It’s a regular occurrence when taking our canine pals for drizzly walks and summer swims. But until recently, the biology behind the water-flinging, human-drenching, muzzle-distorting “wet dog shake” has mystified scientists working to decode the sense of touch.

Last month, researchers in the lab of David Ginty, the Edward R. and Anne G. Lefler Professor of Neurobiology and chair of Harvard Medical School’s Neurobiology Department, reported in work published in the journal Science that they’d used cutting-edge techniques to track sensory signals that underlie wet dog shakes from receptors on the skin to a part of the brain called the parabrachial nucleus.

Using tools — many developed in the Ginty lab — that allow researchers to isolate and trace single neurons and stimulate or block them using light, the researchers determined that the shaking behavior can be evoked by activating a class of sensory neurons called C-LTMRs and, conversely, the number of wet dog shakes evoked by mechanical stimuli decreases when C-LTMRs and the parabrachial nucleus are muted.

Though unseen in humans, the motion is universal among fur-bearing mammals, serving as something of an early warning system that insects, dirt, water, and other substances are about to come into contact with the skin. Occurring in everything from grizzly bears to dogs and cats to lab mice, the response is innate, Ginty said, meaning that, though reflexive, it can be controlled by the animal. In humans, Ginty compared it to feeling a bug landing on your arm: You may jerk your arm or flick at it with your other hand with little thought, but it can be controlled if desired. In Ginty’s lab, researchers used droplets of sunflower oil applied to the upper back to trigger the response in mice who’d been genetically engineered so that specific neurons could be stimulated or blocked using light.

“One thing we’ve done over the last 15 to 20 years is generate genetic tools that allow us to study each of the sensory neurons that associate with the skin in isolation and that’s been incredibly powerful,” Ginty said.

The skin has approximately 20 different types of sensory receptors, including those that detect hot, cold, itch, and touch. Twelve or so receptors detect different types of touch, from a quick stab of pain to vibration to steady pressure to a soft caress. The signal triggering the “wet dog shake” starts in C-LTMRs, or C-fiber low threshold mechanoreceptors, which wrap around the base of a hair follicle. The receptor is one of the body’s most sensitive and can pick up the slightest movement of the hair or a depression of the skin around the hair’s base.

From the receptor, the signal travels along nerve cells into the spine, where it joins with the spinal cord. The signals then emerge from the spinal cord and travel to the brain stem and the parabrachial nucleus. Beyond enhancing our understanding of a basic and familiar mammalian behavior, Ginty said that the techniques developed have allowed researchers to overcome a major hurdle — understanding what’s going on inside the spinal cord.

“We understand the logic of organization of the neural circuitry that underlies visual information processing and sound information processing,” said Ginty, whose lab has been focused on unravelling the neurobiology of touch for decades. “For touch — for somatosensory information processing — we’re kind of in a black box trying to understand it because it’s been so challenging to access and record neural activity in the spinal cord.”

Though they’ve tracked the signal to a specific location in the brain, Ginty said many questions remain. An important one is understanding whether the pathway they identified accounts for all the wet dog shake response or, given the limitations of their functional manipulations, if there’s more going on than they were able to see.

“We’re struggling to answer that question, because the tools we typically use are rarely 100 percent effective in blocking one of these steps,” Ginty said. “So, you never know if a residual 10 percent underlies the remaining behavior or if there’s another pathway or another cell type that you’re missing. In this case, I guess it’s the latter, but we can’t be sure.”

Another important question in the work, supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Lefler Center for the Study of Neurodegenerative Disorders, is why, if C-LTMR receptors are located all over the body, do only those on the upper middle back trigger the response?

From a behavioral standpoint, the answer is clear — that part of the body is out of reach of claws and paws and hooves for swatting or scratching — but that doesn’t explain how nerve signals from that part of the body trigger the wet dog shake while other signals that begin in the same type of receptor and go to the same part of the brain do not. Perhaps, Ginty said, the signals emanating from the nerves originating on the upper middle back propagate to unique regions of the parabrachial nucleus from those originating elsewhere on the body. Another possibility, he said, is that the signal from the upper back is somehow amplified in the spinal cord before reaching the brain.

Though Ginty is a dog lover, he said the work began not out of an appreciation for dogs but by accident. Dawei Zhang, then a graduate student in Ginty’s lab, was using optical tools to activate the then-mysterious pathway beginning with C-LTMR and noticed that every time he did, the mouse would give itself a shake. When Zhang and Ginty saw the reaction, they immediately realized what it was.

“It’s a very exciting time to understand brain-body physiology: how the body is represented in the brain and how the brain, in turn, controls organ systems of the body,” Ginty said. “Some of the new tools coming online are really powerful for helping us unravel these circuits.”

Meroë Morse had no formal background in business or science when she started at Polaroid in 1945, but within a few years she rose to become manager of black-and-white photographic research and later to director of special photographic research, a notable achievement for a woman in the 1950s and ’60s.

A new exhibition at the Business School’s Baker Library is putting the focus on Morse and her contributions to the development of instant photography — launched commercially by Polaroid in 1948. The collection, “From Concept to Product: Meroë Morse and Polaroid’s Culture of Art and Innovation, 1945–1969,” on view in Baker’s north lobby through April 18, draws on the library’s extensive holdings of the Polaroid Corporation Collection.

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Research in black and white

In 1948, Morse became the laboratory supervisor responsible for photographic materials. The earliest Polaroid film, Type 40, produced sepia-toned prints that had limited tonal range. Morse and her lab looked to produce black-and-white images that exhibited greater detail and a color palette more familiar and appealing to consumers. In 1950, after two years of intensive work, the company introduced black-and-white film Type 41. The film produced prints that exhibited finer detail and, as U.S. Camera enthused, created “pictures-in-a-minute of exceptional tonal values.” The Detroit Free Press reported that Land credited Morse with “valuable assistance in research that led to the new film.”

Ansel Adams and Polaroid

Morse also served as chief liaison to Ansel Adams, the renowned landscape photographer. A principal consultant for Polaroid from 1948 until his death in 1984, Adams tested the company’s prototype cameras and film. He reviewed technical and design aspects of Polaroid prototypes, from the wording of instruction manuals to the tonal values of finished prints.

The exhibition was organized by Baker Library Special Collections and Archives, with support from the de Gaspé Beaubien Family Endowment. This text is drawn from the exhibition catalog. Find more information at the Baker Library website.

Gazette photographer Stephanie Mitchell has been conducting a bit of an experiment inspired by her own college years — specifically the address by Nora Ephron to Wellesley’s Class of 1996 expressing, “You are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever.” She met with a group of Harvard students during their first year and sophomore year, photographed them, and asked them to describe themselves in three words. The students, now juniors, participated in the exercise once again. The three words they chose appear below in gray (2022), dark gray (2023), and black (2024).

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Free. Independent. Friendly.

Independent. Free. Possibility.

Free. Independent. Creativity.

When we first spoke to Chavez in 2022, the student from Hidalgo, Mexico, noted that she was “learning how to be independent for the first time, leaving home and my country.”

This year, she said: “I’m growing. I’m an adult. I have the freedom of choosing my own path, making decisions, making mistakes, and learning from them.”

In all three of her interviews, Chavez described herself as “free” and independent.” She added a new descriptor this year: creativity. “It gives you the tools to solve problems, not only academically, but in your life.”

As a first-year, she listed women’s and gender studies and sociology as academic interests. By the fall of her sophomore year, she was leaning toward a government concentration in the law and justice track with a secondary in economics. Chavez has since declared a government concentration with a language citation in French. She is considering a senior thesis in political theory and a career in law.

“As a perfectionist or overachiever, you always want to have things in control,” said Chavez, but lately she is happier because “I don’t think about those expectations anymore, only my own.”

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God-loving. Adventurous. Passionate.

God-loving. Adventurous. Kind.

God-loving. Grateful. Composed.

Two years ago, Zimbabwe native Chinhara characterized himself as an “adventurous” person with “diverse interests,” from electrical engineering to rugby to playing the marimba. He credited Christianity and love of family as guiding forces.

“I still pray every day. I still love my religion,” said Chinhara. He’s added two new descriptors this year.

“Grateful, because I wake up every day, and I realize that I go to Harvard, which was one of my biggest dreams growing up. … Grateful for my mom. She passed away, but she lived a beautiful life. … And then composed, because I’m a junior now. I know how things work. I’ve made mistakes, and I’ve learned from them. I’m now at a point where I know what I want. I know how to pursue it.”

Chinhara’s interest in computer science hasn’t wavered as he tilts toward tech entrepreneurship and product management. In 2023, he launched a software development startup. He said he will declare a secondary in economics and is considering business school.

Last spring, he “started reaching out more, talking to more people, going to office hours.”

“It dramatically improved my academic life, my social life, my mental health.”

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Fun. Kind. Excited.

Grateful. Motivated. Hopeful.

Energized. Grateful. Inspired.

“Building relationships is the most important thing to me,” said Bhathena in her first-year interview. That theme continues today. She feels energized, she said, “reflecting on the people who have gotten me here.”

“It brings me back to my family — my grandparents, my parents, my siblings. I was lucky to spend the end of the summer with a lot of them, and they always ground me.”

Bhathena has completed many foundational requirements for her economics concentration and is turning to her secondary in global health and health policy. Interning at Boston Children’s Hospital doing research this past summer has only reaffirmed her pre-med track. “I am really excited to dedicate my career to medicine and to caring for people.”

She has moved into mentorship roles in clubs and the classroom, for example serving as a Teaching Fellow for EC10. “I love teaching, and I’m excited to meet new freshmen in the class who are just as nervous and scared as I was.”

This year, “I am a more balanced person,” Bhathena said. “Time has given me more freedom to just be myself and take some deep breaths and enjoy my last two years here.”

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Friendly. Excitable. Ambitious.

Approachable. Adaptable. Vibrant.

Evolving. Ambitious. Present.

Omoloja spent the summer back home in Wisconsin. “I had a lot of time to think and contemplate my priorities. There’s so much I need to do and that I want to do in this life.”

In her first Gazette interview Omoloja said she was most looking forward to “immense personal discovery that everyone mentions when thinking about college.”

Now a junior cognizant of how quickly time is passing, she said, “In the past, I spent so much time looking down, be that at my phone, or as I walk, looking at the floor, because I’m thinking about how all these people are seeing me. But now, I really want to pay attention, to be present. Every time I look around, I think, ‘Wow, this world is so pretty, and I want to just take that in more.’”

Reflecting on last year, Omoloja said, “I learned to advocate for myself more. … My biggest lesson was although it is important to show kindness and to have community, it shouldn’t go at the expense of your personal comfort and happiness. … I’m more comfortable in my identity this year. I’m very happy to be me.”

“Ambitious,” a word she used to define herself in 2022, re-emerged as she studies for the MCAT and takes the courses “Medicine and Health in America” and “Therapeutic Rationalities,” concrete steps toward becoming a doctor.

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Adventurous. Ambitious. Authentic.

Excited. Fun. Adventurous.

Excited. Relaxed. Melancholy.

Wang describes himself as both excited and relaxed this year. “I think believing in yourself and having confidence is really important,” and when things become hectic “it’s good to be relaxed and Zen.”

Rejuvenated from a summer of seeing friends and family, doing genetic computational research at the Medical School, and volunteering at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter, Wang also feels a bit melancholic.

“I looked down at my Pset, and I look up, and it’s already junior year. It went by really quickly … I’m looking forward to the second half.”

Since his last interview, the Canada native has declared his concentration in chemical and physical biology with a secondary in computer science and has continued to find ways to break out of his comfort zone, a goal he emphasized in previous years.

Ringing the Lowell House bells every Sunday has been “super fun.” He shares the recruitment joke for the bells, known for waking up students at the bright hour of 1 p.m. on Sundays: “If you feel like you’re too well liked, feel free to join!”

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Creative. Passionate. Fun.

Enthusiastic. Creative/Artistic. Natural.

Creative. Mellow. Open.

Creativity has been a constant for Gone over the past three years. “It’s a great way for me to engage with the world and understand what people think and feel.”

This year, “I’m not as worried about what’s going to happen. I’m just living in the moment. I am really trying to put myself out there and try new things. Now is such a formative time in my life.”

Gone has declared a concentration in women, gender, and sexuality with a secondary in psychology, and is currently taking a history class about the relationship between guns, property, and power, as well as a First Amendment seminar. “I’m in my amendment era, one might say.”

Last year Gone helped stage-manage for the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club musical “Jekyll and Hyde” and the musical comedy “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” and continues this year with the musical “Pippin.”

A key lesson from sophomore year: how to find balance and take breaks between time commitments.

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Excited. Determined. Outgoing

Excited. Passionate. Ambitious.

Growth. Excited. Passionate.

Softball continues to be a focus for Flynn, a rise ball and curveball pitcher who was named Ivy League Rookie of the Year in 2023. While athletics can be time-consuming, she enjoys the camaraderie while traveling the country with her teammates.

Last season, Flynn underwent elbow surgery. “I’m finding my way, working through rehab, and my team has been great through all of that, supporting me and helping me. I should be able to play in the spring.”

What else has changed? “My first years were definitely more about exploring, and this year, I have found things that I am passionate about, whether it’s making friends, playing sports, what I’m studying, and I’m definitely going to go deeper into that in the next two years.”

She’s delving into her concentration in human developmental and regenerative biology with a neuroscience secondary, taking courses in organic chemistry and psychopharmacology.

“I feel that I’ve found my place here and now it’s more about growing in order to continue finding people and places that I love.”

Whether examining animal ethics, combating AI bias, or weighing the values essential to a functioning democracy, Harvard’s newest Rhodes Scholars have made their mark across a wide expanse of disciplines. These eight seniors, representing four countries and several U.S. states, will continue their academic pursuits at the University of Oxford next year. They shared their plans, accomplishments, and what it was like to receive the news of their award.   

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Matthew Anzarouth was at home with family in Montreal when he got the phone call that he had won a Rhodes Scholarship for Canada. Anzarouth was one of two recipients from the region that includes Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritime provinces.

“I felt a mix of shock, excitement, and profound gratitude,” Anzarouth said. “This opportunity is an extraordinary privilege, and I’m really keen to make the most of it.”

Anzarouth is currently writing a thesis on Canadian federalism and multiculturalism, with an emphasis on language policy in Quebec and Indigenous self-determination. The Mather House resident is using political theory to examine the challenge of reconciling universal individual rights with group rights specific to Canada’s national minorities.

“I’m using political theory as a way of understanding — and hopefully better resolving — the challenge of coexistence in a culturally diverse federation,” Anzarouth said. “The thesis work has helped me stay engaged with my country’s politics and reflect on how I want to contribute.”

On campus, Anzarouth is an undergraduate research fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and an editor and podcast host for the Harvard Political Review. 

At Oxford, he hopes to continue his studies of political theory, focusing on questions of how to balance competing claims for cultural preservation and how to balance power between legislative and judicial bodies of government. He hopes to eventually attend law school.

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The summer after her first year on campus, Lena Ashooh worked as a research assistant in Puerto Rico, studying the impacts of natural disaster and trauma on the behavior of a colony of free-ranging macaque monkeys. It was a pivotal moment for the Kirkland House resident, who said it felt like observing an “extremely sophisticated society of individuals.”

“That was where I initially had the idea that, were the conditions that animals are in to change completely, they might behave in ways that we never imagined,” Ashooh said. “This led me, in philosophy, to working out how we might wrong animals in the beliefs we have about them and to be interested in how we’re managing land, the decisions we’re making about who has access to land, and who should be involved in the decision-making process.”

Ashooh designed a special concentration in animal studies, combining political philosophy, government, and animal psychology. She is an undergraduate fellow at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, has written for the Harvard Review of Philosophy, and co-founded Harvard College Animal Advocates. Off-campus, she works as a lab manager in animal cognition scientist Irene Pepperberg’s parrot lab at Boston University.

“I say that to study animal studies is to study social injustice and gives us a new way of understanding how oppression and violence occurs, and how moral complacency and inaction occur,” said Ashooh, who is planning to eventually attend law school. “One of the key questions that animal studies allows us to address is: How is it that people can be led to look at suffering and decide not to act on it?”

Ashooh hopes to study philosophy next year, focusing on the question of what it means to treat and respect an animal as an individual.

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As an undergraduate researcher in different Harvard labs, Shahmir Aziz has analyzed the impact of physical exertion on the glycolytic levels of diabetes patients and has investigated nano-lipids as potential drug delivery vesicles. As an intern at Novo Nordisk, he has focused on optimization of drug-delivery processes. 

He wants to keep working on the cutting edges of biotechnology, and he wants to help others do so as well, in his native Pakistan. 

“In the long run, I hope to help start a culture of startups and biotech in Pakistan, so that students and other innovators can grow out their ideas,” said the Adams House resident named one of two Rhodes Scholars for Pakistan.  

A first-year course in quantitative physiology taught by Linsey Moyer solidified Aziz’ chosen field of study. He also took courses in government and political philosophy, feeding an equal passion for international relations. 

At Oxford, Aziz plans to pursue a master’s in bioengineering, followed by a second degree in diplomacy and global governance — arenas in which he’s also made meaningful contributions on campus.

A member of the leadership team of Harvard’s International Relations Council, Aziz helped the University’s Model United Nations team win two major intercollegiate competitions. “The opportunity I have cherished most at Harvard has been to interact with students from all extremes and opposites of background, pursuing all nature of subjects, and dreaming all ranges of noble dreams,” Aziz wrote in his scholarship application. 

Some of those interactions have come in his four years playing Harvard Club Tennis, as a sports editor with The Harvard Crimson, and as a course assistant in the Department of Mathematics. 

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Tommy Barone wants to understand what people believe, and why.

Barone currently is studying what he calls a “crisis of liberalism,” or the philosophical values essential to healthy democracy. In particular he’s interested in how best to understand the beliefs of people engaging in illiberalism in democratic societies.

“It’s so easy to create a narrative about why something important or worrying or disruptive in society is happening that serves your ends,” Barone said. “I think it’s a civic obligation that we listen to what people have to say and try to understand them. If you are trying to theorize something that involves people without speaking and listening to the people who are part of that phenomenon, you’re going to be missing something.”

Barone said that when he learned he had been named a Rhodes Scholar, all he could do was start “breathing heavily.”

“I didn’t cry until I called my parents,” Barone recalled. “Then I cried. Then I had to get it together to talk to the judges afterward.” 

The Currier House resident, who hopes to pursue journalism in the future, is co-chair for the editorial board at The Crimson. Their coverage won first place for editorial writing in collegiate journalism in the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2023 Mark of Excellence Awards.

“I’ve had the unique challenge, but also the really educational, enriching experience, of being tasked with bringing people together to have difficult discussions in one of the most challenging years on campus in decades,” said Barone, who plans to study history at Oxford. “I’ve had the privilege to publish a really broad diversity of perspectives on a range of important issues on campus.”

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From watching her mother commute several hours a day for work in Maryland to biking throughout her community, Sofia Corona learned early on that how people move is fundamental to the human experience. 

Helping people get where they need to go — within cities, towns, and systems that benefit all — has become her life’s work. “I’m interested in how communities are engaged in infrastructure planning, especially when the benefits of that infrastructure are collective and widespread, but the burdens are localized,” said Corona, a Currier House resident graduating in December. 

Corona, who hopes to work in the transportation sector, thinks seismic shifts toward sustainable modes of transportation are possible. “At the same time, our transportation networks are often superimposed on inherited, segregated landscapes, both racially and socioeconomically,” she said. “We can’t be agnostic to that.” 

At Oxford, Corona’s master’s coursework will contextualize mobility systems within broader economic development and sustainability frameworks. At Harvard, she worked in the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, conducting research on inclusive decision-making in renewable energy projects. She also spent time in the MIT Transit Lab. Her professional experience includes internships at Uber, BMW, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and McKinsey & Co. 

Her interests have taken her all over the world, from working on carbon dioxide pricing for the Chilean Ministry of Finance to collaborating with researchers at the Technical University of Munich on a tool that advises local transit agencies. 

The Colombian American was a walk-on on Harvard’s varsity sailing team and is an avid mountaineer with the summits of Denali and Kilimanjaro among her feats, and she has run the Boston, New York, and Berlin marathons. Among her most cherished moments at Harvard have been as a dog-walker to Currier House dogs Huckleberry and Ari.  

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Waiting in a room with other Rhodes Scholar finalists, Aneesh Muppidi did a homework problem set and chatted about South Asian politics, having already made peace with not winning. 

“In my head I thought, ‘This has been an amazing process, but now it’s time to go back to the real world,’” the Lowell House resident said. 

Then, he heard his name.   

“I called my little brother first,” he said, followed by his parents and two best friends. 

Muppidi has spent time mulling the question Alan Turing famously posed in 1950: Can machines think? He’s come to believe that understanding human intelligence — and computationally scaling up that intelligence — can solve some of the world’s biggest problems, such as diagnosing complex medical conditions or giving personalized tutors to every child in every classroom. 

At Harvard, he’s immersed himself in the power and promise of artificial intelligence through projects on deep reinforcement learning in Assistant Professor Heng Yang’s Computational Robotics Lab; particle filter machine learning algorithms with the Fiete Lab at MIT; and autonomous agent detection with Professor Sam Gershman’s Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.

Outside the lab, Muppidi is equally passionate about AI policy and ethics. Ensuring technologies are developed safely is a cornerstone of Muppidi’s research, which he plans to continue while pursuing master’s coursework in computer science and public policy at Oxford. 

Muppidi served as president of Harvard Dharma and as president of the Harvard Computational Neuroscience Undergraduate Society. He includes among his mentors Sanskrit instructor Nell Shapiro Hawley, now at Vassar College, with whom he took two years of the ancient language of India. “How she taught had a very beautiful effect on my life, in the sense that I was able to get closer to my spiritual identity, who I am as a person, and what I believe in.” 

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When Ayush Noori was 7, his grandmother, Munira Brooks, was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurodegenerative disease that slowly robbed her of the ability to speak, move, or breathe. Assisting in her care and witnessing her long struggle inspired Noori to pursue science and medicine. “My mission is to give people with neurological disease more time with their loved ones,” said Noori.

Noori has championed this mission for nearly a decade. Since the age of 12, working or volunteering in various labs, he has conducted research at the intersection of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and precision medicine, seeking to develop new AI-enabled diagnostic and treatment options for patients with neurological disorders.

As an undergraduate, Noori has authored 25 peer-reviewed publications — including seven as first author — in scientific journals including Cell, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Aging, Alzheimer’s & Dementia, and NBD, and his work has been featured at more than a dozen international conferences. He has been advised by professors including Marinka Zitnik at Harvard Medical School; George Church at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Materials; and Sudeshna Das, Alberto Serrano-Pozo, and Bradley T. Hyman in the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He plans to do graduate study in clinical neurosciences at Oxford next year. 

The recipient of more than a dozen fellowships at Harvard and a Roberts Family Fellow at Harvard Business School, the Goldwater Scholar and Adams House resident is also devoted to teaching and mentorship as co-founder of the Harvard Undergraduate OpenBio Laboratory and as a peer adviser at Harvard College.

“I have an immense debt of gratitude toward Harvard because I’ve studied and trained here since I was a teenager,” he said. “The College, SEAS, MGH, and Harvard Medical School have enabled me to contribute to the global fight against neurological disease and given me hope for a healthier future, for my loved ones, and for the world.”

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Laura Wegner, Currier House resident and Germany Rhodes Scholarship recipient, wants to address patients’ fragmented medical records and revolutionize healthcare technology to improve patient outcomes.

It’s a cause driven by personal experience. While in high school, Wegner, formerly a competitive swimmer, had to undergo surgery for a knee injury. Doctors used the “wrong surgical method,” Wegner said, due to not having access to her full medical history, including information about a pre-existing health condition, leaving her unable to continue swimming.

“That was a personal experience where I thought, ‘Wow, parts of my patient data are stored in so many different places, and I wish they were together somehow.’”

To improve experiences for future patients, Wegner co-founded the startup Mii in 2022, a patient healthcare passport that securely stores patient data so patients can bring their medical history from doctor to doctor, around the world. 

Wegner has taken Harvard courses in health economics, privacy and technology, and entrepreneurship, and has worked as a fellow with the Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship. Eager for global perspectives, Wegner has studied digital healthcare systems in the U.S., Germany, and Australia, and she is writing her thesis on systems in Estonia and Lithuania.

Looking forward to improving her technical skills at Oxford with the hope of continuing her work in healthcare technology, Wegner says she loves both the creative and technical sides of entrepreneurship.

“It’s just about having an idea and then immediately being able to build a prototype, test it out, and see where it goes. It’s an amazing opportunity to bring any idea to life, and hopefully have it improve people’s lives.” 

The Democrats got it wrong.

It wasn’t threats to national security or democracy, and it wasn’t the U.S. Supreme Court’s undoing of Roe v. Wade. What voters cared most about this election was “safety, affordability, fairness, and education,” said Republican operative Kellyanne Conway during a sometimes testy 90-minute talk at the JFK Jr. Forum about the 2024 election and what to expect from the incoming Trump administration. 

That’s why ads and other messaging about crime, inflation, immigration, student loan forgiveness, and school choice proved so effective in the campaigns of President-elect Donald Trump and several other Republican candidates, she told Setti Warren, director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School. 

Trump won by running up the numbers of voters already predisposed to vote for him and “peeling off” some support among “core Democratic” Party constituencies, including African Americans, Hispanic Americans, union households, Jewish, and younger voters, improving on his own 2016 and 2020 numbers, said Conway, who managed the final months of Trump’s 2016 campaign and served as an adviser during his first term.

Conway said she thinks Democrats underestimated how motivating the issue of K-12 education was to many across the political spectrum, particularly women, who did not support Harris as robustly as they had Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

Trump was seen as “authentic” and a proven commodity who had already done the job and ran a “joyful” and “forward-looking” campaign, she said, pointing to Trump’s visit to a McDonald’s franchise, rallies at concert venues, and his garbage truck ride. 

Conway credited the campaign’s embrace of “new, new media” like TikTok, podcasts, and social media influencers, as a strategic move that paid real dividends in the final weeks reaching young men and low propensity voters. Also important was the campaign’s under-reported effort to educate disengaged voters about the many ways they could cast a ballot before Election Day, which also helped the former president prevail. 

Over the past two weeks, Trump has announced more than two dozen nominees for White House and Cabinet positions, primarily top campaign staffers and high-profile business executives.

“What they all have in common is they know him; he knows them; and they are fluent in the America First agenda, meaning: This is what we’ve been elected to do,” Conway said. “So he’s got people who are willing to work with alacrity and energy to get that agenda through.”

At times, Conway flashed the quick and cutting fast-talk that has made her a polarizing figure on the left, sparring with student questioners.

She called for students to try to bring their friends who suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome” back to their senses.

“You all know someone afflicted by it. … It wrecks the nervous system. It addles the brain. There is no vaccine, cure, or therapeutic, but you all have a role to play in helping people at least unwind a little bit from it” by not canceling those who have a different point of view. 

“I certainly hope that the new government that’s forming can rely upon, if not all of you right away, most of you along the way, to help in any way, shape, or form that you possibly can,” she said.

In a new analysis of national data, an estimated 137 million U.S. adults, more than half of the adult population, would qualify for the anti-obesity drug semagludtide.

“These staggering numbers mean that we are likely to see large increases in spending on semaglutide and related medications in years to come,” said corresponding author Dhruv S. Kazi, associate director of the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Center for Outcomes Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “Ensuring equitable access to these effective but high-cost medications, as well as supporting individuals so that they can stay on the therapy long-term, should be a priority for our clinicians and policymakers.”

The findings, which were presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions and simultaneously published in JAMA Cardiology, underscore the need to increase equitable access to this new class of pharmaceuticals.

Semaglutide belongs to a class of drugs known as GLP-1 receptor agonists. It is currently approved to manage diabetes, treat overweight or obesity, and of recurrent cardiovascular disease. About 15 million adults take semaglutide, which stimulates the pancreas to produce insulin and reduces the hunger hormone ghrelin, decreasing the appetite and slowing down the rate of stomach emptying. As a result, semaglutide helps lower blood sugar levels and promotes weight loss.

Semaglutide is found to improve symptoms in sleep apnea and in some types of heart failure, and slows the progression of chronic kidney disease.

In 2023, it was the top-selling drug in the U.S. in terms of total pharmaceutical spending. But rapidly emerging data about its effectiveness for other health conditions is likely to further expand its use in future years. For instance, semaglutide is found to improve symptoms in sleep apnea and in some types of heart failure, and slows the progression of chronic kidney disease. Semaglutide and others in its class are currently being evaluated for treatment of liver and kidney diseases, substance use disorders, and dementia.

Ivy Shi, who is a resident in internal medicine at BIDMC, worked with Kazi to produce the analysis. They used five years’ worth of recent data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a long-running survey of the U.S. population run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to identify U.S. adults aged 18 years or older who would be eligible for semaglutide treatment based on currently approved indications. They analyzed information about 25,531 survey participants gathered through in-person interviews, physical examinations, and laboratory testing.

They found that of the 136.8 million U.S. adults who qualified for semaglutide, 35 million would administer it for diabetes management, 129.2 million for weight loss, and 8.9 million for secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease. The semaglutide-eligible population includes 26.8 million adults covered by Medicare, 13.8 million covered by Medicaid, and 61.1 million covered by commercial insurance.

“The large number of U.S. adults eligible for semaglutide highlights its potential transformative impact on population health,” said Shi. “Prior studies have shown that more than half of the individuals who have taken these medications state the therapy was difficult to afford. Interventions to reduce economic barriers to access are urgently needed.”

Co-authors: Ivy Shi, Robert W. Yeh, Jennifer E. Ho, and Issa Dahabreh of BIDMC; and Sadiya S. Khan of Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University.

Disclosures: Sadiya S. Khan reported grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute outside the submitted work. Jennifer E. Ho reported grants from the National Institutes of Health during the conduct of the study. Issa Dahabreh reported a contract with the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute and grants from the National Institutes of Health during the conduct of the study. Kazi reported grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, American Heart Institute, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and Institute for Clinical and Economic Research outside the submitted work. No other disclosures were reported.

Funding/support: Dahabreh is supported by grants from the National Library of Medicine (R01 LM013616), the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (R01 HL136708), and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (ME-2021C2-22365).

For many Crimson football fans, devotion can be measured by consecutive years of attendance at the Harvard-Yale game. But Saturday’s showdown will be a first for the man who now leads their beloved program.

“All the time I was playing at Princeton, and coaching at Princeton, I was kind of jealous of Harvard-Yale,” said Andrew Aurich, Thomas Stephenson Family Head Coach for Harvard Football. “I’m really excited to experience it.”

The first-time head coach, who came to Harvard from Rutgers University, has led the Crimson to an impressive 8-1 record. The team clinched at least a share of the Ivy League title with a dramatic win over the University of Pennsylvania last weekend, making Aurich the first head football coach in Harvard history to win a league title in his first season.

We caught up with Aurich to learn more about preparations for one of the biggest dates on the Crimson calendar. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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The Crimson are having a great season under your leadership. To what do you attribute your early success?  

Former head coach Tim Murphy played a big part in what’s happening this year. When I got here, it was very clear these players were already training to win a championship. They are very tough mentally. We’ve had some close games where our ability to focus at the end, and really execute, has allowed us to win.

Tell me about your leadership style.

One of the core parts of our culture is 100 percent honesty; the players are always going to get 100 percent honesty from me. Whether or not they like what they hear, they should know it’s coming from a good place. I expect the same from them. If there’s a better way to do something, I want to find a way to do that.

What changes have you brought to the program?

My plan all along was to get an Ivy League head coaching job. But my experiences outside the league helped me see there were opportunities to help these young men become better players and a better team overall. If you ask them, they’ll say there’s a little more emphasis on sports science, whether it’s in the weight room or the emphasis we’re putting on nutrition, hydration, and sleep.

You said something interesting just now — that you always wanted to be a head coach in the Ivy League. Say more about that.

I knew I wanted to get into coaching when I was playing at Princeton. My dad had been my high school football coach, so I went back to St. Paul, Minnesota, and coached with him for a year and confirmed that I loved it. I ended up at a small Division 3 school in Pennsylvania for two years, and then I got the opportunity to go to Rutgers for my first stint as a defensive assistant.

From there I got the running backs coaching job at Princeton. My experience with the student-athletes there was so enjoyable. They’re just so driven and fun to be around. The next year I went to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers with my former boss at Rutgers, coach Greg Schiano. But as soon I got to the NFL, I immediately thought: “The Ivy League is where it’s at, I’ve got to do everything I can to become an Ivy League head football coach.”

What happened next?

I ended up back at Princeton. I was there for a long time, but saw that I needed something more than just Ivy League experience. When coach Schiano got the head coaching job at Rutgers again, I knew that working for him would help prepare me for success.

Landing the top job at Harvard must have felt like a dream fulfilled.

I was on the road recruiting with coach Schiano as the whole hiring process was underway. He doesn’t know the Ivy League all that well, so he was trying to get some perspective. “What is it like?” he wanted to know. I told him: “Coach, this is like being at Ohio State or [University of] Michigan in the Big Ten.” The entire time I was at Princeton — whether I was a player or a coach — I saw Harvard as top dog in the Ivy League.

How are you preparing for Yale?

Well, there’s definitely a different kind of energy right now. My job is to make sure our players are going about their business the same way they have been for the last nine weeks. This game means a lot to a lot of people. Even the level of the interest from the outside, including the number of media requests, is completely different from previous weeks. But ultimately, I can’t get caught up in it. Because if I am, I know the players are.

The Crimson fell to the Bulldogs in 2022 and ’23, but you’re the favorite this year. What do you hope to see on the field Saturday?

I want to see a team that is protecting the football on offense, that is taking the ball away in defense. I want to see a team that is executing 11 guys every play. I want to see a team that’s on the attack every single play. That’s how we define ourselves as a football program.

Will you get to participate in any of the fun stuff this weekend?

Hopefully the fun stuff I’ll be doing is celebrating a win.

In a passage from “Lovely One,” Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson ’92, J.D. ’96, is a Harvard College first-year drawing a smiley face in her notes for the course “Justice.”

“I want to laugh at the way my mind spins as I listen to the opinions being expressed,” she writes in a College essay excerpted in the new memoir. “I want to know the answers. I glimpse that there are no answers. Yet to wonder is not enough. We must never stop asking the questions.”

On Tuesday, Jackson was met by 800-plus smiles — and a standing ovation — as she returned to visit a course that proved influential in her life. Welcoming her at Sanders Theatre was Michael J. Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, who has taught “Justice” since 1980. Jackson credits Sandel’s Gen Ed offering with building her confidence while instilling a passion for healthy debate.

“I felt myself expanding and growing more visible to myself as I engaged the great philosophical conundrums,” she writes in the book. “The animated discussions about open-ended ethical dilemmas made me come completely alive.”

