seating area where visitors can use headphones to listen to the “Anthology of American Folk Music,” a compilation of Depression-era music compiled by Smith and released by American Folkways in 1952. 

He was interested in the way recorded music could help people understand connections between cultures, according to Byers, and approached his anthology like he would a collage art piece. 

“This became the go-to anthology for people interested in folk music in the ’50s, and really spurred the folk revival, the Greenwich Village scene,” Byers said. “That folk revival, and the ‘Anthology’, then spurred the 1960s rock ’n’ roll scene, everyone from Bob Dylan to Jerry Garcia. That act of anthologizing, of creating a subjective narrative from collected songs, had a huge impact on American culture.” 

“Fragments of a Faith Forgotten” is free and open to the public at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts through Dec. 1. Co-curator Carol Bove will present an artist talk at the center on Sept. 26. 

The Federal Reserve moved Wednesday to lower the cost of borrowing by cutting a key interest rate by a larger than expected half percentage point, the first reduction in four years. The move signals good news for those with credit card debt and car loans, home buyers, and stock market investors.

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said the Fed was “encouraged” by the progress they’d seen on inflation and called the U.S. economy “strong overall,” adding to the signals from the central bank that there will be more cuts coming, totaling perhaps as much as another half point by the end of the year.

Powell said the current course can be maintained through “appropriate recalibration” of the Fed’s policy stance. Thus far, it has been able to stave off recession by striking a balance between slowing growth through interest rates to ease inflation while avoiding cooling the economy so much unemployment soars.

The Gazette spoke with economist Jason Furman, Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Department of Economics at Harvard, about how these rate cuts will affect both Wall Street and Main Street. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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The Fed just made its first rate cut in four years. Was this the right call at the right time?

The Fed made the right move. It’s a tiny bit bigger than I would have done or was expecting. But that’s a rounding error compared to what clearly is the direction that monetary policy needs to go in right now.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell noted that had they seen the July jobs figures at the last Fed meeting, they probably would have lowered rates then. Typically, the Fed starts cutting in 0.25-percentage point increments. Is the half-point cut, or 0.5 percentage points, an attempt to correct for that lost time?

I wrote an op-ed right after the July jobs report that began with “Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell must be kicking himself for not cutting the federal-funds rate at last week’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting.” The Fed is about risk management. Ex post they’re always going to get things wrong. The question is: Can you get the balance of risks about right, ex ante, and can you error correct as you go along?

This week’s move was about error-correcting for what was, in retrospect, a very small error six weeks ago. I think that’s a perfectly good argument. And importantly, this is sending a message that if the labor market deteriorates, the Fed will do more.

What’s important about making this message clear is that it will help ensure that the market will do a lot of the Fed’s work for it. For example, if the next jobs report is weak, interest rates will go down because the market knows the Fed will eventually lower those. So even before the Fed acts, the market will now be, basically, more aggressive in keeping the labor market and job growth on track. And that’s a good thing.

It’s what’s called a reaction function, because the world is uncertain. It’s bouncing around in ways you don’t anticipate, and you want people — market participants, businesses — to have contingency plans — “If such and such happens, here’s what we’ll do.” And today was a clear message that, if you see the unemployment rate go up, we’re going to cut rates a decent amount.

There appears to be strong Fed support for perhaps two additional cuts by the end of the year. Is that likely to happen?

Yes, every other meeting the Fed publishes a forecast of what the Federal Open Market Committee, the people that vote on the rates, expect them to be. And the median forecast that was published today was for two more rate cuts of 25 basis points each this year.

Moreover, there was broad agreement on this in that there were very few FOMC members who were signaling no further action with their so-called forecast dots. So that was the way the Fed sent the signal. Jay Powell made it sound like two more rate cuts, but again, they don’t know what the data will be like. Two scary inflation reports, and maybe they’ll call those rate cuts off. That’s why they move gradually, so they can call things off if they no longer make sense.

“This is sending a message that if the labor market deteriorates, the Fed will do more.”

What impact do you expect this may have on business?

Very little in the next couple months, but on a six- to 12-month time horizon, this will result in a little bit more job creation, a little bit more economic growth, and a tiny bit higher inflation than we otherwise would have had.

How will this affect mortgage interest rates? Will this do much for the nation’s housing affordability crisis we’re in?

We have seen in recent months mortgage rates coming down because the market was expecting this to happen. Mortgage rates, though, are still pretty high. They’re more likely to continue to move down as the Fed continues to ease policy. This will help housing affordability.

I don’t love that the Fed’s main tool really affects some parts of the economy, like housing, much more than other parts of the economy. I wish they had a tool that spread itself more easily across everything, but unfortunately, they don’t.

In recent months, consumers have been taking longer to pay down debt like credit-card balances. How soon can they expect to see some relief?

It’s hard to be sure because the rates that consumers pay aren’t just based on the Fed funds rate, but also on what it’s expected to be in the future as well as other factors like the amount of risk about repayment. And these interest rates have built in the changes that are expected in the future. It’s not just mortgages, car loans, credit-card interest rates — all of those are lower than their peak.

