The latest results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study show that U.S. students’ math scores trail those of many of their global peers. They also reveal that U.S. math scores were lower in 2023 than they were in 2019. The test was given last year to fourth- and eighth-graders around the world.

In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Heather Hill, Hazen-Nicoli Professor in Teacher Learning and Practice at Harvard Graduate School of Education, details a “disappointing picture,” including the damage inflicted by pandemic learning loss, and offers ideas on how schools and students might rebound.

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How do you interpret these results?

They first show that the U.S. is not where it wants to be in terms of these international comparisons. They also show that the work that we’ve put in over the last 20 to 30 years to try to improve our standing internationally has not paid off. There are not a lot of surprises here because we’ve been also seeing the same signal coming from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It is a disappointing picture. If you think about kids sitting in classrooms who are going to graduate without being able to reason mathematically or apply mathematical concepts to new problems, it’s just discouraging.

How much of the decline has to do with pandemic learning loss?

A large majority of the decline is due to COVID. Many kids, particularly our most disadvantaged children, lost half a year of math learning because they weren’t in school or they were in a hybrid learning situation. A couple of things about this. First, while the majority of this learning loss occurred at the beginning of the pandemic, teachers reported that even after schools were back to in-person learning, students had forgotten how to “student,” meaning they had forgotten how to attend to instruction, how to do homework in a timely manner, and had lost ground on some of the positive social behaviors that we expect in classrooms. I think most teachers would say that things are now back almost to where they were before COVID, with maybe the exception of cell phones being so distracting for children, but it took several years.

Second, math is cumulative, and students who missed half a year of math are going to struggle to learn new material. A student who has not learned basic fractions in the fourth grade is going to have trouble with more sophisticated fractions in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades, and when they reach algebra, they are going to have trouble with equations that contain rational expressions. And this leaves teachers struggling with the dilemma of whether to present new material or to spend time helping kids finish up the learning they didn’t quite get through during COVID. Math teachers’ time with their students is limited, and many teachers feel this dilemma acutely.

“Kids’ primary pathway to learning math is in school, and the only way to improve math instruction is through the constant improvement of what happens between teachers and students.”

How would you describe the state of math education in the U.S.?

It is highly variable. When I watch classrooms, I see some teachers knocking it out of the park — meaning I see kids talking about the math, solving sophisticated problems, and applying mathematics to new situations. And in other cases, the math is not taught very crisply, in the sense that the lesson might be a little bit conceptually disorganized, or the math may be hard to understand. Many teachers have a mix — a fair amount of student reasoning but also some disorganization around the mathematics.

Another thing is that the pandemic has changed the teaching labor force in the U.S. There are many more novice teachers, and they are therefore inexperienced with the math curricula.

One of the things that’s been promising is that in the last eight or nine years, there’s been more of a focus on high-quality curriculum materials and getting those in front of teachers, and having teachers learn how to use them and adapt them smartly for their children. As this movement continues to build steam, I’m hopeful that we will see improvements in math classroom quality.

Why is math so hard for so many U.S. children?

Some of this is about social pressure. Kids take in the messages that they hear from society about math. It’s common to hear messages like, “Oh, I’m not good in math” from friends or, from adults, “It’s OK not to be good in math; you’ll find something else to do.” Whereas in many other countries, math is seen as a prerequisite to a good life, and the understanding that even if it is a hard thing, you’re going to invest in it, and you’re going to do well.

Also, for many kids, math feels very foreign. They don’t see people like them doing math, and what happens in their math classroom doesn’t connect to their own interests and knowledge. Recently, scholars in my field have begun to think about how to revise curriculum materials so that they feature, for instance, mathematicians from other cultures or successful doers of math that look like the kids that are learning math.

Finally, we’ve moved away from giving students opportunities to practice the mathematics they’ve learned in class. This move comes from two sources: curriculum materials whose lessons contain little time for practice, and recent homework bans. Many of the homework bans are predicated on concerns about children’s unequal access to caregiver support for homework as well as concerns that some schools assign too much homework. But for a content area like math, it matters that kids have a chance to practice what they’ve learned in class.

How can the U.S. education system help students improve their math scores?

One thing that could help is changing the narrative about mathematics from one that says, “It’s OK if you don’t do well in math” to one that says, “If you work hard, you’re going to learn math because it’s logical and there is help.” There are ways everybody can learn math.

Working on teacher-student relationships can, maybe surprisingly, assist with math learning. When teacher-student relationships are strong, they result in better outcomes for kids across the board. In math, one reason may be that teachers can more easily engage kids in the work.

There’s such a scarcity of math teachers, which is driving some of the instructional quality issues. We have teachers who don’t have a background in math teaching math, and we also have folks without a background in teaching or math teaching math. Solving teacher pipeline issues is also key.

Kids’ primary pathway to learning math is in school, and the only way to improve math instruction is through the constant improvement of what happens between teachers and students. This means continuing to work on the quality of curriculum materials and engineering ways to enhance instruction.

“A Complete Unknown,” James Mangold’s new film about Nobel laureate Bob Dylan, will be released in the U.S. on December 25. Based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties,” the film, with Timothée Chalamet starring (and singing) in the lead role, depicts Dylan’s life from his 1961 arrival in New York to his controversial electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. 

Mangold’s movie has been nominated for three Golden Globes, praised by critics, and blessed by Dylan himself, but the judgment of audiences, including hardcore fans, awaits. How to portray an artist who seems to take pride in his talent for evasion? And why try?

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Dylan’s voice is extremely important to his music. How hard is it to get that voice right?

Dylan never strives to recover in performance the sound of a studio album. The crowd may want to hear what they heard when they first dropped the needle on the record. Dylan’s not interested in that. Dylan is interested in the living song, and so, the living song will change from performance to performance. Take a great song like “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and that final verse. Now, if you say it: “Don’t think twice, it’s all right,” that gives the song a certain meaning. If you sing “Don’t think twice, it’s all right,” that gives the song a very different meaning, both in its last verse and back onto the whole song. Dylan constantly is doing that. He’s upsetting audience expectation of the lyrics themselves, which change in performance as well as in drafts. He’s an oral poet in that way.

Should we be looking for an exact Dylan impression in this film? Is it possible to accurately depict someone who has never wanted to be categorized? 

I think it’s a challenge. Dylan was a little more open, though still dealing with the personas, in the early years. It’s in some ways easier to capture the Dylan of ’61, ’62, ’63, even though we don’t have much documentation of him. He was clearly concerned to not reveal too much from an early stage, but that of course intensified as he as he said himself, “I’m only Bob Dylan when I have to be.” That’s why I liked Todd Haynes’ movie [“I’m Not There,” which came out in 2007]. I thought Haynes’ way of dealing with the personae by having different characters of different ages and races and even gender playing Dylan was a brilliant move. Obviously, Mangold went at it more directly. That’s a greater challenge, in a way. 

What are your expectations for the film?

I don’t really care that much about the lived everyday life of Dylan as, partly from being a classicist, my poets have been dead for 2,000 years, and most of the biographical information is invention about them. Invention, from a century or more later, after they’d been classics, after they were being taught in the schools. Now, with Mangold, he sat down and I guess had two or three long conversations with Dylan and, from what I’ve read, Dylan told Mangold a few things that are not known from those years. So, will those be in the movie? And if so, will they reflect reality and truth, or will they reflect what Dylan was creating in 2023 or 2024, whenever he spoke to Mangold? Even the new biographical detail that we may get in the movie will not necessarily be reliable because it may well be a creative act by Bob Dylan.

Even if I personally end up being slightly disappointed, that won’t mean that the movie has failed. I don’t think it’s made for people like me. It’s made to depict a lifetime, or just a slice of a lifetime of the genius of our age, in terms of use of the English language in song.

After 20 years, why continue teaching a course on Dylan?

It’s partly the lyrics. He’s a poet; the lyrics are enduring. They’re not tied to a chronological moment or a political or cultural moment, they’re about issues that are enduring, that repeat over time, over history. Is that partly me, because I have followed Dylan so closely, whereas I haven’t necessarily followed or replayed Herman’s Hermits, Gerry & The Pacemakers, or other singers and groups I loved when I was young? Maybe it’s partly that, but I think it’s also Dylan. The classic status is one that establishes itself retrospectively. Dylan’s unusual in that the career continues in new and newly creative ways. There may even be another album — praise God if so! The story is still going on. And even when the story’s over, there will be performances and versions that we haven’t heard. 

The night sky is now a little clearer.

With the ultimate goal of creating a comprehensive map of the universe, the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time project passed a major milestone in October when its testing camera at the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory captured its first images of the night sky.

“With on-sky images obtained with our engineering camera, Rubin Observatory demonstrated that the Simonyi Survey Telescope and Rubin software frameworks are operational,” said University of Washington Professor Željko Ivezić, the observatory’s construction director.

As the team makes regular updates, its members are “excited about our next milestone: integrating our main camera, the largest astronomical camera ever constructed, with the telescope,” Ivezić said.

That main imager is the much larger LSST Camera, which will be capable of obtaining images 21 times bigger than the test camera’s. Work is now ongoing to prepare this camera for installation on the Chile-based telescope with the aim of having it up and running by the end of January. A commissioning period of approximately six months will follow, with the first public release of astronomical images expected in mid-2025.