Seated with Jackson under the bright stage lights, Sandel invited students to engage with the issue of affirmative action while drawing on insights from influential philosophers, ancient and modern. Primary readings this semester include works from Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls. But the syllabus also features the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision rejecting affirmative-action policies at Harvard College and the University of North Carolina.

Some students lined up to share responses to Jackson’s dissent in the UNC case. (She recused herself in the case of Harvard, having served on its Board of Overseers.) Jackson may have been a quiet participant in “Justice” three decades ago, as she notes in the book. But she was much less so on her return to the two-hour lecture as she laid out her legal and moral reasoning on affirmative action. The whole exchange was off the record.

Taking the stage to address the class for the final 45 minutes of the session was Margaret Marshall, Ed.M. ’69, former chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Sandel assigned students to read her 2003 opinion in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which established the right to same-sex marriage for the first time in U.S. history. Sandel said that Marshall’s opinion is a rare piece of legal writing with the resonance of prayer. It has found second life as a popular reading at weddings nationwide.

Harvard announced on Wednesday the formation of the Consortium for Climate Solutions, a first-of-its-kind renewable energy collaboration of higher education, healthcare, and cultural institutions, as well as state and local government entities, led by Harvard, Mass General Brigham (MGB), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 

The consortium will leverage its members’ collective purchasing power to overcome market conditions that serve as barriers to development of projects that advance cost-effective renewable energy and allow for larger-scale investment.

“Investing in new, large-scale renewables marks a significant step forward for Harvard in its commitment to a clean energy future,” said Meredith Weenick, executive vice president. “By founding the consortium with MIT and MGB, we are not only catalyzing the transition to a cleaner grid but also demonstrating a collaboration model that will enable a variety of nonprofit organizations and municipalities to work together to address the urgent challenges of climate change.”

The consortium recently finalized negotiations that will result in the development of 408 megawatts of new renewable energy through two large-scale, utility-grade projects — the Big Elm Solar in Bell County, Texas, and the Bowman Wind Project in Bowman County, North Dakota. The 200-megawatt Big Elm Solar project came online earlier this year, and the 208-megawatt Bowman Wind project is expected to come online in 2026. Collectively these projects will generate clean power equal to the electricity use of 130,000 U.S. homes annually.

“With these new utility-scale renewable electricity projects, Harvard will purchase the equivalent of 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, fulfilling a key component of our approach to meet our goal to be fossil fuel-neutral by 2026, while we simultaneously work on the longer-term effort to decarbonize our historic and urban campus,” explained Heather Henriksen, Harvard’s chief sustainability officer. 

Achieving fossil-fuel neutrality by 2026 is a bridging strategy to mitigate the negative impact of fossil fuels on emission levels and air pollution while the University develops longer-term technology and infrastructure changes to eliminate its use of fossil fuels by 2050. In addition to purchasing electricity from renewable sources, the University looks to seek greater energy efficiency and heat recovery on campus, replace fossil-fuel equipment at the end of life, increase its electric vehicle fleet, and find other reductions of fossil-fuel use.

“There is plenty of scientific evidence that fossil fuels are negatively impacting health, community stability, and ecosystems around the world. As Harvard continues on its path to become a fossil fuel-free campus, it is critical that the University not only conduct research on how to drive down global emissions and bolster adaptation, but to use our purchasing power to help produce cost-effective renewable energy solutions at scale,” said Mike Toffel, the Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management at Harvard Business School, faculty chair of the Business and Environment Initiative at HBS, and co-chair of the Presidential Committee on Sustainability. “The consortium is an excellent example of engaging with the renewable electricity markets to expand their scale and impact.” 

The consortium founding members, Harvard, MGB, and MIT, sought opportunities to collaborate with smaller nonprofits and municipalities. This resulted in the partnership with PowerOptions, a nonprofit energy-buying organization, enabling the city of Cambridge, Beth Israel Lahey, Boston Children’s Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Tufts University, the Mass. Convention Center Authority, the Museum of Fine Arts, and WGBH to join under the PowerOptions umbrella. The consortium is providing PowerOptions members with access to affordable, large-scale renewable energy purchases that would typically be out of reach for individual buyers. 

The creation of the consortium, supported by Harvard’s leadership, was led by the Office for Sustainability working with faculty and other key stakeholders. The projects chosen for investment align with the recommendations and criteria set forth by the Fossil Fuel-Neutral by 2026 Subcommittee of the University’s Presidential Committee on Sustainability. The consortium vetted more than 100 potential projects, ultimately choosing the Big Elm Solar and Bowman Wind projects from developer Apex Clean Energy.

Locally, the consortium’s power-purchase agreements with the Big Elm and Bowman projects will enable its members to accelerate progress toward their individual sustainability goals consistent with local emissions-reduction regulatory targets, while simultaneously reducing fossil fuel emissions at a national scale. 

“The locations and scale of each project, in two of the most carbon-intensive electrical grid regions in the United States, mean that the potential positive impact is significant, creating a more robust and cleaner grid,” explained Henriksen.

At the Ketamine Clinic for Depression at Massachusetts General Hospital, patients make their way each day to receive intravenous infusions of the powerful anesthetic that has become an alternative therapy for treatment-resistant depression. 

Many of the clinic’s patients have not been helped by traditional treatments, including psychological counseling, antidepressant medication, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and electroconvulsive therapy. With its rapid antidepressant effects, ketamine is sometimes the only option that provides relief, said clinic founder and director Cristina Cusin, who has been researching depression and mood disorders for the past 25 years.  

“We don’t have good weapons to treat some severe forms of depression, just like we don’t have treatments for advanced-stage cancer,” said Cusin, who is also an associate professor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “We’re always looking for the next thing so that we can continue to offer hope to patients who don’t respond to standard treatments.”

In 2000, after a study reported that small doses of IV ketamine rapidly reversed symptoms of depression while standard antidepressants often took several weeks to have an effect, ketamine became the next new thing. In 2019, based on years of research, the FDA approved a nasal spray medication, derived from ketamine, to be administered under medical supervision.

Depression is a mental health disorder characterized by feelings of sadness and hopelessness, that affects 18 percent of Americans. One-third of those diagnosed with depression don’t respond to standard treatments, with acute consequences to their personal and professional lives. The stigma associated with depression makes it harder for people to seek treatment, said Cusin. 

“In our society, if you suffer from depression, you may be told to ‘try harder,’ ‘stop complaining,’ ‘pick yourself up by your bootstraps,’ and so on,” Cusin said. “But there are some forms of depression that have a strong biological component; there are neurocircuits in the brain that are not functioning right. In many cases, it’s not for lack of trying.” 

Patients follow a strict protocol to be admitted to the MGH Ketamine Clinic; not only do they have to be referred by their primary prescribers, but also prior treatments for depression must have failed. Ketamine therapy is integrated with other treatments and is done in the clinic under medical supervision and in coordination with patients’ primary medical teams. The clinic doesn’t admit self-referred patients or those with active substance use disorders or a history of psychosis. Ketamine produces hallucinogenic effects and dissociation, which can exacerbate psychotic symptoms. 

Other risks associated with ketamine are the possibility of developing addiction and a host of medical problems, but for patients who experience rapid relief from their symptoms of depression after treatment, ketamine is a game-changer, said Cusin. “Our patients have failed other treatments, so they don’t have a lot of other options,” she said. “If this is the only thing that works, they keep coming.” 

Scientists continue researching ketamine’s antidepressant effects on treatment-resistant depression. A recent clinical trial found that ketamine was as effective for non-psychotic treatment-resistant depression as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which has long been the gold standard for hard-to-treat depression.

Conducted by Amit Anand, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, the study found that 55 percent of those receiving ketamine and 41 percent of those receiving ECT had at least a 50 percent improvement in their self-reported depression symptoms. Anand co-authored the pivotal 2000 study that revealed the rapid antidepressant effects of ketamine.

Encouraged by his recent study’s results, Anand is conducting a follow-up clinical trial comparing ketamine and ECT treatments among patients with suicidal depression. If ketamine can affect suicidal thoughts, it could be lifesaving. “What we’re trying to see is that if ketamine can cause a very rapid reversal of the troubling kind of depression leading to suicidality,” he said. “People are suffering, and even if it is for a short time, it is beneficial to provide a rapid change.”

Even though doctors and researchers are hopeful regarding the promise of ketamine, there is growing concern about the proliferation of private ketamine clinics, which began to crop up around the country after restrictions on telemedicine relaxed during the pandemic. These clinics offer IV ketamine infusions, with prices ranging from $600 to $800 per infusion. 

Most ketamine private clinics operate in a gray zone, with almost no oversight, and function as for-profit businesses, said Peter Grinspoon, a primary care physician, educator, and cannabis specialist at MGH. 

“The end result is that now our population has broad access to ketamine, and it’s a little bit of an uncontrolled experiment,” said Grinspoon. “Whether it’s going to alleviate many people’s depression or whether it’s going to get a lot of people addicted to ketamine is going to be an open question. We don’t know how much it is going to help or harm things.”

Ketamine is not nearly as addictive as alcohol or opioids, but its use as a recreational drug poses serious risks. Actor Matthew Perry died last year of “acute effects of ketamine.” His autopsy also found opioids in his blood, but the level of ketamine found was equivalent to the amount that would be used during general anesthesia. 

The other troubling issue for Grinspoon is affordability. “I work as a primary care doctor in an inner-city clinic,” he said. “None of my patients can afford six $800 injections. … The last thing we need is for ketamine to be another treatment for just the well to-do. … This has got to be affordable.”

At the MGH clinic, patients receive low doses of ketamine in long intervals and have mixed experiences. While some report feeling relaxed, others find it unpleasant, but most said their symptoms of depression improve and don’t interfere with day-to-day functioning. Still, 

Cusin warns that ketamine should not be a first-option treatment for depression. 

“If someone is depressed or suicidal, there are alternatives out there,” said Cusin. “There are 50, 80 different treatments to consider. It’s rare that somebody has tried everything. Usually, there are entire classes of medications or treatments that have not been considered. There is always hope.”

Twelve projects have recently been awarded grants from the Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund (HCLIF) for the 2024–2025 cycle. Harvard students, faculty, staff, postdoctoral researchers, and fellows submitted grant proposals for projects aimed at fostering an inclusive environment at the University. Each project aligns with HCLIF’s mission to “encourage experimentation, build a culture of inclusion, and grow a network of equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging innovators at Harvard,” while also supporting the University’s goal of achieving inclusive excellence. Funded by the Office of the President and administered by the Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, these grants range from $5,000 to $15,000.

“Harvard is committed to continuing its investment in innovative ideas that promote a campus culture of inclusion and belonging,” said Sherri Charleston, chief diversity and inclusion officer. “These grassroots projects unite community members at all levels of the University — researchers, students, faculty, postdocs, and staff — who identify pressing campus needs and apply their expertise to develop solutions. From a series exploring faith and justice to a project creating inclusive medical illustrations, the HCLIF projects are transforming ideas into action and making a significant impact.”

This year’s project teams showcase cross-University collaboration, with members representing Schools and units from across Harvard.

The awardees include the Lighting for Diverse Skin Tones project, a second-year grant recipient. It is a University-wide training resource that educates video producers and media professionals at Harvard on how to create lighting that captures a variety of skin tones effectively in photography, especially skin tones previously overlooked in photography and film training. With additional funding, they will work to identify a host site for the project and complete editing of previously recorded videos. “This project started with the intention of honing media producers’ skills in the craft of inclusive cinema lighting, but we ended by finding the time and space to really see people and understand how they want to be represented,” said Julia King, creative video producer at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Jacob Beizer, senior digital content producer and strategist at the Harvard Kennedy School in a statement. “We are excited to provide this resource to the entire Harvard community.”

The Inclusive Anatomical Images project stems from collaborations between Harvard Medical School, Harvard Art Museums, and the University of Global Health Equity based in Rwanda. The project seeks to ensure diverse patients have a higher chance of being better served and aims to improve patient outcomes by creating more inclusive educational medical literature. It creates materials reflecting a diversity of bodies — including various sizes, ancestries, genders, and skin tones — to better serve a wide diversity of patients. With this year’s funding, the team will expand their reach by making their resources more accessible to institutions, researchers, and health professionals beyond Harvard, while expanding their team to meet the demand for their expertise and images. Martha Ellen Katz, a faculty member of the Harvard Medical School, said, “Our project has the potential to validate the life experience of historically excluded patients, physicians, dentists, and student learners at HMS, and curricula worldwide. Our equitable work culture, which strives to be as non-hierarchical as possible, also encourages student leadership and acknowledges the essential contributions of all team members, collaborators, and supporters.”

The Connecting Community Through Food project celebrates Harvard’s student body through food. By collaborating with Harvard College students, student organizations, and employees, the Harvard University Dining Services team aims to develop recipes and menus authored by Harvard undergraduates from a diversity of backgrounds. These meals will be served more regularly in dining halls. Smitha Haneef, executive director of the Harvard University Dining Services, explained, “We want students to experience the dining halls as welcoming, comforting places, hopefully like their home kitchens. For this to happen, the menus must feel like home. This project helps us realize that vision for more community members.”

Additional 2024 HCLIF Recipients

• Community Project on Faith and Justice cultivates inclusivity and engagement centered on faith by hosting speaker series and community events where affiliates can explore the influence of faith in their lives.
• Disability Awareness Series aims to increase awareness about the resources available for, and challenges faced by, those with disability and accessibility needs at Harvard. It engages Harvard College students, staff, researchers, and faculty through an awareness campaign and series of events.
• Disability in Health Professions Mentorship Program cultivates a supportive community for current and future health professionals living with disabilities and chronic illness, fostering a greater sense of belonging at Harvard.
• Emerging Scientists Program connects high school students from Cambridge and Boston with Harvard graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and staff, providing meaningful and accessible life sciences research experiences.
• Harvard Career Capsule empowers graduate students by providing professional attire and equipment to support their career development.
• Harvard University Peer Coaching Initiative aims to reduce loneliness and enhance interpersonal skills by pairing Harvard students and researchers. Participants engage in weekly sessions over the course of a semester to practice effective listening with one another.
• Justice-Impacted Inclusion seeks to make Harvard more inclusive of formerly incarcerated people and others impacted by the justice system. The initiative consults with formerly incarcerated policy experts and creates resources, such as a guide on inclusive language and practices.
• LifeSaveHer develops trainings to address misconceptions regarding performing CPR on women, including modifying male CPR mannequins to represent female bodies, ultimately aiming to reduce cardiac arrest survival disparities for women.
• Trans+ Community Celebration at Harvard seeks to uplift the trans+ community by creating inclusive spaces within the University.

Applications for the 2025-2026 funding term of Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund grants are now open to Harvard students, faculty, staff, postdoctoral researchers, and academic personnel. Harvard community members interested in participating as judges for the 2025-2026 HCLIF grant applications can now sign up.

Cancer kills nearly 10 million people worldwide every year, but advances in genomic sequencing, artificial intelligence, and other technologies are ushering in a new era of treatment.

Alumnus Levi Garraway, who runs late-stage drug development at the biotech company Roche and previously worked at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, said the field has come a long way.

“Although cancers may look the same under the microscope, they can be very different when you look at the DNA,” Garraway said. That’s why the pillars of cancer treatment — surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy — are so limited in their applications. Moving to more personalized treatments based on a patient’s genetics has revolutionized the field. “[Genetic sequencing] was one of the first breakthroughs that allowed cancer treatment to start to become a bit more personalized.”

Connie Lehman, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and a breast imaging specialist at Mass General Brigham, said artificial intelligence has shown remarkable promise in detecting breast cancer, with success rates that far exceed what the human eye can detect alone. “What [other industries] are doing in computer vision is just unbelievable. And bringing that into healthcare to improve the lives of our patients is incredibly exciting.”

Treatment and prevention will only become more personalized and effective as researchers continue to explore the human genome and genetic structure of cancers, said Catherine Wu, a professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapies at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. One question that drives some of her research: Is it possible to vaccinate against cancer?

“That’s the vision,” said Wu, a recent recipient of the Sjöberg Prize for cancer research. “Can we, for example, make cancer vaccines as available as, say, the COVID vaccine was? That was a huge rollout given to all citizens of our country. How were we able to roll that out quickly and safely?”

In this episode of “Harvard Thinking,” host Samantha Laine Perfas talks with Garraway, Lehman, and Wu about some of their most cutting-edge cancer research — and what hope lies on the horizon.

Transcript

Levi Garraway: And now all of a sudden, it’s not quite such a blunt instrument. You’re able to get a much more selective killing effect of the cancer. Now you have a way to tell in advance who might respond to this treatment. That was one of the first breakthroughs that allowed cancer treatment to start to become a bit more personalized.

Samantha Laine Perfas: Advances in technologies like genomic sequencing and artificial intelligence have ushered in a new era in the fight against cancer, which kills nearly 10 million people worldwide every year. Researchers are now working on therapies that can be genetically tailored to individual patients and they’re also working on methods for discovering cancers at much earlier stages. Someday, we might even have vaccines that can prevent the disease altogether.

How close are we to turning a corner on cancer?

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

Garraway: Levi Garraway. I run late-stage drug development at Roche, which in the U.S. is known as Genentech.

Laine Perfas: Levi attended Harvard as an undergraduate, graduate, and medical student. He also worked at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for 11 years. Then:

Connie Lehman: Connie Lehman. I’m a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and I’m a breast imaging specialist at Mass General Brigham.

Laine Perfas: She’s also a founding partner at Clairity, which uses the power of artificial intelligence to better inform precision care. And finally:

Cathy Wu: Cathy Wu. I am a professor of medicine and division chief for transplant and cellular therapies at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Laine Perfas: She was an undergraduate at Harvard and completed her clinical training at the University. Recently she received the Sjöberg Prize for cancer research.

And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, your host and a writer for The Harvard Gazette. This episode looks at the future of cancer treatment.

Historically, how have we approached cancer treatment and how has that shifted in recent years?

Garraway: Historically you had surgery, you had radiotherapy, and you had chemotherapy. I put historically in quotes because these are all in wide use today, and they’re probably not going anywhere anytime soon. And the reason why they’re not going anywhere is because they actually can be effective in treating many cancers, even curing some cancers, but there are well-known limitations. And of course, I think for all of us who went into this field, it was in part to try to counter those limitations. And one is that there’s a whole lot of cancers that can’t be cured with those therapies, and the other is that these are all blunt instruments. I mean, often you get damage to normal or adjacent cells and tissues as well as cancer cells. And that’s a big problem. You often can’t tell in advance who’s going to respond or who’s not going to respond, for example, to chemotherapy. So it’s a vexing issue when you have a patient and you know they need treatment, but you can’t tell them that they’re going to benefit from a potentially toxic treatment.

Wu: Yeah. I agree with Levi. I think we were taught that the pillars of cancer care have been chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgery. I think what’s been exciting in the lifetime that we are going through our training and treating our patients is that we’ve seen so much evolved that there are actually new pillars that have been coming up and so I think that one of the things that kind of worldwide that we’re excited about is immunotherapy because this has emerged as a fourth pillar that is touching on all the different disease types and has proven to be really important.

Lehman: It is really exciting to see this transition to more targeted and more personalized treatment. Also at the other end of the spectrum is, can we actually even prevent cancers? Like, are there domains where we don’t need to wait until they’re so far advanced that cure is really elusive even with the most advanced therapies? So in my part of the sandbox, we’re really focused on early detection and also accurate risk assessment so we can have the right interventions to prevent the cancer from developing. It’s so interesting to look at the changes in how breast cancer presents. You can have women moving from one country to another, to adopting different diets, different lifestyles, and their breast cancer risk goes up within their lifetime. So there are these correlations between modifiable risk factors and lifestyle, diet, exercise, environmental, carcinogens, and how can we be better at identifying those and really stopping the cancer from occurring?

Laine Perfas: Treatment has become a lot more personalized in many ways. The historical treatment, if this is accurate, it seems like it was very much one-size-fits-all. What were some of the problems of that approach and why did that need to change?

Garraway: One major recognition that happened over time is that you could have two women with breast cancer, they’re both called breast cancer, but they behave very differently. They may show up very differently. They respond differently to treatment. There’s now a lot more understanding about why that is. And one big reason is that although cancers may look the same under the microscope, they can be very different when you look at the DNA, the genomes of those cancers. They’ve acquired mutations of various types. Some of them are completely random and they don’t matter to the cancer, but others are critical. They become what we call drivers of the cancer. So when we talk about what made cancer become more personalized, it was the recognition that some of those mutations, they occur over again in certain subsets of cancer, but you can design medicines against the resulting mutated proteins that drive the cancer. And those medicines are now much more selective. Now all of a sudden, it’s not quite such a blunt instrument. You’re able to get a much more selective killing effect of the cancer. Now you have a way to tell in advance who might respond to this treatment. That was one of the first breakthroughs that allowed cancer treatment to start to become a bit more personalized.

Wu: A lot of innovation follows technology. So I think that it’s always been recognized that you can try to do one-size-fits-all. But the reality is that not everyone responds and patients do or do not have toxicities. So I think the kind of technology that has brought so much insight has been through unraveling the molecular secrets of cancer cells through sequencing. I think that very, perhaps, simple technological advance has meant the world to what we understand about cancer now. And at some level, I think that the personalization is what is fighting fire with fire. You’re confronting that heterogeneity up front. You’re not trying to hide from it. You’re acknowledging that it exists and that it actually mandates that we become more selective in terms of how and what we can offer to our patients.

Lehman: I really like how both Levi and Cathy talk about [how] this personalized domain is about getting the fit with the patient and that patient’s tumor and the treatment. We see that in other domains of medicine. So, for example, we can look back at old studies and there was a drug therapy that people were very excited about, and the results were mediocre and everyone abandoned and moved on. But there were some patients that responded really well. So you want to go back and say, it wasn’t necessarily a bad treatment. It was a bad selection of the patients that could benefit. If we can be more tailored and more personalized and more targeted, will there be a lot of drugs that had been like, this isn’t a great way to approach treating quote, breast cancer, which is far too broad of a term to use. Exactly the same analogy happens in the imaging sciences and radiology. We had a boon in developing new technology for breast imaging from old film screen to digital mammography to tomosynthesis to contrast-enhanced mammography to MRI to nuclear medicine scans to ultrasound. Everyone’s really excited, and we were trying to use these in screening, and some of them give orders that, well, we can’t screen with ultrasound, there are too many false positives, we can’t screen with MRI, it’s too expensive and we can’t afford it and the value proposition isn’t there. But what we needed to do was to say, what if you targeted the right population, that, one, is disadvantaged with mammography and, two, is really at high risk for having a cancer aggressively grow and fail to be detected by mammography? And if you targeted those high-risk patients, all of a sudden these technologies look a lot better, look a lot more powerful.

Laine Perfas: Cathy, one of the things you mentioned that I wanted to ask about was genetic sequencing. I believe it just was so time-consuming and expensive in the past that it wasn’t really a practical thing that could be done on a patient-by-patient basis. How has that changed and what doors has that opened with research?

Wu: It’s been huge. In short, I think the big change happened around 2008-09, more or less, where suddenly from the exorbitantly expensive experience of running the Human Genome Project, there was new technology available that suddenly made it possible to sequence on the order of hundreds to low thousands, which still sounds like a lot. That was back then. Now we’re coming down to the low hundreds per sample. We are already testing the waters, but I really do think it’s a reality that in the not-too-distant future that this should be a diagnostic test that can be offered that is a standard part of your cancer workup. As we as a community gain more experience, this experience can be aggregated and we can look for patterns and we can look for opportunities that can at one level afford personal opportunities, but also at a population level find perhaps therapies that can benefit another population that may share those kind of genetic characteristics.

Garraway: I’ll add a couple of points. One is that what Sam described, the laborious nature of sequencing, the unlock, as you point out, that happened coming close to two decades ago, was the ability to sequence at scale. So this technology called Massively Parallel Sequencing came on the scene, and now all of a sudden, where it used to be so laborious to even sequence one gene, and there are 20,000 genes in the genome and there are many hundreds that are critical in cancer, now all of a sudden you can sequence dozens or hundreds of genes at a time. Eventually, as Cathy mentioned, it’s become possible to sequence whole genomes routinely and many times over. So the expansion of technology has been remarkable. The other thing that it is enabling is possibly a new generation of what Cathy mentioned: immune therapy. It may be that in the fullness of time, the same sequencing technologies will figure out mutations that actually now cause a tumor to look more foreign. There can be new ways to target the immune system with that information, but that’s also very personalized information. Each tumor will have a different set of mutations or changes like that. So this is a direction that immunotherapy is taking. It’s early days but it looks very intriguing.

Laine Perfas: Is it accurate to say that there could be a future where we might be able to vaccinate against cancer or treat people with personalized vaccines for their specific case?

Wu: That’s the vision. I think that if we are going to be able to offer sequencing as a routine test, then the information content that is provided by that test not only allows you to understand maybe some of the origins of where that kind of cancer came from, what were the steps that made it into the cancer that it was, but it also provides you with different therapeutic opportunities. That gets into another interesting topic, which is, how can we, for example, make cancer vaccines as available as, say, the COVID vaccine was, right? So that was a huge rollout given to all citizens of our country. How were we able to roll that out quickly and safely? A cancer vaccine is far more complicated. Some of the principles, though, are very similar. But because of the scale of that difference in the personalization, it is more complex. On the other hand, the ingredients to make that type of vaccine are contained within the sequencing information that I think we would all envision would be a routine test in the not-too-distant future.

Lehman: I also think it’s exciting, and we’re becoming more and more sophisticated and not thinking of the multitude of cancers as cancer. So a vaccine against cancer is almost like thinking, will we have a vaccine against a virus? And so we have areas that have been incredibly exciting during my career where I certainly didn’t think when I was a medical school student and learning about cervical cancer that we would have a vaccine to prevent HPV infection and that would eradicate a very large percentage of cervical cancers in patients that are vaccinated and that also can reduce the occurrence of prostate cancer. So there’s a whole domain that you can actually stop the trigger for the cancer to be able to develop rather than wait and then see that there’s circulating cancer cells and now let’s come in and let’s try to have the body help fight away those cancer cells.

Laine Perfas: Connie, early detection is an area that you’re really passionate about. And actually in the work you’ve been doing, you’ve been using AI. I would love to hear more about that and how AI is being used to detect breast cancer sooner.

Lehman: Part of the different changing face of breast cancer has been mammography screening. Mammography is a very imperfect tool, but it did change the spectrum of patients presenting with breast cancer. We shifted historically from women coming forward when they noticed that there was a lump in their breast, or a doctor noticed that, and we could find cancers preclinical before that happened, and we really saw a shift in both the morbidity of the treatment, but also the survival.

That was a big win, but as I said it’s limited, and we have women presenting with advanced cancer despite routine screening. We have the costs and the false positives and the challenges of using mammography effectively. So I think that what I’m most excited about is changing the paradigm of how we screen and moving away from a very archaic age-based approach and moving into a risk-based approach.

Everyone has seen over the years the arguments about screening mammography. In Europe they tend to start at 50 and screen every two to three years. In the U.S. we constantly battle about whether you start at 40 or 50 and it’s every year or every two years. That argument is so limited. It’s almost unbelievable to me that we’re still having a basic argument about 40 or 50 or every year or every two years when there’s such a diversity of the risk profiles of women within their 40s, within their 30s, within their 50s, and we ignore that. Now one of the reasons why we’ve ignored it is our traditional risk models are inadequate. So the area I’m most excited about with artificial intelligence is using computer vision, not to look for cancer currently on the mammogram, but to predict whether that woman will develop cancer within the coming five years. So if you can look out into the future, is there something about this tissue that is putting this woman at increased risk? And our research to date shows that the AI applied to the basic regular mammogram can predict future breast cancer at a level that we just haven’t seen before.

It also eliminates the really unfortunate racial biases in our traditional risk models, which were built largely on European Caucasian women, and just don’t perform for us in Black, Hispanic, and Asian women. There’s a whole other domain, too, of having the computers learn how to read the mammograms, because one of the limitations of mammography is you need these highly specialized humans to read them, which really reduces the impact of screening mammography globally, because we just don’t have enough highly specialized radiologists to interpret the mammograms. So I think we’ll also see that shift.

Garraway: We could have a whole conversation, of course, on AI in medicine, and what Connie described in radiology is so exciting. It’s really going to be revolutionary. I’ll just say at a high level that AI is already changing every component of the research and development of new medicines, starting all the way from the very beginning, where you can use AI to conduct a lot of the compound screening or chemical screening in a computer. Where it used to be, you have to have lots of expensive chemical libraries and iterative screening of things. A lot of that can be done in silico, as we call it, because of AI, and even design of therapeutic antibodies from scratch, using AI-first principles. Then when you get into the clinic, the ability to synthesize all kinds of patient data to predict the kinds of patients that one should study so that you’re not fooled either in the positive or the negative way about whether a medicine is working. So it’s hard to come up with a component of the research and discovery of medicines that’s not being impacted by AI.

Laine Perfas: A lot of Connie’s work involves using AI for mammography and then Levi, you mentioned really every area of medicine is being revolutionized. Are there other emerging technologies that are really changing the landscape of cancer detection, treatment, and lowering morbidity rates?

Wu: I think there’s a lot of exciting technologies that are among us right now. It’s not for nothing that we’re in the age of human biomedicine that we actually can learn directly from human biospecimens as opposed to fruit flies, worms, and mice, which is really how we gained our insights in the past. Along the lines of some of the AI work, there’s a tremendous interest, not only unlocking the secrets one cell at a time, looking at the DNA, the RNA, the protein expression, but also looking to see how all of these cells in, for example, tumor tissue, are patterned, are organized in space. These patterns on the one hand are teaching us how the cells are interacting with each other and allowing us to relate that to patient characteristics. So for patients who are destined to respond or not respond to a particular therapy, what were the patterns that were seen? And what does that tell us about the biology that happened? A lot of that information can also be fed into AI-related algorithms so that we can become better at pattern recognition.

Lehman: Yeah, Cathy, I like how you’re presenting that because it is where, again with these multidisciplinary approaches, the more I interact with specialists in computer science and artificial intelligence, the more I realize how much we really need their expertise just infusing healthcare. Because what we deal with is, we’ve had this incredible renaissance where we have so much technology that can collect so much data and in the imaging sciences alone. I think about, when I started, the kinds of images I would look at with plain films and a chest X-ray and a mammogram and then the complexity of the way that we can image the human body and the data that results from that. But the technology to collect that information, to create those patterns, just far exceeds our ability as humans. From the military, from the auto industry, I mean, what they’re doing in computer vision is just unbelievable. And bringing that into healthcare to improve the lives of our patients is incredibly exciting.

Garraway: Sam, you asked the question about other kinds of technologies. Of course, as Connie’s mentioning, AI pervades all of them, but I will mention there are technologies that are also allowing new kinds of cancer treatments to emerge. There are now what we call treatment modalities, which are different than were possible in the past. I’ll just mention a couple of them.

One is what we call cellular therapy. So this is a technology platform. You basically collect certain kinds of immune cells from an individual and then you expand them in the laboratory. You engineer them so that they can destroy tumor cells very effectively and then you give them back to patients. And so, the first generation of cell therapy, you would collect those cells from a patient with, let’s say a blood cancer, and then you engineer them and you give them back to the same patients. That actually often works remarkably well. You can get very profound clinical benefit in patients who otherwise weren’t going to benefit at all. But as you might imagine it’s logistically challenging to do this for every patient, and in every center and every context. So not as many patients have access to cell therapy as one might like.

So there’s now a new kind of emerging generation of cell therapy. The technical term is allogeneic cell therapy. In that setting, what you do is you collect immune cells from completely unrelated donors, and you expand them and you engineer them, just like we talked about, but then you can store them so that in the future, you have, like, an off-the-shelf way of leveraging this cell therapy. You don’t have to do the whole start-to-finish process on every single patient, every single time. We think this is potentially a really exciting, future promise. Then the other platform I’ll just mention very briefly, it’s called bispecific antibodies. Traditionally one kind of therapy we call a therapeutic antibody, it’s a mimic of the immune system but it allows you to design an antibody that binds a particular disease target very tightly. But bispecific antibodies work by binding not just one target, but two targets. So if one target is on the tumor cell and the other target is on the immune cell, the bispecific antibody can bring the immune cell to the tumor cell and activate the immune cell and kill the tumor cell. So I just want to bring up that we talked a lot about AI as it’s revolutionizing everything, but there are other kinds of platforms that we use more and more in the pharmaceutical arena to try to develop new kinds of medicines that can bring new kinds of benefits.

Laine Perfas: Hearing about all these emerging therapies is so exciting and amazing and miraculous-seeming, especially as someone who is not a cancer researcher. But I also want to acknowledge that there’s still challenges there, you know, there’s costs, resources, still limitations on technology. A lot of it is just a lot of work.

Wu: We know. Oh, we know.

Laine Perfas: So what keeps you all hopeful with the current trajectory and where do you see us being or hope we’ll be 10 years from now, 20 years from now?

Wu: I think the hope comes from all the progress that we see. It is incremental. I think all of us know the challenges but experience the positive signals that kind of give us hope and tell us that we’re on the right track, and you’ve got to have the focus and the vision to get you through the finish line.

Garraway: Yeah, Sam, I think it’s a really prescient question because I know that both Connie and Cathy are part of outstanding institutions where unfortunately, the waiting rooms are still all too full with patients, some of whom are benefiting from these approaches, but others are not benefiting enough, or even at all from these approaches. So the unmet need is still quite considerable, and sometimes it feels like the pace of advance, it’s almost like, there’s a concept of how evolution happens, which is punctuated equilibrium: There’s a bunch of evolution, and then it plateaus, and there’s a bunch more, and then it plateaus. Cancer research and drug development can be like that. So you have this flurry of activity that led to targeted therapies, and then you have this flurry of activity that established immunotherapies, but all the while, you can be in these plateau phases also, where it’s like, “Oh, it’s not happening fast enough.” But the fact that these advances have happened and that we’ve been fortunate enough in our careers to either witness or, in some cases, participate in those advances, it doesn’t get old. You don’t forget those moments of impact, those opportunities to bring the advances. That’s what motivates you to bring more of those. I know for me, that’s what wakes me up in the morning.

Lehman: I actually think our strongest energy is around what we know needs to be done and the technology we have to make that happen. So we need to have the right people agree that this is the direction we have to go in. You can be in those domains where dogma, and this is the way we’ve always done it, and politics, can slow down the implementation and the progress. And so that’s really in the domain that I’m working the most in. The early detection-prevention side is to change the guidelines, to change the approach, to change how we think about how we screen to detect breast cancer early.

COVID was such a horrible period for so many, but one of the silver linings was we realized that we can be both safe and fast in certain domains of healthcare. I had been struggling with how many barriers there were to telehealth and to providing services to women in rural areas and in healthcare deserts. All of a sudden, all those barriers with COVID, it’s like, we can probably do these things that we used to always say weren’t safe, weren’t OK. But now that we need to do it, we can do it. I think it gave people new vision in what can be accomplished. That is something that’s going to be exciting as we continue to move forward in the next few years.