But for at least another year, they’re still going to be on the high side. There’s a huge amount of uncertainty. I would be very surprised if rates fell a lot in the next couple of months. And unfortunately, it’s unlikely that interest rates will go back to being anywhere near as low as they were in 2021, or even before COVID hit.

A new analysis led by a group of College researchers finds the U.S. will fall short of its recently finalized target for reducing vehicle emissions by nearly 15 percent over the next decade because of unrealistic goals for increasing electric-vehicle production. But adding more hybrids to the mix could help in the clean-energy transition.  

The study, published in Nature Communications, finds the U.S. won’t come close to its EV sales target by 2032, due mostly to bottlenecks in supply chains for crucial minerals like graphite and cobalt. Failing to correct these issues would amount to nearly 60 million extra tons of carbon dioxide emissions over the next eight years. 

Paper co-author and economics concentrator Megan Yeo ’25 said the team sought to break down the EPA’s stringent new emissions goals and assess whether they were realistic. 

“First we asked, ‘How many EVs need to be sold to reach that target?’ After that, we looked at different scenarios,” said Yeo, who co-authored the paper with Harvard Law School senior research associate Ashley Nunes, along with first author Lucas Woodley ’23 and Chung Yi See ’22. 

The researchers found that meeting the new standards would require replacing at least 10.21 million internal combustion engine vehicles with EVs between 2027 and 2032. But they estimated the U.S. and its allies would only be able to support the manufacture of about 5.09 million EVs during that period, falling short of the goal by about half. 

Manufacturing EVs and their rechargeable batteries requires large amounts of minerals including cobalt, graphite, lithium, and nickel. The U.S. and its allies likely have ample reserves of the raw materials.  

The problem is production capacity — the ability to adequately mine and refine the materials. The challenge is particularly acute for graphite, which has not been mined domestically since the mid-20th century. 

The team scoured for solutions, including rethinking emissions goals by producing more hybrid-electric vehicles. HEVs require fewer mineral resources but have reduced tailpipe emissions, offering a way to close the gap on emissions and expand the government’s focus beyond EVs.   

“We suggest exploring HEVs as an alternative pathway,” Yeo said. 

According to Nunes, another of the study’s takeaways is that the U.S. might be able to build enough electric cars if it leaned more heavily on China for mineral resources. But U.S. lawmakers are wary of this approach for national security reasons. 

“Americans may have to ask, what do we value more — fewer emissions or energy security?” Nunes said. 

Singapore native Yeo said she aspires to be a public-sector economist in her home country and that joining Nunes’ research group to work on the EV analysis opened her eyes to the rigors and constraints of evaluating public policy. 

“Setting lower and upper bounds for different scenarios, and running through alternative possibilities, robustness checks, and assumptions, were all very valuable skills for me to learn,” Yeo said. 

Working in the Nunes group, there’s “never a dull moment,” she continued, with multiple projects related to EVs and other transportation-sector climate goals in the works. 

The paper’s other co-authors were Peter Cook and Seaver Wang of the Breakthrough Institute, Laurena Huh of MIT, and Daniel Palmer, a high school student at the Groton School who participated in Harvard’s precollege and secondary school programs. 

When deciding who to screen for America’s deadliest cancer, should a person who has smoked a pack a day for 20 years get priority over someone who has smoked fewer cigarettes over the same amount of time?

That’s the question tackled by Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital researchers in a recent study that showed that lung cancer screening guidelines set by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — requiring the equivalent of a pack a day for 20 years — miss a large proportion of cases and fail to close a screening gap between Black and white patients. That gap means lung cancer among Black patients is too often caught later in the disease’s course, leading to higher mortality.

The researchers, whose work was published earlier this year in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, suggest switching instead to a simple measure that would recommend annual screening for anyone who’s smoked for 20 years, regardless of how many cigarettes they smoke a day. Both guidelines also require the individuals be between ages 50 and 80 and either be current smokers or having quit within the last 15 years. The simplified guideline would widen the pool of those who qualify for lung cancer screening and, according to the study, both increase the proportion of cancer cases that are caught and virtually eliminate racial disparities in lung cancer screening eligibility.

“We found that it completely eliminated the racial disparity in the proportion of lung cancer patients who would have qualified among both people who currently smoke as well as people who formerly smoked,” said Alexandra Potter, the study’s first author, clinical research coordinator at Massachusetts General Hospital, and president of the American Lung Cancer Screening Initiative.

Smoking duration vs. intensity and risk

The 20 pack-year threshold can be difficult to use and inaccurate, said senior author Chi-Fu Jeffrey Yang, associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and a thoracic surgeon at MGH. That’s because the equivalent of smoking a pack a day for 20 years could mean smoking half a pack daily for 40 years, two packs a day for 10, or any other permutation that results in the required combination of smoking intensity and duration. In addition, most people who smoke have smoked different amounts at different times of their lives which, decades later, can be difficult to recall. Plus, while it may make intuitive sense that someone who smokes more intensely has a higher risk of developing lung cancer, studies have not shown that the risk due to smoking intensity is equivalent to the risk from smoking duration, as the pack-year standard implies, the authors said. 