The team plans to “make all the data immediately available to the entire community of scientists, [with] education outreach for K through 12th grade, and participating countries and institutions.”

Christopher Stubbs

The LSST camera’s size and resolution are needed for “cosmic cinematography,” said Harvard Professor of Physics and of Astronomy Christopher Stubbs, who is currently working with the telescope’s team in Chile and was Rubin’s inaugural project scientist.

Explaining the project, which was conceived roughly 30 years ago, he said: “Astronomers had built large-aperture telescopes, which collect a lot of light to look at things that are faint. Astronomers had built wide-field telescopes that can look at a lot of things at the same time. The idea here was to put those two things together and make a wide-field, large aperture telescope that can look at lots of faint things all at once.”

By scanning the sky every few nights for 10 years with such a powerful telescope and camera, the observatory will garner “a time-lapse image of the sky every single night and look for everything that changes or moves,” Stubbs said.

The project, which is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, breaks ground on two fronts. The first, said Stubbs, is philosophical, as the team plans to “make all the data immediately available to the entire community of scientists, [with] education outreach for K through 12th grade, and participating countries and institutions.”

“The idea of completely wide-open data set is a new way of doing business,” he said.

The project is revolutionary in another way as well, said Stubbs, author of “Going Big: A Scientist’s Guide to Large Projects and Collaborations.” Previously, “people would point the telescope at their favorite object,” a particular galaxy or star. The wide field of the new telescope and its camera makes such a tight focus unnecessary. “The same stream of images will serve a wide span of scientific appetites, ranging from finding potentially hazardous killer asteroids in the solar system to mapping out the structure of our Milky Way to finding exploding stars halfway across the universe” he said.

The breadth and duration of this 10-year project may help unlock other secrets, such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter, Stubbs said, is the name we give to “90 percent of the mass of the Milky Way.”

“We infer its existence from its gravitational effect on things,” said Stubbs. So far, however, scientists have been unable to exactly define dark matter. Dark energy is a similar catch-all term for a force not yet identified, but which is making the universe expand “faster and faster and faster,” he said.

“With this instrument and system, which can do a super-precise job on calibration, we’re optimistic about our ability to look at dark matter and dark energy with unprecedented resolution.”

Ideally, the project will shed light on these mysteries and more. “This is the first instrument that we’ve really engineered from scratch to maximize our ability to study open questions in fundamental physics with astrophysical tools,” Stubbs said.

“The initial plan is to collect data for a 10-year period and process that through computer centers in California and in France, and then disseminate those results as broadly as we possibly can and empower both the formal astronomical community and informal education to make the most of this data set.”

Starting a new job can be intimidating and stressful — what are the unwritten rules, whom can I ask for help? Similarly, the first day of school can be both exciting and a little daunting — will I do well, where will I sit at lunch? Combine the two and you have a sense of what newly elected members of Congress are experiencing right now.

Every two years since 1972, the Institute of Politics has attempted to ease that transition by inviting first-year lawmakers to Harvard Kennedy School for an intensive three-day briefing about what they can expect once they’re sworn into office.

This year’s program, held Dec. 8-10, offered 37 new members from both parties an opportunity to talk to current and former lawmakers and hear from Harvard faculty on key domestic and international policy topics such as economics, national security, and artificial intelligence. The event included an address by Kennedy School Dean Jeremy Weinstein, who also took questions.

The institute’s director, Setti Warren, said that fostering bipartisanship is one of the conference’s main objectives.

“Bringing people from across the aisle together … is extremely important to us, giving them an opportunity to forge relationships in a place that’s not Washington, D.C.,” he said.

Veteran lawmakers such as Republican Dan Crenshaw of Texas and Democrat Cheri Bustos of Illinois (who held office from 2013 to 2023) provided new members guidance on media coverage, effective messaging, and how to manage relationships with their new “classmates.”

“One of the things that was particularly important … was the message that that we heard time and time again from current and former members about the importance of kindness and collegiality toward our colleagues on the other side of the aisle,” said Representative-elect Sarah McBride, a Delaware Democrat.

The first openly transgender woman elected to Congress, McBride was the focus of national news coverage when Speaker Mike Johnson changed House rules at the urging of some Republican lawmakers to restrict restrooms to biological sex.

“Just as Americans every single day go into workplaces with people with different backgrounds and different perspectives but find a way to work together with kindness and collaboration,” said McBride, “we too should summon that basic common sense and basic common decency to work with our colleagues, regardless of our party affiliation or ideology in ways that reflect the kind of diversity of thought and diversity of experience that we see in workplaces across the country.”

Representative-elect Michael Baumgartner, M.P.A./I.D. ’02, a Republican in Washington state’s 5th district, said that while he’s “really proud” to be an HKS graduate, he was hesitant to publicize that he was attending because of what he called the School’s “unwelcoming reputation” on the right when it comes to conservative viewpoints.

“And so, I was really pleased to hear the dean recommit to viewpoint diversity and intellectual diversity and to making sure that conservative Republicans feel like they have a place at the Kennedy School, too,” he said.

While looking forward to Republican control of Congress and the White House, Baumgartner noted the party’s razor-thin margin in the House and also the temporary nature of political victories.

“So, even though we’re going to be in charge this session, it may not always be that way,” he said. “And I hope some of the contacts and relationships that I made at the Harvard orientation will be helpful in the event that we’re not in the majority.”

Representative-elect Janelle Bynum, a Democrat who flipped a Republican-held seat in Oregon’s 5th district to become the state’s first Black member of Congress, said that there were two panels she found “very helpful.”

“The first was the one on AI. That just spun up a lot of different thoughts like moral authority and who gets to participate in that research or in that ecosystem; the financial impact of what’s being developed in AI.

“I’m always thinking, ‘How can we use a technology that may not be being deployed to our benefit right now, but how can we shift that or how can we [get it to] do more good than it is doing?” said Bynum, who also credited a talk about polls and Gen Z voters with John Della Volpe, the IOP’s director of polling.

Asked about her hopes for the new Congress, Bynum said, “The key word that has been emerging for me is governance. I hope Democrats and Republicans take seriously the need to govern” rather than squabbling or attention-seeking.

“Like, do the work.”

Jewish Studies faculty from eight North American universities came to Harvard this month to discuss rising antisemitism on their campuses.

The half-day conference, convened Dec. 10 by Derek J. Penslar, the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and director of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies, kicked off with a panel discussing campus challenges during the 14 months since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre. Professors whose schools experienced high-profile protests in the spring touched on everything from media coverage to hidden gender dynamics within student activism. On the topic of antisemitism, the scholars said that the worst animus has been directed at Israeli students, staff, and faculty, while members of the broader Jewish community have endured targeted pressure to denounce Israel.

“What we’ve seen over many years is growing anti-Zionist sentiment on many college campuses, which often becomes a kind of anti-Israelism,” said Dov Waxman, professor of Israel studies and director of the Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. “In other words, it’s not just a principled demand for equal rights for Palestinians. It’s not just an opposition to Israel as a Jewish state … but an aversion to anything to do with Israel or anybody associated with Israel.”

Maurice Samuels, a French professor at Yale and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism since 2011, emphasized an urgent need for Jewish studies curricula amid the emergence of a “new antisemitism.”

Classic forms of antisemitism, he said, excluded Jews for their supposed racial difference. “By contrast, the new antisemitism would be more likely to accuse Jews themselves of being racist for supporting what they see as a Jewish ethnostate in Israel,” said Samuels, who has pushed to include antisemitism in campus conversations on race.

Related to these issues, he added, is the place of anti-Zionism in competing definitions of antisemitism. Some organizations, like the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, equate all forms of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, while other groups allow for various shades of distinction. The definitions converge around anti-Zionist expression that relies on the racist tropes of classic antisemitism, Samuels said.

“We’ve all seen examples of this over the past year, in which hoary conspiracy theories about Jews controlling finance and the media are trotted out to protest against Israel along with signs and symbols from the Nazi era,” he said. “Are all of these kinds of protests antisemitic? Are some of them? How are student protesters supposed to know that they’re recycling tropes of classical antisemitism if they’ve never studied those tropes? We need to provide that education.”

Picking up on the themes of anti-Zionism and anti-Israel bias was the University of Toronto’s Anna Shternshis, who directs the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. Shternshis, whose campus has seen increased calls to halt collaborations with Israeli researchers and institutions,  has heard from Israeli graduate students who were dropped by their advisers and from others who felt pressured to condemn their own family and friends living in Israel.

“It doesn’t matter what political views they had,” Shternshis said. “People with Israeli names, Israeli accents — they were immediately put on the stand.”

On the positive side, the school’s Jewish community has united like never before, she said, including through collaboration on their own definition of antisemitism. Shternshis excerpted one of the statement’s key passages: “Using ‘Zionist’ or ‘Zionism’ as a proxy for ‘Jewish’ or ‘Judaism’ does not excuse discriminatory or harassing actions.”

The conference featured a second session on teaching Jewish studies in a time of crisis, with faculty from Fordham, Princeton, Brandeis, and the University of California, Berkeley, stressing the need to bolster civil discourse skills for the classroom and beyond. Penslar, who also co-chairs Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias, ended both sessions by fielding audience inquiries on everything from the role of advocacy and “safe spaces” to why some U.S. universities have struggled far less with antisemitism.