Laine Perfas: Thank you for this wonderful conversation.

Thanks for listening. To find a transcript of this episode and links to all of our other episodes, 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 editing and production support from Sarah Lamodi. Original music and sound designed by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University, copyright 2024.

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Researchers at Harvard now have access to one of the fastest and greenest supercomputers in the world.

Built to support cutting-edge research at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence, and Harvard University more broadly, the Kempner’s AI cluster has just been named the 32nd fastest “green” supercomputer in the world in the Green500, the industry’s premier, independent ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers globally. In addition to cracking the top 50 list of green supercomputers, the cluster has been certified as the 85th fastest supercomputer overall in the TOP500, making it one of the fastest and greenest supercomputers on the planet. 

“The Kempner AI cluster’s ranking in the latest Green500 and TOP500 lists positions us squarely among the fastest and most eco-friendly AI clusters in academia and the world,” said Max Shad, Kempner senior director of AI/ML research engineering. “It is no small feat to have built this kind of green high-performance computing power in such a short period of time, enabling cutting-edge research that is innovating in real time, and allowing for truly important advancements at the intersection of artificial intelligence and neuroscience.”

High-performance computing forms the backbone of the massive growth in the field of machine learning, and researchers at the Kempner Institute are leveraging this immense computational power to train and run artificial neural networks, leading to key advances in understanding the basis of intelligence in natural and artificial systems.

Measuring green compute power, from flops to gigaflops

The Kempner’s AI cluster opened with an initial pilot installation in spring 2023, and now represents the forefront of Harvard’s growing engagement with state-of-the-art computing resources. Composed of 528 specialized computer processors called graphics processing units (GPUs), which are networked together in parallel with “switches” to enable fast and simultaneous computation, the cluster can run rapid computations on hundreds of research projects at once. 

To gauge the cluster’s green computing power and overall computing power, engineers from Lenovo measured the speed of the cluster’s highest-performing GPUs (called H100s) using the LINPACK Benchmark, which requires solving vast linear algebra problems. This is expressed in terms of floating point operations per second, or “flops.” The system’s efficiency, or “green” computing capacity, depends on how many flops the H100s can perform with a given amount of power, which is expressed as gigaflops per watt of power used. 

The Kempner’s H100s demonstrated the capability to perform 16.29 petaflops, at an efficiency of 48.065 gigaflops per watt of power used.

A supercomputer supporting new research at the Kempner, and across Harvard

With this magnitude of computing power, Kempner researchers are able to train state-of-the-art AI systems like large language models (LLMs), of which ChatGPT is perhaps the best known, quickly and efficiently. For example, the Kempner cluster can train the popular Meta Llama 3.1 8B and Meta Llama 3.1 70B language models in about one week and two months, respectively. Before the Kempner’s cluster was established and operational, training the Llama models on the next-fastest computer system at Harvard would have taken years to complete. 

Beyond using the cluster to create faster models, researchers are also employing the cluster to better understand how and why they work. “With this enhanced computational power, we can delve deeper into how generative models learn to reason and complete tasks with greater efficiency,” says Kempner Institute Research Fellow Binxu Wang. 

In addition to providing researchers with the capacity to train complex models quickly and efficiently, and to understand the mechanisms behind how they learn, the Kempner cluster enables scientists to compare vast numbers of model architectures and learning algorithms in parallel, with important applications in fields ranging from medicine to neuroscience. One example: In research recently published in Nature Medicine, Kempner associate faculty member and Harvard Medical School Assistant Professor Marinka Zitnik and colleagues used the cluster to develop and train TxGNN, an AI system that distills vast amounts of medical data into knowledge graphs, and then uses the graphs to predict the effectiveness of a drug for treating rare diseases. 

The Kempner GPUs form part of Harvard University’s growing computational ecosystem, joining new or soon-to-be-available GPUs supported by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Research Computing (FASRC). More than 5,200 researchers across the University make use of these computing resources in a wide array of scientific and technological applications.  

The power of parallel processing

So what exactly is a cluster? As the name suggests, a computing cluster gathers together multiple devices, each of which can function as a full-fledged computer in its own right. Linking devices together unleashes the power of parallel computing, which leads to massive speed-ups in processing time by performing large numbers of tasks simultaneously. 

Until a few decades ago, most computers were powered by a central processing unit (CPU) that could only perform one computational operation at a time. By the early 2000s, computer scientists had figured out how to create “multicore” CPUs that perform multiple computations in parallel. 

The road to supercomputing clusters like the Kempner’s involved stacking several levels of parallel processing on top of each other. After the introduction of multicore CPUs, the next level of parallelism was enabled by the use of GPUs. Controlling the graphics on a computer screen requires large numbers of very similar computations that can be done simultaneously. For example, displaying a video game requires computing the brightness and color of millions of pixels up to 120 times per second. GPUs perform these numerous yet simple computations in parallel, freeing up the CPU to perform more complex computations.

Computer scientists realized that the capacity of GPUs to perform vast numbers of parallel computations could be repurposed for other tasks, such as machine learning. Running an artificial neural network such as OpenAI’s GPT or DALL-E, for example, involves vast numbers of mathematical operations that can be performed in parallel. But the parallelism doesn’t stop here: Yet another level of parallelism is enabled by linking multiple GPUs together in a network. The Kempner’s network involves hundreds of NVIDIA GPUs — 144 A100s and 384 H100s — that can work in concert. This multilevel parallelism empowers the Kempner’s researchers to perform the dizzyingly intensive computations involved in the study of natural and artificial intelligence and to develop new AI applications in areas such as medicine. 

When it comes to fast and flexible experimentation, iteration, and computationally intensive research, the Kempner AI cluster is, in the words of Boaz Barak, “absolutely instrumental.” Barak, a Kempner associate faculty member and professor at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, says his lab group “relies on extensive computational experiments using the cluster” to study the mechanisms, capabilities, and limitations of deep learning systems. This, he says, allows his lab group to “hone intuitions and study questions as they arise.”

A powerful supercomputer, built to be green

Intentionally built for optimal energy consumption, the Kempner’s AI cluster is also setting a standard for “green” supercomputing. Modern machine learning has resulted in unprecedented advances in AI, but the methods are increasingly energy-intensive. Lowering the carbon footprint of AI is therefore crucial so that advances in AI do not come at the cost of exacerbating global warming. 

Housed at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computer Center (MGHPCC) along with other FASRC resources, and located in the town of Holyoke, Massachusetts, the Kempner’s AI cluster uses a variety of state-of-the-art techniques to minimize energy usage and make every megawatt of power count. The center is powered by the Holyoke municipal electric company, which delivers 100 percent carbon-free energy through a hydroelectric power station and several solar arrays that they operate.

As the central computing hub employed by most of the state’s research universities, including Harvard, MIT, UMass, Northeastern and Boston University, the MGHPCC was the first university research data center to achieve LEED Platinum Certification, the highest level awarded by the Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Program. Moving forward, the Kempner’s partnership with MGHPCC will allow it to continue to grow with efficiency in mind, keeping the Kempner’s AI cluster green and efficient even as it grows into an even faster and more powerful tool for advancement in the field. 

“Building an AI cluster that is not just blazing fast but also energy-efficient fits squarely into the Kempner’s mission, both to advance the field of intelligence, and to do so in a way that benefits people,” said Kempner Executive Director Elise Porter. “We have worked closely with MGHPCC to ensure this cluster is built with energy efficiency top of mind, and ranking as the 32nd fastest green supercomputer in the world is a testament to that work.”

Fast, green — and human

While landing a top spot on the TOP500/Green500 list is no small accomplishment, the real power of the Kempner’s work is knowing how to leverage its impressive computing resources to facilitate groundbreaking research. This involves more than building the AI cluster and giving researchers access to it. After all, researchers can’t just copy and paste old code into new machines — certain types of algorithms that work on traditional computers have to be reconceptualized and reformatted to be used with the Kempner’s computing infrastructure. 

To this end, the Kempner has assembled a “full-stack” team of professional research engineers and research scientists with expertise ranging from distributed computing to data architecture to computational neuroscience. This Research & Engineering team develops codebases and standards, working with researchers to enable a seamless pipeline connecting scientific problems to computational solutions. The team also ensures that scientific findings are reproducible by helping students, fellows and faculty adopt industry-tested best practices for coding, testing, and maintenance of open repositories for models and data. 

This human know-how is central to the ability of the Kempner community — and researchers all across Harvard University — to harness the scientific and technological potential of the green supercomputing power now available at its collective fingertips. 

To find out more about the latest Kempner Institute research, check out the Deeper Learning blog.

The free-market policymakers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have “an empirical problem,” said Oren Cass, J.D. ’12, founder and chief economist of the conservative think tank American Compass.

“The stuff they were doing on economics did not work.”

Cass, author of “The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America” (2018), argued in a talk last week hosted by the Department of Government that the era’s Republicans, with their focus on deregulation and unfettered trade, marked a departure from the party’s longer, more productive traditions of building the economy by bolstering the labor force.

Cass’ ideas, anchored by social conservatism, are gaining traction with a younger set of policymakers on the right. But his pro-worker rhetoric overlaps at times with language used on the left. “Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance on one side and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the other actually see a lot of the same problems in the economy and are willing to say it,” offered Cass, who rang a note of optimism over this “increasing consensus.”

Across U.S. history, he said, Republican presidents rarely fell in line with what many today consider GOP economic orthodoxy. Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt Jr., and Richard Nixon all used tariffs to shore up domestic industry and protect the country’s wage earners.

Former President Ronald Reagan, celebrated by conservatives for his embrace of free enterprise, raised taxes at least five times and was far more protectionist than his reputation might suggest. Cass underscored this point by offering background on Reagan’s famous quote: “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Reagan uttered these words in 1986 while announcing record-breaking aid to American farmers, including drought assistance and price supports. “One of the very funny things about what we think of as Reaganomics, conservative economics — what I call market fundamentalism — is it’s actually a post-Reagan phenomenon,” Cass said.

How did the market fundamentalism come to dominate politics on the right? Cass, a policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, pointed to the distinct interest groups that comprised the famous “three-legged stool” of Reagan’s electoral coalition: social conservatives, economic libertarians, and national security hawks. 

“What do these three groups have in common?” Cass asked. “They all really, really, really hate communists. And in the middle of the Cold War, in the context where the Democratic Party was — let’s be honest — a little squishy on communism, getting together everybody who really, really, really hated communism turned out to be a powerful strategy.”

This coalition collapsed in 1989 with the Berlin Wall, Cass continued. That left the three-legged stool in splinters, with each faction vying for supremacy. “That is the economic libertarians unchained from any actual Cold War just running amok,” he argued. “This is [activist] Grover Norquist getting everybody to agree they will never raise taxes under any circumstances.

“And by the time you get to the 2000s, you have a bunch of [President George W.] Bush tax cuts that bear no relationship to any economic priority and manage to send us back into debt while producing no economic growth whatsoever. You have several massive new wars starting to no apparent effect. And you have social conservatives sort of sitting there, losing on their priorities for the most part.”

For 30 years, that group ceded all territory on economic issues, Cass said. “And then they started to say, ‘Wait a minute. The economy that the economic libertarians are producing does not align with any of the things we actually believe equate to human flourishing.’”

Core to Cass’ critique is the economic libertarian focus on cheap consumer goods over building a labor force where workers can support strong families.

As evidence that the free-market era has failed to deliver for the average American household, Cass showed a series of charts detailing everything from the growing U.S. trade deficit to 50 years of stagnant wage growth even amid rising per-capita GDP. Over the same period, deregulation led to the rise of offshoring, while an increasingly dominant financial sector embraced high-speed trading and speculation over investments in U.S. communities.

Cass also shared a data visualization of America’s growing reliance on government transfers, recently published by a bipartisan Economic Innovation Group associated with Facebook founding president Sean Parker. The display can be read as a “massive victory” by free-market thinkers focused, above all, on individual purchasing power, Cass argued.

But he ventured that most Americans are unsettled by increased dependence on Social Security, veterans’ benefits, and other federal aid programs. “This is not actually a sustainable model for a thriving nation either socially or economically,” he said.

Conservatives like to approach the market in definitional terms, Cass explained. What is the market, and what is it for? He rejected the terms put forth by former U.S. Senator Pat Toomey during a 2020 talk at the Heritage Foundation.“The market is … really just the name that we assign to the sum total of all the voluntary exchanges that occur every day by free men and women,” Toomey said.

“That’s not a market,” Cass countered. “A market is a much more complex mechanism that allocates labor and capital in response to conditions, rules, and institutions.”

What is the market actually for, in his view? “It’s not just for optimizing consumption,” Cass said. “We need to do a lot more than that, because we don’t want to rely on government to do everything else. We need it to empower workers to support their families. We need it to strengthen the social fabric. We need it to foster domestic investment and innovation.

“And if that’s the case, the role for policymakers isn’t as little as possible,” he concluded. “Their role is to create the rules and support the institutions that will lead to productive applications.”

Humans, it turns out, possess much higher metabolic rates than other mammals, including our close relatives, apes and chimpanzees, finds a new Harvard study. Having both high resting and active metabolism, researchers say, enabled our hunter-gatherer ancestors to get all the food they needed while also growing bigger brains, living longer, and increasing their rates of reproduction.

“Humans are off-the-charts different from any creature that we know of so far in terms of how we use energy,” said study co-author and paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman, the Edwin M. Lerner Professor of Biological Sciences in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology.

The paper, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges a previous consensus that human and non-human primates’ metabolic rates are either the same or lower than would be expected for their body size. 

Using a new comparison method that they say better corrects for body size, environmental temperature, and body fat, the researchers found that humans, unlike most mammals including other primates, have evolved to escape a tradeoff between resting and active metabolic rates. 

Animals take in calories through food and, like a bank account, spend them on expenses mostly divided between two broad metabolic categories: resting and physical activity. In other primates, there is a distinct tradeoff between resting and active metabolic rates, which helps explain why chimpanzees, with their large brains, costly reproductive strategies, and lifespans, and thus high resting metabolisms, are “couch potatoes” who spend much of their day eating, said Lieberman. 

Generally, the energy animals spend on metabolism ends up as heat, which is hard to dissipate in warm environments. Because of this tradeoff, animals such as chimpanzees who spend a great deal of energy on their resting metabolism and also inhabit warm, tropical environments, have to have low activity levels.

“Humans have increased not only our resting metabolisms beyond what even chimpanzees and monkeys have, but — thanks to our unique ability to dump heat by sweating — we’ve also been able to increase our physical activity levels without lowering our resting metabolic rates,” said co-author Andrew Yegian, a senior researcher in Lieberman’s lab.

“The result is that we are an energetically unique species.”

“Humans have increased not only our resting metabolisms beyond what even chimpanzees and monkeys have, but — thanks to our unique ability to dump heat by sweating — we’ve also been able to increase our physical activity levels without lowering our resting metabolic rates.”

Andrew Yegian

The team’s analysis shows that monkeys and apes evolved to invest about 30 to 50 percent more calories in their resting metabolic rates than other mammals of the same size, and that humans have taken this to a further extreme, investing 60 percent more calories than similar-sized mammals.

“We started off questioning if it was possible that humans and other primates could have comparatively low total metabolic rates, which other researchers had proposed,” Yegian said. “We tried to come up with a better way to analyze it using quotients. That’s when we hit the accelerator.” 

The research team — which includes collaborators at Louisiana’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center and the University of Kiel in Germany — plans to further investigate metabolic differences among human populations. For example, subsistence farmers who grow all the food they eat without the help of machines have significantly higher physical activity levels than both hunter-gatherers and people in industrial environments like Americans. However, all human populations, regardless of activity levels, spend similar amounts of energy for their body size on their resting metabolic rates.

“What we’re really interested in is variation among humans in metabolic rates, especially in today’s world of increasing technology and lower levels of physical activity,” said Yegian. “Since we evolved to be active, how does having a desk job change our metabolism in ways that affect health?”

An Ed School panel highlighted the critical role schools can play in helping students learn to listen to different perspectives and have conversations across divides in a webinar on Thursday.

“Schools are one of the places where people with diverse perspectives are often together,” said Richard Weissbourd, senior lecturer on education. “Other settings are often not diverse, or at least they’re contained or bounded in ways that schools are not … Schools can be laboratories of democracy.”

Led by Meira Levinson, Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society, the panel made the case for schools as ideal settings for lessons in compromise and civil disagreement.

“Schools are socializing agents,” said Carlton Green, an assistant clinical professor and co-director of Intergroup Dialogue Training Center at the University of Maryland. “That is where we learn some of the ethic around how to be in community with other people, especially people who are different from us.”

Educators help students learn interpersonal skills and how to navigate conflict, the panelists noted, fostering their social and emotional development. Although that work has been part of education for decades, the concept of “social-emotional learning” has recently come under attack by some conservative activists — and parents — who insist that teachers should focus strictly on academic learning.

Kara Pranikoff, an education consultant and coach, pushed back on that idea.

“We have this tendency to say that social-emotional learning is one thing, and academic learning is another thing,” said Pranikoff. “But we cannot separate our social-emotional selves from our academic selves. It’s just not possible, even if people report that it is. It’s not part of being a human. They go hand in hand.”

As microcosms of society, schools experience their own versions of national debates over issues such as religion, LGBTQ rights, and immigration, creating third-rail moments for teachers, the panelists said.

“There are things that you can say that are going to trigger a parent,” Weissbourd said. “Without support from your administration, these conversations become very difficult.”

But those conversations are important, said Weissbourd, who directs the Ed School program Making Caring Common, which provides resources for families and educators to help children develop empathy and other emotional capacities.

“It’s important to be able to mend fractures and for people to get along,” said Weissbourd. “But we want to have these conversations because we really believe in principles of human rights, justice, inclusion, and fairness. Part of the work, too, is how do you have conversations in ways that advance those principles?”

Educators should rise to their daily challenges by communicating with parents and building support from school administrators, Green said.

“I’d say to parents, ‘I think you want me to help your child be a good human, right?’ and if you have questions about me helping your child to be a good human in the context of the other little humans, I’m open to that, but that’s what I’m committed to doing,” said Green. “We are educating good humans here.”

A new study shows that being sedentary increases the risk of the most common types of heart disease, even among those who get enough exercise.

Investigators at Mass General Brigham found sedentary behavior was associated with higher risks of all four types of heart disease, with a marked 40-60 percent greater risk of heart failure and cardiovascular death when sedentary behavior exceeded 10.6 hours a day. (Sedentary behavior is defined as waking activity with low energy expenditure while sitting, reclining, or lying down and does not include hours spent sleeping at night.)

Researchers also emphasized that meeting guideline levels of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity may be insufficient on its own to reduce cardiovascular risk if one is also sitting too much.

Their results are published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

“Many of us spend the majority of our waking day sitting, and while there’s a lot of research supporting the importance of physical activity, we knew relatively little about the potential consequences of sitting too much beyond a vague awareness that it might be harmful,” said lead author Ezimamaka Ajufo, a cardiology fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

“Sedentary risk remained even in people who were physically active, which is important because many of us sit a lot and think that if we can get out at the end of the day and do some exercise we can counterbalance it,” Ajufo says. “However, we found it to be more complex than that.”

Ajufo’s team, which included researchers from across MGB, analyzed one week of activity-tracker data from 89,530 individuals from the U.K. Biobank prospective cohort.

They looked at associations between daily time spent sitting and the future risk of four common cardiovascular diseases: atrial fibrillation, heart attacks, heart failure, and death from cardiovascular causes. The team used a machine learning algorithm to classify sedentary behavior.

Many of the negative effects of sedentary behavior persisted even among those individuals who achieved the guideline-recommended more than 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week.

For example, although the study found that the risk of atrial fibrillation and heart attacks could be mostly eliminated by engaging in physical activity, the excess risk of heart failure and cardiovascular  death could only be partially offset by physical activity.

“Our data supports the idea that it is always better to sit less and move more to reduce heart disease risk, and that avoiding excessive sitting is especially important for lowering risk of heart failure and cardiovascular death,” said co-senior author Shaan Khurshid,  an electrophysiologist and faculty member in the Telemachus And Irene Demoulas Family Foundation Center for Cardiac Arrythmias at Massachusetts General Hospital.

The research team hopes these findings will help inform future guidelines and public health efforts. They would like future prospective studies to test the efficacy of public health interventions that help people reduce the number of hours they spend being sedentary and see how that affects cardiovascular health.

Next, they plan to extend this research to investigate the impacts of sedentary behavior on a range of other diseases and for longer spans of time.

“Exercise is critical, but avoiding excessive sitting appears separately important,” said co-senior author Patrick Ellinor,  a cardiologist and co-director of the Corrigan Minehan Heart Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Our hope is that this work can empower patients and providers by offering another way to leverage movement behaviors to improve cardiovascular health.”

Authorship: Additional Mass General Brigham authors include Timothy W. Churchill, J. Sawalla Guseh, and Krishna G. Aragam. Additional authors include Shinwan Kany and Joel T. Rämö.

Disclosures: Krishna G. Aragam receives sponsored research support from Sarepta Therapeutics and Bayer AG; he also reports a research collaboration with the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research. Patrick T. Ellinor receives sponsored research support from Bayer AG, IBM Research, Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer and Novo Nordisk; he has also served on advisory boards and/or consulted for Bayer AG.

Researchers were supported by the John S. LaDue Memorial Fellowship in Cardiovascular Medicine or Vascular Biology grant, the Walter Benjamin Fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (521832260), a research fellowship from the Sigrid Jusélius Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (K23HL159262-01A1, 1K08HL153937, RO1HL092577, R01HL157635, and K23HL169839-01), the American Heart Association (19AMFDP34990046, 862032, 18SFRN34230127, 961045, and 2023CDA1050571), the President and Fellows of Harvard College (5KL2TR002542-04), and the European Union (MAESTRIA 965286).

Five Harvard College students are among the 32 U.S. Rhodes Scholars for 2025, the most awarded to any institution this year. Three international students in the College also received Rhodes Scholarships, bringing Harvard’s total to eight.

The students will attend Oxford University next year to pursue graduate studies in fields ranging from political theory to neuroscience.

Harvard’s 2025 Rhodes Scholars:

Matthew Anzarouth of Quebec, Canada, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship for Canada. A former competitive debater, Anzarouth won the World Schools Debating Championship with Team Canada in 2020 and 2021, and competed for the Harvard College Debating Union in his first year at the University. During his time at Harvard, where he concentrated in social studies, he served as senior world editor at the Harvard Political Review, co-founded and co-hosted a podcast exploring political and philosophical issues, and coached debate for high school students. Combining his interests in political theory and Canadian politics, Anzarouth is writing his senior thesis on Canadian federalism and multiculturalism. He plans to study political theory at Oxford.

Lena R. Ashooh of Shelburne, Vermont, designed a major in animal studies, with research in philosophy, psychology, biology, political science, and other disciplines. She has worked with land law examiners as an intern at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and has lobbied legislators as an environmental justice intern at the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, a California nonprofit. Ashooh conducted field research on macaque monkeys in Puerto Rico, plays classical harp, and has created a stop-motion animation film about the ethics of eating animals. She plans to study political theory at Oxford.

Shahmir Aziz of Lahore, Pakistan, was named one of two Rhodes Scholars for Pakistan last month. He has conducted research in drug delivery and bio-nanotechnology. Outside the classroom, he is passionate about diplomacy and global governance, serving as a leader of the Harvard International Relations Council and Harvard’s Model UN Team. Aziz plans to continue researching bio-nanotechnology at Oxford while also studying diplomacy with a focus on global health to better understand how to cultivate cross-border ideas in biotech.

Thomas Barone of Little Falls, New Jersey, is a social studies concentrator focused on intellectual history, political rhetoric, and policy. He has interned at the national politics desk of ABC News and serves as editorial chair of The Harvard Crimson, where he won first place for editorial writing in collegiate journalism in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence Awards. Barone intends to study history at Oxford and plans to pursue a career in journalism.

Sofia L. Corona of Delray Beach, Florida, is studying applied mathematics and economics. She designed her course of study to develop a multidisciplinary perspective on issues in transportation policy, including infrastructure development, clean energy governance, and community decision-making. She worked on federal transportation oversight cases as a legal intern at the U.S. Department of Transportation; researched community participation and renewable energy implementation at the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation in Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation; and analyzed alternative vehicle upgrades for car models at BMW. She has climbed Aconcagua, Denali, and Mount Kilimanjaro. At Oxford, Corona plans to pursue economics and focus on development, sustainability, and enterprise.

Aneesh Muppidi of Schenectady, New York, is a concentrator in computer science and neuroscience. He has conducted research at the Computational Robotics Lab and the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, both at Harvard, and MIT’s Fiete Lab, and has been involved in AI policy discussions for New York State and the federal government. Muppidi served as president of the Harvard Computational Neuroscience Undergraduate Society, co-president of the Hindu Students Association, and president of the Harvard Spikeball Club. At Oxford, he will study advanced computer science and public policy.

Ayush Noori of Bellevue, Washington, is studying computer science and neuroscience. His research uses artificial intelligence to comb large-scale biomedical data for diagnosis and treatment options, and he has developed an AI model that can be deployed to predict treatment outcomes in bipolar disorder, Parkinson’s disease, and neuropathic conditions. He has co-authored more than 20 peer-reviewed papers and was awarded the Barry Goldwater Scholarship for natural sciences. Noori is co-founder and co-president of the Harvard Undergraduate OpenBio Laboratory. At Oxford, he hopes to complete degrees in clinical neurosciences and in physiology, anatomy, and genetics.

Laura Wegner of Walsrode, Germany, was one of two recipients of German Rhodes Scholarships. She studies economics and computer science and founded Mii, a digital healthcare passport that empowers patients to manage and access their health records anywhere in the world. At Oxford, Wegner plans to pursue graduate work focused on digital health care technology.

Read more about this year’s Rhodes Scholars at the Rhodes Trust.

Democrats lost the 2024 election because they paid too much attention to positive macroeconomic trendlines and not enough to Americans’  economic reality, according to economist Larry Summers.

“In too many ways, Democrats have lost sight of the common man and woman in favor of the attitudes and philosophies of the faculty common room,” said Summers during a talk Thursday night on why the Democrats lost the 2024 election and the risks President-elect Donald Trump’s policy plans pose for the U.S. economy.

Many voters moved toward the Republican Party and Trump, who hammered Democrats over inflation, because they felt the GOP understood what they were going through better than Democrats, who strayed from their traditional focus on issues like kitchen-table economics, said Summers, who was Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration and is currently the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and the Frank and Denie Weil Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The Federal Reserve also contributed to voters’ anger over inflation, he suggested.

In 2021, when $2.5 trillion in stimulus funding was flooding the economy, the Fed was still anticipating interest rates would stay at 0 percent through summer 2024 and buying back long-term Treasury debt by issuing “what was, in effect, floating-rate short-term debt.” This led to significant losses to the government that some estimate — in market value terms — at $500 billion to $1 trillion, before the Fed finally course-corrected, said Summers, who also served as director of National Economic Council during the Obama administration.

“I think that if there had not been hyper-expansionary policy in 2021, it would have been easier for Democrats to escape blame for whatever inflation took place,” he said.

Summers worries the Fed could err once again during the new administration given current economic conditions, and he warned Trump’s economic policy plans, such as raising or adding new tariffs, could worsen inflation.

“If President Trump does what he said he would do during his campaign, the inflation shock administered to the economy is substantially larger than anything that happened at the beginning of the last administration,” Summers said.

“He’s vowed huge deficit increases through continuation of his tax cuts and new tax cuts; he has trashed the idea of the independence of the central bank; he said that we should want to have a less highly valued currency, which means less valuable money [and] higher prices, and that’s just on the demand side,” he said.

More importantly, “He’s talked about a big tariff on every good that we import, which means higher import prices [and] also means higher prices for everything that competes with imports,” Summers said.

Summers criticized Trump’s promise to implement 60 percent tariffs on all Chinese goods, saying it will not only force American consumers to pay much higher prices, but will further strain U.S.-China relations. The U.S. ought to precisely “calibrate” its trade policies to the nation’s overall strategic objectives, he said.

“At a time when the Chinese economy is struggling, when there are very difficult economic problems, the worst thing we could do would be to make it completely easy for the Chinese government to scapegoat us for their own economic failings. And so, we need to be very careful that we are focused on our own security [and] … not pursue policies that can be interpreted as reflecting a generalized desire to suppress the Chinese economy,” he said, adding “That’s going to require subtle choices about policy and it’s going to require not bluster, but very careful communication.”

In addition, tightening U.S. borders is “clearly something we have to do,” he noted. “But if you’re talking about sending millions of people out of the country who are here now, that’s a prescription for large-scale labor shortages, and we’ve seen in the past what that does to inflation.”

Vice President Kamala Harris made a pitch to voters who “love our country,” a sentiment Summers said he’d like to see the Democratic Party and institutions like Harvard champion.

“I’d frankly like to see it as a value embraced more in our University, where it’s not something we talk about or celebrate or think about,” he said. “There’s plenty that we have done wrong in our history. But there’s something odd about the degree to which the history that is received in our educational system is as negative about our country as it is.”

The University needs to “find a way” to encourage patriotism as a positive principle on campus because the U.S. today faces “real threats” and because it is “an alternative to each subgroup of Americans embracing a particular identity, which leads to a great deal of divisiveness.”

President-elect Donald Trump is moving swiftly to announce Cabinet and other appointments for a second term in office, which many observers expect to pick up where he left off in January 2021 on major policy issues like immigration, trade, and foreign relations.

What will be different, say veteran Washington journalists Susan Glasser ’90, and Peter Baker, is the speed at which Trump will move to advance his agenda, with a likely boost from a Republican majority in Congress.

“Trump 2.0 is Trump on steroids,” Baker, senior White House correspondent at The New York Times, told moderator Yevgenia Albats, Ph.D. ’04, a Russian journalist and political scientist. The discussion on Tuesday with Baker and Glasser, a staff writer for The New Yorker, examined what U.S. policy with Russia, China, and the European Union may look like during a second Trump administration.

The pair, who are married, served in Moscow as co-bureau chiefs for The Washington Post from 2001 to 2004, and have written several books together, including “Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution” in 2005 and “The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021” in 2022.

Unlike in 2016, when he ran as a celebrity businessman who wanted to shake up Washington, Trump will return to the White House in January having run on “an explicit campaign of revenge and retribution,” according to Glasser, and intending to take care of what he sees as “unfinished business,” namely to “fundamentally reorient” U.S. foreign policy to his own more isolationist view of the country’s role in the world.

Trump has more experience now in how to use the levers of presidential power. And his loyalist picks for secretaries of state and defense and national security adviser — Sen. Marco Rubio, Army veteran and Fox TV host Pete Hegseth, M.P.P. ’13, and Rep. Mike Waltz — lack deep experience in foreign policy and will likely do little to restrain Trump’s plans, unlike their counterparts in Trump’s first term, they said.

“If you look [at] who’s in the room making decisions right now, there is no dissent,” Baker noted.

The fate of Ukraine is likely to be among the first matters Trump takes up.

The incoming president, who has reportedly engaged in back-channel talks with Putin, made a campaign promise to end the Ukraine war quickly. He is almost certain to cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine and try to broker a deal that will favor Russia, the pair told Albats, editor in chief of The New Times, an independent Russian language news outlet, and a visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard.

NATO’s fate in a second Trump term is unclear. As the president-elect demonstrated in his first term, “He has no interest and no commitment whatsoever to defend, frankly, anybody, but especially the Eastern European countries,” said Baker.

Even without a formal withdrawal by the U.S., as Trump repeatedly threatened during his first term, NATO is already weaker than it was before Nov. 5, he said.

“If you’re an adversary of NATO, Article 5 [which calls for the nations to defend one another if attacked] is meaningless, because if it’s a conditional thing, depending on the mood of the president of the United States as opposed to a solid commitment, it’s a dead letter,” said Baker.

“He has, just by getting elected, undercut NATO in a way that it has not been undercut” since its beginnings after World War II amid concerns over the rise of the Soviet Union as a nuclear power, he said.

Supporting student engagement in live theater as it fosters lasting relationships between the two is the idea behind the American Repertory Theater’s Lavine Learning Lab. The new student initiative will, among other exercises, bring participating public high school students to an evening performance of every show in the company’s season.

Rooted in A.R.T.’s core values of inquiry and collaboration, the Lavine Learning Lab uses A.R.T. productions as the foundation for student workshops that bridge the arts, humanities, and social and emotional learning, fostering lasting relationships between the theater and its young audience.

“The theater is where we develop our muscles for inquiry, empathy, and debate,” said Artistic Director Diane Paulus ’88. “The Lavine Learning Lab will be a gymnasium where high school students will come to exercise their humanity so they can become the most impactful citizens and participants in our society.”  

“The lab’s students will diversify A.R.T.’s audience in multiple dimensions, turning our theater into a space for intergenerational dialogue among people with different lived experiences and perspectives.”

Dayron J. Miles, A.R.T. associate artistic director

For each production, students participate in an introductory in-school workshop centered around the production’s “Essential Questions”; a pre-show workshop at A.R.T., held alongside a second Learning Lab school, exploring one of the production’s themes or elements, followed by dinner and a performance; and a post-show, in-school student-led workshop for students to unpack their own perspectives and those of others.  

In addition, two educators from each participating school join a Professional Learning Community in which A.R.T. facilitates ongoing collaborative learning and provides professional development.   

An important aspect of the program is Learning Lab students will attend evening performances of every show in A.R.T.’s season — instead of morning matinees traditionally designated for school groups. Students will sit in groups of two to four, alongside the general evening audience. 

“When we attend a performance, we aren’t impacted only by what we see onstage, but also by our fellow audience members,” said A.R.T. Associate Artistic Director Dayron J. Miles. “The lab’s students will diversify A.R.T.’s audience in multiple dimensions, turning our theater into a space for intergenerational dialogue among people with different lived experiences and perspectives. Empathy is a necessary tool for responsible democratic participation, and that’s what we can cultivate with this model.”   

Evening attendance also builds familiarity with theatergoing and sense of belonging at the theater to cultivate a culture of lifelong theatergoing. To increase accessibility by removing common barriers, A.R.T. provides transportation between the schools and the theater and a pre-show dinner onsite.  

 The Lavine Learning Lab is supported by a $5 million gift from the Crimson Lion / Lavine Family Foundation, which was founded by Bain Capital Chair Jonathan Lavine, M.B.A. ’92,  and Jeannie Lavine ’88, M.B.A. ’92, to support nonprofit organizations focused on leveling the playing field for individuals and families.   

“We’ve been struck by A.R.T.’s commitment to expanding access to theater,” said Jeannie and Jonathan Lavine in a statement. “We are delighted to play a part in engaging Boston’s students and teachers in the essential questions sparked by A.R.T.’s world-class programming and in supporting A.R.T., whose work inspires people all throughout our city and this country.”  