White patients tend to smoke more each day

In the work, supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, researchers applied both the current screening guidelines and the proposed simplified guidelines to participants in two studies: the Southern Community Cohort Study, which included both Black and white subjects receiving care at community health centers in the U.S. Southeast, and the Black Women’s Health Study, whose study population was limited to Black women. Both included data on subjects’ health and smoking history. 

Researchers first applied the current screening guideline and found that, of those who developed lung cancer in the Southern Community Cohort Study, just 58 percent of Black patients and 74 percent of white patients would have qualified for screening. In the Black Women’s Health Study, just 43 percent of those who developed lung cancer would have qualified for screening.

By contrast, applying the simplified 20-year smoking duration guideline would capture over 80 percent of both Black and white participants who developed lung cancer in the Southern Community Cohort Study, and 64 percent of lung cancer patients in the Black Women’s Health Study. That would not only significantly increase the percentage of lung cancer cases eligible for screening, it would virtually eliminate the racial disparity in eligibility.

That racial disparity, the authors said, largely stems from the fact that current guidelines include the pack-a-day measure of smoking intensity, which varies between Black and white individuals. White individuals smoke significantly more each day, lowering the bar for screening eligibility. That has been seen in previous studies and was apparent in Potter and Yang’s research as well. Research has identified several possible explanations for differences in smoking intensity and lung cancer risk, including differences in nicotine metabolism between Black and white people who smoke. However, there are also an array of social and cultural factors still unexplored, the authors said. 

“We showed that the median number of cigarettes smoked among Black patients with lung cancer was almost half of that among white patients with lung cancer,” Potter said. “Even though they smoke similar durations, intensity was really the driving factor in the difference between them.” 

Other screening barriers

The debate over who should get screened and when is just one part of lung cancer’s dismal landscape. Smoking is its leading cause, accounting for 85 percent of cases. It is one of the most aggressive cancers, Yang said, meaning it can spread rapidly if not caught early. It kills more people annually — in both the U.S. and the world — than colon, breast, and prostate cancers combined, and is expected to kill 125,070 Americans in 2024, according to statistics from the American Cancer Society. 

Despite lung cancer’s deadly record, a recent study by the American Lung Association showed that more than 80 percent of those who qualify for screening don’t even know it is an option. Further, only between 5 percent and 19 percent of those who qualify actually get screened for lung cancer.

“It pales in comparison to breast cancer, colon cancer, and cervical cancer screening, where 70 to 80 percent get screened,” Yang said. “There’s a huge gap.”

80%

Of those who qualify
for lung cancer screening don’t even know it’s an option

5-19%

Of those who qualify actually get screened for lung cancer

85%

Of lung cancer
cases are caused
by smoking

125,070

Americans are expected to die from lung cancer
this year

In addition to lack of awareness, part of that gap may be due to additional requirements placed on those seeking a lung cancer screening, Potter said. Unlike a mammogram, which a patient can schedule themselves, lung cancer screening has to be scheduled in conjunction with a visit to a healthcare provider. While it’s not bad to have a provider involved, Potter said, it is an extra step and one required by many insurers before they’ll pay for the procedure.

“Out of lung, breast, colon, and cervical cancer, lung cancer is the only one where it’s required to have this formal documentation of a shared decision-making visit,” Potter said. 

The screening itself is straightforward, noninvasive, and takes just minutes, Yang said. Patients can stay in their street clothes and lie on a table for a CT scan that takes a series of X-rays to create an image of the lungs, revealing any tumors that might be present. 

Yang said a recent patient’s case highlights the situation. She smoked lightly — just three cigarettes a day — but for many years. The light intensity of her habit put her at just 8.4 pack-years, not enough to qualify for lung cancer screening. Fortunately, she was able to get screened through an ongoing clinical trial, called INSPIRE, that Potter and Yang are leading to investigate lung cancer screening in high-risk Black women. The scan showed three small, aggressive cancerous nodules that Yang was able to remove surgically. 

“She’s doing very well right now, but she’s 69 and without the screening this would certainly have come back in her 70s as stage IV lung cancer with a very, very different outcome,” Yang said. “We’re hoping that people take a good look at pack-years and whether this is really the best measure overall and the best criterion for Black cancer screening eligibility.”

“History Report” is excerpted from the collection “Glory Days” by Simon Rich ’07. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.

I interviewed my great-​grandfather Simon because he is the oldest person in my family who is still alive. He was born in a country called America, on Earth. He said he used to be a writer. I asked him if he wrote “Spider-Man,” and he said no, he wrote other things that have all been lost.

My great-​grandfather was one of the only men to escape from Earth. The rest of the people who got seats on the Escape Pod were women and children. My great-grandfather says they let him on because “they needed one man to row the spaceship.” I’m not sure what he means, because there are no oars on a spaceship, but that is what he said.