Rebecca Kobrin, an associate professor of American Jewish history and co-director of Columbia University’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, picked up on the last topic by praising Dartmouth College, highlighting its popular course on the Arab-Israeli conflict, co-taught by two scholars with complementary expertise in Jewish and Middle East Studies.

“What happens in the classroom is how you change the narrative,” Kobrin said. “It is really helpful to have a class where two professors show that there are two opposing views — and the students have to learn to talk to each other about it, just like the professors.”

In 2021, the city of Evanston, Illinois, established a program to make reparations to Black residents for historic housing discrimination. The first phase of the project gave 16 residents $25,000 each for home repairs or property costs.

The Evanston program was one topic explored at the recent Center for Race, Inequality, and Social Equity Studies symposium “Are Reparations the Answer?” in which experts across disciplines explored the case for restitution to Black Americans legally, economically, and ethically.

Daniel Fryer, an assistant professor of law and philosophy at the University of Michigan and a speaker at the forum, praised the Evanston example because it targeted a specific injustice that the city was trying to repair. Fryer argued that practitioners must consider the different avenues to attain justice.

“An essential question is, what are we trying to repair?” said Fryer, who also serves as a board member for the Board of Commissioners’ Advisory Council on Reparations in Washtenaw County in Michigan. “In order to repair something, we need to know what’s broken, and it also helps to know why it’s broken.”

Christopher Lewis, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School, also called for a need to clarify the distinctions between different types of reparations — under either compensatory justice or utilitarian justice, a moral principle that considers the greater good for the greatest number of people.

Lewis, along with Assistant Professor of Sociology and of Social Studies Adaner Usmani, has conducted research on what is owed to the estates of formerly enslaved people for their forced, unpaid labor. Using historic data on government bond yields, they arrived at a “conservative” estimate of the amount due for unpaid slave labor. The number reached into the quadrillions.

“It’s more wealth than exists in the entire world. That can tell you something about the scope and size of the injustice,” he said. These results prompted Lewis to consider other ways to look at the issue of reparations, including those shared by Duke University’s William Darity Jr., and museum curator Kirsten Mullen, who gave the keynote address earlier in the conference.

Darity and Mullen, founder of Artefactual, co-authored “From Here to Equality,” which focused on how to close the racial wealth gap, suggesting an intraracial redistribution of $16 trillion, with Black American families receiving at least a million dollars each.

Raj Chetty analyzed empirical patterns in Black-white economic disparities in a panel. The William A. Ackman Professor of Economics and director of Opportunity Insights discussed his research on how income evolves across generations for Black children versus white children.

Black children who come from high-income families tend to trend downward in terms of economic mobility as adults, compared to their white counterparts, who tend to remain at the top, he said. “In my view, this is really fundamental to understanding how to close the persistence of racial disparities in the U.S.,” he said.

The economist acknowledged that when conducting this research he had expected racial disparities for communities of color would narrow if individuals had sufficient income. The data proved him wrong, he said. “Understanding what’s happening there strikes me as really crucial to make progress, and addressing those disparities is really fundamental,” Chetty said.

As you walk past the columns of the Harvard Art Museums and step into the bright light of Calderwood Courtyard, you see a group of 16 people dressed in white. They are arranged in various positions, some standing, some sitting, some using wheelchairs or crutches. They all are wearing garments made of zip ties — plastic spikes protruding at different angles. The forms drape around each performer’s arms, shoulders, legs. The only sounds to break the silence are the low murmurs from visitors who wend between the performers, watching intently, photographing, taking video. Moment by moment the performer’s movements change, gentle shifts in their body, each gesture intuitively executed slowly and thoughtfully.

Founded in 2015, the durational performances of “On Display Harvard” create living sculpture parks that the audience is invited to wander through, viewing each performer up close.

“By exposing the general public to our widely diverse sculpture courts, we are expanding what inclusion looks like,” states the “On Display” website.

The sculptural garments worn during this year’s “On Display Harvard”  were created by Harvard Graduate School of Design ’24 alumni Pin Sangkaeo and Benson Joseph, collectively known as (snobs._). Collaborators since they met at the School of Architecture at Syracuse University, for the past three years (snobs._) has created one-of-a-kind wearables for “On Display Harvard.” On its statement, (snobs._) explained that to build the garments for each performer “you have to create something that is universal, but at the same time has the capability to be adaptable. Zip ties are the way that we did the wearables. We pre-model a series of implied poses and where they can be put, and then we lay the pictures out on the wall, and we let [the performers] pick and … we modify it to fit the person better. It’s like sketching at full scale.”

Using more than 8,000 zip ties and taking more than a year and a half to complete, the wearables are part of an ongoing, ever-evolving project for (snobs._). Collaborating with the performers of “On Display” allows the creative team to see and understand their work more profoundly. After the event the performers and designers sat together in the greenroom sharing their performance experiences.

“The feedback is the most important part. There’s a validation that comes in when other people offer all the insights of things that maybe you weren’t thinking about … it’s not possible to do that kind of work without feedback,” noted (snobs._).

A discovery inspired by the humble slug may soon be the answer to managing painful oral lesions associated with chronic inflammatory conditions and sealing surgical wounds in the mouth.  

Scientists at Harvard had been searching for a biomaterial that would hold up in wet conditions — that’s when they turned to Mother Nature for inspiration. When slugs feel threatened, they secrete a sticky mucus that protects them from predators. This mucus has strong mechanical properties allowing it to stick to wet surfaces and stretch about 10 to 15 times its original length.  

Inspired by these properties, researchers in the Mooney Lab of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, developed a strong adhesive patch composed of 90 percent water from a natural polymer derived from algae, and present in dental impression materials. The adhesive patch will work on wet surfaces and is not toxic to humans. After finding it successfully stuck to animal tissues, acting as a surgical wound sealing biomaterial in lab testing, their findings were published in Science in 2017. 

Now, its applications for oral health and treatment of painful oral lesions may be coming soon to a dental office near you. David Tiansui Wu, D.M.Sc. ’23, instructor of oral medicine, infection, and immunity, has been involved in the development of an adhesive hydrogel patch that can seal wounds and act as an intraoral Band-Aid capable of strong adhesion in wet environments and on dynamically moving surfaces. His work as a postdoctoral research fellow and periodontology resident at Harvard School of Dental Medicine first exposed him to the slug-inspired biomaterial, and connections he made in the Mooney Lab fueled his interest in developing a product for use in dental medicine. 

“When I started at Harvard University, I had the privilege of meeting Professor David Mooney, who is a world-renowned expert in tissue engineering and biomaterials and decided to start my doctoral thesis at the lab,” Wu said. “At that time, Benjamin Freedman, a postdoctoral fellow at the lab, was working on the preclinical translation of the tough adhesive hydrogel technology for diverse medical and health care applications, such as hemostasis in general surgery, tendon repair in orthopedic surgery, and wound sealing in dermatology. As a periodontist in training, the possibility of bringing this revolutionary technology from benchtop to patient care appeared to be a great opportunity to solve unmet needs in our field,” Wu said. 

“This technology can be applied to seal surgical sites such as gingival graft harvest sites, extraction sockets, bone augmentation surgical sites, and much more.” 

David Tiansui Wu

Wu collaborated with Freedman to advance the preclinical testing and development of the technology and expand its functionality with drug-release capabilities that would allow the hydrogel to deliver a range of medications relevant for dental, oral, and craniofacial applications. 

In parallel, Wu and Freedman began working with other faculty collaborators at the Massachusetts General Hospital departments of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery and of Dermatology respectively, including Fernando Guastaldi and Yakir Levin, to conduct preclinical validation of the adhesive technology in oral applications. 

Together, they developed what they call “Dental Tough Adhesive (DenTAl).” Their findings were published in a landmark paper in the Journal of Dental Research, paving the way for the technology’s clinical translation to one day impact patient care. 

Chronic inflammatory conditions, such as oral lichen planus and recurrent canker sores, “negatively affect patients’ quality of life,” said Wu. “Current treatment approaches are mainly palliative and often ineffective due to inadequate contact time of the therapeutic agent with the lesions. 

“This novel technology has the potential to impact several areas in dentistry, including applications in oral wound repair and regeneration, and drug delivery. In periodontics and oral surgery, this technology can be applied to seal surgical sites such as gingival graft harvest sites, extraction sockets, bone augmentation surgical sites, and much more. Our vision is to one day develop sutureless wound repair,” he added. 

This innovative technology is now being translated into the clinical arena through a license for continued development beyond the laboratory. The multidisciplinary team is taking the next steps to bring the technology into the dental office by obtaining clearance from regulatory authorities such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. 

“My goal as a clinician, scientist, and innovator is basically to bridge the gap between benchtop research and the clinical arena,” Wu said. “We are excited to translate this technology to impact millions of patients and their dentists in improving their oral health.” 

A new analysis of nearly 200,000 adults shows that those with a clean result on their first colonoscopy may not need another for longer — perhaps significantly longer — than the current recommendation of 10 years.