The Learning Lab exemplifies the type of community-centered, accessible programming A.R.T. will offer from its new home, the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Creativity & Performance. Currently under construction at 175 N. Harvard St. in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, the center is expected to be completed in the fall of 2026.  

A.R.T. facilitated a pilot with six public high schools during the 2023-2024 school year to develop the current model.  

“I feel like a lot of my analytical skills have been reinforced and retaught in the Learning Lab, but I’ve also taken the vulnerability that I feel when I’m in the lab and applied it to other parts of my life,” said Malden High School student and pilot and Learning Lab participant Addison McWayne. “This experience has provided me with opportunities to speak up for myself and to share my opinion, which has made me a stronger and more confident person.”   

 “The lab is one of the ways that A.R.T. shares the resources of Harvard University with our community, but the A.R.T. community gains so much, too,” said Kelvin Dinkins Jr., executive director of the A.R.T. “The students bring their anticipation and excitement, which translates into a galvanizing energy on the sidewalk, in our lobbies, and in the theater itself that enhances the experience for everyone. Thanks to this incredible support from the Crimson Lion / Lavine Family Foundation, A.R.T. is positioned to bring our mission into public high schools across Boston for years to come.”    

  “When the Lavine Learning Lab works in Boston, we hope it will be a model for other cities, because A.R.T. has led the way in so many areas, and A.R.T. can help lead the way in providing this kind of access and inspiration to students all over the country,” said the Lavines.   

  

The average American consumes 41.8 pounds of cheese per year. We asked Harvard Chan School nutritionist Walter C. Willett about the health impact.

Whether cheese is good or bad for health depends on the comparison. It is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum from great (nuts and soy foods) to processed red meat. Like other dairy foods, cheese does have nutritional value, including a high calcium content. However, our calcium recommendations are seriously overstated because they are based on studies of several weeks, which is far too short.

Current National Institutes of Health recommendations suggest Americans older than 18 get 1,000 mg of calcium daily. However, as little as 600 mg is probably enough for most people.

Of course, the amount of cheese makes an important difference, and it has become common to put a huge amount in sandwiches and salads. About one serving of dairy foods a day is probably a good target; some evidence suggests that yogurt has some health advantages, and cheese could be part of that mix. But if you are thinking of a cheese sandwich, consider peanut butter on whole grain bread as an alternative, or adding nuts to your salad instead of cheese.

Americans consume about 1.5 servings of dairy foods per day, and the majority of this is now in the form of cheese. This is a major shift over the last several decades; the total amount of dairy foods consumed has not changed greatly, but until recently this was mainly milk. The USDA has been strongly supporting consumption of cheese (despite their own guidelines encouraging reduction in saturated fat), which has probably contributed to this trend.

Some of the increases in cheese consumption are probably due to more people reducing red meat for various reasons including health, animal welfare, and climate change, but the strong promotion of cheese by the USDA has very likely been an important factor. Starting with the Dairy Production Stabilization Act of 1983, a small tax on sales of dairy has gone to the USDA to promote sales of dairy foods, creating a massive conflict of interest within the organization. 

In the past, the vast majority of cheese consumed by Americans was cheddar, but we now consume a wider variety. There is no good evidence that one type or another is different for health. 

The differences in nutrient content of cheeses are primarily due to the amount of water. Cottage cheese and other fresh cheeses with high water content have higher percentages of lactose — a carbohydrate that decreases with aging. As cheese ages and becomes hard like parmesan or manchego, the lactose is fermented and lost.

However, volume matters. We usually eat more cottage cheese than an aged cheese, so the amount of calories, calcium, and saturated fat can end up not being very different.  

In addition to the direct effects of cheese on health, it is important to consider the implications for climate change because dairy production has a large impact on greenhouse gas emissions and land use. In an analysis conducted as part of the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy and sustainable food systems, we found that if global production of dairy foods increased to 2 servings per day, limiting severe climate change would be difficult.  

— As told to Anna Lamb/Harvard Staff Writer

Philip Deloria and Joseph P. Gone had family members who were taken from their homes and placed in government- or church-run boarding schools as part of a decadeslong federal initiative aimed at forcibly assimilating thousands of Native children.

Late last month, President Biden made a historic apology to Native Americans on behalf of the U.S. government. “I know no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy,” Biden said during a visit to the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona. “But today, we’re finally moving forward into the light.”

The gesture was applauded by many in the community, and for good reason, said Deloria, the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History.

“Apologies have not exactly been forthcoming from the federal and state governments and the churches, and the various entities that have enacted some of these programs on any people over the years. Any time that there’s recognition of those histories, I think it’s really important,” he said. “For many Native people, the moments where the rituals of formal American diplomacy are actually visible is also recognition of Native nationhood and of Native continuities and futurities.”

“A lot of people will be grateful for this apology, irrespective of the motivators for it, and are grateful that he appointed Secretary [Debra] Haaland, because it wouldn’t have happened without her,” added Gone, anthropology professor and faculty director of the Harvard University Native American Program. Gone credited Haaland, the first Native American to serve as U.S. secretary of the interior, for making the “boarding school wound” a priority during Biden’s administration.

Boarding schools, which often kept children away from their families for long periods of time, forced American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian students to speak English and prohibited them from speaking their own languages. These children were also banned from learning or practicing their own religions.

“The parts that are worth emphasizing are just the sheer brutality of many of these schools,” Deloria said. The children were subjected to physical and emotional abuse and sometimes served as free labor. Many died after contracting illnesses at the schools, he pointed out.

The federal initiative continued well into the 20th century. A July investigative report by Haaland’s department revealed that 19,000 Native children were forced into these boarding schools, with nearly 1,000 dying while there.

At the age of 5, Gone’s great-grandfather Many-Plumes was taken to a federally run industrial school in Fort Belknap Agency in Montana, where his name was changed to Frederick Peter Gone. There, the young boy was kept away from family and abused, he said.

 “It colored his life and the life of our descendants ever since in part because of these experiences,” Gone noted.

Similar boarding or industrial schools were also run by Christian, Mormon, and Catholic churches. Deloria’s grandfather and great-aunts went to church boarding schools that were just “a little better” than other federal or religious-run institutions.

“There’s an entire theory of historical trauma, which is largely based around the kinds of ways in which boarding-school trauma suffered by these children is passed down to subsequent generations,” he said.

In 1928, the “Meriam Report: The Problem of Indian Administration” highlighted the ineffectiveness of the boarding-school policy. Following reforms, some of the federally run schools transformed into places where Native students could interact with members of different tribes, Gone said.

“In the ’60s and ’70s, going to these schools sometimes could be more interesting than being in your tiny, little rural school on the reservation where you already know everybody,” Gone said. “One of the unintended consequences is you had a lot of intermarriage among Indian people who met at boarding schools.”

Despite reforms, the impact of boarding schools is felt to this day. In addition to calling on the federal government to apologize, Haaland’s report recommended creating a national memorial commemorating of Native children who died in the schools, and an investment in Native communities and their languages.

The Biden administration signed legislation that invested more than $45 billion in Native communities through the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act.

Deloria and Gone suggested some of the funds should be invested in healthcare, particularly in a way in which tribal nations can retain their sovereignty and autonomy. “There’s no domain of Indian life that wouldn’t benefit from additional resources,” Gone said.

Biden’s apology came just days before the recent presidential election, but the two professors said the timing was unimportant to them. “It may be that this is like a capstone for Biden, and it may be a cynical gesture in relation to the election, but it may also be the beginning of something new that goes forward,” Deloria said.

The deeply divided U.S. is like “two people locked in a wrestling match on the edge of a cliff,” said Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg at a campus event Monday evening.

“The implicit working theory of our administration has been if we could just deliver on the basics,” such as safe roads and bridges and clean drinking water, “solving some of those basic problems would move our wrestling match a few feet from the edge of the cliff,” he said. “But as everyone has noticed, we don’t seem to be that far from the edge of the cliff.”

He noted that part of the problem for the Biden White House was time. “I would argue that we’ve made enormous progress, basically full employment,” he said. “But so many of the economic benefits that we’ve been working on are things that take years.”

Buttigieg ’04 returned to campus for a Harvard Kennedy School discussion before a capacity crowd with Setti Warren, Institute of Politics director, on his own work at the Department of Transportation, some of the issues awaiting incoming President Donald Trump, and the need for Democrats to focus on advancing priorities through projects on the local and state level that can win wide support.

The transportation secretary said that as he was speaking in his official capacity he would largely avoid talking partisan politics. And he spent much of this time detailing his time in office.

Problems with commercial aviation, he said, loomed large, with issues ranging from a lack of transparency about fees and passenger reimbursements to safety concerns, such as when a section of the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines plane blew out during a flight in January.

In response, Buttigieg said, his department took a holistic response, from a package of consumer protections to a “dashboard” that tracks consumer complaints and airline compliance.

“First we used transparency to supply change, and now we have the letter of the [recently passed aviation] law” while also stepping up enforcement, he said, citing such regulations as new ones that make refunds automatic when flights are canceled (without alternatives being offered) or unduly delayed (three hours for a domestic flight, six hours for an international flight).

“We’re doing these things not against the airlines, but because we need them to deliver better service,” he said.

Ongoing issues include equal access for those with disabilities, he said, noting how some of those passengers say they dehydrate themselves because they know they will not be able to access airplane restrooms. Road safety, as well, remains a concern.

“We lose more than 100 people a day on our roadways,” he said. Comparing this statistic to the safety of air travel, with all its shortcomings, he concluded: “We should be able to do better with forms of transportation on the surface.”

Such basic concerns were the goals of the Biden administration, he said. Acknowledging issues with inflation even as the economy enjoyed robust employment, he explained that focusing on infrastructure improvements was viewed as a possible way to ease the country’s divisiveness.

Looking back on the past four years, the secretary noted the long-term nature of the majority of the Biden administration’s projects and how those have set up the Trump administration for its next moves.

Trying “not to sound bitter,” he pointed out that the incoming administration “will inherit a lot of groundwork that has been laid, jobs that were always expected to come online in 2026 and ’27.” This could provide the basis for a boom, he said.

“The building trades have a pipeline of work that they haven’t seen since before I was born,” said the 42-year-old, who also cited “interest rates ticking down.”

However, he added, the new administration may also create its own challenges. For example, he said, “if something disrupts our supply chains, such as mass deportations,” Americans may once again have to worry about the economy.

Looking ahead, Buttigieg saw common ground in “local voices.” “We’re doing 63,000 local projects,” he said, citing projects that came to the administration “because a state or a city or a tribe … wanted to get something done.”

He stressed the potential for Democrats to muster bipartisan support for such projects. “Principled conservatism has some regard for the local — if anything more regard than the left,” said the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. “I am hopeful that that principle will survive.

“In moments like this our salvation will come from the local and the state level. A lot of the answers are going to come from mayors, from communities, from states.”

At times this fall, Bohdan Tokarskyi has felt split between two contrasting worlds.

On one side is Cambridge, where he works as a new assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures. On the other are the sirens, bomb shelters, blackouts, and flattened universities that flash across his phone each morning when reading about Russia’s war with Ukraine.

“I feel great responsibility to be teaching Ukrainian literature and culture at a historic moment like this, when Ukraine is at the forefront of the clash between democracies and dictatorships,” said Tokarskyi. “It is really humbling for me what impressive work the educators and students in Ukraine continue to do against all odds and in spite of the horror of the war. This is a gigantic reminder that education is a privilege.”

Tokarskyi started his new role in July. This semester he is teaching “Poetics of Resistance: An Introduction to Ukrainian Literature,” an ambitious “crash course,” by his own telling, covering 12 centuries in 12 weeks.

“I want to provide a bird’s-eye view of Ukraine’s centuries-long literature and culture,” said Tokarskyi, who was a fellow at Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute in the spring. “Because Ukraine’s lands have been subjected to different imperial powers over the many centuries, there has been a lot of oppression of the Ukrainian language and culture. In my course, I show to my students how time and again in Ukrainian literature we find themes like solidarity, human rights, the pursuit of justice, feminism and, of course, resilience.”

Literature has played a central role in shaping Ukraine’s history, Tokarskyi said, and still does. During the 2013-2014 Euromaidan demonstrations, graffiti portraits, and quotes from Lesya Ukrainka, Taras Shevchenko, and other writers were used as inspiration to protesters. This past January, poet Maksym Kryvtsov read works by the 20th-century poet Vasyl Stus in videos posted to social media. The very next day, Kryvtsov was killed on the frontlines. 

“This reminds us that even nowadays Ukrainian writers are fighting and being killed defending their country and their culture,” Tokarskyi said. “But it also shows what great importance this cultural tradition has in Ukraine. It connects cultural thought across history, even when the producers of this culture were oppressed and executed.” 

Tokarskyi is currently writing the first-ever English-language book on Stus, a dissident poet who spent more than a decade in Soviet prisons. He is also collaborating with poet and translator Nina Murray on an English-language volume of Stus’ selected works. 

“Picture a poet of the stature of T.S. Eliot or Rainer Maria Rilke, working deep in the mines of a Gulag labor camp with an 80-kilogram-heavy rock bolt, managing nonetheless to produce some of the most exquisite post-war poetry in Europe,” Tokarskyi said. “You would expect that someone with a biography like that would create a work that is overtly political. But in his case, his response to the extreme conditions in which he found himself was instead producing this highly introspective poetry.”

The book is a passion project for Tokarskyi, who said Stus’ work helped inspire him to switch fields and pursue literature after completing an international law degree at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 2014.

“To me, Stus is a paragon of moral imperative and the pursuit of authenticity that is not only fighting against something but also asking oneself ceaselessly, ‘How can I become my true self?’ — and doing that by creating an absolutely innovative poetic language,” he said. “One of the extraordinary things about Stus’ poetic style is the sheer number of neologisms — new words he coined to be able to capture these between states of our own identity, of these not-yet-crystallized selves.”

Next semester Tokarskyi will teach the graduate-level seminar “Modernisms: Ukrainian, Soviet, European.” Also on the agenda is a first-year seminar titled “Making the Self: Poetics of Authenticity,” which will examine how writers and philosophers seek to answer the question “What does it mean to be authentic?” which Tokarskyi says is all the more urgent in the era of social media and artificial intelligence. 

Tokarskyi is excited about introducing graduate students to a “treasure trove” of potential Ph.D. projects. “My door is always open for students, and I cannot wait to help them explore and discover Ukrainian literature.”

Gene mutations have consequences both good and bad — from resistance to conditions like diabetes to susceptibility to certain cancers.

In order to study these mutations, scientists need to introduce them directly into human cells. But changing genetic instructions inside cells is complex. The human genome comprises 3 billion base pairs of DNA divided across tens of thousands of genes.

To that end, Harvard researchers have created a tool that allows them to rapidly create mutations only in particular genes of interest without disturbing the rest of the genome. Described in Science, their tool, called Helicase-Assisted Continuous Editing (HACE), can be deployed to predetermined regions of the genome in intact, living cells.

“The development of tools like this marks a significant leap forward in our ability to harness evolution directly within human cells,” said first author Xi Dawn Chen, a Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student studying synthetic biology in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. “By allowing targeted mutagenesis in specific parts of the genome, this tool opens the door to creating enzymes and treatments that were previously out of reach.”

Unlike current methods for mutagenesis, which involve inserting extra copies of genes or broadly mutating many different genes at once, HACE offers the advantage of being directed to locations — like going to a specific address, rather than a neighborhood. The team’s novel bioengineering involves combining a helicase, which is an enzyme that naturally “unzips” DNA, with a gene-editing enzyme. They then use the gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9 to guide the protein pair to the gene they want to mutate. As the helicase unzips the DNA, it introduces mutations into only that gene sequence.

“HACE combines CRISPR’s precision with the ability to edit long stretches of DNA, making it a powerful tool for targeted evolution,” explained senior author Fei Chen, assistant professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and member at the Broad Institute.

To demonstrate the tool’s power in the lab, the scientists used it to identify drug resistance mutations in a gene called MEK1, which cancer treatments often target but frequently fail because the diseased cells mutate resistance mechanisms. Using HACE, the team sequenced only those mutated genes and pinpointed several unique changes associated with resistance to cancer drugs like trametinib and selumetinib, offering insights into how mutations affect drug performance.

They also examined how mutations in SF3B1, a gene involved in a biomolecular process called RNA splicing, affects RNA assembly. Mutations in this gene are common in blood cancers, but it’s been unclear which mutations cause the splicing defects; with HACE, the team could easily identify those changes.

And in partnership with Bradley Bernstein’s lab at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the researchers also used the tool to better understand how changes in a regulatory DNA region affect the production of a protein in immune cells recognized as a potential target for cancer immunotherapies.

Bernstein said tools like HACE could someday allow massive edits of gene regulatory sequences that could then be coupled with deep learning computation for deciphering. “One can imagine many new therapeutic opportunities that involve precise edits or tuning of these regulatory sequences to ‘fix’ gene activity and ameliorate disease,” Bernstein said.

This research was supported by multiple sources including the National Institutes of Health, the Broad Institute, and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Mammals, including humans, stand out with their distinctively upright posture, a trait that fueled their evolutionary success. Yet the earliest known ancestors of modern mammals more closely resembled reptiles, with limbs stuck out to their sides in a sprawled posture.

The shift from a sprawled stance like that of lizards to the upright posture of modern mammals, as in humans, dogs, and horses, marked a pivotal moment in evolution. Despite more than a century of study, the exact how, why, and when behind this leap has remained elusive.

A new study published in Science Advances provides fresh insights into this mystery, revealing the shift from a sprawled to upright posture in mammals was anything but straightforward. Using methods that blend fossil data with advanced biomechanical modeling, the researchers found that this transition was surprisingly complex and nonlinear, and occurred much later than previously believed.

Lead author and postdoctoral fellow Peter Bishop, and senior author Professor Stephanie Pierce, both in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, began by examining the biomechanics of five modern species that represent the full spectrum of limb postures, including a tegu lizard (sprawled), an alligator (semi-upright), and a greyhound (upright).

“By first studying these modern species, we greatly improved our understanding of how an animal’s anatomy relates to the way it stands and moves,” said Bishop. “We could then put it into an evolutionary context of how posture and gait actually changed.”

The researchers extended their analysis to eight exemplar fossil species from four continents spanning 300 million years of evolution. The species ranged from the 1-ounce proto-mammal Megazostrodon to the Ophiacodon, which weighed hundreds of pounds, and also included animals like the sail-backed Dimetrodon and the saber-toothed predator Lycaenops. Using principles from physics and engineering, Bishop and Pierce built digital biomechanical models of how the muscles and bones attached to each other. These models allowed them to generate simulations that determined how much force the hindlimbs could apply on the ground.

“The amount of force that a limb can apply to the ground is a critical determinant of locomotor performance in animals,” said Bishop. “If you cannot produce sufficient force in a given direction when it’s needed, you won’t be able to run as fast, turn as quickly, or worse still, you could well fall over.”

The computer simulations produced a 3D “feasible force space” that captures a limb’s overall functional performance. “Computing feasible force spaces implicitly accounts for all the interactions that can occur between muscles, joints, and bones throughout a limb,” said Pierce. “This gives us a clearer view of the bigger picture, a more holistic view of limb function and locomotion and how it evolved over hundreds of millions of years.”

While the concept of a feasible force space has been around since the 1990s, this study is the first to apply it to the fossil record to understand how extinct animals once moved. The authors packaged the simulations into new “fossil-friendly” computational tools that can aid other paleontologists in exploring their own questions, as well as help engineers design better bio-inspired robots that can navigate complex or unstable terrain.

The study revealed several important “signals” of locomotion, including that the overall force-generating ability in the modern species was maximal around the postures that each species used in their daily behavior. Bishop and Pierce say this made them confident that the results obtained for the extinct species genuinely reflected how they stood and moved when alive.

After analyzing the extinct species, the researchers discovered that locomotor performance peaked and dipped over millions of years, rather than progressing in a simple, linear fashion from sprawling to upright. Some extinct species also appeared to be more flexible — able to shift back and forth between more sprawled or more upright postures, like modern alligators and crocodiles do. Others showed a strong reversal toward more sprawled postures before mammals evolved. Paired with the study’s other results, this indicated that the traits associated with upright posture in today’s mammals evolved much later than previously thought, most likely close to the common ancestor of therian mammals.

These findings also help reconcile several unresolved problems in the fossil record. For example, it explains the persistence of asymmetric hands, feet, and limb joints in many mammal ancestors, traits typically associated with sprawling postures among modern animals. It can also help explain why fossils of early mammal ancestors are frequently found in a squashed, spread-eagle pose — a pose more likely to be achieved with sprawled limbs, while modern placental and marsupial fossils are typically found lying on their sides.

“It is very gratifying as a scientist, when one set of results can help illuminate other observations, moving us closer to a more comprehensive understanding,” Bishop said.

Berlin-based filmmaker Hito Steyerl was 23 when she witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Some of her earliest films document this fraught period of Germany’s history, capturing the rise in xenophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic violence that followed unification. But that was more than 30 years ago, making the specifics a bit difficult to remember, she joked during an event held at the Harvard Art Museums on Oct. 29.

“It almost feels as if … a different person made these films,” she told those gathered. “It’s strange for me to try to talk about it; don’t ask me any details,” she added with a laugh.

Three films by Steyerl — “Deutschland und das Ich” (“Germany and Identity”), “Die leere Mitte” (“The Empty Centre”), and “Normalität 1-X” (“Normality 1-X”) — were recently acquired by the Busch-Reisinger Museum, the sole museum to own the works. These films are featured prominently in a current exhibition titled “Made in Germany? Art and Identity in a Global Nation.”

“As an exhibition, [it] features artists from different backgrounds and generations and [has work] that complicates notions of German identity, especially the idea of ethnic and cultural homogeneity,” said Lynette Roth, the Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger. “We’ve seen that in recent months incredible conversations and questions around the question of national identity, both here in the United States and abroad.”

Steyerl was invited to speak as part of the annual Busch-Reisinger Museum Lecture series, which started in 2005 and is supported by the German Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. She shared her experience filming her early documentaries, and explained the connection between some of her modern work and Germany’s evolution as a country, historically and technologically.

Steyerl said that one of the films, “The Empty Center” (1998), took eight years to complete. At the time, she was working with Wim Wenders, a filmmaker she met while studying in Tokyo. He was shooting a film called “Until the End of the World” and was “too busy” to capture the fall of the Berlin Wall himself, so he gave Steyerl a camera and told her to go document what she saw. Over the course of eight years, she filmed the wall coming down in an area she called “no man’s land” — what used to be a minefield between the East and the West between the two walls — and its subsequent transition and real estate development. In many ways, she hoped to highlight the transition from going to one border system (a literal wall) to another (the borders of privatization and capitalism).

“That’s basically the organizing principle of that film,” she said. “The superimpositions [are] showing something which had remained the same … but everything else had changed a lot.”

Throughout her lecture, Steyerl showed clips of her older documentaries. She also shared portions of her more contemporary work, such as her 2015 film “Factory of the Sun,” which uses different forms of imagery — video games, drone surveillance, dance — to explore financial power, control, and the spread of information in our increasingly technology-driven world.

After the event, attendees were invited to explore the “Made in Germany?” exhibit, which includes three of Steyerl’s films. Other works on display include Katharina Sieverding’s monumental pigment-on-metal print “Deutschland wird deutscher XLI/92” (“Germany Becomes More German XLI/92”) from 1992; Ulrich Wüst’s hand-crafted leporello (accordion book) “Hausbuch” (“House Book”) (1989–2010); and a loan of East Germany-born Henrike Naumann’s “Ostalgie” (2019), a room-sized installation addressing the immediate post-Wall period in Germany’s “new” federal states. Additionally, a special “Made in Germany?” playlist featuring music from the 1980s to today is available on Spotify, as well as a print catalog accompanying the exhibit.

The exhibition is on view through Jan. 5, 2025, in the Special Exhibitions Gallery and adjacent University Research Gallery on Level 3 of the Harvard Art Museums.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the death toll in Gaza. The territory’s health ministry reports that more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, but it does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths. Israel says it has killed more than 17,000 militants.

A former Saudi Arabian intelligence chief called international inaction in Gaza “criminal” and called on Israel’s sophisticated military to employ more targeted methods to reduce civilian deaths in its conflict with Hamas.

“What we need there is for both sides — not just the Israelis but also the Arabs — to say enough is enough and to turn to wiser heads and more capable leadership around the world to bring an end to the cycle of tit for tat and death for death and destruction for destruction,” said His Royal Highness Prince Turki Al Faisal, who served for 24 years as head of the Saudi Arabian Intelligence Presidency before stepping down in 2001.

Al Faisal, current chair of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, also proposed a U.N.-brokered process for a two-state solution during the Middle East Initiative’s “Middle East Dialogues” last Thursday at the Harvard Kennedy School. Hosted by Tarek Masoud, the initiative’s faculty chair, the series brings prominent actors from across the Middle East to discuss the war in Gaza and broader regional issues.

“This is something we began at Harvard last year to bring to this University genuine, candid, open conversations with people who hold wildly varied but widely shared views on the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the causes of that conflict and how it might be brought to an end,” said Masoud, who is also the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance, as he introduced the event, the first of this school year.

Al Faisal, a member of the Saudi royal family and former ambassador to the U.S. and U.K., said that Hamas — whose Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel sparked the war — is a terrorist group, but argued that if Hamas mingles with civilians and digs tunnels under hospitals and mosques, Israeli soldiers should fight in the tunnels, not bomb indiscriminately.

Al Faisal called for establishment of a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem to resolve the conflict as part of the creation of a two-state solution, with talks guided by the United Nations and participation of global powers.

“Part of the U.N. setup would be an article to come out in the United Nations Security Council resolution barring anybody on the side of the Palestinians and Israelis who does not accept a two-state solution from being in negotiations for a two-state solution,” Al Faisal said, adding that that would include even major players like Hamas and Hezbollah. “A mechanism should be put in place to get only those committed to the principle of peace between Arabs and Israelis to be party to the negotiations.”

Masoud described Al Faisal as “one of the broadest minds in our region, if not our planet” and as “not just a witness to history, but a shaper of it.”

Despite repeated calls for peace, the war has killed thousands of civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands. It has expanded in recent months into southern Lebanon after Iran-backed Hezbollah repeatedly fired rockets into Israel. Concerns about the war widening further have risen as Israel and Iran exchanged rocket fire.

In response to Masoud’s questions, Al Faisal said the ongoing fighting is planting seeds of anguish and anger among today’s children in Gaza. Those seeds will fuel the continuation of the long-running cycle of violence that has plagued the region.

“My view is even one death on both sides is not worth the destruction that is taking place,” Al Faisal said. “There is a verse in the Quran which says, ‘The killing of an innocent person is like killing all mankind.’ That is the attitude I think a state with the recognition that Israel has in the world should take into consideration.”  

Al Faisal also addressed Saudi Arabia’s approach to relations with Israel, saying normalization by other nations like Egypt and Jordan has had no impact on the fighting, so Saudi Arabia shouldn’t pursue it until the fighting has concluded, and a Palestinian state is assured.

Asked why Saudi Arabia hasn’t responded as it did to U.S. support for Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, when it imposed a painful oil embargo, Al Faisal said that times have changed. Such an approach today would be ineffective, he said, largely because the U.S. has become a major oil-producing nation.  

Prior speakers in the Dialogues series included Jared Kushner, former senior adviser to former President Donald Trump; Matt Duss, executive director of the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders; Salam Fayyad, former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority; and Einat Wilf, a political scientist and former member of the Knesset.

Al Faisal also addressed broader issues outside the conflict and praised the recent loosening of cultural rules in the kingdom and its more welcoming approach to outsiders. He also said there are opportunities for the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to cooperate more. Saudi Arabia is a significant provider of international aid, he said, and together the two could make a difference on international poverty.

“We are an evolving country, like all countries are,” Al Faisal said. “It’s not going to be a matter of a top-down decree on what to do, but rather an integration of the sense of what people want and what leadership can provide them.”

More from Middle East Dialogues

• 

  Speaking to the moment

  Tarek Masoud, organizer of Middle East Dialogues, wanted to show that Harvard could confront the tensions around Israel-Gaza without vitriol or shouting. So far, it’s worked.

• 

  Jared Kushner speaks from Middle East experience in Kennedy School forum

  Ex-Trump adviser criticizes Biden’s pre-Oct. 7 engagement in the region, defends Israel’s actions in Gaza

• 

  Palestinian scholar pressed on views of Hamas, Oct. 7 attack

  Conversation with Kennedy School’s Masoud reflects wider tensions

• 

  Gaza cease-fire alone won’t repair larger enduring rift, political scientist says

  Einat Wilf, who is also former Knesset member, says shift needed in Palestinian ideology on legitimacy of Israel

• 

  Ex-Sanders aide calls for U.S. to take harder line with Israel

  Sustained assault ‘indefensible,’ Duss says. Kennedy School’s Masoud disputes arguments on governance of Gaza, history of conflict.

• 

  Roadmap to Gaza peace may run through Oslo

  Former Palestinian Authority prime minister says strengthening execution of 1993 accords could lead to two-state solution 

• 

  Cease-fire will fail as long as Hamas exists, journalist says

  Times opinion writer Bret Stephens also weighs in on campus unrest in final Middle East Dialogues event

To better protect newborns from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), the leading cause of hospitalization in U.S. infants, pregnant women should receive a vaccine five weeks before delivery, according to new research led by investigators at Mass General Brigham.

RSV typically causes mild, cold-like symptoms in most adults but can be deadly for infants. While current guidelines recommend a vaccine during weeks 32–36 of pregnancy, new findings suggest that vaccination closer to 32 weeks could provide the best protection. Results of the study are published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

To assess whether maternal vaccine timing is an important consideration for RSV vaccination, the investigators measured RSV antibodies in the umbilical cord at the time of delivery among 124 women who received the RSV vaccine during weeks 32–36 of pregnancy and in the blood of 29 2-month-old infants of these mothers.

All study participants were receiving care at MGH or Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. Levels of RSV antibodies can predict protection against RSV infection in infants too young to yet receive their own vaccines.

The investigators found that maternal RSV vaccination at least five weeks before delivery led to the most efficient transfer of maternal antibodies across the placenta to the newborn, compared with maternal vaccination at two to three or three to four weeks prior to delivery.

In an additional analysis, RSV antibody levels in maternal and cord blood after RSV vaccination were compared with RSV antibody levels in 20 unvaccinated mothers. Maternal RSV vaccination resulted in significantly higher and longer-lasting maternal and cord RSV antibody levels.

“Our findings suggest that being vaccinated earlier within the approved timeframe allows for the most efficient placental transfer of antibody to the newborn,” said senior author Andrea Edlow, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Massachusetts General Hospital. “They also may have implications for when the RSV monoclonal antibody, Nirsevimab, should be administered to newborns. Similar research should be conducted for other vaccines administered during pregnancy.

“This work provides much-needed data to guide physicians in counseling patients about RSV vaccine timing during pregnancy,” Edlow added.

The investigators noted that additional studies are needed to determine the minimum amount of antibody transfer and/or infant blood antibody levels to adequately protect infants against RSV. It will also be important to understand the potential additive protection for infants provided by breastmilk from RSV-vaccinated mothers. This study was designed to measure antibody transfer, but larger studies of infants 2 to 6 months of age will be needed to determine the extent to which this leads to enhanced protection.

Disclosures: Outside of this work, Edlow serves as a consultant for Mirvie, Inc. and is a consultant for and has received research funding from Merck Pharmaceuticals. Additional disclosures can be found in the paper.

Authorship: In addition to Edlow, Mass General Brigham authors include Olyvia J. Jasset, Paola Andrea Lopez Zapana, Lydia Shook, Emily Gilbert, Zhaojing Ariel Liu, Rachel V. Yinger, Caroline Bald, Caroline G. Bradford, Alexa H. Silfen, and Lael M. Yonker.

This work was funded by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (1U19AI167899, R01AI171980), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (5K12HD103096 to L.L.S; NIH/NHLBI: R01HL173059 to L.Y.; MGH ECOR: MGH Research Scholar Award to A.G.E., Claflin Award to L.L.S.; Binational Science Foundation Award number 2019075 to L.K.) None of the funders had any role in the design of the study; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; or in the decision to submit the article for publication.

President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory over Vice President Kamala Harris was made possible partly by a significantly expanded coalition of multi-ethnic, working-class voters, signaling a potentially seismic shift in the American political landscape, according to a political analyst.

“I believe that we are in a new political era in which class will be the dominant factor in political divisions,” said William Galston, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, during a panel discussion Thursday hosted by the Center for American Political Studies.

Analysts at the election post-mortem, moderated by Harvey Mansfield, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government, Emeritus, noted Trump made gains with voters in every age group, across racial and ethnic demographics, particularly Hispanic and Black men, and even improved over 2020 with women.

Class and gender were more determinative than race and ethnicity this year, Galston noted, with class, as defined by educational level rather than income, being the most important. The split between people with higher and lower levels of education is a development the country “will be wrestling with for the next generation with consequences that I can’t begin to predict,” he said.

The group noted the Trump campaign correctly predicted wide-ranging voter discontent over the economy and immigration would override any misgivings about their candidate’s personality or behavior. And Trump’s recent pledge to veto a national abortion ban appeared to allay concerns with many voters over an issue Democrats had expected would drive turnout their way.

They also noted the campaign’s media strategy proved very effective. TV ads attacking Harris as being too liberal did some damage. And the unconventional decision to put less emphasis on mainstream news outlets in favor of more friendly, less overtly political settings, like “The Joe Rogan Podcast,” along with aggressive use of social media influencers, crypto and gambling events, and internet memes, helped the campaign reach likely supporters, the panelists said.

The Harris campaign had much to overcome, tied as it was to the coattails of a deeply unpopular administration that was blamed for the nation’s high inflation and problems with border security and immigration, the analysts said.

President Biden ran on restoring normalcy to the pandemic-battered U.S. economy and using his considerable foreign policy chops to cool global hotspots and repair international relations damaged by Trump, said Ross Douthat ’02, opinion columnist at The New York Times, who anticipated that Trump would prevail.

Instead, he said, voters faced much higher prices on essentials like gas and food and witnessed a botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and two wars erupt in Ukraine and in the Middle East.

Trump “said a lot of wild and deplorable things over the course of the 2024 election but having lived through the first Trump administration in which there was a huge disconnect between Trumpian rhetoric and the actual realities of governance, I don’t think it was that surprising that the voting public [told themselves] if we went through this for four years and things were OK, and Donald Trump did not become a fascist dictator, we can go through it for four more years’” because he offers better prospects than the alternative, Douthat said.  