My great-​grandfather told me how scary it was when Earth became too hot to live on. The skies burned with fire day and night, and you couldn’t walk across the street without collapsing. I asked him if he had had any kind of warning about climate change and he said yes, there’d been articles, movies, and books about how it was going to happen. I asked him if he tried to stop it from happening and he said yes, of course. I asked him how and he said that he had done something called recycling, which is where you throw your garbage into different-​colored boxes. I asked my mom what he was talking about, and she explained that when people become as old as my great-​grandfather, their brains start to break down and it is almost like they turn back into babies.

Since my great-​grandfather is going to die soon, and he is one of the only survivors of Earth, I decided to ask him what his favorite memory of the planet was. I thought he might tell me about the end of World War IV or going to see “Spider-Man,” but instead he told me about the first date he went on with his wife, my great-grandmother Kathleen. They met in college, which is a place people used to go to after high school to drink alcohol. Some people drank so much there that they died.

My great-​grandfather said that when he was in college, online dating hadn’t been invented yet. Instead of matching with someone through a dating app and sending a series of nude photos to each other before eventually meeting up for sex, you would meet them in person before doing anything else. This meant that when my great-​grandparents went out for the first time, they had no idea what each other looked like naked. At this point my mother, who was recording our interview, told my great-grandfather that he was being inappropriate because this was a project for school, and he apologized but said that the naked stuff was “crucial to the story” and that he was going to keep bringing it up whenever it was relevant.

My great-​grandfather explained that not only had they not seen each other naked, he wasn’t sure if my great-​grandmother wanted that to happen. Sometimes, in those days, when someone agreed to go out on a date with you, they were still undecided about the naked thing and wanted to learn more personal information about you before making up their mind. Since this was before social media, the only way to get this personal information was by asking people questions to their face, like as if their actual living, breathing face was their social media profile. Sometimes this would get embarrassing. Like you might say, “What do your parents do?” And they would say, “My parents are dead.” And then you would have to say something like, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that because I have no information about you. We are strangers.” And sometimes the other person would forgive you, but sometimes they would not. Also, sometimes the person you’d asked out on a date would not even know it was a date because they assumed that you were gay, or they found you so unattractive that it had not even occurred to them that you might be pursuing them romantically — like that notion was so sick to them that it had truly not even crossed their mind. And sometimes they would convey this information to you in the middle of dinner — that they considered you a friend and nothing more — and to make the situation less humiliating, you would have to pretend that you felt the same way, and keep on smiling all night, even though you’d just learned that this person you hoped you might see naked was so repulsed by you that even though you had invited them to a Spanish restaurant, it had legitimately never entered their mind that you were hoping for intimacy, because that would be as insane as being asked out by, like, a dog or a potato.

The point, my great-​grandfather said, is that he had no idea what my great-​grandmother thought about him. He had no idea what she thought about anything. He had zero information about her, other than what she looked like wearing clothes, and also how it sounded when she laughed, which she had done a couple of times on their long, slow walk through campus, with the cool fall breeze whipping through the scattered leaves.

My great-​grandfather said that all dates began with the same custom. The two people on the date would take turns verbally listing all the TV shows they liked. If they both liked the same show, they’d exchange memes from it. But here’s the thing: GIFs did not exist yet. So instead of texting the other person a funny moment from the show, you would say out loud, “Do you remember the part when …,” and then you would perform the meme yourself, using your face and body to imitate what an actor had said and done. Exchanging memes in person was much scarier than doing it by text, because when you text someone a meme and they don’t respond, you can tell yourself that maybe they liked it but just didn’t have time to text you back. But when you performed a meme with your body and the other person didn’t like it, you would be able to tell, because instead of laughing they would just kind of sadly look away and say, “Yeah, I remember that part.” And you would have to just keep on walking to the restaurant.

Luckily, though, my great-​grandfather’s meme performances went over well, or at least well enough to keep the conversation going. And while he still had no idea whether they would ever see each other naked, he knew it was at least technically still possible.

My great-​grandfather had invited my great-​grandmother to a Spanish restaurant because it was the only restaurant he knew that served wine to people under 21. But when they arrived, it was too crowded to get a table. They needed to find some other place to eat, but neither of them had internet access, so their only option was to physically search for food, by walking around and looking in random directions — like, truly the same process used by animals. Things grew tense. The sun had set, and my great-​grandfather was fearful that they would not be able to find alcohol. But after a few stressful minutes, they followed the scent of fried food around a corner and found a Chinese place that served beer, and they were so proud of themselves that they spontaneously high-​fived, and that was the first time that they touched.

My great-​grandfather told me they stayed at the restaurant so long that by the end they were the only customers left. Because they were strangers, they asked each other very basic questions, like “Who are you? Where did you come from? What kind of a person are you?” They ended up having a lot of things in common, which was exciting, because that didn’t usually happen on a first date. Often the other person would dislike things you liked, or love things that you hated, or things would seem to be going pretty well, and the person would seem really nice, but then out of the blue they would say, “What is your relationship with Jesus Christ?”