The result is a bit of good news about a cancer whose increasing rates in younger patients has worried experts, including the Harvard Chan School’s Mingyang Song, for several years. Colorectal cancer is the nation’s second-deadliest after lung cancer, killing an estimated 52,550 in 2023. While rates among older patients have been declining, younger patients — those 40 to 49 — have seen cases rise 15 percent between 2000 and 2026. Experts aren’t sure of the cause, but in 2021, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force lowered the recommended age of first screening to 45 from 50. They also recommend that those with average risk get screened 10 years afterward.

Song, an associate professor of clinical epidemiology and nutrition at the Chan School, said that the increase in screenings has also increased appointment wait times.

“Especially with the lowered age, the clinic is overwhelmed,” said Song, also an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. “It was overwhelmed before, now it’s even worse.”

In the work, published last month in JAMA Oncology, Song and colleagues examined colorectal cancer screening results and colorectal cancer incidence among 195,453 participants in three long-running studies: the Nurses’ Health Study, Nurses’ Health Study II, and the Health Professionals Followup Study. They compared incidence between two groups: those who received negative results in their initial colorectal cancer screening — meaning no polyps or cancer — and those who had not yet been screened.

They found that the risk of developing colorectal cancer was significantly lower among those who had received a negative cancer screening than those who had not yet been screened. The research team, led by first author Markus Knudsen, a postdoctoral fellow in Song’s lab, then divided the negative screening result group according to lifestyle risk factors for colorectal cancer. The work was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health.

The results showed that, among individuals with a negative screening result, it took 16 years for those with an intermediate-risk profile to have the same colorectal cancer incidence of the high-risk group at 10 years, and those with a low-risk profile — including maintaining a healthy diet and exercise — didn’t reach the 10-year cancer incidence of the high-risk group until 25 years from their negative screening.

The results, Song said, show that cancer screening should be individualized and discussed between patient and physician. While it is likely that additional evidence will be needed before national screening guidelines are changed, those with a negative screening result may be able to safely extend the screening interval beyond the recommended 10 years and, for those also living a low-risk lifestyle, perhaps as long as 20 years.

What this more tailored approach would do, Song said, is spare those who might get little benefit from a colonoscopy while focusing increasingly scarce resources where they’re most needed: on people who’ve never been screened — only about 70 percent of eligible U.S. adults have been screened — on disadvantaged groups with historically lower screen rates, and on those whose lifestyle or family history puts them at increased risk.  

“What we have seen generally is that the more advantaged groups of individuals are more likely to receive colonoscopy, whereas those who are disadvantaged and who actually have a higher risk of developing colon cancer are less likely to receive colonoscopy,” Song said. “We’ve tried to correct this mismatch and improve colonoscopy delivery at the population scale.”

Three Harvard students will take their passions for journalism, health equity, and education equity to the United Kingdom next year as members of the 2025 Marshall Class. Ryan Doan-Nguyen, John Lin, and Laila Nasher are among 36 students nationwide to receive 2025 Marshall Scholarships, which support two years of study at a U.K. college or university.

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Ryan Doan-Nguyen

Joint concentration in History & Literature and Government, with a secondary in Ethnicity, Migration, Rights

Doan-Nguyen ’25, of Westborough, Massachusetts, strives to bridge research, writing, and advocacy in journalism and history. Having grown up listening to his family’s stories about fleeing the Vietnam War as refugees, he is passionate about amplifying marginalized voices in his work. His senior thesis includes oral history interviews with 40 Vietnamese refugees impacted by imperialism.

“There’s so much knowledge and innovation and ways of thought and approaching the world that are excluded because of the way in which we value certain voices more than others,” Doan-Nguyen said. “I’m trying to help break that down in the work that I do.”

The night the Mather House resident learned that he had been named a Marshall Scholar, he ran straight to his roommate to share the good news. Then he called his family and his closest mentors.

“It’s the chance of a lifetime, and I did not expect to receive it in the slightest,” Doan-Nguyen said. “I just remember receiving the call and being so overwhelmed with gratitude.”

Doan-Nguyen is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellow, an editor for The Harvard Crimson, and co-founder of a Harvard chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association. He served previously on the JFK Jr. Forum Committee at Harvard Kennedy School and on the board of the Harvard Vietnamese Association.

Doan-Nguyen plans to attend the University of Oxford, where he will study global and imperial history the first year and U.S. history the second year.

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John Lin

Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology; secondary in Global Health and Health Policy

Lin ’25, of Boston, wants to know what different rare diseases have in common, and what factors link them together.

As a member of the Greka Lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Lin studies how cells harness cargo receptors to recognize, degrade, or trap misfolded proteins. He has investigated how cargo receptors regulate disease severity in a rare kidney illness and is applying his findings to other rare diseases.

“We’re finding that if you target these cargo receptors, you can clear misfolded protein in each of these diseases, suggesting that these different misfolded proteins are trapped through this common mechanism,” Lin said. “Just by targeting these common pathways, you can resolve many different rare diseases.”

Lin is also interested in using science journalism to make information more accessible to the general public. The Currier House resident said he became passionate about health equity after seeing his parents, working-class immigrants from China, face linguistic and economic barriers in accessing care.

“Even though I was really interested in solving these diseases and at the most direct level through research, I realized through observing my family’s experiences that it’s not just discovering the science that’s important but also getting the science to the people who are impacted by it every day,” Lin said.

Lin was swimming in the Malkin Athletic Center pool when the call came that he had been named a 2025 Marshall scholar.

“I was really surprised,” said Lin, who immediately phoned his mom to share the news. “I’m very, very grateful for the opportunity.”

Lin is co-president of the Harvard Global Health Institute’s Student Advisory Committee and an associate magazine editor for The Crimson. He also works for the Harvard Ed Portal mentoring youth from Allston-Brighton.

Lin plans to spend his first year as a Marshall Scholar studying biological sciences at the Wellcome Sanger Institute for genomics research at the University of Cambridge, and his second studying medical anthropology at the University of Oxford.

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Laila Nasher 

History and Anthropology; secondary in Ethnicity, Migration, Rights 

Nasher ’25 wants education to be a protected American right for all students. A first-generation college student, Nasher said that coming to Harvard after attending public school in her low-income neighborhood in Detroit fueled her desire to make change. 

“For me it was the question of, why not us?” said Nasher. “Why did I and why did the people in my community never have these types of educational opportunities that are and should be the norm?” 

A joint concentrator in History and Anthropology, with a secondary in Ethnicity, Migration, Rights, Nasher found her passion for history in her first year in a course on the modern Middle East that “completely opened” her mind to a subject matter that felt “so much bigger” than herself. A Truman Scholar and a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, Nasher focuses in her research on the history of feminism in South Yemen before and after independence from the British, and after unification with North Yemen. 

Nasher was in her Mather House dorm room when she got the call that she had received a Marshall, and immediately celebrated the news with her roommate. 

“I was just in shock and very, very grateful,” Nasher said.

On campus, Nasher founded the First-Generation Low-Income Task Group, served on the board of Primus, and was co-director of diversity and outreach for the Institute of Politics. Off-campus, she interned with Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and the Tawakkol Karman Foundation in Istanbul, and organized with the Michigan Education Justice Coalition.  

She’ll spend her first year as a Marshall Scholar studying education at the University of Oxford, where she plans to do a comparative study on how primary and K-12 education systems in the U.K. and the U.S. shape the experiences of people in low-income, urban Yemeni communities.

Since the opioid epidemic was declared a public health crisis in 2017, it has claimed the lives of nearly half a million Americans. High-profile cases like that against Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family put the focus on prescription drugs, but the reality is far more complicated, says Elizabeth Chiarello, author of “Policing Patients: Treatment and Surveillance on the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis” and a former fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Over the course of 10 years, she spoke to healthcare workers who face difficult choices between treating and punishing patients, and the problems that have arisen from policing drugs at the pharmacy counter. The Gazette spoke to Chiarello about what she learned. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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At the beginning of your book, you say the problem is pain, not drugs. Why should pain be centered in conversations about the opioid epidemic?

When we talk about the opioid crisis, we usually categorize two groups of people: those with substance use disorders and those in chronic pain. We act as if these are two different groups of people who have little in common, with the implication that people with pain have a legitimate claim on opioids and the people with substance use disorders do not. Pain is the throughline that connects these two groups. Whether we’re talking about pain from mental health disorders or the pain of trauma, substance use disorders are often a mechanism of self-medication or avoiding pain. People with substance use disorders are often taking opioids not to chase a high, but because they’re trying to avoid the pain of withdrawal.

It’s worth mentioning that when we think about pain, the boundaries we’re willing to set around other people’s bodies are very different than the boundaries we’re willing to set around our own. When we are in pain, we are very eager to stop it, and we’d want any resources available to help us.

During your research, you were surprised to learn pharmacists are on the front lines of this crisis.

Culturally, pharmacists don’t loom particularly large in our collective imagination; they’re often behind the scenes filling prescriptions and we don’t always know their names (whereas we tend to know a lot about our doctors and are very selective about who we choose). People often believe that pharmacists just dispense whatever it is that the doctor orders. But in fact, they are professionals who work under their own licenses; they have extensive discretion at the pharmacy counter. Pharmacists act as medical, legal, fiscal, and moral gatekeepers; they balance those different gatekeeping roles in different organizational settings, but ultimately decide who receives medications.

Pharmacists use something called prescription drug monitoring programs, or PDMPs. What are they and what role do they play?