In addition, Biden’s seeming retreat from his 2020 pledge to be a one-term “transitional president,” waiting until July to step aside, gave Harris no time to introduce herself to voters and to lay out and sharpen the substance and presentation of her agenda in just three months put her at a great disadvantage from the outset, said Galston.

Without a primary, Harris also had no real chance to establish an identity independent of Biden, making it easier to tie her to everything voters disliked about his administration. And arguments that Harris and Democrats thought would be key, such as reproductive rights and Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack, proved less powerful than hoped.

“There is a mountain of political science evidence to the effect that for people who feel hard-pressed economically or insecure physically, democracy is a luxury good,” said Galston.

Then there was the appeal of Trump himself. The president-elect has had 50 years as a celebrity, skillful marketer, and TV performer, so it’s not surprising that he excels at creating effective political images and viral content, like pretending to serve McDonald’s french fries, that cut through today’s fragmented media landscape and deliver his intended messages, said Bill Kristol ’73, Ph.D. ’79, a longtime conservative intellectual and founder of the now-defunct Weekly Standard, who became a critic of the Republican Party under Trump.

He said Trump returns to office with a more supportive Republican majority in the Senate and possibly the House, expanded presidential protections conferred by the Supreme Court, and a plan to purge the federal government of those who would try to block his initiatives. And so, he appears much more powerful than he was in 2016.

Referencing Karl Marx’s famous quip about history repeating itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, Kristol said about a second Trump term: “What makes me most worried about the next four years is that it could end up being ‘first time farce, second time tragedy.’”

While earlier diagnostic studies have suggested that 7 percent of the population suffers from long COVID, a new AI tool developed by  Mass General Brigham revealed a much higher 22.8 percent, according to the study. 

The AI-based tool can sift through electronic health records to help clinicians identify cases of long COVID. The often-mysterious condition can encompass a litany of enduring symptoms, including fatigue, chronic cough, and brain fog after infection from SARS-CoV-2. 

The algorithm used was developed by drawing de-identified patient data from the clinical records of nearly 300,000 patients across 14 hospitals and 20 community health centers in the Mass General Brigham system. The results, published in the journal Med, could identify more people who should be receiving care for this potentially debilitating condition.

“Our AI tool could turn a foggy diagnostic process into something sharp and focused, giving clinicians the power to make sense of a challenging condition,” said senior author Hossein Estiri, head of AI Research at the Center for AI and Biomedical Informatics of the Learning Healthcare System (CAIBILS) at MGB and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “With this work, we may finally be able to see long COVID for what it truly is — and more importantly, how to treat it.”

“With this work, we may finally be able to see long COVID for what it truly is — and more importantly, how to treat it.”

Hossein Estiri

For the purposes of their study, Estiri and colleagues defined long COVID as a diagnosis of exclusion that is also infection-associated. That means the diagnosis could not be explained in the patient’s unique medical record but was associated with a COVID infection. In addition, the diagnosis needed to have persisted for two months or longer in a 12-month follow up window. 

The novel method developed by Estiri and colleagues, called “precision phenotyping,” sifts through individual records to identify symptoms and conditions linked to COVID-19 to track symptoms over time in order to differentiate them from other illnesses. For example, the algorithm can detect if shortness of breath results from pre-existing conditions like heart failure or asthma rather than long COVID. Only when every other possibility was exhausted would the tool flag the patient as having long COVID. 

“Physicians are often faced with having to wade through a tangled web of symptoms and medical histories, unsure of which threads to pull, while balancing busy caseloads. Having a tool powered by AI that can methodically do it for them could be a game-changer,” said Alaleh Azhir, co-lead author and an internal medicine resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system.

The new tool’s patient-centered diagnoses may also help alleviate biases built into current diagnostics for long COVID, said researchers, who noted diagnoses with the official ICD-10 diagnostic code for long COVID trend toward those with easier access to healthcare.

The researchers said their tool is about 3 percent more accurate than the data ICD-10 codes capture, while being less biased. Specifically, their study demonstrated that the individuals they identified as having long COVID mirror the broader demographic makeup of Massachusetts, unlike long COVID algorithms that rely on a single diagnostic code or individual clinical encounters, skewing results toward certain populations such as those with more access to care.

“This broader scope ensures that marginalized communities, often sidelined in clinical studies, are no longer invisible,” said Estiri.

Limitations of the study and AI tool include that health record data the algorithm uses to account for long COVID symptoms may be less complete than the data physicians capture in post-visit clinical notes. Another limitation was the algorithm did not capture possible worsening of a prior condition that may have been a long COVID symptom. For example, if a patient had COPD that worsened before they developed COVID-19, the algorithm might have removed the episodes even if they were long COVID indicators. Declines in COVID-19 testing in recent years also makes it difficult to identify when a patient may have first gotten COVID-19.

The study was limited to patients in Massachusetts.

Future studies may explore the algorithm in cohorts of patients with specific conditions, like COPD or diabetes. The researchers also plan to release this algorithm publicly on open access so physicians and healthcare systems globally can use it in their patient populations. 

In addition to opening the door to better clinical care, this work may lay the foundation for future research into the genetic and biochemical factors behind long COVID’s various subtypes. “Questions about the true burden of long COVID — questions that have thus far remained elusive — now seem more within reach,” said Estiri.

Support was given by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) R01AI165535, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) OT2HL161847, and National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) UL1 TR003167, UL1 TR001881, and U24TR004111. J. Hügel’s work was partially funded by a fellowship within the IFI program of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as well by the German Research Foundation (426671079).

Comedian Iliza Shlesinger doesn’t jot down her jokes — she stores them in her head until showtime. Even her setlists are just single-word prompts, like “giraffe” (for her baby giraffe impression) or “armpit” (she has joked that no man has ever dumped a woman over armpit stubble).

But that doesn’t mean her routine is mostly impromptu, or “unfiltered,” a label Shlesinger told a Paine Hall audience last Wednesday is overused for female comedians. In reality, she said, most audiences don’t realize how much stand-up material is edited and refined before it’s delivered.

“When you do stand-up, it’s a polished piece of art,” said Shlesinger, a national headliner who has starred in six of her own stand-up comedy specials on Netflix (considered a top-notch venue for comedians) and has toured internationally to sold-out theaters. “Every laugh that is elicited is purposefully placed. I know where the tension is. It’s a symphony.”

“As women we are constantly having to justify everything and make sure that you know that ‘I don’t mean to offend.’”

Iliza Shlesinger

At the Hauser Forum for the Arts talk hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center, Shlesinger spoke with comedy writer Bess Kalb about self-censoring, comedy in the age of social media, and double standards for female comedians.

Shlesinger said that when it comes to the balancing act between not offending and not allowing public opinion to ruin a good joke, female comedians are always judged more harshly for their choices. She believes this could discourage them from wanting to make art.

“As women we are constantly having to justify everything and make sure that you know that ‘I don’t mean to offend,’” Shlesinger said. “We love to pick apart people and women. We do it deliciously. We love the schadenfreude of ‘I know that all she said was she loves fluffy clouds, but she didn’t say she loved rain clouds also, which means you hate the rain, which means you love climate change.’”

Kalb, an Emmy-nominated comedy writer who has written for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and The New Yorker, said she’s witnessed this double standard firsthand while writing for an all-female comedy special.

“It was at the same network where there were men who had their own specials, and the notes that we got about what all these women could and couldn’t say were astounding,” Kalb said.

Part of the reason behind the nitpicking, Shlesinger believes, is that social media algorithms have normalized content tailored to individual tastes.

“We all have our own personalized channels on Netflix, and we all have our own personalized comedians because we have so much to pick from on social media,” Schlesinger said. “That’s just not the way the human brain works. How could I tailor something that 100 percent speaks to you?”

Female comedians are often disproportionately expected to pull out anecdotes about trauma onstage to be relatable, said Shlesinger, who added that she speaks about her own experience with miscarriage during stand-ups. Kalb dubbed these moments “trauma gems.” Still, Shlesinger said, vulnerability onstage is important for engaging an audience.

“I always think if I’m feeling this, particularly when it comes to the experiences of being a woman, everybody else is feeling this,” Shlesinger said.

Though she knows her jokes won’t land with everyone, Shlesinger said she works to find the common denominator for her audience in whatever venue she’s in.

“At the end of the day, we are all people, and we do all go through the same things,” Shlesinger said. “When you can tap into that, which I always strive to do, that’s how you’re able to play Kuala Lumpur and also Ireland and also Tokyo. You’re reaching a very human thing.”

Jennifer Koh stood onstage in Paine Concert Hall and lifted her bow to her violin, drawing out the first haunting notes of a Bach sonata. 

The back door of the hall then opened, and Davóne Tines ’09 entered singing a Handel aria, his rich bass-baritone interrupting Koh’s performance as he walked down the aisle. They traded notes in call-and-response until Tines joined Koh onstage, and the two performed a duet from Holst’s Songs for Voice and Violin, Op. 35.

The performance was the artists’ re-enactment of the real-life moment Tines and Koh met and began collaborating on “Everything Rises,” a staged performance that premiered at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2022. Tines and Koh told the audience at a recent evening talk hosted by the Department of Music how they created their show, which traces their family histories of racialized trauma and their own experiences navigating racism in the majority-white, tradition-bound world of classical music.

“Oftentimes things that are traditional or a part of the core of what institutions uphold go unexcavated, which is really detrimental,” Tines said, pausing to note the names of white European composers like Haydn, Schubert, and Wagner written on the walls in Paine Hall. “We say, ‘Oh, this Beethoven symphony is nonpareil, the best thing that you could be listening to’ so the institution doesn’t go to the lengths of actually self-reflecting to tell the audience why.”

Tines, who concentrated in sociology, was a member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and sang his first opera, Stravinsky’s “Rake’s Progress,” his senior year with the Dunster House Opera Society. Currently he combines opera with gospel and spirituals, and often uses art to highlight and confront societal issues.

The award-winning Tines recalled meeting the violin virtuoso Koh backstage at the Paris Opera several years ago, and when they spotted each other, the only two people of color in the room, each felt an immediate connection. 

“We banded together and went to dinner, and continued to get to know each other,” Tines said. “As we compared and contrasted our life experiences, we found that we had a lot of similarities in our journeys as artists of color within classical music.” 

Soon after, they began working on “Everything Rises” and slowly assembled a team of collaborators, including composer Ken Ueno, Ph.D. ’05. They approached the show through a lens of lineage, telling the stories of Koh’s mother, a refugee from North Korea during the Korean War, and Tines’ grandmother, who holds vivid memories of anti-Black discrimination and violence in the U.S. Recorded interviews with the two women are included in the show.

“[Famed cellist] Yo-Yo Ma often says that it takes three generations to make an artist: the first generation to pull the family out of poverty, the second generation to become educated, and then the third generation then has the freedom and foundation to have creative pursuits,” Tines said. 

The lyrics of one song by Ueno, “Story of the Moth,” comes directly from frustrations Tines expressed about feeling objectified as a performer.

“Those words, which might seem affronting or surprising — ‘dear white people,’ ‘money, access and fame’ ‘I yearn for your validation’ — these were all things I’ve actually felt,” Tines said.

Tines and Koh adapted a setting of the 1930s anti-racism protest song “Strange Fruit” — which they also performed in their show — into a film for Carnegie Hall’s “Voices of Hope” series. That project came together shortly after the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings. In it, their music accompanies a gallery of racist political cartoons and CCTV footage of anti-Asian violence.

Koh said she’s noticed a clear difference in audience enthusiasm when she performs, say, a work by Tchaikovsky as opposed to a socially and politically charged piece like “Embers,” which was inspired by her years of anger and frustration over anti-Asian hate in the U.S.

“As performers, of course [we hope] you guys will clap at the end,” Koh said. “But to a certain degree, art is not about entertainment. It’s about confrontation of oneself. It’s not only an excavation of our own experience, but something, I think, for the audience to experience as well.”

One of their biggest challenges was finding the perfect way to end their show. At first, Tines said, he had suggested ending with the triumphantly hopeful “Ode to Joy” — both the Beethoven and the gospel hymn version — to suggest a move toward unity. 

But Koh disagreed, saying that type of resolution would be letting the audience “off the hook.” 

Tines turned to her. “Another thing you said was, ‘Davóne, you don’t have to give that to them. That can be for you,’” herecalled. “’You can find resolution and hope for yourself, but the audience will continue to contend with what was presented.’”

Ultimately, they went with an original composition by Ueno titled “Better Angels” (a reference to Lincoln’s first inaugural address), which they perform directly to each other, a choice Tines felt struck the appropriate chord.

“You want people to go to places that are doubtful,” Tines said. “You hope that those things sit with them, but you don’t want to let them off the hook. You don’t want them to eviscerate what actually has been built in the performance.”

Birth rates are falling globally. In fact, the fertility rate in the U.S. hit a record low of 1.64 expected births per a woman’s lifetime in 2020.

At the same time, about 5 percent of women in the nation currently have five or more children. Catherine Pakaluk, Ph.D ’10, a Catholic University economist and mother of eight (and stepmother of six), wanted to find out why, both academically and personally. Her new book, “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth,” offers an intimate view into the lives of families around the country who have decided to pursue large families.

Pakaluk spoke with the Gazette about what she learned. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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What drew you to this topic, and why do you think it’s an important one to talk about in the current moment?

As an economist I’ve been interested in questions related to population growth as it relates to labor market and human development for a long time. But in the last 10 years, especially since the Great Recession, it’s become increasingly a puzzle: Why have birth rates been declining so rapidly and why aren’t they responding to some of the [policy] things that we would assume they would respond to? I thought this was really interesting.

I’m also interested in women’s choices and labor market choices. I was noticing that around the world, countries are about to get kind of bossy about women having children. They’re applying bigger and bigger incentives to try to get people to have kids. It’s becoming a mounting policy concern, with nations wanting people to have kids. That always sounded a little alarming to me, so I wanted to see what we could learn. Falling birth rates represent one of the main concerns for the contemporary political economy, mainly because the social welfare programs [like Social Security] are creaking and straining under these decreasing birth rates.

In your book, you talk to women who are defying the birth rates by having five or more children. You found that they faced misperceptions by those around them about why they had so many children. What were they?

The main misperception would be that the kind of women who decide to have a lot of children — whether they have careers or not — must be part of religious cults or are people who lack full human agency. That’s concerning that the assumption is that other people are making decisions for these women, be it their religious leaders or husbands. That’s not the case.

The other main misperception that I heard commonly is that women who have a lot of children probably reject modern forms of birth control, either because they don’t know how to access it or don’t believe in it. I knew that wasn’t true in my life, but I thought it was worth exploring.

Nobody I talked to said that not using birth control was the reason for their family size. Some women did prefer to use fertility awareness methods for spacing their children, but I found that whether they did or didn’t use birth control they truly and intentionally chose to have their children.

Did you find any connection between religion and family size?

What I found (and this will sound very economist-y of me) is that the choice process followed a cost-benefit, rational choice model. In that framework, when people make a decision they weigh the expected joys or benefits with the expected costs.

In the case of women making purposeful decisions to have large families, they definitely described the costs in their choice. What I heard was an acute description of the costs, which didn’t seem to be expense-driven, but were more about waking up every two hours for a long time, the effects on their bodies, the trade-offs made in regard to their personal identities.

But when it comes to faith and religion, what I heard was a uniting around the idea that children are a great blessing. That provided a huge benefit to the women in my study that outweighed the significant personal costs. Faith played a role of tipping the scales toward having more children.

I will say, I didn’t talk to people who had smaller family sizes. That wasn’t the purpose of this project. But this group was a group of people who really felt that they began their families intentionally, experienced great joy, felt the blessings were tangible in their lives, so they decided to keep going.

Studies have shown many women want more children than they eventually have — you call this the fertility gap. What’s causing this?

If I could easily answer what’s causing the gap, I’d probably be a candidate for the next Nobel Prize. But in all seriousness, I think of recent Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin’s work, which helps us see what’s going on. I would point back to her work on the “Power of the Pill” and what the pill does in shaping the lives of American women. It opens the choice set, right? And, of course, I think her more recent work on women’s labor is so insightful and helps us see that when you change the choice set for people, who are rational agents making decisions, you create a new comparison class for the goods that you can choose.

What hormonal contraception did in the 20th century is it provided women with more choices. If you wanted to pursue a career, you didn’t have to give up marriage. In the past, if you wanted to go to college or have a profession, you had to give up marriage and partnership. What ends up happening when you broaden the choice set is that a lot of people want both. And so they end up choosing a little bit less of each. So if, objectively speaking, you might have chosen three kids, you might be okay with the trade-off of fewer children to also have a profession.

What we’re seeing is the outcome of a constrained optimization. People are choosing the bundle career and family, and in this constrained world there’s only so much time. One of the women in my study said, “Look, there’s some things that are best done young.” She says, of her medical training, “I would never want to go through that later in life.” But it’s also the easiest time to build the family size that you might want to have. So you have these two things that are in tension. I don’t think that’s an enormous mystery.

Most of the families that you talk to in the book describe themselves as happy and healthy. Did you speak to any who are struggling — economically, emotionally, physically — with dealing with a larger family?

My sample is not representative, and people volunteered to talk to me. So I’m sure, in that sense, there’s a bit of a bias in favor of people who are pretty happy with how things were going. But within that sample, I intentionally looked for families who are at all ends of the wealth distribution. I talked to families who were either on food stamps or eligible for food stamps or other forms of income supplements.

I also spoke to people who were going through postpartum depression, women who were struggling to manage ongoing mental illness, depression, or anxiety. But I would say that everybody that I talked to, mostly due to the study design, felt that whatever troubles they experienced were worth it. I certainly don’t believe having a large family is any guarantee that everything will work out well. However, the purpose of the book was to examine motive: What could lead people to have more children than normal?

The women you spoke to were fully on board with their decisions to devote so much of their lives to their families, even while acknowledging that it took incredible sacrifice. Is there anything policymakers can glean from their experiences that can help make things better for parents and families overall?

I don’t think women have children thoughtlessly. I think a lot of blood, sweat, and tears goes into the decision. And I would say that the same thing must be true for people who choose not to have children.

The sometimes flippant nature of political discourse on women’s family and fertility decisions doesn’t take the issue as seriously as it should. The idea that we could influence a couple with $1,000 more of a tax break or a baby bonus is almost offensive. Or even to say you can influence people with a lot of money, like $200,000 to $400,000 per baby, that it would move the needle. I think this is a really sacred and private decision.

So if we know that, what could make things easier? One thing that came out of this work was the story of faith, but I think that story has just as much to do with community and social support. Where can we put our dollars (in a fiscally responsible way) that helps people in this way?

What I took away from my study was that whatever we can do from a policy perspective to protect and enlarge spaces — religious or not — for people to grow and develop, those are the kinds of things people should think about.

I also think about role modeling. Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s book “What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice” is so interesting. They look at these deep-seated fears that people have about making the choice to have children. But if you can see others who have gotten over the hurdles, you might be more open to it. I think policymakers could think harder about how we treat faith institutions and think about them as a favored means to provide support to families.

What do you hope readers take away from the experiences of the women in your book?

I wanted to leave people with a message of hope. These are serious topics. But if there’s some people out there defying the odds and not undershooting their own fertility desires, here’s a model of people who are pulling this off.

A lot of times you read the news and see how nobody’s having the families they want to or it’s getting harder and harder. It’s helpful to realize that trends in society are measured in averages. But in fact, many people live lives that are very different from the average.

If we’re interested in building a family, I think there are some concrete lessons from people who have done it. It shows that what’s happening with family size isn’t deterministic. I hope people feel hopeful and optimistic about it, and not like these falling birth rates have to be the whole story of the future.

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Nov. 5, 2024, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Dale Weldeau Jorgenson was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Dale W. Jorgenson was an economist of prodigious energy and creativity, remarkable discipline, and extraordinary productivity and impact. He pioneered combining rigorous theoretical modeling with careful empirical work to develop economic models that both enhance our understanding of the economy and provide directly applicable quantitative guidance to economic policy. He led the way in developing rich, theory-informed data sets that can be used to answer important empirical questions in economics, inspiring a movement to improve national economic measurement. He was also a bulwark of the Harvard Department of Economics and helped to transform it — and the field itself — into one in which empirical research is careful, relevant, and grounded in economic theory.

Jorgenson, an only child, was born in Bozeman, Montana, on May 7, 1933. A former Ph.D. student John Fernald recalls Jorgenson saying that “Montana was a pleasant place, especially if you like winters,” to which he added, “I don’t.” Jorgenson was nominated for a scholarship to the Naval Academy but was refused admission because of his poor eyesight; instead, he attended Reed College, where he became fascinated by economics. At the advice of his undergraduate thesis advisor, Jorgenson entered the Ph.D. program at Harvard, where, after three and a half years, he received his Ph.D. in 1959 under the supervision of Wassily Leontief.

Jorgenson’s first academic appointment was at the University of California, Berkeley, where, after four years, he was promoted to full professor at age 30. In 1969, Jorgenson was recruited back to Harvard as a key part of Henry Rosovsky’s plan to modernize the Department, which included recruiting Zvi Griliches and Kenneth Arrow and promoting Martin Feldstein. In 1971, Jorgenson received the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded (then biennially) to the most intellectually significant American economist under age 40, for marrying economic theory and econometric analysis. One of us had the honor of promoting Jorgenson to University Professor in 2002 to recognize his lifelong research program that changed the discipline.

A scholar of prodigious energy and generosity, Jorgenson held multiple important service positions in the economics profession, including President of the Econometric Society in 1987, President of the American Economic Association in 2000, and Chair of the Advisory Committee to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis from 2004 to 2011.

Of Jorgenson’s many intellectual contributions, he will be remembered particularly for three. First, in a 1963 article, he developed the modern framework for analyzing firms’ investment decisions. This paper transformed the then-murky topic into one guided by a precise, implementable formula for a key determinant of investment, the user cost of capital.

Second, Jorgenson is a founder of modern growth accounting. He provided a framework — the so-called KLEMS system of capital, labor, energy, materials, and services — for measuring the determinants of economic growth. Jorgenson’s vision, combined with his passion for getting the details right, created a global society dedicated to measuring, comparing, and using these determinants of growth.

Third, Jorgenson was a pioneer in econometric modeling, especially of producer and consumer behavior. Starting with the oil crisis of the 1970s, he developed economy-wide models that linked energy prices and production to overall economic growth. He and coauthors used a descendant of this model in a pioneering 2013 book, which analyzed how the revenue from a carbon tax might best be used to foster economic growth, and the lessons from that research remain relevant today.

Altogether, Jorgenson authored 300 articles in economics and authored or edited 37 books, undertaken with more than 70 collaborators. His final edited volume appeared in 2016, when he was 83.

Connecting all this work was an abiding commitment to developing rich data sets, grounded in economic principles, that could be used to estimate econometric models. In so doing, Jorgenson moved economic measurement from the dull work of government statisticians to be a central part of modern economic research.

Jorgenson and his inseparable wife, Linda, were dedicated to the welfare and betterment of the Department of Economics. He chaired the Department from 1994 to 1997. Linda, in turn, was its social glue, as outgoing and ebullient as was Jorgenson reserved. Linda and Dale hosted countless events at their apartment for students and colleagues. Linda reached across the lingering barriers of seniority and status to ensure that all members of the Department knew they were valued personally as well as professionally. Jorgenson’s mentorship, combining high standards with personal support, and Linda’s warm embrace were deeply helpful to many junior colleagues.

Jorgenson’s work at Harvard extended beyond the Department. He directed the Program on Technology and Economic Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School from 1984 to 2007. He helped lead the Harvard-China Project on Energy, Economy, and Environment in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences from its founding in 1993, advising a stream of economics students from China and working with economist colleague Mun Ho until spring 2022. Jorgenson was also a Faculty Fellow at the Kennedy School’s Harvard Environmental Economics Program, in which he was also active until shortly before his death.

One of Jorgenson’s greatest legacies is his legion of students, both undergraduate and graduate. Jorgenson had a formal and dispassionate public demeanor: graduate students regularly presented him as Mr. Spock of Star Trek at the Department’s annual holiday skit party. In reality, however, Jorgenson was warm and supportive of his students and junior colleagues, with a wry sense of humor. His former students include Robert Hall and Ben Bernanke, two of the leading economists in the profession, and two consecutive Harvard senior classes voted him to be one of their favorite professors.

Economics is a different and better discipline, and Harvard is a better place, because of Jorgenson Jorgenson. Economic measurement is now recognized as an important part of the work of the profession and as something that can be, and indeed must be, infused with theory. From the cost of capital, to the KLEMS approach to production, to his many other contributions, the Jorgenson approach to economics lives on.

Respectfully submitted,

Michael McElroy
Lawrence H. Summers
James Stock, Chair

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Nov. 4, 2024, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Otto Thomas Solbrig was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Otto Thomas Solbrig was born in Buenos Aires in 1930 and died in Massachusetts in 2023. He was trilingual as a child, speaking English with his mother, German with his father, and Spanish with his siblings. From 1950 to 1954, he studied for an undergraduate degree in agronomy at the National University of La Plata, where he was active in student politics. By order of the government of Juan Péron, Solbrig was expelled from the university and was imprisoned for three months without trial in 1955. After his release, but before the fall of Péron, and without completing the formal requirements for his undergraduate degree, Solbrig emigrated to the United States to study botany at the University of California, Berkeley. His doctoral thesis in plant systematics was advised by Lincoln Constance, Herbert G. Baker, and George Ledyard Stebbins, Jr. Solbrig then served as a curator in Harvard’s Gray Herbarium for seven years (1959–1966) before accepting a faculty position at the University of Michigan. Three years later, he returned to Harvard as a tenured professor of biology, where he remained until his retirement in 2002.

Solbrig’s research focused on the lives of plants in ecological communities. He is best known for his work on dandelions, in which he used isozyme patterns to show that multiple genotypes existed within local populations. In seemingly simple habitats like lawns, he found that there was not one “general purpose genotype” superior to all others but rather multiple genotypes that were better suited to different microenvironments. One factor that helped maintain the genetic diversity of dandelions was the pattern of human perturbation. Some genotypes were better adapted than others to frequent disturbance. Solbrig thus placed earlier theoretical work on “life-history strategies” on a firm genetic basis.

Throughout his career, Solbrig was prominent in the organization of international collaborative research, both on biodiversity and on tropical agriculture. During the 1970s, he was an administrator of the International Biological Program’s Convergence and Divergence of Ecosystems project, which compared the desert floras of Arizona and Sonora with those of northern Argentina and influenced a similar comparison of the Mediterranean floras of Chile and California. During the 1980s, Solbrig served as president of the International Union of Biological Sciences and directed its Decade of the Tropics program. He also served on the International Coordination Council and on the General Scientific Advisory Group for UNESCO’s Program on Man and the Biosphere. In the 1990s, he was the chair of the first Internationally Commissioned External Panel of the Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical, with headquarters in Colombia.

Solbrig’s international activities took him to many countries, including the Soviet Union and China, but he always maintained a special love for Latin America. He taught courses on tropical ecology in Costa Rica and Venezuela for North American students, and he taught many courses for Argentinian students in his beloved Argentina. After returning to Harvard in 1969, Solbrig was active in the community of Harvard faculty interested in Latin America. He taught regular courses on the geography and environment of Latin America and was a member of the first Executive Committee of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. He organized the Rockefeller Center’s first international conference, Towards a Sustainable and Productive Agriculture in the Pampas.

In 1998, Solbrig received the International Prize for Biology, bestowed by the Emperor of Japan, for his work on the biology of biodiversity, with his work on dandelions singled out for special mention. Among other honors, Solbrig was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received honorary degrees from the universities of Buenos Aires, La Plata, Mar del Plata, and Lomas de Zamora.

Solbrig is survived by his children from his first marriage, Hans and Heide, and by Dorothy, his wife of more than 50 years.

Respectfully submitted,

Peter Ashton
Noel Michele Holbrook
Naomi E. Pierce
David Haig, Chair

When field hockey midfielder Faith Schmidt ’25 graduates in the spring, she will carry on a storied family legacy, one that takes place 45,000 feet in the air.

The Air Force Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadet recently received her pilot slot from the Air Force. Soon after Commencement, she will find out her base assignment, or where she will spend roughly the next two years in flight school and training.

“I applied for the pilot slot my junior year, one of the most competitive slots to get,” the St. Louis, Missouri, native said. “I knew I had a competitive package and there were some good signs coming in. When it was signed, sealed, and delivered, I was so happy, celebrating with my fellow cadets.

“I FaceTimed with my dad, and he just hopped out of a fighter jet at Boeing. He flipped the camera around to the fighter jet and told me, ‘You’ll be in there one day!’”

The engineering sciences concentrator at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences comes from a family of veterans. Her father spent more than 20 years as a fighter pilot for the Navy, and now works as a test pilot for Boeing. Both her grandfathers and her godfather also served in the military.

“When my dad was growing up, my grandpa would tell him about the aircraft carriers he worked on during the Korean War,” Schmidt said. “My dad was fascinated by that experience, and he joined Navy ROTC halfway through his college experience. There is a long line of military history in my family, but just looking at their passion for service, the dedication for the people around them, all that really pushed me to go the military aviation route.”

Her earliest impressions of life in the clouds began in early elementary school when she watched her dad and her uncles, also pilots, fly together. When her father would ask his children who wanted to go up in the air, her hand immediately shot up. “I knew I wanted to go, and those little moments throughout my life pushed me to fly,” Schmidt said.

“Faith has been climbing high and jumping off those heights since she was a toddler, ranging from gymnastics, competitive diving, and pole vaulting,” said her mother, Cathy Schmidt.

During her senior year of high school, Schmidt applied for ROTC scholarships as she found another reason to be drawn to the Air Force: the design of fighter jets. At Harvard, she balanced her engineering course load with commitments as a cadet, field hockey player, and member of the Catholic Center.

“Harvard is one of the only places I could have gone where everything works all together,” she said, expressing gratitude for her coaches and teammates.

“They have been such a backbone for me, I don’t think I could’ve done ROTC and engineering without them,” Schmidt said. “Just having two hours of practice every day, with some of the most amazing women I know, is such a great reset. I’ve been grateful for all the smiles in the locker room and having the opportunity to chase that common goal. Whenever they see me on campus in uniform, they hype me up.”

“We know some of the sacrifices that lie ahead for her,” Schmidt’s mother said. “We respect her decision to face those challenges with courage and commitment. We could not be more proud that she has chosen to serve in this honorable profession.”

Shane Rice ’25 was visiting his parents in Virginia and preparing for his first combat deployment. Alexandria Durrant ’28 was recovering after a 12-hour medical shift at a military base in Hawaii. And Ed Somuk ’27, a retired Marine, was busy potty-training the youngest of his three children.

“I looked at my phone, and all I could register was: ‘Congratulations. Harvard. Welcome Class of 2027,’” recalled Somuk, 49, a history concentrator who recently retired as a master sergeant after 26 years of service. “I had about six seconds to immerse myself in it. And then I had to get into that bathroom because I had a kid in there.”

The number of U.S. military veterans at the College has climbed in the last half-dozen years, thanks to stepped-up outreach and word of mouth. In 2018, a total of eight veterans were enrolled at the College. This fall, 21 started as first-year or transfer students, with a total of 78 current students having completed service in the armed forces.

“Our veterans bring a diversity of perspective to Harvard College and make deeply valued contributions here,” said Joy St. John, director of admissions. “Additionally, public service is core to our mission, and time in the armed forces constitutes one of the most meaningful acts of service. Our commitment to recruiting and admitting more veterans is motivated by this.”

There is a thread of military service running through Harvard’s long history. That legacy is written all over Memorial Hall, its walls etched with the names of 136 Harvard associates lost during the Civil War. Likewise, the walls of Memorial Church bear hundreds of names representing faculty and alumni killed during World War I and World War II.

The presence of U.S. service members on campus began fading around the Vietnam era, but the trend started to reverse early in the 21st century. In 2005, Kit Parker, Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics, started bringing veterans to campus for summer opportunities via the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program.

“We found these veterans brought an uncommon skill set in terms of maturity and work ethic,” remembered Parker, who is also a colonel with more than 30 years of service in the U.S. Army Reserve. “You’ve got to stay past midnight to get an experiment working? It’s no problem if you’ve been in the military. Night ops is what we do!”

Parker went on to join efforts by 2022 Harvard Medal winner Tom Reardon ’68 to improve support for veterans campuswide while easing obstacles for those applying. “Maybe they were late bloomers academically, but something about their military records revealed a potential, a talent, a desire, and certainly a focus,” Parker said.

Additional efforts were made to support soldiers returning from the American-led global war on terror launched after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In 2006, Reardon, who served in the Army during Vietnam, established the Harvard Veterans Alumni Association, which seeks to strengthen connections between veterans on campus and in the alumni community. President Drew Faust announced in 2009 that the University would participate in the Yellow Ribbon Program, helping veterans to pay tuition costs exceeding what is covered under the Post-9/11 GI Bill.

“At one point in the 2000s — between Harvard College students, Research Experiences for Undergraduates, and staff members I had hired — there was more combat experience in my laboratory than most infantry platoons in the Army,” Parker said.

The 2010s saw the University deepening its commitment. In 2014, Harvard started partnering with the Warrior-Scholar Project, a nonprofit offering free academic boot camps at top U.S. universities.

Attending a week-long session at Columbia University last summer gave Durrant, 24, the confidence to apply to Harvard. “It taught me to challenge myself and to understand that being an active-duty veteran is not a weakness; it’s actually a strength,” said the first-year who grew up in North Carolina and fell in love with healthcare while serving as a Navy hospital corpsman. “Right now I’m leaning toward a concentration in government with a secondary in global health and health policy. However, I still want to be ambitious and get the prerequisites for medical school.”

In 2017, Harvard College joined Service to School’s VetLink program, which provides free counseling for veterans applying to college. Somuk had mentally bookmarked its resources after seeing ads on social media. In 2021, he was freshly retired and living with his family near Fairbanks, Alaska, when his wife, an attorney with the Air Force JAG Corps, received orders to head to Hanscom Air Force Base about 20 miles northwest of Boston. Somuk, who grew up in Connecticut, gave Service to School a call.

“Have you ever thought about Harvard?” asked the first counselor he reached.

“I think of Harvard all the time,” Somuk remembered joking. “I think it’s a great institution that will never, ever let me inside their gates.” Today, the Dudley Co-op affiliate commutes to campus from Hanscom, often making the 40-minute trip multiple times per day while juggling courses and study halls with family obligations.

Veterans of militaries worldwide eventually organized a Harvard College student group, which was officially recognized in 2018. Rice, 25, was still stationed in Okinawa, Japan, when he stumbled upon the undergraduate-run organization five years ago. The anthropology concentrator and Cabot House resident remembered sitting in his barracks one day when he grabbed his phone and typed: “good schools USA.”

Harvard popped up. Rice, who was at the time a mortarman on his second deployment, did a bit more searching on the application process. “But never did I take it that seriously until I found Harvard Undergraduate Veteran Organization,” recalled Rice, who is studying abroad this semester at Trinity College in Dublin.