My great-​grandfather said that the main thing he talked to my great-​grandmother about was how nervous they both were about the future. I asked if he meant climate change, and he admitted that the imminent climate holocaust hadn’t come up much, and instead they’d mostly talked about their careers. It turned out they both had the same dream: to write stories down onto pieces of paper. In fact, they were both already trying to do that. Every day, they would each type out stories on computers and then print them with ink onto pieces of white paper. Their goal was to get better at making these paper stories, in the hopes that someday, they might be able to persuade someone to reprint their paper stories onto multiple pieces of paper, and then sell those pieces of paper for pieces of money, which were also made of paper. At this point, my mother whispered to me that it was time for my great-​grandfather to take a nap, and she gave him some medicine that made him sleep for about four hours. When he woke up, though, he was still insisting all this paper stuff was real, and that it was their actual shared ambition to write stories down on paper and then sell the paper for more paper. And my mother smiled and rubbed his hand and said she believed him, but while she was doing that she buzzed for the doctor, and he brought in this huge syringe that was almost like a gun, because it was made out of metal and it had this trigger on the bottom, and the doctor explained that he was going to shoot this thing into my great-​grandfather’s brain, to make him less confused. And my great-​grandfather laughed weirdly and said that he had been joking about “all that paper stuff,” and that really what he and his wife had talked about on their first date was climate change, because that’s what any sane person from that era would have prioritized: being a climate warrior. And the doctor looked into my great-​grandfather’s eyes with his finger on the trigger, and said, “Are you sure?” And my great-grandfather swallowed and said, “Yep!” And so the doctor left, but on his way out, he told my mom that he would stay nearby in case my great-​grandfather got confused again, in which case he would come back and give him that gunshot right in the middle of his brain.

My great-​grandfather was quiet for a while, almost like he was afraid to keep going with his story. But I pressed him for more information, and he said the main thing he had wanted me to know before was not what he and my great-​grandmother talked about; it was how they talked, because even though they were basically still strangers who had never even seen each other naked, they somehow believed in one another from the start.

My great-​grandfather told me that all dates ended with the same custom. After the two people finished all the alcohol they’d been served, one person would ask the other to come over to their dorm room to watch “Arrested Development.” “Arrested Development” was a non-​“Spider-Man” show that you played by putting small, round discs into a machine. The reason it existed was to create a way for people on dates to gauge each other’s interests in becoming naked without having to directly ask them. The way this worked was a little complicated, but my great-​grandfather was able to explain all the steps. First you asked the other person if they had “seen ‘Arrested Development,’” and they would respond, “Some, but not all of it.” This would be your prompt to ask them if they wanted to come to your dorm room to watch the episodes they’d missed. If they didn’t want to see you naked, they would say that they had to “finish a paper,” which was an expression that meant that they were not attracted to you. If they did agree to watch “Arrested Development,” it meant that they probably did want to see you naked. But here’s where it gets complicated: sometimes it did not mean that. Sometimes it just meant that they wanted to watch “Arrested Development.”

That’s why there was a third part of the custom. After walking back to your dorm room and putting one of the discs into the disc-​playing machine, you would sit side by side on a small couch. Your eyes would be facing the screen, but your attention would be focused entirely on each other. As “Arrested Development” played, you would physically move closer to the other person, inch by inch, without making any sudden movements. The idea was that if you both moved incrementally toward each other, eventually your hands would touch. If the other person pulled their hand away or laughed and said, “Sorry!,” that meant they had really, truly come to watch “Arrested Development.” But if they did not pull their hand away from yours, that meant it was time to start kissing, which is what my great-​grandparents did, even though they had never exchanged even the most rudimentary of nudes, and at this point my mother told my great-​grandfather to stop telling the story, and he had to admit that the next part was genuinely inappropriate.

My great-​grandfather said that their marriage wasn’t perfect. Sometimes they argued, and in the 2050s they both had full-​fledged affairs with sex robots. But they ultimately forgave each other, because nobody’s perfect, and also by the 2050s sex robots had become extremely advanced as well as incredibly persuasive — like if you refused to have sex with them, they would start making really high-​level philosophical arguments about “why it wasn’t wrong,” using logic that was essentially bulletproof, while their genitals lit up and spun and stuff, and eventually it got to the point where the UN had to regulate the Sex Robot Industry, because they needed people to leave their apartments again so we could go back to being a society.

The point is, my great-​grandparents rekindled their romance in the 2060s, and they even ended up renewing their vows while riding on the Escape Pod to New Earth, surrounded by their daughters and their grandchildren. And my great-​grandfather asked my mom if she could remember the ceremony, and she said she was only four at the time, but she did vaguely recall how weird it was to see him on the spaceship when it was supposed to be just for women and children, and my great-​grandfather said that they needed to bring one man to “help the women lift their bags into the overhead compartments,” and I reminded him that earlier he’d said he’d been on the ship to row an oar, and there was a long pause, and then he said that he was tired and had to go to sleep. And he closed his eyes, but it didn’t really look like he was sleeping, because every few seconds he would open his eyes to check if we were still there, and when he saw we were he would quickly close his eyes again.