PDMPs are two-tiered “big data” surveillance systems. When a patient goes to the pharmacy with a prescription for an opioid, the pharmacist dispenses the medication and then sends that information to the organization that runs the PDMP. It varies from state to state but could include the Board of Pharmacy, the Board of Health, the Department of Justice, or Department of Consumer Affairs. They then partner with a private company that compiles that information and feeds it back to healthcare providers who can use it to make decisions about patient care.

However, they also feed that information to law enforcement, who can use it to make decisions about targeting healthcare professionals and access individual patient data. You might wonder, isn’t this all covered under HIPAA? And the truth is it’s not. PDMPs are not afforded the same privacy protections as other healthcare data. We see both physicians and pharmacists reorienting towards policing, away from care, and toward using this surveillance system. As a result, patients are routed out of healthcare and left incredibly vulnerable.

One aspect of the opioid crisis that has received a lot of media attention is the role of organizations like Purdue Pharma. In what ways has their role — while not to be minimized — become an oversimplification of what’s happening?

The Purdue story has been everywhere; it’s been in bestsellers, movies, TV shows, and in lawsuits. The problem is not that the story is wrong, but that it’s incomplete. It places a lot of blame on the shoulders of a single medication and a single company. What we lose is the last 100 years of drug policy, where we’ve seen the drug policy pendulum swing back and forth between medicalization and criminalization.

For example, at the turn of the 20th century, there were a lot of middle-class, rural housewives who were hooked on opium and it wasn’t considered a social problem. But when Asian men came over to build the railroads, we saw the criminalization of opium. Then in 1914 we passed the first drug law, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, that made it illegal to give people medication just for the purposes of preventing withdrawal. Supreme Court cases followed, and we saw the arrests of thousands of physicians and pharmacists that led to a chilling effect around opioids for around 50 years. In the 1980s we had the hospice movement in England that argued people shouldn’t have to die in pain. On the heels of that movement followed the pain-management movement in the United States that said if people shouldn’t have to die in pain, they shouldn’t have to live in pain either. They pushed for increased access to opioids and drew attention to chronic pain patients who had been undertreated for decades.

If you don’t know that story, it seems as if OxyContin came out of nowhere and did an extraordinary amount of harm. But a lot of the increase in prescribing that we saw at the end of the 1990s was really a corrective to underprescribing that had been happening for decades before that.

You go as far as saying that we should reframe the current epidemic as an overdose crisis, rather than one of opioids.

With drug policy, we have a tendency to put our blinders on and focus very narrowly on a single drug or class of drugs. Crack was the problem in the 1980s and ’90s, then meth was the problem in the early 2000s, then prescription opioids, then heroin, and then fentanyl, and now xylazine [also know by street name “tranq.”] But when we treat these as individual, isolated crises, we miss the throughline and the larger story. The problem is not opioids. The problem is overdose. I think we need to talk about it as both an overdose crisis and a pain crisis, because millions of people are suffering in chronic pain and cannot get help.

What stories stuck with you the most during the course of your research?

My dad is a doctor. Hearing what doctors have to say and the ways they feel trapped is hard. And for some doctors, the kind of callousness that they bring to their patients was incredibly disheartening. You know, the doctors who are like, “I tell the patient, I’m going to taper them down, and I don’t care how they feel about it.” Or they stop seeing patients if their urine tests come back positive.

But then there are other physicians like Megan. She worked in a federally qualified health center, which ironically, gave her a little bit more leeway than those who work in private clinics. She had a lot of patients with substance use disorders, so she went out and got the credentials she needed to treat those patients. She had a lot of patients in pain, so she went out and got those credentials. She pushed back on other doctors who were using punitive mechanisms. She was the quintessential patient advocate, and doctors like that really give me hope.

There was a police officer in California who lost his brother to overdose and that drove a lot of the work that he did. He experienced a tragedy, and then his mission became trying to prevent that from happening to other people.

What next steps do you recommend to change our approach to this issue?

We need a three-pronged approach to addressing the overdose crisis, one that’s grounded in treatment, harm reduction, and prevention. When people think about treatment, they often think about either a 28-day inpatient treatment facility or self-help programs like Narcotics Anonymous. But in head-to-head comparisons, we know medications for opioid use disorder are the most effective treatments. We should also expand the types of pain treatment that are available; manipulative therapies like massage and Rolfing therapy can really help.

Then harm reduction. That includes things like Narcan, syringe service programs that provide sterile syringes to people who inject drugs, hotlines like SafeSpot and Never Use Alone, and overdose-prevention sites.

And finally, prevention. I mean capital “P” prevention. We need to uplift our communities and reinforce our social safety net. People have a hard time finding housing, jobs, access to high-quality healthcare. Addressing these issues is an upstream way of dealing with drug crises. Otherwise, we end up with just one crisis after the next.

Go Deeper

Listen to Liz Chiarello’s interview on the BornCurious podcast about the US pain and overdose crises.

Planning a holiday meal and need inspiration? The Schlesinger Library at Harvard Radcliffe Institute has you covered. It holds the papers of the late celebrity chef Julia Child, author of the iconic cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” and personality behind the long-running PBS television series “The French Chef.” She famously hosted other cooking shows from the kitchen of her Cambridge home. Radcliffe curators helped pull together the following recipes for festive desserts drawn from their vast collection, which includes correspondence, documents, books, photos, audio, and videotapes.

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“There are the pleasures of giving at Christmastime, and the most welcome pleasure of receiving guests bearing edible gifts — something good to eat!”

Julia Child, Parade Magazine, Dec. 13, 1982

Smoking has declined in the U.S., but 49.2 millions Americans, about 20 percent, still use tobacco products. And the tobacco wars rage on, with rates rising globally even as they’re falling in many developed countries. Tobacco companies have created new active compounds to replace cooling menthol and mimic addicting nicotine in an end run around state laws seeking to reduce the harm tobacco products do. Those steps forced California in September to pass legislation closing loopholes in laws banning menthol and regulating nicotine. The Gazette spoke with Vaughan Rees, director of the Center for Global Tobacco Control at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, about the increasing sophistication of the tobacco battlefield. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Tobacco companies have developed new formulations of nicotine and menthol, sparking an argument as to whether the new compounds can be regulated by current laws. How big a loophole is this?

It could be an enormous loophole, and tobacco manufacturers have exploited it in some states. For example, in Massachusetts, when a ban on the use of methylation went into effect, tobacco manufacturers came up with an analog product that functions like menthol, that imparts a cooling sensation, and that was not technically banned under the Massachusetts law. So tobacco manufacturers continued to sell products that looked, tasted, and functioned almost exactly like mentholated cigarettes.

That subverted the intention of the law, which was to prevent consumers from being misled about the health risks of smoking and to prevent young people from starting smoking, in part because of menthol’s cooling sensation.

How big a problem is the substitution of ingredients to circumvent restrictions? Is this a blip and once lawmakers understand the strategy, they can get ahead of it? Or is this potentially opening a new front in the tobacco wars?

Relatively few jurisdictions in the United States have put product standards like this in place. Massachusetts and California are leaders in that area with bans on methylation, and a ban on the use of synthetic nicotine compounds is about to go into effect in California. So tobacco manufacturers haven’t really had to do much, in a wider way, in terms of subverting those laws.

If a federal ban did go into effect, tobacco manufacturers would very likely seek to introduce menthol or nicotine analogs. Better-crafted regulations should eliminate the opportunity for tobacco manufacturers to substitute analog chemicals for menthol or nicotine. But it’s been a long-term theme of tobacco manufacturers to subvert the intention of laws put in place to protect the health of the public.

Another example was the adoption of clean indoor air laws. There was a lot of pushback from tobacco manufacturers or allies of tobacco manufacturers. The owners of hospitality venues argued that they could create smoking sections in pubs or restaurants, for example, that would  meet the needs of all of their customers. But the science doesn’t support that. When people are smoking in one part of a room or building, the smoke infiltrates other areas, exposing nonsmokers and workers to secondhand smoke.

In the end, public health and science prevailed, but it took some effort to ensure that public venues were 100 percent smoke-free. Tobacco manufacturers have prevailed in other parts of the world, though. In other countries, laws have been put in place that allowed smoking if portions of the building are open-air.

1% Or less of Massachusetts high school students smoke cigarettes

Are there other significant developments on the tobacco-control scene?

Nicotine is the constituent that causes or promotes addiction, so there’s a rationale for thinking about reducing the nicotine in tobacco products below the level at which those products can be considered addictive. That is something that the FDA has proposed as a potential strategy to reduce harm associated with tobacco products.

The idea is that tobacco manufacturers might one day be required to sell cigarettes and other tobacco products that have such low levels of nicotine that people would never become addicted to them. Those products would still produce smoke that contains carcinogens and other dangerous constituents, but consumers wouldn’t be addicted, and the product couldn’t satisfy anybody’s nicotine dependence.

How far along are plans for this new, low-nicotine cigarette?

The FDA issued a proposed federal rule in 2018. The FDA has regulatory authority for tobacco products and can issue regulations around the way products are designed, formulated, sold, and marketed.

A few years ago, the FDA issued what is called “an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking” to seek public comment and input from stakeholders — which includes public health agencies and tobacco manufacturers — to guide a proposed final rule.