A former HUVO president even took the time to offer a bit of counsel over Zoom. “He was also a Marine, so we clicked over that,” Rice said. “That was the moment I realized this wasn’t just a pipe dream. People have done it!”

Another support arrived in 2020 with the appointment of the College’s first program manager for military student services. Craig Rodgers, Ed.M. ’96, a former reservist who matriculated in the Army ROTC program at MIT, works to counsel and connect veterans and ROTC cadets on campus.

“He does a really good job of letting us know what’s going on in the veterans’ community,” said Durrant, who underscored the comfort she finds in gathering with this group. “Sometimes it’s nice to just be able to talk in military jargon with people who understand.”

The College isn’t the only Harvard School with strong U.S. military representation. At the Kennedy School this fall, 76 students are on active duty or veterans. The Law School has 70, and the Extension School counts 423 veterans or active-duty U.S. military members taking courses this semester.

Parker emphasized that more can be done to support this growing population. Adding accessible family housing options near campus would make admission possible for a greater number of veterans with physical disabilities. Bolstering mental health supports would serve those dealing with post-combat stress. He called for a greater awareness of how the Americans With Disabilities Act uniquely impacts war veterans.

But most will find the campus welcoming, with military training increasingly understood as an academic asset, he said. “It’s a great time to be a veteran at Harvard.”

It may feel like the world is slowly devolving into one big dumpster fire. But that’s hardly the case.

“For all the problems we have today, the problems of yesterday usually were worse,” said Steven Pinker, Ph.D. ’79, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology. “Things really have gotten better [and] not by themselves; it’s taken human effort and human ingenuity and human commitment.”

In many measurable ways, global progress has far exceeded failure. Jane Nelson, the founding director of the Corporate Responsibility Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School, points out that of the United Nation’s 24 indicators of their Sustainable Development Goals, 18 have improved since 2015. During her career she’s seen enormous changes for the better, and that gives her hope when she looks to the future.

“We know what is needed to move forward and make progress. What are the policies that need to be changed? What are the new business models and market incentives?” she said. “It’s a question then of building the political will and public narrative to get there.”

Tal Ben-Shahar ’96, Ph.D. ’04, who directs the master’s degree program in happiness studies at Centenary University and formerly taught at Harvard, said embracing “evidence-based optimism” grounds us in reality. Alternatively, when we experience “detached optimism,” it can lead to toxic positivity. This “just be happy” attitude pervades our culture and can ironically lead to hopelessness and despair.

“Two seemingly opposing ideas are optimism and pessimism,” he said. “[We can] believe that things are going well and will continue to go well and at the same time … see and recognize the things that are not going well and that need to be improved.”

In this episode of “Harvard Thinking,” host Samantha Laine Perfas speaks with Ben-Shahar, Nelson, and Pinker about choosing optimism.

Transcript

Steven Pinker: When you plot measures of human well-being over time, like safety, health, longevity, maternal mortality, child mortality, human rights, they get better. For all the problems we have today, the problems of yesterday usually were worse.

Laine Perfas: Things aren’t what they used to be: They’re actually better. Yet even though many measures show how much progress we’ve made, many people feel like things are worse than ever. It’s led to a cycle of pessimism that leads to further despair and anxiety.

How do we break this cycle and intentionally choose optimism?

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

Jane Nelson: Jane Nelson, and over the past 20 years I’ve served as the founding director of the Corporate Responsibility Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School.

Laine Perfas: She’s spent her career figuring out how companies, communities, nonprofits, and governments can work together to create a more equitable and sustainable world. Then:

Tal Ben-Shahar: Tal Ben-Shahar. I spent 15 years at Harvard as an undergraduate and graduate student and then taught two classes on positive psychology and the psychology of leadership.

Laine Perfas: He’s currently the director of the master’s degree program in happiness studies at Centenary University. And finally:

Pinker: Steve Pinker. I am a professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard.

Laine Perfas: Pinker’s books include the bestsellers, “The Better Angels of Our Nature” and “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.” His work shows that progress isn’t just a mindset, but a statistical reality.

And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, your host and a writer for the Harvard Gazette. In this episode, we’ll be discussing the value of optimism and how to embrace it when it feels like things are falling apart.

I thought it would be good to talk about how each of you think about optimism. Is it simply trying to be positive all the time or is it something more?

Steven Pinker: I’ve often been called an optimist because of the hundred or so graphs in the two books showing that when you plot measures of human well-being over time, like safety, health, longevity, maternal mortality, child mortality, human rights, they get better. For all the problems we have today, the problems of yesterday usually were worse. And I prefer to talk about progress because optimism, for some people, can be depressing. If the best you can tell me is, “Put a smile on your face and have a happier attitude and see the glass is half full” … I think those can’t be helpful. But the point is that objectively speaking, as best we can determine, things really have gotten better. Not by themselves. It’s taken human effort and human ingenuity and human commitment. But it is easy looking on the undeniable problems today to assume that things were better in the past, whereas I think objectively the conclusion we have to come to is it’s the other way around.

Jane Nelson: From my perspective, I see two causes for sort of evidence-based optimism despite challenging times we face. And I think first, as Steve says, there’s very compelling evidence that things have got better and that we’ve made enormous progress, certainly in my career in the last 30 to 40 years in improving quality of people’s lives, livelihoods, their rights, their opportunities. If we look at the Sustainable Development Goals, colleagues of mine at Brookings recently did some research showing that of 24 indicators, 18 of them have improved even since 2015, which has been a more challenging period. So I think that the fact that we know it’s possible, we know what is possible and what can be achieved is cause for optimism. And then to me, I think the second cause for optimism is that we know what is needed to move forward and make progress. What are the policies that need to be changed? What are the new business models and market incentives? We know many of the technologies, whether it’s food systems or health systems or energy systems that can make a difference; it’s a question then of building the political will and public narrative to get there.

Tal Ben-Shahar: Now, what both Jane and Steve are talking about is “evidence-based optimism” or “grounded optimism,” and it is important. Why? Because what we see around us is a great deal of “detached optimism,” which leads to what has become known as toxic positivity. So once we detach optimism from reality, we have a problem. Because we know that if we’re just told to, “Oh, smile, everything will be just great; if you think positive, things will be positive.” And many of those self-help mantras, we know that they’re actually harmful, that they hurt us more than they help us. And therefore, we need essentially the synthesis that leads to realism. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. And these two seemingly opposing ideas are optimism and pessimism: to believe that things are going well and will continue to go well and at the same time to also keep our eyes wide open and identify and see and recognize the things that are not going well and that need to be improved.

Laine Perfas: I think that gets at something that I’ve struggled with. I often joke with my friends that I’m not really an optimist, I’m a depressive realist and that it is hard to embrace the “be happy all the time” attitude that I think is very pervasive in our culture, but the reality is that things are objectively, statistically speaking better now than they have been maybe ever, and yet it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like we’re living in a dumpster fire all the time. What do we do with that disconnect?

Pinker: We have to be aware of why it often feels like we’re in a dumpster fire, where it feels like things are getting worse. And there are both psychological biases, such as the fact that we are more attuned to negative events than positive ones, particularly recent negative events. We often remember things that went wrong in the past, but we don’t remember how bad they were at the time. As in the quotation from Franklin Pierce Adams, the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory. It has a lot of psychological truth to it. But, and while also realizing that a rich diet of media stories is, in some ways, not the best way to have an accurate appreciation of the world, because there are some built-in distorters. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen, and it’s about things that happen suddenly and that are unexpected, and so there will be a natural pessimistic bias built into the news, even if none of the editors or journalists themselves are pessimistic. Simply because if you’re reporting something that happened yesterday, it’s more likely to be bad than good. Because bad things can happen quickly. A building can collapse, a war can be declared, a terrorist can attack, a school shooter can attack. But good things often consist either of things that don’t happen, like there are no wars going on in the Western Hemisphere or in Southeast Asia: historically unusual. Or things that build up a few percentage points a year and compound, such as the decline in extreme poverty that Jane alluded to. Max Roser, an economist who set up the invaluable website Our World in Data, once said that the papers could have had the headline, “137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday, every day, for the last 30 years.” But they never ran the headline, and so a billion people escaped from extreme poverty and no one knows about it.

Nelson: I very much agree with that. There’s that drumbeat of negative news and a sort of an element of unease that comes with that. There’s also the challenge, in many cases, of unrealistic expectations because of social media, celebrity lifestyles, that sort of sense that other people’s lives might be better or progress is being made and one’s own isn’t. And if you combine that with concern about change and the speed of change that is happening, I think, in a lot of communities around the world, it sort of layers on to each other in terms of a sense of unease. And then if one has leaders and in any sphere who are exerting a sort of negative narrative that compounds it further.

Pinker: Yes, and I’m an avid consumer of the positive news sites, but although there is a danger there, if positive news is perceived as human-interest fluff: a puppy defends orangutan, a cop buys groceries for a single mother, then people read it and say, “Oh, geez, is that the best you can do? Is that the best that’s happening on Earth? Now I’m really depressed.” But there are some sites that actually concentrate on truly consequential positive developments.

Ben-Shahar: And I think the first thing is that we need to be aware of the fact that the media does not provide us with a looking glass. Rather, it provides us with a magnifying glass and what it magnifies is the negative. And that’s a problem because when we assume a negative mindset, that actually can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, today we see it, you know, what we focus on are the negative elements of politics and the politicians. As a result of that, good people don’t want to enter politics.

So the question is, what do we do it about it? On the individual level, it’s what has become probably the best known, by now cliched, intervention in positive psychology, which is writing a gratitude journal. Appreciating. I love the word appreciate because it has two meanings. The first meaning, of course, is to say thank you for something. The second is to grow in value. And the two meanings of the word appreciate are intimately related because what happens is that when I appreciate, the good appreciates. Unfortunately, the opposite is also the case. When I do not appreciate the good, when I take it for granted, it depreciates. So before I go to bed, I write three things at least for which I’m grateful and I do it regularly. That can be a sort of an antidote against the negative bias, or if we do it as a family or if schools introduce it or even in organizations, if employees write, “What progress have we made today?” That can go a long way in rectifying the bias.

Laine Perfas: There was something you said, Tal, that stuck out to me when you were talking about politics and this idea that pessimism, there can actually be negative consequences. For example, politicians fighting all the time. If you are then a citizen who cares about the world, you’re a little less likely to be involved because, what’s the point? Politics are a mess anyway. Are there other negative consequences or dangers to pessimism?

Pinker: There are two big ones. One of them is fatalism. Why bother trying to make the world a better place if, despite decades of effort, things are worse than ever? And the other could be radicalism. If we’re living in a, as one commentator put it, a late capitalist hellscape, or as from the other end of the spectrum, we’re living in a disaster like very few people have ever seen before, then let’s smash the machine, drain the swamp, burn everything to the ground in the hopes that anything that rises out of the ashes will be better than what we have now. But, if you have enough, I don’t want to call it pessimism, but I’ll call it realism, that things by themselves don’t get better, that the universe has no benevolent interest in our well-being, things fall apart, disorder increases, there are more ways for things to go wrong than to go right, we’re living in a hostile ecosystem where itty bitty little parasites and pathogens are constantly evolving to attack us from the inside and they have the advantage that they can evolve faster than we can … if you start off with what I think of as realistic expectations, namely, we’re in a hostile universe, we’re flawed humans. If we achieve any progress at all, that is something to be grateful for and that we should calibrate our expectations. That, especially if, as we have been emphasizing, there actually has been progress then, let’s not dismantle the system. Let’s constantly improve it, because nothing is optimal, and even if it were, the world changes, so we constantly need to reform things. But let’s build on the successes that we’ve had, and not be so fatalistic and cynical that we give up, or hope that things just naturally get better, which they do not.

Nelson: Both toxic optimism and to a large degree pessimism prevents us from asking the difficult questions that we need to ask of ourselves and our colleagues and families. I think it prevents us from making the changes that often need to be made. And it also often prevents us from taking the precautions that need to be made in terms of navigating challenging environments. So I feel where evidence-based optimism can play a critical role is in being solutions-oriented and having the confidence to try things even if we’re not sure that they’re going to work out and to be looking the whole time whether it’s at a micro community level or a new policy level or even a global governance level, what are new solutions we can try and building a sense of shared purpose and common goals around those potential solutions?

Ben-Shahar: A concept that for me has been very helpful in understanding optimism has been hope. Rick Snyder, who is one of the founders of the field of positive psychology, identifies two separate elements that make up hope. The first element is willpower. So hope is about saying, yes I can, it’s possible, I’m going to do it, or things are going to turn out well, which is more or less what we associate with an optimistic mindset. But there is a second element to hope, according to Rick Snyder, and that is way power. Way power is how I’m going to do it. I was watching an interview with Serena Williams. This was years ago and it was one of her great comebacks. And the interviewer asked her, “How’d you do it? So often you come from the brink of defeat, and you win.” And she said, “Every time I go on court, I have a Plan A and I try it, and if that doesn’t work, I always have a Plan B. And if that doesn’t work, I have a C, a D, and an E.” That’s way power. So it’s not just, yes, I can win this game. There are also alternative pathways that will help me succeed.

Nelson: And I think that the power then of what one could call collective willpower and collective way power is remarkable. I was in Tanzania over the summer visiting some of the hospitals there and 10 years ago the central hospital in Tanzania didn’t have an emergency department. And a small group of four or five doctors and a couple of nurses got together, got some support from a U.S. based company, the Ministry of Health, some American medical schools, and they built an emergency care residency program. They built the department. They’ve now built an emergency care professional association to cover the entire country, and they’re building out hospitals now all over the country. And it was a group of four or five people who started it. And over the period of less than 10 years, it’s now a nationwide program. And I think we see examples of that again and again. And I think to Tal’s point, some things didn’t go right and they reoriented and tried different pathways, but that sense of purpose and willpower, and then collectively developing those sort of shared pathways and vision, I think, can be very powerful.

Laine Perfas: Jane, a lot of the work that you’ve done over the last few decades has been basically based on the idea of cooperation. I’m thinking about another aspect of humanity, which is competition, and I’m wondering if there are times where it can lead to this sense of one-upmanship and everyone just looking out for themselves. Do you see a tension between those things, between cooperation and competition?

Nelson: I mean, certainly in my case, there are tensions. But I think even in the most competitive industry sectors, I’ve seen industry competitors coming together around issues like safety, human rights, living wage, decent work. And then, equally, you’ll see other companies and other industries where competition is the absolute driving force, and then they’re not willing to cooperate even on a sort of precompetitive basis to make the broader human rights environment, operating environment, and environmental issues better for everyone. So I think a lot of it comes down to the leadership. I think if you’ve got a set of leaders who recognize that there’s always going to be competition, but that there are certain fundamental values and goals for human well-being and safety and welfare that are more important than the competition.

Pinker: An understanding of where competition is inherently zero-sum and it’s actually positive sum and there’s overlaps of interest. So in professional sports, for example, it’s set up to be zero-sum in terms of winning a championship. If one team wins the World Series, that means another team doesn’t. On the other hand, there are also common interests in keeping the sport entertaining for everyone, and so all of the team owners can get together and decide baseball games are taking too long and they’re too boring, and we’re all losing as people are sick of watching players adjust their gloves before a pitch is thrown, so how can we change the game in a way that benefits all of us, even as we compete against each other?

Jane mentioned the sustainable development goals, which is easy to neglect, but it’s an astonishing achievement that I think it’s, was it 191 of 193 U.N. members voted for it? In an era in which there seems to be rampant nationalism and polarization and mistrust, everyone agrees it’s better if fewer babies die. It’s better if fewer mothers die. It’s better if more people have access to electricity. And against the cynicism that the world is falling apart, it is astonishing that the Sustainable Development Goals really were things that all of humanity agreed on. And that’s essential to not mistakenly see every competition as zero-sum.

Ben-Shahar: What’s very important here also is how we frame our goals. There’s fascinating research by the late psychologist Lee Ross and his colleagues on framing. So they basically divided a large group into two subgroups. One group, they told them, “You’re going to be playing a game now. It’s called The Wall Street Game.” And they interacted. And then they took the second subgroup and they said to them, “You’re going to play a game now. It’s called The Community Game.” Now, even though they played the exact same game, there was much more competition among the participants in the first group, The Wall Street Game versus the second group that were much more likely to cooperate, to help each other, to work together. So merely framing our goals, our objectives, our projects in a different way can sometimes make all the difference between cut-throat competition and benevolent cooperation.

Laine Perfas: Even though things globally are a lot better now than they’ve been, there’s still a lot of suffering in the world. It made me wonder if optimism is a privilege, if it’s a privilege to be able to feel optimistic even to the point where maybe you take progress for granted?

Pinker: I think it’s the other way around. In fact, if you look at measures of optimism across countries, it’s the rich countries that are pessimistic. That’s the luxury. In fact, I think the most pessimistic country in the world is France. That’s a pretty nice place to live. And the most optimistic, for a while it was, I think it was China. And I think Kenya was pretty optimistic. Partly it’s the slope. It’s the trajectory. The improvement that people see in their lives. But, and this goes back to Tal’s point on the salubrious effects of gratitude and appreciation. I hate to say, this is a national stereotype and a cliche to say that the French are spoiled. But by human standards, they have it pretty good. But in many ways it’s pessimism that’s the luxury, at least if it comes in the form of blowing off the good fortune that your ancestors worked very hard to attain. Because again, good things don’t happen by themselves. It’s easy to pocket the gains and forget that they’re not the natural state of affairs, but they themselves are the hard-won achievements of our predecessors.

Nelson: And I think Tal’s framing of toxic optimism, I think if you have toxic optimism amongst elites, there is a danger of lack of empathy and compassion. And, the infamous, the poor can just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and total lack of understanding that they don’t have bootstraps and probably not boots. And that so many communities do need support and help.

Ben-Shahar: The key to my mind here, the emphasis needs to be on effort. So when you have a country emerging from poverty, there’s a great deal of effort that millions and sometimes billions of people have to invest. And why is effort so important? Steve, we were talking earlier about, how you can have a national character that is spoiled. Why? Because in some ways, not in all ways, but in some ways, things have been too easy. Now, if we go to the gym and all the weights are on zero, and we lift those, we’re not going to get stronger. In fact, our muscles over time are going to atrophy. In other words, we need resistance in order to grow stronger. We need hardships and difficulties in our lives to a point.

Laine Perfas: How do we break out of this pessimistic cycle that we have found ourselves in?

Pinker: I would like to see the news media have a bit more of a historical perspective. And by that I don’t mean going back to the writings of de Tocqueville in the 19th century or ostentatiously erudite allusions to the Romans but just in presenting an event, you put it in statistical context, put it in the context of the last five years, 25 years, 50 years. I would like to see the news section of the paper take some lessons out of the business section and the sports sections, where they present everything in statistical context. The sports page is not optimistic in the sense of only reporting when your team wins or pessimistic in only reporting when it loses. Either way, it gets reported and you read the standings every day. Likewise, the stock prices and commodity prices and so on. I think there should be realism in terms of opinion journalism and the opinion industry in general of what we can reasonably expect. That is, can a politician really solve the problems of unemployment and inflation and energy and national well-being? It’s a recent idea that that is part of the job description of a president, to control the economy and the national mood. But just to remember, our politicians themselves are humans, with all their flaws, with many constraints, and not to lead to a situation where trust in all institutions is plummeting, in part because our expectations are that they have near magical powers, which they can never live up to, leading to this cycle of cynicism and fatalism.

Ben-Shahar: Steve, I love the fact that you essentially recommended reading the sports section of the newspaper, which I must admit is my favorite. And then on top of that, what I would add is, the approach of the field of positive psychology and what’s unique about it is that it changes the questions that we ask. Traditional psychologists or psychotherapists would begin perhaps the session by asking, “What’s not working in your life?” Or, “What’s wrong?” Or a couple’s counselor would ask, “What’s not working in your relationship? What do you want to fix?” Positive psychology takes these questions and changes them. And a therapist, positive psychologist, would first ask, “What’s going well in your life? What’s working? We’ll of course get to the problem. We’re not ignoring them. But let’s begin with what is going well.” Or a couple’s counselor would ask, “What’s working in your relationship? You wouldn’t be here if nothing was working.” And what the evidence shows is that when we start with these questions, we energize the individual, the relationship, the team, we’re in a much better place from which we can deal then with the difficulties, hardships, and failures.

Nelson: My former boss, the late Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the U.N., used to talk about coalitions for change. And I think coalitions, whether they be within a community or they’re within an industry sector or at a national level, if one can build coalitions with initially a small group of people who have that sense of purpose, I think that’s another way to overcome cycles of pessimism and to build larger groups around a common agenda.

Laine Perfas: For my last question, I wanted to get a little bit personal, not too personal, but as you all navigate the world, I’m sure you’ve got your rough days. I’m sure you’ve got your days where you’re like, this is a mess. How do you stay hopeful?

Pinker: I try to compartmentalize. Ignoring worries won’t make the problems go away. They have to be dealt with, but not to let them invade your consciousness 24/7, as much as possible, to decide when you’re going to be in problem-solving mode. I try not to deny myself simple pleasures. There’s some things in life that are just guaranteed to make you happy: good food and good company, and you deserve those too. Put things in perspective: What’s the worst that can happen if I don’t solve this problem or if this fear comes to pass, will I fall apart? Prioritize what’s important in life: human relationships, being a person that I can respect, accomplishing my longer-term goals, and try not to get sidetracked by distractions that ultimately won’t count for much. A set of tricks like that, but not least, not depriving yourself of sources of guaranteed pleasure because the world has no shortage of stressors and toxic stimuli.

Nelson: To me, it’s family and friends and trying to be very intentional every day. And I travel a lot and being very conscious of checking in with people I love and who I know love me. I, like Tal, journal and have a gratitude journal. And I think, doing that very consciously every day, one realizes just how blessed we are and how much joy we often have in our lives, even when things are challenging and difficult. I meditate and I love getting out in nature. And then I think just the constant reminders of encounters with people who have demonstrated amazing resilience or courage in overcoming challenges. And in my work, I am incredibly blessed and privileged to meet a lot of people like that. And just a reminder of just how many amazing, remarkable, inspiring people are there in the world. And those numbers definitely outweigh the people who are bad and, being constantly aware of that is what keeps me very positive and hopeful for the future.

Ben-Shahar: So I’ve been keeping a gratitude journal since the 19th of September, 1999. Not because I read the research then. The research didn’t come out until 2003. But because Oprah told me to do so, actually on one of her shows she mentioned the gratitude journal. And I thought, wow, what a lovely idea. And I tried it and again, I didn’t need the research that came much later to convince me how helpful it is, but there is another thing that I do. And I credit one of my other teachers with that, and that is the late Daniel Wagner. His research on ironic processing points to a very important point within the field of positive psychology, and that is that the first step to happiness is allowing in unhappiness. The paradox is that when we experience sadness or anxiety, and our response to that is, “I shouldn’t be sad or I don’t want to be, or I shouldn’t be anxious,” the sadness and anxiety only intensify. The paradox is that when we accept and embrace them, when we give ourselves the permission to be human, that is when they do not overstay their welcome. Simply observe. Simply accept. Simply be with the emotion. The first step to happiness is allowing in unhappiness.

Laine Perfas: Thank you all for joining me for this really great conversation.

Nelson: Thank you.

Pinker: Thanks, Jane, Tal, and Sam.

Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. For a transcript of this episode and to see all of our other episodes, 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 editing and production support from Sarah Lamodi. Original music and sound designed by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University, copyright 2024.

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The recent deployment of North Korean troops to aid Russia against Ukraine and the weak response from the international community could lead to a potential escalation of the conflict, warned Russian policy expert Alexandra Vacroux.

“The deployment of North Koreans to fight in the war is an escalation of exactly the kind Russia has been warning NATO not to consider, which is to say, ‘Don’t put foreign troops on the ground,’” said Vacroux, executive director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Vacroux spoke from Kyiv, where she is spending her academic leave as vice president for strategic engagement at the Kyiv School of Economics.

“And what has been the U.S. response?” she asked. “Well, pretty much so far, the geopolitical equivalent of thoughts and prayers. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had said that this was very, very serious. Apart from that, there has been no reaction.”

During a Monday webinar, Vacroux spoke about the current state of the war in Ukraine as it nears the third anniversary of the Russian invasion and the future of the conflict in the aftermath of the U.S. elections. She called on the U.S. and the international community to help end the war with security guarantees that can deter future Russian aggression against Ukraine. Ukraine’s long-term security is not only in that nation’s interest but also in ours, she said.

“It is in the interest of the United States to defend democratic values and stand up to dictators,” said Vacroux. “You might not care about Ukraine all that much, but if you care about a stable world order, American trade and influence abroad, and about reducing Russia’s influence in American politics, you should be wondering what we can do to help Ukraine negotiate a just and secure conclusion to the war, and be grateful that the Ukrainians are fighting and dying so that we don’t have to.”

The webinar was sponsored by the Davis Center, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

The conflict is largely taking place in the southern part of Ukraine, where Russia has seized 18 percent of Ukrainian territory and subjugated around 5 million people, she said.

U.S. officials estimate as many as 115,000 Russians have been killed and 500,000 wounded so far. And they put Ukrainian casualties at more than 57,500 killed and 250,000 wounded.

The situation may get worse as Russia has intensified drone and missile attacks against Ukraine. Citing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Vacroux said that Russia this past week launched 900 guided aerial bombs, 500 drones, and 30 missiles against Ukraine.

“Apartment buildings are being hit regularly, and particularly in the East, in Kharkiv, for example, and civilians in Kherson, which is in the south, report that they’re being chased in the street by armed drones,” said Vacroux, who spent part of this past Sunday in her closet during a five-hour Russian air raid and drone attack.

Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in August managed to bring the war to Russia, and even though the territory taken was small, the offensive had an important symbolic value, said Vacroux.

It is unknown what effect the North Korean deployment ultimately may have. That nation has been providing artillery shells to Russia since 2022, noted Vacroux.

Vacroux also discussed the potential impact of the U.S. elections on Ukraine’s support. American funding is critical for Ukraine to keep fighting against Russia. Congress appropriated more than $113 billion to support the country’s response efforts, and so far, the U.S. has sent more than $60 billion in military and humanitarian aid to help the embattled country.

Former President Donald Trump has said that he views Ukraine as mainly Europe’s problem, which could affect future U.S. funding if he becomes president. If Vice President Kamala Harris wins, the situation may look more promising for Ukraine, but there are no guarantees if Congress ends up being divided after the election.

In her final remarks, Vacroux praised the resilience of Ukrainian society, and asked for more international pressure on Russia and renewed military and diplomatic efforts to ensure Ukraine’s long-term security.

“Ukraine will only stop fighting if it can be sure that Russia will stop fighting and not use a ceasefire to rearm and reattack where the world has moved on,” said Vacroux. “Ukrainians are resilient but exhausted, and many people have been displaced more than once … They’re very strong … they’re very motivated, but the stress and the trauma of the past three years are so deep. More than 80 percent of Ukrainians have lost someone that they loved in the war … It’s amazing that they continue getting up, going to work, and fighting for their country in whatever way they can.”

Gabby Anderson’s dorm room desk does double duty: homework central for microeconomics and statistics during the week, art studio on the weekends.

Her principal medium? The same sneaker models she wears playing guard on the women’s basketball team — along with those she custom designs for clients, including some high-profile professional athletes.

On a recent afternoon Anderson ’26, who lives in Kirkland House, unpacked her brushes and acrylic leather paints from their plastic crate and unboxed a pair of fresh white Nike Air Force 1s. Dipping her flat paintbrush into the red pigment, Anderson began applying the first layer of her planned design: floral patterns and song lyrics set against a background of fiery red and yellow hues. 

“My favorite part is learning peoples’ stories behind why they want their design,” Anderson said. “As I’ve continued to create for people, presenting them with their shoe that expresses exactly what they want brings me so much joy because you see people light up when you do something for them like that.”

Anderson is an economics concentrator with a studio art secondary, balancing academics and athletics with her creative financial endeavor. Her work is recognizable for its bright colors, bold lines, and playful animated style.

Graffiti by Gabby started in 2020 as a pandemic hobby when Anderson was taking high school classes from home in Ohio. Inspired by a design she saw on social media, Anderson decided to paint a pair of her own sneakers.

“Then I had a friend ask me to make them a pair of shoes,” she said. “After that, I was like, ‘Oh, it’s kind of fun, maybe I’ll do it some more.’”

After starting an Instagram page to showcase her work, her designs began getting attention. Her first request for a custom pair of sneakers came during the summer of 2020 nationwide Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality. Nicki Collen, then head coach for the Atlanta Dream, asked Anderson to design her a pair of sneakers to commemorate Breonna Taylor. 

“I was so excited. I remember she was on ESPN, and they mentioned my name while I was watching,” Anderson recalled. “I freaked out in the car. It was like, ‘Oh my gosh, my shoes are on ESPN. They just mentioned me,’ And that’s when it hit that I’m doing an actual thing, and this is probably an actual business, and I need to take it seriously.”

While still in high school, she was commissioned to paint sneakers for then-Seattle Storm star Sue Bird, Golden State Warriors’ Moses Moody (who was then at Arkansas), and Delaware Blue Coats’ R.J. Hampton Jr. She designed shoes for a Nike campaign with Dallas Mavericks player Kyrie Irving, and did a series of commissioned paintings for Walmart’s “Beauty in Color” campaign. 

In 2020, she also painted sneakers for all 15 members of Texas A&M University women’s basketball team, designs that reflected a range of messages the players wanted to promote, from heart disease awareness to Indigenous pride and female empowerment.

“Each girl gave me a list of things that they were very passionate about, something that they wanted on their shoe, and I followed up with each of them and was like, ‘Can you tell me more about this?’” Anderson recalled. “I got to learn not only their stories and where they came from, but what makes them who they are, what drives them to play basketball.”

At Harvard, Anderson has been learning more about business through her economics concentration and courses in the Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship. In addition to the basketball team, Anderson is involved in the Black Arts Collective and Office for the Arts programming.

She has branched out from sneakers. As a first-year, she painted cleats for New England Patriots player Deatrich Wise Jr., as part of the NFL’s “My Cause, My Cleats” project. Last year she designed 10 pairs of skates for the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.

She also last year launched her own line of kids’ school supplies — backpacks, lunch boxes, and pencil pouches — tailored toward African American children and emblazoned with the slogan “Brilliant, Authentic, AND Black.” The line was inspired by a pencil pouch Anderson had as a child, which had a picture of a little girl who looked like her.

“I want kids to walk into a store and not just see one backpack with a Doc McStuffins or a Princess Tiana on it, but someone who represents them in their youthfulness,” Anderson explained. “I also wanted it to inspire them to be more than just what they see on that bag, which is where I came up with ‘Brilliant, Authentic, AND Black.’ I really wanted kids to understand that you can be all three, and being all three is what’s going to help you thrive in whatever space you’re in.”

Anderson said that school, athletics, and Grafitti by Gabby actually mesh more easily than one might expect.

“In my classes I am learning about different things to do with my business, and my art classes are teaching me new techniques that I can use when I’m making shoes.”

“In my classes I am learning about different things to do with my business, and my art classes are teaching me new techniques that I can use when I’m making shoes,” she said. “Working with athletes ties directly back into basketball, and my own experiences from that can help me relate to these professional athletes I’m working with.”

The title character of “Funes the Memorious,” a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, suffers a head injury that renders him incapable of forgetting even the smallest detail. Forced to perceive everything at every moment in sharp relief, Funes grieves the ability to experience the world, as others do, in abstractions.

This story of the “perfect observer” helped author William Egginton better understand German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s principles that helped lay the foundations of quantum mechanics. It also inspired Egginton to write a book exploring the nature of reality and the different ways humans grasp it through the lenses of three great thinkers: Borges, Heisenberg, and Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant.

At a Harvard Science Book Talk on “The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality,” Egginton was joined by Homi K. Bhabha, the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities. Their conversation kicked off with Egginton reflecting on the book’s themes, including metaphysics, ethics, and cosmopolitanism.

Egginton, the Decker Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and author of several books that cross philosophy and science, called attention to the key theme of epistemic humility, or the idea that there is a fundamental limit to how much we know.

“But we have a tendency to override those limits,” Egginton offered. This is a central idea in Kant’s body of work, known as critical philosophy, and arguably in the literature of Borges and the science of Heisenberg, he said.

The mysteries of quantum mechanics can be summarized, Egginton continued, by the double-slit thought experiment (which later became an actual experiment), in which particles like electrons and photons become wave-like when not being observed, only to revert back to particles when measured. Heisenberg declared that “a particle has no path until we observe it.” Albert Einstein was famously uncomfortable with the notion.

Being perfect in knowledge meant Funes the Memorious could not generalize ideas and experiences, which he experienced as imprisonment — even torture. Egginton likened Funes’ fate to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, in which observation of a physical phenomenon automatically constrains our view, putting natural limits on what we can call “reality.”

“We need to remind ourselves that what we’re studying is not nature itself,” Egginton said. “We’re studying nature as it reveals itself to our instruments of knowledge … and this is exactly what Kant was ultimately saying about science, too. It’s not that the world out there doesn’t exist in some kind of radical, solipsistic sense at all. We’re accepting that when you’re trying to do science, you’re doing science about the world as it exists for beings like us.”

The next Harvard Science Book Talk on Nov. 18 features Nobel Prize winner P.J.E. Peebles on “The Whole Truth: A Cosmologist’s Reflections on the Search for Objective Reality

Every four years, major news organizations spend millions to create a dazzling spectacle out of what broadcast news pioneer Reuven Frank once called “a TV show about adding.” At the center of election night coverage is the race to be first to correctly call who will be the next president.

This year, in particular, news outlets are treading carefully. Polls are showing a virtual toss-up in the combative race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Early voting across the U.S. has been heavy. Rules differ from state to state and have shifted considerably since the 2020 election. Add to that the likelihood of post-election legal challenges and even unrest, television and print news organizations are preparing for a dramatic finale that likely won’t conclude Tuesday night.

“The theater of election night coverage” makes it look as if declaring winners and losers that night is the norm and if that doesn’t happen, “something must have gone wrong,” said Nancy Gibbs, former editor in chief of Time magazine and now the Lombard Director of the Shorenstein Center and Edward R. Murrow Professor of the Practice of Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

So there’s “an enormous obligation on journalists” to inform and remind people again and again that all 50 states have their own distinct rules about when and how votes are counted “and therefore, it is perfectly normal in a close race that it will take longer for some states to report than others, and that is not a sign of voter fraud or vote rigging or any of the other accusations,” she said.

To guard against that, organizations such as The New York Times, NPR, the Associated Press, and ABC News are taking steps to be more aggressive in explaining the variable state regulations to prepare voters for why there may be delays and to be vigilant on election night for signs of misinformation.