And it was around this time that my great-​grandmother rolled up in her wheelchair. And my great-​grandfather stopped pretending to be asleep, and he sat up and smiled, and she smiled back, and then he lowered his voice and said, “Do you want to watch ‘Arrested Development’?” And my mom reminded my great-grandfather that “Arrested Development” had been lost, along with everything else on Earth, because of his generation’s crimes against humanity. But my great-grandfather ignored her and motioned for his wife to wheel next to him. And he flipped through random channels, while their hands inched slowly toward each other.

And that’s when I finally figured out what Earth was really like.

It was kind of like “Arrested Development.”

It was something people talked about, and praised, and maybe even tried to save, but the whole time, what everybody secretly, actually cared about was the person sitting next to them. That’s where all of mankind’s effort went, the sweat and the toil of billions, not to saving the world but to the frantic, desperate quest for love. And that’s why Earth is gone, because it was nothing more than a conversation starter. It wasn’t what we really, truly cared about. We never even really lived there. We lived in the presence of each other.

And when my mom read my first draft of this, she said that I shouldn’t end it this way, because it’s glib and defeatist and seems to absolve my great-​grandfather of his political inaction, but it’s not like anybody’s going to read this stupid essay anyway, and even if they do it’ll eventually be lost like everything else besides “Spider-Man,” so I’m just going to stop it right here, because I want to go out and the night’s still young.

Copyright © 2024 by Simon Rich.

Popular social media platforms were once a place to connect with old and new friends, post life updates, and share photos of your kids. But they have become fraught with misinformation, an algorithm-delivered onslaught of content aimed at fueling discord, all in service to business models that prioritize drawing eyeballs, said experts on digital life at a discussion last Thursday on how to improve discourse and spaces online. 

But that’s not how they started. 

“I think it’s important to remember why people were originally going to a lot of these services, these online environments. They were looking for connection and were looking for community,” said danah boyd, founder of research nonprofit Data & Society. “It was self-identified geeks, freaks, and queers — which I identify as all three — that were very, very happily finding their people in these online environments, and they were investing in those relationships.”  

boyd, who is also a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University, was part of a keynote panel at an afternoon-long series of discussions, titled “Beyond Discourse Dumpster Fires.” boyd’s panel was moderated by Berkman Klein Center Faculty Director Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School. 

“I’ve been thinking a little bit about what I call the three laws of digital governance,” said Zittrain, who is also a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School and a professor of computer science at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “One, we don’t know what we want. Two, we don’t trust anybody to give it to us. Three, we want it now. And the optional fourth is can AI scale it.” The crowd chuckled. He asked the panel how they felt these rules might be helping or hurting public discourse.  

Deb Roy, a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT where he directs the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, said that when thinking about all of these technologies, it’s important to think about their intended goals.  

Roy served as Twitter’s chief media scientist from 2013-2017. During that time, he was surprised by the lack of clarity within the company on its larger vision. The decision by social networks to follow a broadcast media model for monetization ended up leading to many unanticipated challenges. 

“The point of this must be to build an audience and to have a modern-day version of broadcast reach. It’s not clear that’s the primary kind of social network we were seeking when we talked about connection and community,” Roy said of the vague goals they pursued.  

His team at MIT has been experimenting with a new social network that puts dialogue — both in person and virtual — at the center of its platform. It is currently being tested voluntarily by students and is slowly being rolled out to faculty.  

It goes back to connection, boyd says. 

boyd, who focuses some of her research on youth and the current mental health crisis, said that when young people turn to social networks or interventions for help, what they’re seeking is human interaction.

 

Before the pandemic, crisis workers would focus on connecting struggling youth with the “noncustodial adults” in thesir lives, she said. These are the teachers, pastors, coaches, and mentors that don’t have direct power over their lives in the way parents do, and can offer a critical level of support. But coming out of the pandemic, they found that the number of youths who had even one of these types of relationships had plummeted.  

Could connecting them with an AI chatbot help? Probably not, she suggested. 

“When somebody’s in crisis, what they’re grateful for is that a human has spent time listening to them,” boyd said. “Somebody, even a stranger, is willing to dedicate time. And that will never be replaced.” 

“When somebody’s in crisis, what they’re grateful for is that a human has spent time listening to them. Somebody, even a stranger, is willing to dedicate time. And that will never be replaced.”

danah boyd

But there may be other ways AI can lend a hand. Gordon Pennycook, associate professor and Himan Brown Faculty Fellow at Cornell University, recently published a study in Science that showed the value in using AI tools to address conspiracy theories.  

Pennycook’s team used DebunkBot, an AI tool, to have short conversations with people about conspiracy theories they embraced. The bot presented participants with counterarguments using evidence-based research. The team found that nearly a quarter of participants no longer held those beliefs by the end of the conversation, which typically lasted only eight minutes. 