We haven’t seen any further action on that from the FDA, so this is something that could be taken up by states such as California, who have the prerogative to advance those kinds of rules themselves. Regulating product standards is an important strategy, but we have seen less come to fruition in that area.

“Among the lowest-income populations in the United States, we’ve seen little decline in the rate of smoking over the past 30 years.”

Where we’re seeing a lot of impact is around the accessibility of tobacco products: Four years ago, the legal age to purchase tobacco products went from 18 to 21.

Another thing that shouldn’t be overlooked is a dramatic decrease in the use of traditional combusted cigarettes, particularly among youth. Kids who might have smoked 15 or 20 years ago now are vaping instead. That’s not a perfect outcome but presents a lower health risk for those individuals than might have been the case. So we’ve seen a dramatic change in the tobacco landscape with regard to the products used and preferred by young people.

Does that mean the tobacco companies are still making profits with e-cigarettes?

Yes and no. Not all cigarette manufacturers have found a way to pivot to the sale of e-cigarettes — at least in the United States. But the bigger companies, Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds, for example, seem to be increasingly attracted to the idea that nicotine vaping products are the way forward, at least in countries like the United States. In low- and middle-income countries, there’s relatively little interest in moving in that direction. The evidence suggests they’re selling more cigarettes in those countries than they’ve ever sold in the past.

What is the broad trend right now? My understanding is that smoking is down in the U.S.

In the United States and many developed countries, we’re seeing year-over-year declines in the prevalence of smoking, most particularly among younger populations. In Massachusetts, 1 percent or less of high school students smoke cigarettes — that doesn’t include those vaping.

But among the lowest-income populations in the United States, we’ve seen little decline in the rate of smoking over the past 30 years. People who live in federally subsidized housing, for example, smoke at perhaps four times the rate of the general public. People with substance use disorders and mental health disorders smoke at a vastly greater prevalence than the general population. People who’ve been historically oppressed — for example, people of gender and sexual minority — smoke at much greater rates than the general population.

In other parts of the world, it’s very different. We haven’t seen the same impact from tobacco control interventions. There are higher rates of smoking among men in some countries, among both men and women in others.

Optimistically, we may see improvements in many global regions in the near future, as tobacco control initiatives are put in place, as high excise taxes are implemented, as clean indoor air laws are implemented, as restrictions on marketing and advertising go into effect. These all reduce demand for tobacco. So regulations really do matter. These battles need to be fought until the public is no longer being harmed by these products.

The ruins of apartheid were still smoldering in 1995 when Jeremy Weinstein stepped off a plane in South Africa. A former political prisoner named Nelson Mandela had become president months earlier and the country’s new constitution was still being drafted.

It was a period of hope in a nation whose racist policies had made it an international pariah. But it was also a time of challenge. After a decades-long struggle against white minority rule, once-disenfranchised South Africans had to shift from protest to citizenship, from tearing down an unjust system to building up equality for all.

“There’s this extraordinary moment of change in a country that, like the United States, has race and identity as a critical feature of its makeup and also structural inequality, both in an economic sense and in a political sense,” Weinstein said. “And I thought, ‘Maybe there’s something really important for me to learn from what’s unfolding in South Africa.’”

During his nine months in the country, Weinstein lived with a local family in the township of Gugulethu, took classes at the University of the Western Cape, and nurtured a newhigh school pilot initiative in democracy and public service. The program’s aim was to foster citizenship among youth born as second-class citizens in a divided nation, but who would mature into full participants in South Africa’s new democracy.

“It’s no surprise, given the kind of environment that I was growing up in, that my eyes were open to lots of things around me that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen.”

Jeremy Weinstein

Weinstein, who started as dean of Harvard Kennedy School in July, remembers that seminal moment in one nation’s history as inseparable from his own development as a scholar and a person. In some ways, his upbringing had primed him for his time in South Africa to make a significant impact on his worldview. He had been sensitized to the power of government for both good and ill by a tragedy that destroyed his grandfather’s life. He had been exposed to lively political discussions at the dining room table, where colleagues and graduate students of his academic parents visited regularly. And he had become alert to inequality through the stark differences between his comfortable life in Palo Alto, California, and the struggle for economic security and safety he saw nearby, in East Palo Alto, a town with almost the same name, he observed, but one in which life couldn’t have been more different.

“It’s no surprise, given the kind of environment that I was growing up in, that my eyes were open to lots of things around me that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen,” he said.

‘Case’ tragedy

Weinstein grew up the son of a psychologist mother who was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a psychiatrist father who served as director of student health at Stanford University. His mother’s passion as a researcher was whether teachers’ beliefs about the ability of their students affected the students’ educational outcomes and how to create classrooms where all could thrive. His father’s passion was “The Case.”

Weinstein’s grandfather, Lou Weinstein, was once a prosperous Canadian businessman. In middle age, Lou experienced a series of panic attacks and a bout of anxiety. After consulting with a psychiatrist, was admitted to a psychiatric institution. Over four years, he was hospitalized a total of four times and emerged from his treatments diminished and broken.

“He came back from his hospitalizations a different person, lost his business, lost his identity, lost a lot of basic functioning,” Weinstein said. “My dad was a teenager at the time and became a psychiatrist to figure out what happened to his father.”

In the 1970s, news articles appeared about a CIA program called MKUltra, whose aim was to develop mind-control techniques to be used in interrogation during the Cold War. Among the participating physicians was Donald Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist who led, at various times, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association. He was also the doctor who admitted and treated Weinstein’s grandfather.

Cameron’s experiments on unwitting subjects included high doses of PCP and LSD, drug-induced sleep for months on end, and repeated electroshock treatments intended to break down existing behavior patterns. The treatments also included sensory deprivation with the playback of verbal messages to imprint new behavioral triggers for up to 24 hours per day over three months.

“It clicked for my father when he saw a New York Times story and learned what MKUltra was,” Weinstein said. “He realized that this is what, potentially, happened to his dad. It became his life’s work for more than a decade to bring to the public eye what had happened and seek justice for his father.”

“The Case,” as the Weinsteins called it, brought an array of extraordinary people into the family’s orbit, including Joseph Rauh, a noted civil rights lawyer who led Lou’s lawsuit against the CIA.

Evidence was difficult to obtain and the case dragged through the 1980s. Files were classified or had been destroyed, forcing Lou and other plaintiffs in the lawsuit to settle. The justice that might have emerged from a public trial was denied, but one ancillary result was the impact of the ordeal on Weinstein’s home. He grew up in a place where ethics, justice, and politics weren’t theoretical and remote, but rather personal, affecting the people he loved.

“This case was emblematic of what happens when a government loses sight of its obligations to those that it represents, loses sight of the dignity of individuals, loses sight of a commitment to civil rights and civil liberties,” Weinstein said. “It’s painful to think about Guantanamo Bay. It’s painful to think about the wars after 9/11 and the Abu Ghraib prison. It’s painful to think about how these patterns of gross injustice at the hands of government have ways of repeating themselves over time.”

Real-world experience

The summer after enrolling at Swarthmore College, Weinstein headed to Washington, where he worked on the founding of AmeriCorps, a national service program launched by President Bill Clinton to address unmet needs in disadvantaged communities.

While in D.C., Weinstein heard about an opportunity in the new democracy taking root in South Africa. Leaders in the African National Congress were enthusiastic about establishing pilot programs to promote national service. He jumped at the chance, with support from a Swarthmore scholarship.

After he arrived, Weinstein began teaching a course on democracy at a local high school. To enrich the student experience, he arranged public service internships with government organizations and nonprofit partners. Teaching was an energizing experience for Weinstein, but the biggest impact came from his experiences outside the classroom. Weinstein became close with a student and activist named Malala Ndlazi, who was also studying at the University of the Western Cape. Ndlazi wasn’t shy about his belief that the deal ending apartheid was a bad one. It didn’t go far enough in redistributing wealth and resources, he said.

“Almost every night it was me and Malala in the back of the house talking about this moment of extraordinary change,” Weinstein recalled. “I was living in a society that was negotiating the terms of its own constitution — not in the 1700s but in the 1990s — with everything that the democratic project had experienced over hundreds of years about who has voice, who’s included, how you design mechanisms of accountability, how you preserve the rights of individuals but also take advantage of the potential good that government can do, how you think about issues of redistribution. All of these things were being negotiated in real time every day, being contested in the streets, and talked about in the cafes.”

Weinstein threw himself into life in Gugulethu, seeking to build relationships and get to know the community. He ate dinners with his host family and joined a local basketball team. Though Jewish, he attended services with his host family at the Seventh Day Adventists church on Saturday and headed to Catholic Mass with Ndlazi on Sundays.  

In September 1995, Weinstein returned to Swarthmore for his junior year. The young person who had been attuned to injustice at home had had his eyes opened to the breadth of the problem globally and the role government might play in remedying it. He studied politics and economics and wrote an honors thesis on Kenya’s struggle for democracy. After graduating, he headed to the Harvard Kennedy School, a place he believed would nurture his dual interests in scholarship and policy.

After his first year in graduate school, Weinstein spent the summer of 1998 working at the National Security Council in Washington, energized by the prospect of peaceful post-Cold War transitions from authoritarian to democratic rule in Africa. Instead, the council’s four-person Africa team faced a summer of unrest: a border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, an invasion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by Rwanda and Uganda, embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and U.S. military strikes in Sudan.