“That’s a major worry, that the period between when people vote and when there’s a decision is a very, very troublesome time for misinformation and for manipulation, and I think news organizations are super focused on that,” said Sally Buzbee, formerly a top editor at the Associated Press and until June, executive editor of The Washington Post.

Since 2000, U.S. elections have been “improbably close” Electoral College contests compared to prior elections, which makes tabulating delays “much more likely,” said Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at HKS.

“I think the important thing is for there not to be an information vacuum” that bad actors can fill with confusion and disinformation. While it may not be as splashy or entertaining, news outlets can do a lot of civic good while votes are being counted to minimize predictions based on things like exit polls and instead, get “in the weeds” about state election rules and how that affects the vote counting and validating, he said.

The 2020 election between former Vice President Joe Biden and Trump serves as a kind of cautionary tale for news organizations. It took four days to call the election for Biden.

The tally was slowed by a record number of mail and absentee ballots cast due to the pandemic and ended in a close finish with a margin of victory of just 113,000 votes combined in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

While votes were still being counted election night, the Trump campaign prematurely declared victory. Even after Biden was declared the winner, the campaign, along with some supporters, pushed false accusations about widespread voter fraud, which were later disproved by investigations and recounts and rejected by courts but nonetheless persist to this day.

The very notion of an election night where the results are known hours after the polls close is relatively new. For most of the nation’s history, voting results always took time to come in.

“This is literally how AP started. The results from the West had to come in by Pony Express and then telegraph, and so, it definitely took many days to figure out who had won the presidency,” said Buzbee, currently a Nieman visiting fellow.

The expectation that voters would learn who won sometime after 9 p.m. election night began with the emergence of television in the 1950s.

The industry is now going through a “sea change.” Most major news organizations know “there is still demand for election night and for some spectacle around election night, but … are [also] now keenly aware that there isn’t an Election Day, there’s an election couple days or weeks,” said Buzbee.

Outlets are hoping to head off a repeat of the last election but face some challenges. Newsrooms have seen significant layoffs over the last two years. Some, like NBC, ABC, and the BBC, cut hundreds of jobs in the last two months. Election coverage is expensive, takes many months of careful planning, and isn’t necessarily a money-maker. Still, news organizations think it’s worth the investment and effort.  

“You’re building credibility if you do a good job on election night. If you are accurate, if you are compelling … on election night, then you are doing a good job with a big audience and what you hope is that translates into credibility long term,” Buzbee said.

Gibbs agrees.

“At the most basic level, what is a bigger news story than who is going to be the next president of the United States, who’s going to control the Senate, who’s going to control the Congress, who’s going to be confirming the next Supreme Court justices? Those outcomes have enormous impact on people’s lives and prosperity and health,” so it’s not surprising that news outlets devote so much time and resources to election coverage, she said.

Even if news outlets, especially TV networks, suddenly changed their approach, “even if somehow we dismantled the entire machinery of election night and made it ‘election week,’ I don’t think that that would change the fact that more and more people, especially people who are under 30 or even under 50, have many, many other sources where they’re going to be getting their information,” she said.

Many election officials learned from 2020 and are doing significant public outreach to provide greater clarity around their state’s rules and procedures, hoping to tamp down misinformation and reassure voters that their election is secure and fair, said Fung.

But the responsibility should not be shouldered solely by officials and journalists.

“I think every organization in society, whether it’s a business, or colleges and universities, or high schools, or nonprofits, should do their part to make our democratic institutions work. Obviously, a big part of that is encouraging people to participate in the democracy. But now, more and more, a bigger part [is] keeping people informed and updated” about what’s going on and why, said Fung.

“But I think we all have an individual responsibility as citizens, and then an organizational responsibility, to try to turn down the temperature and keep people informed in this moment of high anxiety on almost all sides.”

On Wednesday, Nov. 6, Gibbs and Fung will join other HKS panelists for “Democracy 2024: The Day After” in the JFK Jr. Forum at 1pm.

It’s one thing to be immersed in a language. It’s another to speak it. And Ava Silva ’27, who grew up in the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe’s, wasn’t fluent in Alabama.

“My áapo’s first language is Alabama,” said Silva, using the Alabama word for grandmother. “I could never fully understand it, but … I loved sitting beside her and just hearing her talk.” 

At Harvard, Silva quickly connected with Assistant Professor of Linguistics Tanya Bondarenko. Within months, Bondarenko’s WOLF Lab (Working on Language in the Field) began studying the innerworkings of Alabama. Over the summer, Bondarenko and five linguistics students traveled to the Alabama-Coushatta Reservation in East Texas to document, preserve, and revitalize the endangered language.

Alabama is no longer naturally transmitted to Alabama-Coushatta children, Bondarenko explained. “In my community, language is such a beautiful thing, but it’s also a point of pain,” Silva said.

For those in her grandmother’s generation, enrolling in primary school brought their first encounters with English. “They were hit with rulers and dealt with some stuff trying to adapt into this English-speaking society,” Silva said. “So there’s a lot of people who didn’t teach their kids [Alabama] because they have that pain with them.”

The pattern sounded familiar to Bondarenko, who specializes in syntax, semantics, and linguistic fieldwork. “These are the stories we encounter all the time,” she said. “Other people come and take their land, try to take everything else from them, try to prohibit people from speaking their language and from doing their cultural practices. It’s heartbreaking, and an important factor in why languages cease to be spoken.

“A lot of languages in the world are endangered, around 44 percent,” she continued. “If the work is not done, we will just lose the languages and even information about those languages completely.”

WOLF Lab provides opportunities for linguists interested in field work and understudied languages. During their visit with the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe this summer, the team worked on elicitations with 19 native speakers to learn how Alabama is spoken today and gather recordings of the language in use. The team collected more than 140 hours of recordings that were already shared with the community and are now being analyzed in Cambridge.

As a community coordinator, Silva helped WOLF Lab identify native speakers. She also partnered with the morphology team to research the verb conjugations.

“To be able to do this project and say, ‘This language is so beautiful and I’m sorry that anyone ever made you feel like it wasn’t,’ has been something I love,” Silva said. “You see them light up and have this moment of healing.”

Jacob Kodner, a second-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics and member of the lab, noted that many linguistic theories are based on English or other Indo-European languages. “For me, as a linguist, it is particularly important to look at languages that are not Indo-European,” he said. “If we want to have a theory of how language works well, we have to have a better sample size.”

He underscored how many Indigenous languages spoken in North America are “critically endangered,” with low numbers of native speakers. While many North American linguists opt to pursue their studies abroad, he argued they can make a greater impact working with Indigenous communities on this continent.  

“That’s the beautiful thing about the study of linguistics, to learn more about what these languages have in common and how they differ,” Kodner said.

Findings and future plans were presented to the tribal council. The linguists plan to return to the reservation for further field work over the winter and next summer.

As an Indigenous person and a linguist, Silva also believes it’s crucial to document, preserve, and revitalize Indigenous languages such as Alabama. She argued that revitalization work, in particular, helps Native communities come together. But the work carries deep cultural value as well.

“To know the language is to know the culture,” she said, “and the culture feeds from the language.”

Robert Putnam is that rarest of academics: a crossover star.

Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy, Emeritus, grew up in postwar Port Clinton, Ohio, a working-class town on Lake Erie. The kids played Little League together, parents were on the PTA, and everyone in the community gathered in groups to worship, play bridge, and help solve local challenges.

Memories of his youth would become Putnam’s intellectual lodestar for a life of pioneering scholarship and lead to a landmark book, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” in 2000, which made him one of the world’s most famous political scientists.

Putnam argued in “Bowling Alone” that the glue that holds communities together comes not from formal institutions, but from social ties forged at places like churches, Elks Club meetings, and bowling leagues. That book, along with his earlier work identifying a now-widely used conflict resolution theory known as “the two-level game,” won him his field’s most prestigious honors. His desire to turn theory into problem-solving policy earned him the ears of Presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama.

Putnam, now 83, came to Harvard’s Government Department in 1979. In addition to research and teaching, he held several administrative posts, including dean of Harvard Kennedy School (1989-1991), associate dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, and director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Putnam retired from teaching in 2018 but remains a member of the Kennedy School faculty.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

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You’re best known for your work on the important effect that community and social connection have on American society. Tell me about your family life growing up in Port Clinton.

Port Clinton was a small town. I was born in 1941, so I’m a pre-Baby Boomer. I was born in 1941, so I’m a pre-Baby Boomer. My parents were both fairly well-educated. My dad had a master’s degree in business and was the first in his family to go to college. He graduated from the University of Michigan right in the middle of the Depression, so the first 10 years of his career he was looking for jobs.

Then he went into the Navy when the war started, and he lost a leg in the war. Back in the day, military veterans had very little support. He spent a year in the hospital in the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

After the war, he had a wife and a young child — me — and no way to make a living. But my dad was a talented, hard-working guy, and within a couple of years he had started a small construction company from scratch. As a start-up contractor he built houses on spec. He was outgoing and soon became one of the town leaders, very much involved in civic life. But in 1962, while I was in college, there was a big national housing recession, and he went bankrupt.

In short, I grew up in a fairly comfortable life, but that happened to have been the only 10 years of my family’s life when we were comfortable. Shortly after he went bankrupt, he died of a heart attack, so he died very young, leaving me the sole support of my chronically ill mom.

Was your community a “Leave It to Beaver” kind of place—homogenous racially and economically?

No. It was actually very mixed. On the one hand, it was a farming area. I could walk out my back door into farmland. But it was also part of Greater Detroit. There was one big factory in town, Standard Products, which was a supplier to Detroit. They made the little rubber molding around car windows.

Many of the dads of my classmates were UAW workers, so it was solid working class. And then, some kids in my class were kids of farmers, and some were poor. Nobody was very rich and nobody was very poor.

The town was small, and it was very cohesive. We all played on the same basketball teams and Little League. So, growing up in a close family and a close community, I was conscious of the importance of community, even though I wouldn’t have had the words for it.

The school was integrated; my bowling team was integrated — three white members and two Black members. The president of the student body was Black, and the second-ranked student in my class was Black. We were all friends.

Were you socially active?

By personality, I’m shy. I was precocious, if I can put it that way. I was focused on books. My mom didn’t want me to be spoiled, so she kept telling me, “You’ve got to get out and join things!”

When I was in grade school, I didn’t play sports. So early every morning, she would get up and play catch with me in front of our house. Ruth Putnam was bound and determined that Bobby Putnam was not going to be an aloof intellectual.

In high school, I belonged to everything. I was in sports; I was in debate; I was in band; I was in the science club; and I was in chorus. I was doing that despite the fact that, inside, I was shy.

Also, I was trying to be one of the guys, so even though I was not a natural athlete at all, in my junior year I went out for football. I had very poor eyesight, so the only position I could play was a position in which you didn’t have to see anything. That meant I was on the offensive line, where all you had to do was try to block the guy in front of you. And I was awful. I was like fifth string or something.

What I didn’t know was that all my classmates were watching the fact that though I was good in school, I had put myself in a position in which I was not good. And, for that reason, they elected me president of the student class. Now, I’m not bragging about that. I’m trying to say, Here’s this little kid. He’s basically shy. His mom is pushing him to get involved in community. He takes on that lesson. And moreover, it turned out the community was a welcoming community not just to me, it was welcoming to everybody.

You enrolled at Swarthmore College in 1959. What was campus life, especially the political mood, like back then?

Let’s look at Bob Putnam at this moment: He’s a hick from Ohio; he’s a science nerd; he’s a Methodist; and he’s a moderate Republican. In the summer of 1960 — this now sounds crazy — I would write to the Nixon campaign, volunteering.

Swarthmore was small. It was homogeneous socially and intellectually and even politically, and it was intense. And very intellectual. Sophomore year, the fall of 1960, I had to take a distribution course, so I took a course in political science. There were two guys running for president — Kennedy and Nixon.

Swarthmore was very left-wing. It was very socially conscious. Kennedy was a little conservative for many people at Swarthmore.

In this poli-sci class, there was this cute coed named Rosemary sitting in front of me. After class, we started hanging out together. She’s Jewish [Putnam would convert after they married], she comes from a big city — Chicago. Her parents are very clearly New Deal Democrats. We got talking. Of course, we were talking a little bit about politics because that was the class we had just come from.

For our first date, she took me to a Kennedy rally. Sort of, “In your face, Putnam!” And, of course, the next week, I invited her to a Nixon rally. Those were our first two dates. We got along pretty well, and by the election, I was a Democrat.

On Jan. 20, 1961, we said, “What the hell? It’s not that far down to Washington. We’ll go to the inauguration.” We heard Kennedy say with our own ears, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” I thought he was speaking just to me. And I thought, “I’ve got to do something about America. I have obligations to this country.”

Not long after, you switched your focus in college to psychology, history, and political science. Who were some of your mentors back then?

In social psychology, I was lucky enough to have two excellent professors. Dean Peabody was one. He was not well known then, but he became a very well-known social psychologist. And Solomon Asch, who at the time was the leading social psychologist in the world. He was a great teacher; he taught small seminars. He was most famous for something called the Asch Social Pressure experiment, which was about the effects of conformity.

Another was Roland Pennock, who was a very distinguished political philosopher. He was known globally, even though he taught at a tiny liberal arts college. I also became quite close to Chuck Gilbert, another Swarthmore professor. The relationships you had with your mentors there were very intense.

After Swarthmore, you studied at Balliol College, Oxford, on a Fulbright scholarship and then headed to Yale for your master’s degree and doctorate. What drew you there?

Yale happened at that point to have the best political science department in the world. They had extremely good political scientists — Bob Lane, Karl Deutsch, and most of all, Bob Dahl, who were the giants of the ’60s and ’70s in political science. We studied in small seminars, so I benefited enormously from working with them.

What was your first big break as a young political scientist, the thing that put you on the professional map?

Professionally the first paper that I wrote as a graduate student was called “Political Attitudes and the Local Community.” It was on this issue of how the community affects the individual. That paper was published in the APSR [American Political Science Review]. That now sometimes happens, but then it was unheard of for a graduate student to publish a paper in the American Political Science Review or World Politics or whatever. It proved to me that I could play in the big leagues in professional terms.

At the time, the Yale paper was just one more term paper. I did not think my whole career was going to be about community. But looking back on it now, I can see, going all the way back to Port Clinton, I was always drawn to these issues. There was something in me that was interested intellectually in the connection between individuals and the community.

Another lucky thing: When I was going on the job market in 1966, ’67, there were very few Ph.D.s coming out then. My birth year was at the end of the baby dearth, during the ’30s and early ’40s, so I had almost no competitors.

But right behind me, universities could see this enormous wave of Boomers entering college. It meant that before I had written a word of my dissertation, I had many tenure-track offers — from Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, UW-Madison, the University of Michigan. This was not because of me; it was because of the times. So, we had all these choices. We could have gone almost anyplace. But Rosemary and I were Midwesterners, and we had parents whom we were close to, so we went to Ann Arbor. That felt like going home.

I’ve always been aware that I am influenced by my environment. So, I choose environments where I’d be led in a certain direction. When I went to Ann Arbor, I knew it was the most quantitative place studying social and political science in the world. I was not that good, but I knew that if I’m there, I would become so — by osmosis. And I did.

“I did not think my whole career was going to be about community. But looking back on it now, I can see, going all the way back to Port Clinton, I was always drawn to these issues.”

After Yale, you joined the Michigan faculty where you taught for several years before taking a detour to work at the White House. You served on the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter’s legendary national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. How did that come about? 

In about the middle ’70s, I still thought maybe I should be in public service, not just an academic. I got an opportunity to work for a year in the government, and, as it turned out, in the White House. I did that thinking, “Let me put myself there and see whether I like that. Maybe I’ll like it even more than academics or maybe I’ll learn something while I’m there.”

I worked on the staff of the National Security Council for the calendar year 1978. It turned out to be a really important year, and it had a powerful effect on my work in many ways.

It was amazing for me recently to read my own notes from that year, because I could see how much of the whole rest of my career had been affected by that service. I’d never been in government before. I could have taken the Kennedy admonition in that direction. I could have said, “Go into government.” I didn’t. I went into academics.

I took handwritten notes of conversations between the President of the United States Jimmy Carter, and the chancellor of Germany, which, at the time, would have been very highly classified. We were dealing with Iran; we were dealing with nuclear arms control negotiations and U.S.-European relations and U.S.-Soviet relations.

I was just a novice, so I was always working with somebody who knew a lot more than I did. The field I was supposed to be working in was called “global strategy,” but global strategy then actually meant sticking it to the Soviets. So we spent all of our time figuring out — if the Soviets did X, what should be the U.S. response? It was exciting and remarkably interesting.

Did that experience shape any of your subsequent work?

I did some quite significant work based directly on what I learned in Washington. I later invented something called the two-level game model. It turned out to be, in academic terms, a really big deal. The two-level game is what got me into the National Academy of Sciences, not my work on social capital. It came directly out of my service on the NSC.

The other thing that happened was that I was working with Sam Huntington, a famous Harvard professor. He was my boss at the NSC. Somewhat to my surprise, he came away thinking that I was really good. After I finished my time in the NSC, he persuaded Harvard to make me an offer. It seems silly now, but my first thought was, “Why would I want to go to Cambridge? I’m happy. We’re loving it here in Ann Arbor.” But I’ve been at Harvard ever since — nearly half a century.

This idea you’re best known for — that social capital plays a very important role in society — came out of an academic study in Italy that you had worked on for many years. How did that happen?

Most people who know of my work now know only of my work after 1990, when I was already 50 years old. In between the two-level games and “Bowling Alone,” there was this long-term study about Italian regional government. Among academics, it’s at least as well-known as “Bowling Alone.” The book was called “Making Democracy Work.”

If you’re a political scientist and you wanted to study the development of political institutions, logically, you’d like to take the same organization, with the same powers, and the same money and so on, and put it down in different social and economic and political contexts, so you could see which governments flourished and which faltered. That would give you a clue as to how the environment affected the development of these institutions.

Normally, political science is not an experimental study. But while Rosemary and I and our kids were in Italy in 1970, the Italians, without knowing it, created exactly the basis for this kind of study. They created, for the first time, a set of regional governments that had never existed before.

On paper, they were all identical, but in economic and political and cultural and social terms, were vastly different. That unexpectedly turned into a 25-year-long study to measure the success or failure of those new governments.

We had many different hypotheses. We didn’t guess for a long time what turned out to be the critical ingredient — choral societies and football clubs. To what extent did people in a given region join together in things, not just politics, but these informal kinds of connections. We gradually realized, “Whoa! It’s not the education; it’s not the wealth. It’s the choral societies and these informal connections.”

And at the very end of that study, I was a visitor at Oxford and was living in Nuffield College. Late one night, I couldn’t get to sleep. I looked for some book that would put me to sleep. In the library I found this big, thick book of sociological theory called “Foundations of Social Theory” by James Coleman. I thought, “I’ll read this, and I’ll be asleep in 10 minutes.”

I came to this chapter in the book called “Social Capital.” That was the first time I’d ever heard the term, which Coleman used to refer to social connections. Almost immediately, I realized that what I’m talking about in Italy is social capital. It’s these connections, which turn out to be valuable. I ended up not sleeping at all that night. I was so excited.

Up until then, the only people who cared about my work were the half-dozen political scientists in the world who cared about Italian regional government. But now, because I’d introduced the idea of social capital, it got a lot of attention. An Economist review said I was one of the leading social scientists of the last 100 years! That review was another big turning point.

As you were finishing that project, you began to see that this idea about social capital might also explain the political, racial, and social divisions that seemed to be underway in the U.S. beginning in the early 1990s?

Yes. We lived in Lexington at that point. I came down to breakfast, and Rosemary showed me a story in The Boston Globe about how the Lexington PTA didn’t have as many members as it used to. And I thought, “Doesn’t everybody always join the PTA?”

I had a research assistant, so we gathered a little data, and it turned out it wasn’t just Lexington, it was everyplace. PTA membership was falling off. I’d grown up in the ’50s, when all parents belonged to the PTA. And I thought, “What’s going on here?” My dad had been in Kiwanis; I wonder if it’s true in Kiwanis? And sure enough, we got the data on Kiwanis membership. It was also declining. That led me pretty soon to say, “I think I’ve stumbled onto something here.”

I had had lunch with a Harvard donor friend of mine, who happened to own a chain of bowling alleys. I said, “It looks to me like people are not bowling in leagues anymore, but they’re still bowling.” He said, “You’ve stumbled onto the major economic problem facing the bowling industry.”

It turns out if you bowl in a league, you drink four times as much beer, and you eat four times as many pretzels. The money in bowling is not in the balls and shoes, it’s in the beer and pretzels.

So his industry was in the strange situation of having more people coming through the door, but revenue was falling because they weren’t drinking as much beer and eating as many pretzels. When I recounted that story to a colleague at the Kennedy School, Jack Donahue, he said “My goodness, you mean they’re bowling alone?”

Soon I delivered a paper at a research conference in Sweden sponsored by the Nobel Foundation. As a joke I titled the draft “Bowling Alone.” It got published in a tiny little journal that had a circulation of about a dozen called the Journal of Democracy. It was published on Jan. 1, 1995, and the same day, the two leading political commentators in America said in their New Year’s columns, “This crazy professor at Harvard has just discovered this amazing effect.”

Within a week, my mailbox, email, and real letters went through the roof. Within about two weeks, I was invited to Camp David to talk with the Clintons. And within about three weeks, Rosemary and I were profiled in People magazine.

Why do you think “Bowling Alone” caught fire so quickly?

I had stumbled onto something that most Americans actually knew privately. I was pretty confident that I was right because thousands of people wrote me saying, “My father was in Rotary, or he was in the Elks. I was proud of him for being in the Elks. I’m not in the Elks. I know I have good reasons, but I kind of feel sorry, and you’ve now helped me understand my personal problem.” For a long time, the academics were skeptical. But underneath, all those thousands of letters suggested to me that I was onto something.

It’s quite unusual for an academic to produce work that’s taken seriously by peers, but also crosses over into the popular culture. What was that like?

I know it’s unusual. There are some advantages and disadvantages to it. I told you about going to the John F. Kennedy inaugural. I wanted to make a difference in America. So, at some level, I welcomed it.

Once the book was published around 2000, I became a kind of celebrity. That gave me a standing to reach to a larger audience and to at least fool myself into thinking that I was actually making a difference. Not change history. The way my team and I talked about it is, we were going to try to bend history. Maybe, at the margins, we could help things a little bit.

You did get some pushback. Some questioned the 1995 paper’s accuracy, and for a while it looked like that might flatten enthusiasm for your findings. What happened?

Early on, I discovered that there had been a methodological mistake in the original article in the Journal of Democracy ­— not that I had made personally, but I’d used some data from a data archive, and the archive data was wrong. Fortunately, I caught that before anybody else did. But still, if you corrected that mistake, then it was not at all clear that I was right.

At one point, there was a newspaper story saying, “‘Bowling Alone’ is bunk.” That was deeply depressing — clinically. I went through this long depression in which I thought, “Maybe I’m completely wrong.” And then I discovered two data archives, and it turned out I was righter than I’d even suspected I was.

After the publication of this journal article, I got a very generous book deal. I thought I was going to publish it in six months, but I spent the next five years trying to figure out whether it really was true that social capital was declining in America. And if so, why it was true? Did it matter? And what could we do about it? Once the book came out, I did not want to have another “‘Bowling Alone’ is bunk” headline.

I had a big research team by this point. Most social scientists then were doing it like artisans — one person doing all the work. By the time I got to “Bowling Alone,” I was doing industrial social science, if I can put it that way. So, it took me five years, but then it came out, and it was a big hit again. Probably right now, I’m better known than I have been in my whole life even though I’m in my mid-80s. That’s fundamentally because the ensuing years have shown that I was right. I was saved by the data.

In “Join or Die,” a new documentary about your work, there’s an old clip where you lament, “We’re watching ‘Friends’ instead of having friends.” Are you disheartened that the downward trends around community and social connection you identified and warned about in the 1990s have perhaps gotten worse?

Things have gotten worse and when I’ve said that I often leave people with the impression that I think I’ve been a failure. I don’t think I’ve been a failure. Even forgetting about my academic successes, I think I’ve been reasonably successful in raising the alarm about this. But I’ve not found the solution.

Over the last 20, 25 years, most of my time has not been spent on research or writing. It’s been spent on outreach. I have worked with hundreds of grassroots groups all across the country, in every state in America, trying to explain what I’ve found and trying to encourage them to think about what they could do to turn this around. You’d have to ask them to be sure, but I think you would find that they would say, “Putnam has not fixed the problem, and we have not fixed the problem, but he’s put us on the right track.”

The second thing I’ve done is to speak to thousands of journalists and public officials. I’ve tried to make use of the fact that I’ve become something of a celebrity. I could tell you how I spent today, which is in four or five Zoom meetings with somebody from New Hampshire who wants to talk about what they can do here to fix things, and Gov. Josh Shapiro’s team to find out what they could do in Pennsylvania to fix these things, and so on. If I could speak to 500 people a year for 25 years, that’s a lot of people.

“Things have gotten worse and when I’ve said that I often leave people with the impression that I think I’ve been a failure. I don’t think I’ve been a failure. I think I’ve been reasonably successful in raising the alarm about this. But I’ve not found the solution.”

Political scientists aren’t expected to fix the things they study. But you have worked with U.S. presidents and world leaders, policymakers, local officials, and communities to help them address these challenges. Did that come from your desire to live up to President Kennedy’s call to service?

Actually, I do want to fix America! (Laughter.) The irony of all this is: I haven’t quite fixed it, but underneath, that’s been my real motive.

There’s an approach to social science now, which is to say, “We just do the facts. It’s not our business to say what people should do, much less get out and work with them to do it.”

I strongly disagree with that. Of course, there’s a role for people who just do the math. That’s fine. I admire that. Once upon a time, I did it myself. So, I’m not saying political scientists or social scientists shouldn’t do high-tech, quantitative stuff. I’m just saying that, as a group, social scientists should not be focused just on description. They should also be focused on, in some sense, taking a more active role, trying to change. One way or another, ordinary Americans help to fund what is a pretty cushy life for academics like me, and I think we have some obligation to work on problems that concern them.

In the early 2000s, you launched an initiative to convert ideas about social capital into practical solutions, called the Saguaro Seminar. In a recent interview with The New York Times, you called it your biggest failure. Why?

It turned out the problem was too vague. We had this idea — it came from some experts at the Kennedy School — of so-called executive sessions in which you bring together some academics and some practitioners and try to figure out what to do about a problem. And it works for quite specific problems, like crime. We had a report, but the report did not have the impact that we hoped it would have. In retrospect, I think our hopes were exaggerated.

Lots of people have invested a ton of money in having some kind of national commission on one of these big problems — the national commission on polarization or national commission on inequality. None of them have solved the problem. That’s because, I think, fundamentally it’s not an absence of good ideas, it’s an absence of grassroots efforts. Everybody in that group worked hard, and we had some good ideas, but ideas are not enough.

We did make one really good decision. It was made by a guy named Tom Sander, my No. 2 for about 20 years. We were trying to get together a bunch of practitioners from across the nation. We wanted to have a very diverse group. He heard of this young lawyer who was then working as a community organizer in Chicago. And he came back and said, “I think this guy might be our guy.”

Let me guess: His name was Barack Obama?

He was younger than almost anybody else in the group, and he was super smart and very ambitious. Just lovable. We all liked him because he’s very likable and smart. His nickname was “the governor” because we thought, “You’re so good. Maybe someday you might end up being elected governor of Illinois.” Imagine that! (Laughter.) Within five years, he was president of the United States.

While he was president, quite often, he invited me to the White House to speak. In his second term, he awarded me the National Humanities Medal for my work on community. I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say some of his main initiatives came from my talks with him at the White House. And all of that was because Tom Sander, this colleague of mine, had gone looking for a bright young organizer in Chicago.

So, at every stage of my career, I benefited from somebody else. I was lucky in the mentors and colleagues and friends and students that I had. I was lucky that I met my wife. It was not moments in which I was brilliant, it was moments in which I recognized that somebody else had come up with a good idea.

Election night 2000 represents a difficult chapter in the history of broadcast news.

Exit polls showed a tight presidential election between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush. Just before 8 p.m., NBC News projected a Gore victory in the pivotal state of Florida, with all the other major television networks closely following. Two hours later, all retracted their forecasts as Gore’s margins narrowed with the reporting of additional votes.

Just after 2 a.m., the networks felt confident calling the state — and therefore the presidency — for Bush. But two hours later, they had to backtrack again when it became clear Florida was headed for a recount.

“The media had a vulnerability in understanding the changing nature of how elections are actually run,” said Stephen Ansolabehere, Frank G. Thompson Professor of Government, reflecting on Florida’s razor’s edge results, which exposed the networks’ reliance on outdated statistical modeling.

Five years later, Ansolabehere, an elections and public opinion expert, joined a team of social science Ph.D.s charged with improvingdata journalism and election forecasting for CBS News. “I’ve been there ever since for every midterm and presidential election as well as the primaries,” he said.

We caught up with Ansolabehere, mastermind of the long-running Cooperative Election Study, for a lesson on the evolving nature of real-time vote projections and a preview of election night 2024. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

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How did TV journalists get it so wrong in 2000?

That election exposed a lot of administrative failures in the U.S. electoral system — from voting machines to registration to management of polling places. But the networks relied on the same old statistical models to ingest data — and then they just put that out. They stationed journalists in various areas to report on local results, but they weren’t necessarily placed where the problems were.

There was also a rush to report. The television networks were basically racing each other. Don’t get me wrong. There was certainly an ethos of getting it right because calling the election can have a big impact — it can shift how legal strategies are pursued by the campaigns afterwards. That was very much the case in 2000 and 2020. It was almost the case in 2004.

Journalists know it’s a big responsibility. But for me, it’s also this very cool problem.

Say more about that.

The very cool problem is, you’re shown in real time little portions of something that has occurred — the election. At 7 p.m., you get to see, say, 10 percent of what has happened. At what point can you make a decision? Do you need to see 50 percent of the data? Do you need 90 percent? It’s a missing data problem. It’s a forecasting problem. And it’s forecasting things that we political scientists care about, like turnout, vote shares, and how different groups voted.

How has the rise of absentee voting complicated this work?

In 2000, one in eight ballots nationwide was cast absentee or early. In 2016, 40 percent of ballets were cast absentee or early. During COVID, more than 60 percent were. That makes it really challenging to understand what’s going on during election night. In particular, there have been a bunch of studies that say making absentee voting easier doesn’t increase turnout. But since the states made absentee voting easier, turnout has gone up a bunch.

Many will recall from 2020 that there are idiosyncrasies with how absentee ballots are reported. How has that affected your work on election night?

Our old data models were based on [electoral] precincts. There are about 180,000 precincts in the U.S. — each a tiny place, with about 1,000 people — and we could see in each one how things had shifted from one election to the next.

But absentee ballots are not reported at the precinct level. They’re usually reported at the county level. There are 3,000 counties in the U.S., and they are very heterogeneous. That makes it very difficult to understand which little pieces of the missing or obscured puzzle have been revealed as the votes are reported.

Absentee voting was also politicized in 2020. How did that affect your team?

Up until 2020, we were lucky because absentee voting was pretty much like in-precinct voting. That is, it was unrelated to how people voted. But when we started getting the data streams in 2020, Biden would be up by something like 20 points in the absentee ballots, because that’s usually what gets dumped first on election night. You’ll see zero precincts reporting, but 20 percent of the votes are in — that’s the absentees from the county.

The problem was particularly vexing out west, because there you have these big urban counties that count for something like 75 percent of the state’s population. Think Maricopa County where Phoenix is in Arizona or Clark County with Las Vegas County in Nevada. We were, on the fly, trying to partition the data based not on the presidential vote. We could see that, say, the round of absentee votes that came in at 10:05 EST p.m. also had a reported vote from a certain state legislative district. That gave us some information about what part of Maricopa County the votes were from.

When did you know the results of the 2020 presidential election?

By about 1:30 a.m., I knew Biden had won.

But it took days for the media, including CBS, to declare a winner.

Everyone on the Decision Desk team was just racking their brains through midnight — can we figure out anything about where these absentee ballots are coming from? CBS staffer Kabir Khanna and I finally hit on a model where we could understand not so much what data we already had, but what data we didn’t yet have — how Democratic or Republican were the areas that hadn’t reported their absentee counts. And given how things were trending, what that must mean for the outstanding ballots.

At 1:30 it became obvious to me, at least, that Biden would win Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada.

What will you keep your eye on when you’re back at the Decision Desk?

One of the things we’re starting to look at right now is what’s the absentee ballot yield — that is, how many people have returned their absentee ballots — by party registration. A lot of states, not all, report party registration. But almost all of the states where the race will be close do.

And on Election Night itself, the first reporting we get is the 5 p.m. exit poll. If the Democrats aren’t up by five [points] in the raw exit-poll data, I’m going to guess it’ll be bad night for them. That’s what happened in 2016. The exit-poll data came back with Hillary Clinton up by five.

Why would the exit polls favor Democrats?

Raw exit-poll data always overstate the Democrats by five. We’ve studied it. We found things to explain little parts of it, but nobody really knows why. It’s been that way since the 1970s.

With another presidential election at America’s doorstep, Lawrence D. Bobo, the dean of Social Science, last week gathered four of his division’s faculty members — Mina Cikara, Jill Lepore, Eric Nelson, and Theda Skocpol — to discuss the state of the U.S. political system.  

“We don’t have enough occasions in the social sciences to share ideas across our disciplines, across our methods, and across our different perspectives to understand key issues,” offered Bobo, who is also the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences, at the top of the conversation. He hoped that the interdisciplinary panel’s expertise ­— in history, sociology, government, political theory, and psychology — would yield “a sense of illumination, if not calm, about the fate of American democracy.” 

Drawing on field research with American voters and the history of U.S. political thought, the symposium quickly surfaced disagreement over the source of recent dysfunction.

Borrowing from a lecture she delivered last month upon winning the American Political Science Association’s James Madison Award, Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, shared with the panel a timeline of recent actions by the Republican Party that in her view are aimed at undercutting U.S. elections and accountable governance. 

“We’re in a period of radicalization to the point of authoritarian, anti-democratic commitment by one of the two major political parties,” she said. “Ironically, it’s the party that started out in the Civil War-era celebrating freedom and opposing slavery.” 

Skocpol, co-author of “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism” (2012) and “Rust Belt Union Blues” (2023), distributed a handout listing 18 examples since 2000 of what she termed “legal hardball,” a concept she credited to her Government Department colleagues Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, whose book “Tyranny of the Minority” (2023) details how Southern Democrats used “constitutional hardball” during Reconstruction to disenfranchise Black voters and secure their own power.

Nelson, Robert M. Beren Professor of Government, offered “a modest dissent, or at least a friendly amendment” to Skocpol’s account. “There’s no question that the Republican Party has become deeply radicalized,” said Nelson, author “The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God.” (2019). “But I think the phenomenon that we’ve seen is a spiral, and in order to diagnose it correctly you have to realize that the dynamics require a kind of tit-for-tat on both sides.”