“Even for this group of people who everyone thinks is down the rabbit hole — you can never change their mind — you see effects. Evidence matters,” he said of the findings. “It’s benefiting people … After the conversation, people trusted the AI more. Most people have really enjoyed the conversation, and they learn a lot from us.”

The event also featured other discussions around anonymous discourse on the online communication platform Nymspace and the role of technology in participatory democracy.

Toward the end of the keynote conversation, the panelists discussed the blurring of private and public spaces and the unique challenges this creates online.

Roy mentioned the book “A Pattern Language” by Christopher Alexander, which looks at patterns that correlate with human flourishing. One pattern is the intimacy gradient, which looks at architecture and considers the experience of moving from more private spaces to more public ones, such as the differences that might exist between a bedroom and an entryway.

“What we’ve done with a lot of the design of social media [is] imagine your child in their bedroom, and they open the door and just step into Times Square. There is no gradient,” Roy said. “How do we bring that kind of thinking and those principles into the spaces that we all together can create?”

Ketanji Brown Jackson was plagued by homesickness and imposter syndrome as a College first-year in the late 1980s.

“Could I really cut it?” the Supreme Court Justice recalled thinking during a sold-out event at Sanders Theatre last Thursday marking the publication this month of “Lovely One,” which traces her “unlikely journey” from South Florida to the nation’s highest court.

That self-doubt began to evaporate with the help of an experience she had in that very venue: Taking Michael J. Sandel’s near legendary offering on classical theories of ethics and justice applied to issues of the moment. Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, has taught a version of the course for more than four decades.

“Doing well in that class was one of the things that helped me to see that maybe I could cut it here,” said Jackson ’92, J.D. ’96. “I loved that class, and it really confirmed for me that law and philosophy were things I was interested in.”

At the book talk, Jackson read a short excerpt and discussed her motivations in writing it with Tomiko Brown-Nagin, the event moderator and Harvard Radcliffe Institute Dean. “The key takeaway,” Jackson said, “is the good fortune of the moment of my birth. … I was born in 1970, five or six years after the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and the end of Jim Crow segregation.”

Jackson, 54, set to work on the book soon after her contentious confirmation hearings in March 2022. “I was really, really grateful to get through that experience successfully,” she said. “I felt as though I wanted to take the time to pay tribute to the people and circumstances that were most responsible for that accomplishment.”

At the top of the list are her parents, Ellery and Johnny Brown, both first-generation college graduates who grew up in segregated Florida. Jackson credited her mother, a middle-school educator, with teaching her to read at an early age. Her father, a high-school history teacher who enrolled at University of Miami Law School when Jackson was 3, inspired her interest in pursuing a legal career.

The Browns showered their daughter, a star student, with emotional support and enrichments. “My parents were very intentional about wanting me to participate and do all the things they didn’t get to do,” said Jackson, who listed swimming lessons and theater among her many extracurriculars.

In fact, it was the Miami Palmetto Senior High School speech and debate team that put Harvard on her radar. Jackson remembered raising money — “we sold a lot of candy” — to fund a trip to the annual national tournament on the University’s campus. “It was only because of that that I thought, ‘Oh, this looks like a pretty decent school,’” Jackson said to peals of laughter.

An audience of about 1,000 people responded warmly throughout the hourlong event, hosted by the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. Attendees included the justice’s Boston-based in-laws as well as at least one former roommate from her time living in Cabot House. Seated near the center of the theater was her husband of 28 years, Patrick G. Jackson ’91, a surgeon at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital.

The mood turned giddy as Jackson shared the story of their romance. She remembered Patrick, who counts among his ancestors King Edward I of England and four Mayflower passengers, sitting behind her in a history class. They became the sort of friends who awkwardly flirt. “Over time, I started to like him, but I felt like he probably didn’t like me,” Jackson said. “I had not had a serious boyfriend.”

The justice pantomimed the moment Patrick finally made his move — with a yawn and a stretch of the arm as they watched a Blockbuster movie rental at his parents’ place.

She recalled jumping to her feet. “I just don’t want to be hurt,” she protested.

Patrick stood and took her hands. “Ketanji,” he told her, “I will never hurt you. I love you.”

Also discussed was less ebullient material from the new memoir, including the time a 7- or 8-year-old Jackson found a handwritten note from her maternal grandmother. “She didn’t have a lot of schooling,” Jackson said. “She grew up in Georgia in the ’20s and ’30s.”

Jackson’s mother was “crestfallen” to find her daughter amused by the note’s misspellings. “She said, ‘I thought we were raising you better than this,’” Jackson recalled. “The memory of that [moment] has replayed throughout my life when I think about all the advantages I have been blessed to receive and how there are people who don’t have similar opportunities.”

Another formative chapter occurred during Jackson’s junior year at Harvard College, when a Confederate flag was displayed by a fellow Cabot House resident. Jackson participated in protests with the Black Students Association, as she recounts in the book. But what she focused on Thursday was the way racism functions as a distraction.