“Africa was very much on the president’s agenda every week, but not because of progress toward democracy and economic growth,” Weinstein said. “Africa was on the agenda because we were dealing with the emergence of conflicts and instability that were associated with this moment of tremendous transition in the region.”

‘Inside Rebellion’

In the summer of 1999, Weinstein returned to Africa. In Zimbabwe, he interviewed people about the country’s military intervention in the DRC. In Zambia, he visited refugee camps on the DRC and Angolanborders.

“Many of these revolutionary movements and even governments purported to speak for citizens, purported to be for things that people wanted,” he said. “Yet tens of thousands of people were fleeing, walking 1,000 kilometers with their most valuable possessions — a sewing machine for one family — on their back. I would go house to house or tent to tent, asking people about why they left to understand what their experience had been of the conflict coming to their community: what the insurgents said about what they were doing, what violence they experienced, and why they made the decision to leave.”

That experience led to his dissertation on rebel violence against civilians. Published in 2007 as a book, “Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence,” the work explored why some revolutionary movements commit horrific acts of violence againstcivilians and others do not. It was the product of 18 months in the field, traveling alone or with a local graduate student as a research assistant. Living out of a backpack, Weinstein interviewed ordinary people and former fighters. Some of the revolutionaries — such as Uganda’s National Resistance Army — were now leaders of a recognized government. In Mozambique, they were less prominent, settling for peace in an agreement that fell short of the goals for which they’d fought.

Peru was different for a number of reasons. It was the sole location Weinstein visited outside of Africa and the only country whose revolutionaries — the Shining Path — were still active. It was also the only place he encountered trouble.

Weinstein first spent time in Lima, interviewing former rebels in prison and those who had fought them on behalf of the government. From there he traveled to the countryside, where he interviewed ex-fighters and civilians in Ayacucho and illegal cocoa growers in the upper Huallaga Valley, where Shining Path remnants remained active. Late one evening, Weinstein heard a knock on his door.

“It was my research assistant, who had gotten word that the Shining Path was aware of my presence and unhappy with it,” Weinstein said. “We left in the middle of the night.”

The pair took a late bus back to Lima and remained in the capital for several weeks, wrapping up their work.

Weinstein saw a pattern in the numerous accounts he’d collected for “Inside Rebellion.” A key factor in insurgencies, he wrote, is the availability of external resources, such as mining wealth or foreign support. Groups that are able to tap that wealth to build their armies act more coercively toward local populations because they are less dependent on them. Revolutionary groups without those resources are forced to use persuasion rather than coercion.

“It is unusual for someone writing a dissertation to do in-depth fieldwork in three different places, but it’s also one of the things that made the book so convincing,” said Stephen Walt, the Kennedy School’s Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs, who was a member of Weinstein’s dissertation committee.

“Indeed, it was necessary to show that the theory could explain not just one type of rebel organization but other types as well. None of these were places where it was easy to do research, and Jeremy deserves a lot of credit for persistence, audacity, and dedication.”

‘Uniquely inspirational’

Weinstein’s first academic job after earning his Ph.D. was as an assistant professor at Stanford, where his work on violence, war, and post-conflict transition continued. He returned several times to Africa as a researcher and became an adviser to the first Obama campaign for the White House. After the 2008 election, he joined the administration as director for democracy and development at the National Security Council. His time in the White House spanned several posts — including chief of staff and then deputy to Ambassador Samantha Power at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations — and numerous international crises, including the Arab Spring, the Ebola epidemic, the Syrian civil war, Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, and the Iran nuclear deal.

“He proved to be someone who brought this unusual, encyclopedic, academic rigor — the best of academia — and leveraged it to be useful in the meeting, in the moment of crisis, in the strategic review, in the bilateral dialogue,” said Power, a former Harvard faculty member who today is the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“Jeremy can see a blank slate and have a vision for what’s to be planted there or what should be built there.”

Samantha Power

“Jeremy has an uncanny ability to see what is not there,” she said. “I might see what is there and it might frustrate me and I’ll try to fix or amend or do away with it. Jeremy can see a blank slate and have a vision for what’s to be planted there or what should be built there. It’s very, very unusual.”

In the years to come, Weinstein, back at Stanford, would refocus on key topics he’d wrestled with while in D.C.

The Syrian Civil War had sent refugees fleeing the country and sparked a crisis that eventually included migrants from Africa, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. With colleagues, Weinstein co-led Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab, focusing on how best to promote immigrant and refugee integration and the role of national policies in shaping patterns of migration.

With the tech revolution well underway, more undergraduates were entering computer science and related fields, and Weinstein again saw what was not there: instruction in social science, ethics, and public policy that would influence how young computer scientists designed applications, programs, and devices that would influence lives far beyond Silicon Valley. He collaborated with colleagues in philosophy and computer science on teaching and writing projects, and co-authored the 2021 book “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot.”

In addition to his work on immigration and tech, Weinstein co-founded the Stanford Impact Labs, which grew out of his belief that walls between academic disciplines and between researchers and practitioners hinder problem-solving. The initiative brought to the social sciences a research and development approach familiar from engineering and the life sciences, investing in collaborative teams of researchers and practitioners. The organization also launched a fellowship program to help faculty members pursue their ambitions for impact beyond their scholarly contributions. It also created a public service sabbatical to provide faculty the opportunity to embed in nonprofits and in government to better understand how they might contribute to solving major social problems.

Fundamental to Weinstein’s academic achievements is his ability to learn and apply new knowledge, to inspire, and to see across disciplines, traits that will suit him well in his new role, Power said.

“I think that that cross-pollination throughout his career has been what has defined him,” Power said. “Despite the many challenges facing the world right now, Jeremy is a uniquely inspirational person in reminding people of the good that they can do. No matter what the odds are, he finds a way to convince you — you have a chance of making a huge difference.”

Weinstein said that the chance to return to the Kennedy School, an institution at the intersection of scholarship and practice — a place where he can learn, teach, and above all be useful — was irresistible.

“It represents everything I have tried to pursue as a scholar and policymaker,” Weinstein said. “The extraordinary thing about this institution is that it attracts people, whatever role or function they have, who are motivated by problems in the world that they want to solve and believe that universities have an essential role to play.”

Amid news coverage of the 2023 Women’s World Cup, researchers with Harvard’s GenderSci Lab spotted a familiar narrative concerning rampant ACL tears.

There was an immediate attribution of women athletes’ disproportionately high injury rates to biological sex differences, remembered Sarah S. Richardson, Aramont Professor of the History of Science and professor of studies of women, gender, and sexuality. “Do women’s hormonal cycles mean that their ligaments are more likely to tear? Does their hip structure mean that their knees are not meant for a certain level of activity?”

In a new study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Richardson and her co-authors cast doubt upon explanations that rely solely on sex-linked biology. The researchers specifically homed in on “athlete-exposures,” a metric widely used in the field of sports science — and repeated without question by many journalists covering women’s higher rates of ACL injury. The popular measure embeds bias into the science, the researchers say, because it fails to account for different resources allotted to male and female athletes. They find women may face a greater risk of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury because they play on smaller teams and spend a greater share of time in active competition.

“We knew from previous research that the real story is usually a complex entanglement of social factors with biology,” said Richardson, who founded the GenderSci Lab in 2018. “Our goal was to elevate the consideration that social factors can contribute to these disparities — and to show that it matters quantitatively in the numbers.”

Sports science literature reviewed by the research team included a recent meta-analysis, which arrived at an ACL injury rate 1.7 times higher for female athletes. Most of the 58 studies cited by the meta-analysis calculated athlete-exposures rather simply: the number of athletes on a given team multiplied by total number of games and practices. Exposure was rarely calculated at the individual level. Nor was weight given to time spent in active competition, when injuries are up to 10 times likelier to occur.  

A systematic analysis revealed the folly of this approach. “For every match that a team plays, a women’s team will, on average, train less compared to men,” explained co-author Ann Caroline Danielsen, a Ph.D. candidate studying social epidemiology at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “This is significant not only because injuries are more likely to happen during matches. It’s also true that optimal conditioning helps prevent injuries from happening in the first place.”

Underinvestment in women’s sports also means lower rates of participation, with playing time distributed among smaller numbers of athletes. “If you look at one individual woman ice hockey player, for example, her risk of injury is going to be larger than a man who’s playing on a much larger team,” noted co-author Annika Gompers ’18, a former Crimson runner now pursuing her Ph.D. in epidemiology at Emory University. “At the same time, the actual rate of injury per unit of game time is exactly the same.”

Recommendations for more accurately calculating ACL injury risk include careful considerations of structural factors. “We wish, for example, there was more systematic data on inequities in the quality of facilities,” said Gompers, noting the high-profile example of the NCAA’s 2021 March Madness basketball tournament. Also helpful would be better numbers on each player’s access to physical therapists, massage therapists, and coaching staff.

But the co-authors also call for improving the very metric used to calculate ACL injury rates. That means disaggregating practice time from game time and specifying each player’s training-to-competition ratio. It means gauging athlete-exposures at the individual level. It also means controlling for team size.

The paper is the first in the GenderSci Lab’s Sex in Motion initiative, a new research program promising thorough investigations into how sex-related variables interact with social gendered variables to produce different outcomes in musculoskeletal health. Its fourth co-author is U.K. sports sociologist Sheree Bekker, who led a 2021 paper that called for greater attention to social inequities in approaching ACL injury prevention.