Democrats were the first to break with norms around judicial appointments, he argued, with Democratic senators lining up in 1987 against President Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. “Republicans then responded and began abusing the confirmation process, particularly for lower court federal judges,” he said. 

Democrats, he said, then eliminated the filibuster for lower court appointments in 2013. Republicans, in turn, refused to give President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland a SCOTUS hearing in 2016 and eliminated the filibuster for nominations the following year. 

As a result, presidents no longer nominate justices who are “at least minimally acceptable to those in the minority,” Nelson said. Democrats have become increasingly outraged by the succession of Supreme Court decisions that followed. “And the Democrats now propose to violate the Constitution by having Congress pass a bill that pretends to have the authority to impose term limits on justices,” he concluded. 

Also documented by Skocpol is an uptick in what she called “extralegal” threats and violence following false claims about the 2020 election results. Her examples included harassment of public officials as well as the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

Republicans controlled the presidency and Congress for much of the period she analyzed, Skocpol said. “I think the timeline here raises the possibility that an outright offensive authoritarian movement has emerged that wants to take it all and to turn elections into, at most, decorations — and to deploy harassment and threats of violence regularly along with quasi-legal tactics,” she said.

Insights from the event’s other two speakers looked beyond partisan politics. Lepore, David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, drew from her 2020 book “If Then” to review six decades of technological change and what she sees as its corrosive effect on all levels of government. Cikara, a professor of psychology who specializes in intergroup conflict and polarization, spoke to a hopeful body of research on altering people’s “meta-perceptions,” or an individual’s ideas about how others regard them and their identity group. 

With both Harvard students and faculty in attendance, the Oct. 21 symposium featured a lively Q&A section, dominated by fears of constitutional crises and democratic collapse.

Nelson shared his concerns that this year’s election results could set off “terrifying sorts of constitutional impasse” and “dangerous levels of instability and dysfunction.” Nevertheless, he lamented all the talk of existential danger this election season. “It reminds people of things that were said in 2016 and 2020,” he said.

It has become the “standard get-out-the-vote rhetoric” on left and the right alike, Lepore added. “I think there’s a lot of really important work about the stakes, and the stakes are extremely high, but I think that rhetoric is fundamentally incendiary.”

“But why would it be rhetoric to identify those threats and try to communicate them?” Skocpol wondered. 

“The argument is that it has a perverse effect,” Nelson replied. “At this point, there’s been so much of it that people tune it out and don’t take the actual threat sufficiently seriously.”

This summer, cultural critic and author Laura Kipnis wrote about her experience being hired by an AI app to record 12 hours of commentary on “Romeo and Juliet” to train a chatbot to impersonate her. For a fee, the app lets users read a classic book in the public domain while chatting with an AI “guide,” such as Margaret Atwood, Roxane Gay, or Salman Rushdie. The goal, Kipnis explained, is to replicate the experience of a one-on-one tutoring session.

“The assignment was to be interesting more than it was to be an expert,” said Kipnis, who spoke at Harvard last week about the experience and the larger impact of generative AI on literature. “There were no parameters. Anything, however tangential, that I wanted to comment on about the play was OK. They were looking for voices that are kind of quirky and engaging for readers.” 

The Department of English debate titled “Should You Become a Literary Bot?,” which was part of a campus initiative to boost civil discourse and intellectual vitality, featured an discussion between Kipnis and Claire Messud, Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Senior Lecturer on Fiction, on whether AI chatbots are a good tool to help us analyze literature.

Kipnis, who learned in 2023 that her own books were among the thousands used without permission to train generative artificial intelligence, said she wouldn’t go so far as to call technology “neutral,” because it can be developed for social purposes that fall across the moral spectrum. 

But she also doesn’t believe AI has an inherent social purpose baked in, which she says is the fear behind most of the “hand-wringing” about AI’s future.

“New technologies are going to reflect and intensify existing social forces and relations of production,” Kipnis said. “I don’t think they themselves create those relations — at least, so far.” 

She suggests treating AI as a public utility and regulating it like one, though she is skeptical that the political will exists to do that.

“It seems currently a given that AI will take over the project of milking maximum profits from every last corner of social and private life for short-term gains in even more creatively nefarious ways,” Kipnis said. “Resisting AI isn’t going to change that dynamic if the culprit is not the technology.”

Messud pushed back on Kipnis’ assertion that adopting AI is a “given,” saying that attitude only perpetuates the idea that using AI is inevitable. She also pointed out that the Rebind app for which Kipnis recorded commentary is an example of the capitalist profit-chasing she was critiquing.

“At what point do you think you are making a difference by not participating in something?” Kipnis argued. “We’re enrolled. We’re enlisted. There’s no standing outside.”

In the Q&A portion, some audience members debated what such tools could or should replace, whether it could bring equity to public education in under-resourced areas, or if it distracts from the actual need for a better-funded education system. 

The “Romeo and Juliet” Kipnis-bot hasn’t been published yet, but the audience examined an example of a chatbot on the same app that impersonates Irish author John Banville and, though still in beta, offers commentary on James Joyce’s “Dubliners.” As Kipnis prompted it with questions about the role of masculinity and sex in Joyce’s era, the bot, trained on Banville’s 12 hours of recorded commentary, infused its answers with much of the author’s signature witty humor. 

“I always felt that Freud should have been a Catholic because psychiatry is akin to the Catholic confession box: ‘Be quiet and listen,’ until they get on to the subject of sex, and then they say, ‘Oh, tell me more,’” the bot quipped in the middle of its answer about the influence of religious doctrine on Irish society.

Messud criticized the Banville-bot’s multi-paragraph responses, which often repeated ideas and even phrases, calling them intellectually thin with a “high blather quotient.” 

“So much of what’s interesting when I read is to know that an individual consciousness has chosen the words,” Messud said. “I’m really interested in the fracturing, in the weird decisions and the words that don’t quite fit, in the idiosyncrasies of it.”

Kipnis said Messud might be setting the bar too high in expecting a chatbot that is designed for interaction to also be “brilliantly original.”

“I think the idea is that it promotes or helps people engage who might not otherwise engage in classics,” Kipnis said. “People who just want a different experience of reading.”

Inspectors general are placed in most federal agencies to promote efficiency and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse, and the U.S. Supreme Court would benefit from having one, said former inspector general of the Department of Justice Glenn Fine.

There are 74 offices of inspectors general across the federal government, but the federal judiciary, which includes the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals, and the U.S. District Courts, has none. With roughly 2,000 judges, 30,000 employees, and an $8 billion budget, the federal judiciary is a huge operation that lends itself to fraud and waste, which only an independent internal overseer can evaluate and investigate, said Fine ’78, J.D. ’85.

“Justices are human, and some may commit misconduct, and some may be accused of misconduct unfairly,” said Fine during a conversation with Jack Goldsmith, Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. “I believe an inspector general would be good for the U.S. Supreme Court and it would help improve trust in the court.”

Fine’s proposal for the Supreme Court was one of several he offered during the talk about his new book, “Watchdogs: Inspectors General and the Battle for Honest and Accountable Government,” which highlights the critical role of inspectors general in promoting efficiency and government accountability. 

Established by Congress in 1978, the office of inspector general and its role is still not well understood by the public or even by government officials, said Fine, who hopes his book underscores the critical work they do. As independent, nonpartisan overseers within their agencies, inspectors general can conduct audits, evaluations, and investigations to detect and deter waste, fraud, and abuse, providing an essential check and balance in government. IGs report to their agency heads and to Congress and must make public reports with recommendations.

“We do need a better answer to the question of who is watching the watchdogs, both in terms of when there’s actual misconduct committed and also when an IG is just not that effective.”

Glenn Fine

“They have been called some of the most important public servants you’ve never heard of, and that’s true,” said Fine. “When I was the IG of the Justice Department, I worked with five attorney generals, and when I was the acting IG of the Department of Defense, I worked with four secretaries of defense, and even they did not understand the independence of the IG.”

As inspector general of the Department of Justice from 2000 to 2011 and acting inspector general of the Department of Defense from 2006 to 2020, Fine served during the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. In April 2020, Trump ousted Fine as the Pentagon’s acting watchdog, and subsequently removed him as the head of a panel tasked to oversee the $2 trillion coronavirus relief package. At the time, Trump also removed four other inspectors general, including the Intelligence Community IG and the State Department IG.

During his tenure at the Justice Department from 2000 to 2011, Fine’s office oversaw investigations of the ways in which the FBI missed and failed to connect the dots before the Sept. 11 attacks, the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and the failure of FBI internal security procedures to detect agent Robert Hanssen as a spy working for Russia for over two decades, among many others.

From 2006 to 2020, Fine’s IG office at the Department of Defense investigated the use of reconstruction funds in Afghanistan, as well as the wars in Iraq and Syria, and the “Fat Leonard” case, the worst corruption scandal in Navy history.

During his talk, Fine also proposed reforms to improve the IG’s office, including setting a term limit for inspectors general, preventing them from holding multiple positions at the same time, and establishing a better system to oversee inspectors general.

“We do need a better answer to the question of who is watching the watchdogs, both in terms of when there’s actual misconduct committed and also when an IG is just not that effective,” said Fine.

Goldsmith, who interacted with Fine at the Justice Department when Goldsmith was the assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, from 2003 to 2004, had words of praise for inspectors general.

“Inspectors general are feared in agencies because of their independence and because they could go anywhere and do anything within the department,” said Goldsmith. “It’s hard to exaggerate how important these institutions are to the functioning of the executive branch and how successful they are.”

The work of inspectors general makes government accountable and promotes democracy, said Fine, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution and an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School. They should strive to be timely, transparent, and make actionable recommendations, and most importantly, they should be independent and stand up to potential challenges by government officials.

“Don’t expect to be popular,” said Fine. “You can’t try to please one side or the other because that’s a recipe for disaster, and your credibility is shot. That’s the only thing that matters: your credibility or independence … the belief that you’re doing this in a nonpartisan, credible way, relying only on the facts.”

“We are at a perilous moment in our country,” celebrated civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill said Tuesday evening before hundreds at Klarman Hall. And the factors that brought us to this point of divisiveness are more persistent and pervasive than “any one man or any one election.”

“We’re here because over decades, we’ve left the foundations of our democracy largely unattended” and “embraced an anemic and vapid form of citizenship,” she said. “We’re here because as a nation, we have been too weak to face the truth of our history and the truth of our national identity,” one rooted in slavery and continued through systemic racism and white supremacy, realities the nation looked past for too long.

President Alan Garber and chief diversity and inclusion officer Sherri A. Charleston welcomed Ifill, who was president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 2013 to 2022 and is now a professor at Howard University Law School. Ifill was selected to deliver the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture, which honors an individual whose public service, scholarship, or activism advances King’s lifelong work around racial justice, equality, and democratic ideals.

In her address, “Reimagining a New American Democracy,” Ifill said, “We are here because far too many have convinced themselves that the disease that is embedded in the DNA of America, racism and white supremacy, can coexist with healthy democracy. It cannot.”

Ifill reflected on how her life and the opportunities she had growing up in the 1960s and ’70s were profoundly different from those her nine older siblings and parents had, thanks to the victories won by previous generations who “found the courage to fight for a world they had never seen.”

“And that is what we are being called to do today. This is the work, as I have said, of founding a new American democracy, and it’s hard work,” said Ifill, who taught a seminar on the 14th Amendment at Harvard Law School last fall and will chair Howard’s new 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy, a multidisciplinary initiative focused on promoting equality and justice. “The emergence of a new and better democracy will come at a cost, but it will come.”

She criticized business leaders for enjoying the fruits of democracy but then saying they’re “agnostic” when things get messy, and took citizens to task for being eager to point out the flaws and failures of democracy, but not thinking they had any responsibilities to it beyond jury duty and voting every four years.  

“We don’t show up for a school board meeting; we don’t show up for a city council meeting; we don’t call our representative; we don’t call our senator — we don’t do any of that stuff,” Ifill said. “We just expect them … ‘We voted for you; now make it happen.’ And then we love to be outraged when they don’t make it happen.”

The MLK lecture, which takes place in the fall in memory of King’s visit to Harvard Law School in October 1962, is an initiative launched three years ago by then-President Larry Bacow. His purpose was to offer a “new way for Harvard to participate in a critical and ongoing national conversation about racial justice, equity, and opportunity.”

Toward the end of this year’s event, Ifill had a discussion with David B. Wilkins, Lester Kissel Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Wilkins, an expert on the legal profession, asked her what role lawyers play in the quest for a healthy, truly inclusive multiracial democracy.

Though some have damaged our norms and institutions in recent years, most “lawyers are leaders” and problem-solvers who are grounded in facts and the rule of law, which are foundational building blocks of any democracy, she said.

But it’s not their job alone. “Democracy is an ecosystem” in which we all have to do our part, Ifill said.

“I think we can all see that we need a fresh, new iteration of our democracy. Who’s going to do that — somebody else?” she said.

“We need to decide that we are going to be founders and framers of this new democracy, and that means behaving as though we have the right and the ability to literally shape this democracy.”

Breast cancer rates rose by 1 percent a year from 2012-2021 for all American women combined, but steeper increases were seen for women under 50 and Asian American and Pacific Islander women, according to the American Cancer Society, which released its biennial report earlier this month on the state of the disease in the nation.

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in women, second only to lung cancer. Overall mortality rates, however, have fallen by 44 percent since 1989 because of advances in treatment and earlier detection.

But the new figures also show there remain significant racial and ethnic disparities. There has, for instance, been no change in mortality rates for Native American women over the past 30 years. And Black women have a 5 percent lower incidence rate than white women but are 38 percent more likely to die from the disease, a trend of divergence that began after 1980.

Laura Collins, a physician who specializes in breast pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a professor at Harvard Medical School, spoke to the Gazette about the report and its findings. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Did anything in the latest report surprise you?

The piece of the report that caught the headlines was the increasing incidence found for breast cancer in young women. It was interesting to see that data captured in this report. Certainly anecdotally, we’ve been diagnosing breast cancer in younger women in the patient case mix coming through our practice. So in some ways it wasn’t surprising, but in others, it was a surprise to see it documented in this important paper from the American Cancer Society.

Do we have a sense of why that is?

People have many thoughts about this. Certainly there are changes in lifestyle that could impact the incidence of breast cancer, things like deferring childbearing to later in life, increasing obesity rates, people are walking and moving about less — we know that exercise is protective for many types of cancers, but certainly for breast cancer.

And then there are other environmental factors that we’re less certain about, and those need to be investigated further. The recent concern that people are thinking about is microplastics. These chemicals are everywhere, and it’s been found that we are ingesting them too. And so we need to figure out what harm they do and how we can avoid them.

While rates for younger women are on the rise, it looks like the overall rate of increase in breast cancer cases remains fairly stable. Have we made progress, or should we be worried?

Breast cancer is still one of the leading cancers amongst women and causes of death from cancer amongst women, but certainly with the introduction of widespread screening mammography we have increased detection at earlier stages.

We did see a decline in breast cancer rates because of improvements in diagnosis, treatment, and better understanding of the different types of breast cancers that women get. We’ve seen a decline in the mortality rate. We were seeing a decline in incidence in the 2000s, but we are now seeing a slow rise again, with that increase more dramatically present in younger women.

Are there other demographics of women who are more at risk than others?

It was outlined in the report the different populations for whom the increases are more marked, with the caveat that the ethnicities may not be as accurately captured as one would like.

There are differences in rates between white, Black, Asian, and Pacific Islander women, attributed in part to ongoing issues of systemic racism and access to care. For example, Black women often present at a higher stage, as well, we see biologically more aggressive cancers in that population.

Additionally, depending on where a person lives and their ability to access care, it can be a factor in the stage at which a woman’s breast cancer is detected. These are challenges that we need to figure out and resolve to create equity of care for all.

For young women who develop breast cancer, what are some additional challenges they face with their diagnoses and care?

Because we think of breast cancer as a cancer of older women and postmenopausal women, when young women present with a breast mass there’s a tendency to think that it’s something benign and very unlikely to be cancer. And often that is the case — it is much more likely to be a benign rather than malignant tumor.

But what this report tells us is that we can’t ignore these things. We can’t have this assumption that there’s nothing to worry about in younger women. The report should be a consciousness-raising issue, that we need to make sure that if a young woman presents with an abnormality there is prompt follow-up with necessary steps, whether it’s with imaging studies or a biopsy so there can be pathologic confirmation that either it’s benign or malignant.

And if it’s malignant, that the patient can be referred promptly for appropriate care. It’s important we don’t delay treatment.

What advice would you give to younger women when it comes to breast cancer awareness and how they might begin to advocate for themselves?

The U.S. Preventative Services Task Force lowered the age for biennial screening from 50 to 40 years of age. If you’re younger than 40, knowing if you have a family history of breast cancer is important because you may have an increased genetic predisposition to cancer. That would be a conversation to have with your healthcare provider.

And then knowing other risk factors, like if you’re having children later in life, your exercise levels, weight, things like that are factors for you and your healthcare provider to consider in guiding screening. If you feel an abnormality in your breast, make sure you speak to your healthcare provider about it. Because we are seeing increased breast cancer in younger women, it is important to advocate for yourself to ensure further examination or work-up is not delayed.

What gives you hope that we will continue to improve our capacity and ability to detect and reduce occurrences of breast cancer?

There’s a lot of work going on in the arena of breast cancer research. I know that the Harvard hospitals have a strong commitment to taking care of young women with breast cancer. I think there’s a big effort to understand the differences in the biology of breast cancer occurring in young women compared to cancers that occur in older women. That exploration and research is important to understanding how best to treat women with breast cancer.

Additionally, there are many different psychosocial factors that impact young women with breast cancer compared to older women, such as impacts on career, fertility concerns, or coping with cancer treatments whilst caring for young children, so attending to those issues is important and there’s lots of work going on in those areas as well.

Self-described “former spooky kid” Katie Kohn teaches the class “Advanced Fiction: Writing Horror” at Harvard Extension School. The Gazette interviewed Kohn, a doctoral candidate in the Art, Film and Visual Studies program, about people’s fascination with scary stories, the difference between bad and good horror, and what the genre can teach us about ourselves.

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What makes horror stories different from other stories?

All stories are rooted in conflict; they promise us that things will go wrong. But horror stories do two things that I truly think are unique. For one, horror tends to destabilize the very binaries out of which other stories source their tension. It’s not just about playing good against evil, the familiar against the strange. Horror complicates. For instance, we use the term “uncanny” to describe a breakdown between something we recognize and something we don’t. It’s neither simply familiar nor strange; it’s somehow both. Horror loves to take us to these places where nothing is certain, where it feels like the rug is always about to come out from under us.  

That’s the other effect horror stories promise: uncertainty to the very end. Horror asks us to accept the prospect that things might not turn out well. If other stories overcome challenges or resolve tensions, this one might be as raw and as confrontational as life can be, without curation or niceties. For instance, there are points at which we no longer feel safe reading a horror story or watching a horror film, that moment when we want to look over our shoulder or check under the bed. All stories ask that we suspend our disbelief. Horror exploits that basic instinct to give ourselves over to stories. Horror is a genre that bites back. 

“There are points at which we no longer feel safe reading a horror story or watching a horror film, that moment when we want to look over our shoulder or check under the bed.”

What draws people to horror stories?

The first theory that often comes up is catharsis. Horror fiction offers a safe way to experience things that we fear in life. I’d add that horror doesn’t just confront what we already fear. It’s a genre that goes digging; it looks for what’s buried, and in doing so, it tends to find that which is repressed, to speak to the otherwise unspeakable, or bring what has been overlooked or marginalized back into focus. Horror gets at truths that we might not be able to access in other ways. It gives us a language to speak to what troubles us. In that way, dark things can be quite illuminating.  

And yet, horror is considered a lowly genre, both in literature and film. Why?

There are theories. American film scholar Linda Williams once proposed certain genres are considered “lowly” because they’re associated with bodily effects. Horror tries to get us to scream, melodrama to cry, and pornography, well … you know. All these genres are trying to assault your body, to provoke a physical reaction. This places them in a hierarchy opposite qualities associated with higher art: stimulating the mind or the intellect rather than the body. That’s a theory that I’m willing to buy. I’d also say it’s possible horror — genre fiction, in general — exists within existing power hierarchies. Popular fiction can be accessible fiction, becoming a home for marginalized voices with little access to institutional power. This is precisely one of the things that makes horror so exciting to me, personally, but it’s also what sets it apart. 

What’s the difference between good and bad horror?

In any form of storytelling or craft there are “bad” versions, but these things are subjective. There is of course horror that just wants to shock or push you to the limits. I tend to find horror more satisfying when it’s tackling difficult or illuminating questions.

Folks use the term “elevated” horror to describe this, perhaps to distinguish certain texts and authors from horror’s reputation as a “lowly” genre, which is itself telling. But if we’re talking personal favorites, I don’t know how much such distinctions really matter. In film, I love “The Descent,” which is something of a cult hit, as well as “The Others,” more of a gothic. “Alien,” of course. As for prose, I always recommend Scott Smith’s “The Ruins.” I thought it was going to be a simple thriller, but it turned out to be a novel I return to year after year. 

In general, I think the fun of horror is that it’s always surprising. Something doesn’t have to have a big budget or big names to strike a chord; sometimes what resonates can be quite personal — even idiosyncratic. For instance, I personally tend to avoid cannibalism plots, but I’ll run to haunted houses and feminine gothics or anything involving deep-sea horror. If there’s an underwater laboratory and things start to go wrong, I’m there. Not surprising, as one of my biggest fears is being stuck underwater.

In terms of works we read in this course, I do have a soft spot for Bram Stoker’s “The Judge’s House.” It’s a relatively simple ghost story, but it made me look over my shoulder when I first read it. And if horror isn’t making us question the world that we live in and our position in it, what’s the point?

How do classic and contemporary horror stories reflect the anxieties of their times?

In many ways we’re still very much living in the shadow of gothic literature. The gothic is a response to the Enlightenment era view of man’s supposed intellectual and moral prowess: that we can be in control or at least understand the world, that the known world is itself a stable — even conquerable — thing. Today, horror continues to do what the gothic has always done, reminding us that the world is far stranger than we presume to know and, ultimately, not ours to control. Horror will often take us to that more radical source of conflict where we realize that there is a limit to what we can control or even comprehend. Certainly, some stories exploit anxieties both past and present rooted in presumed oppositions: us vs. them, pure vs. impure, holy vs. profane, good vs. evil. But again, horror also confronts these binaries.

Our course tries to look to the past to see how much of its legacy remains present in today’s horror. We cover excerpts from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” as well as Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” But the focus is more on contemporary works. Of course, we must consider Stephen King as well as other prolific writers who are not necessarily household names: folks like Paul Tremblay or Tananarive Due or well-known experimentalists like Carmen Maria Machado. We also look beyond the format of prose in works from Emily Carroll and even a children’s picture book. I genuinely think Stan and Jan Berenstain’s “The Spooky Old Tree” is a masterpiece of horror storytelling, it’s just one that happens to be for early readers. 

How do horror writers succeed in raising the hairs on our neck?

There are many ways horror gets under our skin. One strategy is docufiction. In different ways, both “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” are presented as first-hand accounts, making us wonder whether we understand our own world as well as its sometimes-naive protagonists do. 

Related is the motif of infection. I don’t just mean as a plot point, say, the mass infection of a zombie apocalypse. If the characters in a film have just watched a video that will kill them in seven days, what does that mean for those of us in the audience who just watched the same video? What really gets under our skin — and what really makes a film like George Romero’s 1968 “Night of the Living Dead” so affecting — isn’t the idea that the scary thing in the story could happen to any of the characters, but that it could also happen to us. By the end of “Night of the Living Dead,” you know that there is something worse than being bitten by a mindless zombie, and it’s something possibly even more insidious. Zombies, after all, are just reminders that to live with a human body offers no guarantee that one will be seen as human.  

It’s important to not forget that horror isn’t just about being scary. I tell my students that horror, like any fiction, should try to tap into something that resonates. Something that affects people on a deeper level. Not just the element of surprise or a jump scare, but something that lasts. 

While researching voter suppression and the Civil Rights Movement, artist Lisa Jones Gentry came across a story published by the Southern Poverty Law Institute. The news post highlighted 40 people who were murdered between 1954 and 1968, among them activists, victims of vigilantes, and ordinary citizens. The names inspired Gentry to create a piece of mixed media artwork to honor those lives.

“They Died for You: Vote 2024” features the faces of these men, women, and children concealed among brightly colored geometric shapes. The piece, and another Gentry created in 2020, sit in a new exhibition titled “Vote!” highlighting African American voting history at the Neil L. and Angelica Zander Rudenstine Gallery in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

“They were really just ordinary people whose lives had been cut short because they were trying to make sure that this country was free for everyone,” said Gentry, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

“Vote!” showcases key figures who historically defined civic participation as their community struggled for equal voting rights. Works by Gentry, Haili Francis, A.L.M. ’18, Titus Kaphar, and others are on display along with selections from the Hutchins Center’s permanent collection, including Jules R. Arthur, Ray A. Frieden ’65, Charles W. White, and Rico Gatson. 

Curator Dell Marie Hamilton, acting director of the Cooper Gallery for African & African American Art at the Hutchins Center, said she is intrigued by undecided voters and said she hopes the exhibition can show them the long road Black Americans have traveled to gain and protect their right to vote.

“This is a very long trajectory that doesn’t just happen. We, as civic participants, are part of this history as well,” she said. “For those folks who are perhaps still struggling with whether or not this is even a system worth saving, I would hope that an exhibition like this gives them some of the fuel they need to understand that this is the history that we’re wrestling with. This is the aftermath of why we are where we are. I feel like you can’t know the present or the future without really understanding the history.”

From the beginning, visitors are confronted with the U.S.’ violent and shameful past with enslavement. Kaphar’s “Drawing the Blinds, Thaddeus Stevens” is an oil on canvas featuring the abolitionist and American lawyer and a seated Black woman — a hint at Stevens’ relationship with Lydia Hamilton Smith, a mixed-race, born-free housekeeper, businesswoman, and abolitionist. The piece is displayed next to “Raffle,” a piece developed by Charles W. White in 1970 that was inspired by advertisements promoting slave auctions. “Raffle” is an oil wash on illustration board in shades of brown, featuring an enslaved Black woman who appears to be pregnant.

Two works by Francis, an alumna of the Harvard Extension School who helped plan a Harvard Black Alumni Society’s Global Change Makers Conference, which inspired the exhibition, are also displayed.

“As an artist, my role is to simply bring attention to something that can spark a larger conversation,” said Francis, an artist and scholar working at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. “I believe that when we use art [we can] catalyze these conversations that can be difficult to have in other areas.”

One of Francis’ pieces, “Sidney Revels Redmond,” showcases the legacy of Redmond, a fellow alum (1923, HLS 1925), the grandson of the first Black senator, and a civil rights attorney in his own right. Francis’ second piece, “Shirley Chisholm: Unbought,” pays homage to the first Black woman elected to the House of Representatives and the first Black woman to run for president.

“My hope is that people understand that voting is powerful,” she said. “They do have a voice, even though sometimes they can get discouraged when the outcome doesn’t necessarily look like it’s going in a direction that feels fair or right.”

“Vote!” runs until Dec. 7, and is co-sponsored by the Harvard Black Alumni Society, the Harvard Alumni Association, and Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

Mara Bolis arrived at the airport in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire last June — delayed, tired, and disheveled following a 20-plus hour journey from Boston. A security guard signaled for her to follow him through passport control and led her to a waiting SUV, assuring her that her luggage would follow. She sank into the back seat, eyes closed, looking forward to her hotel bed.

But when the car rolled to a stop, it was outside the gate of an elegant home. Glancing down at her jeans, sneakers, and cargo shirt, Bolis felt a wave of panic. It occurred to her that she was at the home of Patrick Achi, the former prime minister of the west African nation — and a former observer of her course.

Bolis’ road to Côte d’Ivoire began last spring semester. A fellow at the Harvard Center for International Development (CID), she led a seminar titled “Bringing a Gender Lens to Development Policy and Practice.”

While there are many drivers of inequality in the developing world, marginalization based on gender is a persistent cause. Part of the reason is because women continue to have less formal political authority — they make up only about 27 percent of parliamentarians around the world, so their unique needs and perspectives often go overlooked. Bolis’ course aimed to help leaders build the practical skills necessary to bridge that gap.

Achi arrived for a research fellowship at CID that semester. After stepping down from government in October 2023 to focus on his longtime role as president of the Regional Council of the La Mé region, he had come to Cambridge to research the factors slowing Africa’s development progress.

The former prime minister was planning for his own spring seminar, “Unlocking Africa’s Potential through Development,” which would provide insights into these challenges and explore strategies for overcoming them, and he decided to sit in on Bolis’ class as an observer.

After the first class, Achi approached Bolis and told her he’d enjoyed the class but felt uncomfortable as the only man in the room. (He would later reflect that this was the first time this had ever happened to him in a professional setting.) Achi didn’t want the other participants to feel they could not speak freely with a man in the room. He asked whether he should continue to attend.

“You should absolutely come back,” Bolis replied with a smile. “And now you know how most women in the professional world feel.”

Achi would not only return, he would soon become an integral voice in class and an advocate of gender equality.

“It was revelatory for him,” said Bolis. “In learning about examples of inequality in public life around the world, and how inequality on the basis of gender had personally affected many of the other students in the class, he grew increasingly energized by the prospect of what he could do to support women back home in La Mé.”

In May, Achi took the stage at CID’s Global Empowerment Meeting where, alongside former Jordanian Prime Minister Omar Al Razzaz, he spoke with PBS NewsHour’s Amna Nawaz on how he had advocated for women and girls during his time in office (including doubling the rate of high school attendance for girls by building schools walking distance from their homes) and what he would do differently now (a major lesson for Achi: Listen to women).

Achi reflected on his experience in Bolis’ course in an article for CID, noting that it was “instrumental in deepening my understanding of gender issues and made me realize that while many of us believe we are implementing effective gender policies, the actual awareness and prioritization of these is often significantly lacking.”

Achi and Bolis began collaborating on the development of a comprehensive gender strategy for the La Mé region. The work had three components: research to identify women’s needs as distinct from those of men (the first time the region had gathered sex-disaggregated statistics to inform their strategy development); a roundtable discussion, hosted by the La Mé Regional Council, of the key issues facing women in the region; and a training, run by Bolis, for elected and administrative officials to bring a gender lens to their policy and programs.

In June, Achi and Bolis initiated a research project alongside two HKS students, Femi Olonilua and Kotomi Odate, with the support of gender leaders and members of Achi’s La Mé team. The team went on to talk to hundreds of residents about what activities they felt would help women reach their goals. The HKS students facilitated focus groups and administered questionnaires, then worked to identify the key challenges facing women and develop policy recommendations to address them.

In July, Bolis arrived in Côte d’Ivoire, expecting to participate in a small, closed-door session with the Ministry of Women in the Economy to discuss opportunities and living standards for women and provide training on bringing a gender lens to policy and program development for La Mé regional officials.

This is how Bolis found herself at Achi’s home, surrounded by elegantly dressed people who, she was realizing, had waited until she’d arrived at 10 p.m. to begin their dinner. What Bolis assumed would be a private session turned out to be a much longer major event.

“When we arrived in La Mé the next day, I found a public ceremony with over 100 participants, including members of the press, elected and administrative officials from all levels of government, international donors, representatives from the World Bank and French Development Bank, and members of civil society and women’s rights organizations from across Côte d’Ivoire,” said Bolis.

She was brought onstage to give remarks. She noted, laughing, that working with Achi means always being on your toes.

Later, in a smaller, closed-door session, Olonilua and Odate presented their survey findings to the multi-stakeholder group. The two students talked about women’s aspirations in agriculture and commerce, their interest in learning about women’s rights, and the barriers they face.

Following the presentations, the group talked about their “vision for women’s empowerment in La Mé and took a hard look at exactly what was standing in our way,” Bolis said. “Like elsewhere in the developing world, the unpaid care work done by women in the region keeps them from engaging in economic activity and gaining financial independence. They lack safe and reliable transportation options. Many women were unable to secure permission to leave their homes alone. In parts of La Mé, women have an 80 percent illiteracy rate. We talked through these problems and their root causes. The conversation had an incredible energy.”

One problem the group identified is that many women in La Mé lack formal identification, which can lead to their being overlooked in economic or social programs. “Right then and there, we decided to have an ID drive. It’s rare that you can have a conversation with so many different players where everyone is ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work,” said Bolis.

Over the course of the rest of the week, Bolis led a gender-sensitization workshop for 50 elected and administrative regional government officials in La Mé, which was met with requests for more such opportunities by male and female participants alike.

Then Achi’s wife, Florence Achi, one of the few female mayors in Côte d’Ivoire, invited the HKS team to an event celebrating the region’s mothers where the mayor was the guest of honor.

Before they went, Mayor Achi’s team helped the HKS team obtain dresses in Ivorian fashion to befit the occasion. The event featured a parade of women’s associations, music, and dancing with hundreds of celebrants resplendent in a rainbow of colors and designs.

In closing, Mayor Achi gave a rousing speech, assuring the crowd that women could do anything they set their minds to — even become mayor — to an eruption of roaring cheers.

“Nothing could have prepared us for the moment the mayor pulled us in to join her in a traditional dance in front of all of the spectators,” Bolis said. “The audience was generous with their applause, considering our clear lack of experience with Ivorian dance.”

Since the July event, Achi’s gender-equity work in La Mé has picked up speed. This fall, La Mé’s Regional Council approved the country’s first-ever gender-responsive budget, which allots funding for gender initiatives across the region in 2025. Areas of focus include women’s rights awareness-raising, training on active citizenship, adult literacy classes, and enhanced support for agricultural production.

Women in the area have also expressed a strong interest in financial-inclusion initiatives. In response, the government has budgeted for increased investment in support of women’s savings groups, which are called AVEC (French for “with”), in Côte d’Ivoire, as well as training to help women use their phones for saving, lending, and transactional purposes.

The new budget “brought tears to my eyes,” said Bolis, who has wrapped up her time in CID but continues her work in gender-justice initiatives as a fellow with Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership.

“These initiatives will contribute to the financial resilience, well-being, and happiness of women — and men — across La Mé. They are the outcome of countless hours of work by our students to carefully untangle these complex issues, and by former Prime Minister Achi’s efforts to champion gender issues in a new and important way. They demonstrate the types of cross-border collaboration and joint learning that is made possible through an environment like Harvard. The joy of developing partnerships to create more equitable futures is why I do what I do.”

“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.

Photographic motion studies were first pioneered in the 19th century by Eadweard Muybridge, who used multiple cameras and trip wires to photograph horses galloping. The process later evolved to use individual cameras and strobes in the work of 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 Harvard Kenneth C. 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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