“What we needed to do was make sure we were still going to class, we were still doing our work, we were still doing well,” said Jackson, who credited this wisdom to a famous quote by the late “Beloved” author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.

Jackson briefly touched on “the mixed bag” of her parenting journey, in particular the challenge of reconciling her parents’ hard-driving “you got this, kid” model with the needs of her eldest daughter, who is on the autism spectrum. “I try to be as transparent as I can in the book about that,” she said.

Brown-Nagin, who also serves as the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School and a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts Sciences, asked about key mentors and role models. Jackson gushed about her experience clerking for retired U.S. District Judge for the Massachusetts District Patti B. Saris ’73, J.D. ’76. “She was my first real professional mentor, and we’re still very good friends,” Jackson said.

She was equally effusive about the late Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to serve as a U.S. federal judge and the subject of Brown-Nagin’s “Civil Rights Queen” (2023). Jackson learned of Motley while in middle school. It turns out, the trailblazing judges share a birthday, born on the same date 49 years apart.

Motley had been an “unbelievable” litigator, Jackson explained, winning nine of 10 cases argued at the Supreme Court before her appointment in 1966 to a U.S. District Court in New York. But ascending to the country’s highest bench simply wasn’t a possibility back then.

“I’m the first Black woman to get appointed to the Supreme Court,” Jackson said near the end of the event. “But I’m not the first Black woman who could do this job.”

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A discovery six years ago took the condensed-matter physics world by storm: Ultra-thin carbon stacked in two slightly askew layers became a superconductor, and changing the twist angle between layers could toggle their electrical properties. The landmark 2018 paper describing “magic-angle graphene superlattices” launched a new field called “twistronics,” and the first author was then-MIT graduate student and recent Harvard Junior Fellow Yuan Cao.  

Together with Harvard physicists Amir Yacoby, Eric Mazur, and others, Cao and colleagues have built on that foundational work, smoothing a path for more twistronics science by inventing an easier way to twist and study many types of materials.   

A new paper in Nature describes the team’s fingernail-sized machine that can twist thin materials at will, replacing the need to fabricate twisted devices one by one. Thin, 2D materials with properties that can be studied and manipulated easily have immense implications for higher-performance transistors, optical devices such as solar cells, and quantum computers, among other things.

“This development makes twisting as easy as controlling the electron density of 2D materials,” said Yacoby, Harvard professor of physics and applied physics. “Controlling density has been the primary knob for discovering new phases of matter in low-dimensional matter, and now, we can control both density and twist angle, opening endless possibilities for discovery.”

Cao first made twisted bilayer graphene as a graduate student in the lab of MIT’s Pablo Jarillo-Herrero. Exciting as it was, the achievement was tempered by challenges with replicating the actual twisting.

At the time, each twisted device was hard to produce, and as a result, unique and time-consuming, Cao explained. To do science with these devices, they needed tens or even hundreds of them. They wondered if they could make “one device to twist them all,” Cao said — a micromachine that could twist two layers of material at will, eliminating the need for hundreds of unique samples. They call their new device a MEMS (micro-electromechanical system)-based generic actuation platform for 2D materials, or MEGA2D for short.

The Yacoby and Mazur labs collaborated on the design of this new tool kit, which is generalizable to graphene and other materials.

“By having this new ‘knob’ via our MEGA2D technology, we envision that many underlying puzzles in twisted graphene and other materials could be resolved in a breeze,” said Cao, now an assistant professor at University of California Berkeley. “It will certainly also bring other new discoveries along the way.”

In the paper, the researchers demonstrated the utility of their device with two pieces of hexagonal boron nitride, a close relative of graphene. They were able to study the bilayer device’s optical properties, finding evidence of quasiparticles with coveted topological properties.

The ease of their new system opens several scientific roadways, for example, employing hexagonal boron nitride twistronics to produce light sources that can be used for low-loss optical communication.

“We hope that our approach will be adopted by many other researchers in this prosperous field, and all can benefit from these new capabilities,” Cao said.

The paper’s first author is nanoscience and optics expert Haoning Tang, a postdoctoral researcher in Mazur’s lab and a Harvard Quantum Initiative fellow, who noted that developing the MEGA2D technology was a long process of trial and error.

“We didn’t know much about how to control the interfaces of 2D materials in real time, and the existing methods just weren’t cutting it,” she said. “After spending countless hours in the cleanroom and refining the MEMS design — despite many failed attempts — we finally found the working solution after about a year of experiments.” All nanofabrication took place at Harvard’s Center for Nanoscale Systems, where staff provided invaluable technical support, Tang added.

“The nanofabrication of a device combining MEMS technology with a bilayer structure is a veritable tour de force,” said Mazur, the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics. “Being able to tune the nonlinear response of the resulting device opens the door to a whole new class of devices in optics and photonics.”

Federal funding for the research was provided by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Army Research Office, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the National Science Foundation.