“There’s a deep story here, and a nice case study, of how gender can be built into the very measures that we use in biomedicine,” Richardson said. “If the athlete-exposures construct is obscuring or even effacing those gendered structures, we’re not able to accurately perceive the places for intervention — and individuals are not able to accurately perceive their level of risk.”

Notre-Dame Cathedral re-opened to worldwide acclaim last weekend after a massive fire ravaged the Parisian landmark in April 2019. French authorities still have not been able to pinpoint an exact cause for the fire, but a new analysis may provide insights into how to avoid such a catastrophe.

The beloved Gothic cathedral, built from wood, limestone, iron, and lead in 1163 along the banks of the Seine, was long the city’s top tourist attraction and the site of many iconic events in French political and literary history. Reconstruction and restoration, from spire to sanctuary, cost an estimated ₵700 million, or about $740 million.       

While an official cause has yet to the determined, a new Harvard Business School case study examines the complicated series of mishaps and operational breakdowns that allowed a small roof fire to become a catastrophic blaze. The Gazette spoke to Amy Edmondson, co-author of the case study and Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at HBS, about what the fire has to teach us about preventing such disasters. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Why were you interested in the Notre Dame fire for a case study?

Jérôme Barthelemy, a professor at ESSEC Business School in France, reached out to me to ask whether I was interested in co-authoring a case on the fire with him. I said yes, because, for me, this was a quintessential complex failure. I just wrote a book called “Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well” in which I identify three kinds of failure — basic, complex and intelligent.

The “right kind of wrong” refers to intelligent failures, which are the undesired results of thoughtful experiments. But complex failures are a fact of life, and they are a phenomenon that when we are at our very best as individuals, but more importantly, as organizations, we can prevent. My research is about what more can we do to prevent tragic events like this, failures like this.

You delineate a number of poor decisions and troubling actions that may have contributed to the fire’s size and destruction. Five years later, why do you think French authorities still have no definitive answer on the cause?

I don’t know for sure. I know only what we could learn from published sources. With that in mind, I think the cause will likely remain elusive, because multiple factors — multiple culprits, if you will — were present. Multiple deviations from best practice are highlighted in the case — everything from workers smoking to a confusing fire code system to a built-in 20-minute delay between a call and the arrival of firefighters in the best of circumstances.

As with all complex failures, contributing factors interacted in complex ways. Identifying a single cause is rarely the best way to think about these kinds of failures. Every one of the small factors, like the workers smoking on the roof or storing electrical equipment near very old wood or doing hot work in the vicinity of the rafters, the way the fire alarm and warning system was set up, and the built-in delay is a potential contributing factor.

I can say confidently that it was devastating to all of those involved, both inside and outside the organization. So, they should be motivated to make changes, but identifying a definitive answer is unlikely.

Given that complex failures are caused by a set of contributing factors, rather than one factor, it can be difficult to motivate change. What I argue in the book is that complex failures are on the rise because of the complexity of our systems. But they are theoretically and practically preventable. And the only way to prevent them is through vigilance — absolute commitment to best practices, a dedication to getting the little things right, all of them.

This is not as expensive or laborious as it might sound. It is about a habit of excellence, driven by the belief that rules and procedures matter, and deviations can escalate in dangerous ways. It’s far more expensive and laborious to clean up a failure like this than to run a tight ship, so to speak.

“Complex failures are on the rise because of the complexity of our systems. But they are theoretically and practically preventable.”

Could the fire have been avoided or done far less damage if one or two of these particular things had not occurred?

Yes, and that’s characteristic of complex failure. Often, all you need is to remove one or two of these contributing factors, and the failure is prevented. For example, if you didn’t have the fire department showing up 20 minutes after the call, you’d probably catch the fire before it turns into a devastatingly large fire. If you had very strict rules about where the electrical equipment goes, where smoking happens, etc. Take out any one of these factors, and it might have been a different outcome. I can’t tell you which, because we don’t really know.

More than 30 years ago, I was studying DuPont, which conducted multiple high-risk manufacturing activities but nonetheless had an extraordinary safety record, to understand how it worked. And I discovered that people in the company wouldn’t let an executive walk down the stairs without holding the banister; if you did that, you’d get reprimanded. You couldn’t walk around with an open coffee cup. No one at any level would put their key in the ignition of the car until they heard the click of each seatbelt. It was almost second nature.

Now, these seem downright silly. But their belief was: “Watch out for the little stuff.” If you apply that logic to the factory, if you aspire to have everything as close to excellent as possible, you can avoid the tragic perfect storms that cause complex failures.

You study leadership. Was this a failure of leadership?

Yes. By definition, leaders are accountable for the whole. Even if you could say, “Well, I didn’t do it; I didn’t smoke in the rafters.” Well, that is not quite right. As a leader, you did do it. You led in a way that allowed such deviations to occur. Sins of omission are every bit as important as the actual acts that may have contributed to the fire.

What issues do you want students to grapple with from this case study?

Exactly what we’re talking about. First, I want them to understand the difference between a basic failure — with a single, simple cause — and a complex failure, and then to take a close look at the organizational factors, which means managerial factors that allow such failures to happen. And then, I want them to think about what the leader’s role is: what they need to put in place to run an excellent operation. The lesson is that leaders can insist on the discipline and the vigilance needed to prevent complex failures.

Improbably, the building has been carefully restored in record time. Do you think anything else positive can come out of this situation or this tragedy?

Yes. The thing that’s positive that will, I hope, come out of it is that other important landmarks will be less vulnerable. This tragedy was a wake-up call for anyone who has responsibility for an important and fragile landmark, or any public good like a national park or even human safety in a complex operation. The insights do not apply only to ancient cathedrals.

Anytime you are leading or in charge of an important resource, especially anything related to human life, you have a responsibility for being vigilant and thoughtful, and encouraging voice, and for stress-testing your hypotheses rigorously. I think there’s a lot of prevention insight that comes from this case, and because of the emotional nature of that loss, it gets people’s attention and could make a difference in that way.

Nothing is certain except death and taxes, the saying goes — but there’s another sure thing to add to that list: change.

“The more we resist change, the more we suffer. There’s a phrase I like. It says, ‘Let go or be dragged,’” said Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Harvard Study on Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies on human happiness and well-being.

As humans, we are constantly changing. Sometimes change is pursued intentionally, when we set goals, for example. But change also happens subconsciously, and not always for the better. Richard Weissbourd, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of Making Caring Common, said that disillusionment is often underappreciated as a factor in change.

“People can respond to disillusionment by becoming bitter and withdrawing — and cynical,” he said. “They can also respond to disillusionment by developing a more encompassing understanding of reality and thriving.”

Mahzarin Banaji, an experimental psychologist who researches implicit beliefs, said that even our biases can change over time as we experience new circumstances. It’s one reason why it’s important we do not lose agency when it comes to changing ourselves.

In this episode of “Harvard Thinking,” host Samantha Laine Perfas talks with Waldinger, Weissbourd, and Banaji about the value of embracing change.

Transcript

Robert Waldinger: The more we resist change, the more we suffer. There’s a phrase I like. It says, “Let go or be dragged.” There is just constant movement of the universe and all of us as individuals as part of the universe.

Samantha Laine Perfas: You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, goes the saying, and sometimes this feels true. But the idea that people can’t change is a myth. Research shows that people are capable of making dramatic shifts at nearly every stage of life in spite of our habits and biases.

So how much of that change is within our control and how much is at the mercy of our circumstances?

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

Mahzarin Banaji: Mahzarin Banaji. I’m an experimental psychologist. I live and work in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

Laine Perfas: Her work focuses on implicit bias, and she co-wrote the best-seller “Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.” Next:

Waldinger: Bob Waldinger. I’m professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School

Laine Perfas: He also directs the Harvard Study on Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies on human happiness and well-being. It tracks the lives of participants over 80 years. And finally:

Richard Weissbourd: Rick Weissbourd. I’m a senior lecturer at the Grad School of Education. I’ve also taught at the Kennedy School of Government for many years.

Laine Perfas: He’s a psychologist and is the director of the Making Caring Common Project at GSE.

And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, your host, and a writer for The Harvard Gazette. Today, we’ll discuss how, when, and why we change, intentionally and otherwise.

It feels like we live in a culture that is constantly pushing us to do more, be more. Why do we focus on changing ourselves so much?

Waldinger: What’s so striking is that for a long time, developmental scientists focused almost exclusively on children, because children change so dramatically, right before our eyes. And people thought once we got into our 20s, we found work, if we were lucky we found love, and then we were good to go, we were set, and people didn’t change much across adulthood. People began to look more closely and look at their own experience and realize how much change happens psychologically and biologically across the adult lifespan. And so you began to see the kinds of studies of change across adulthood that my study represents that was begun in 1938. But for a long time, adult development was the kind of poor stepchild of developmental science.

Banaji: Psychologists, I think, have been remiss in really studying the two ends of life, right? As Bob said, because we are interested in development for a variety of reasons, we focus on from the day a baby is born and we go through, really, well, the adolescent years because we’re interested in the emotional mind and what happens, the volatility during adolescence, and change and so on. And then we know nothing until again, we get to a much older age where we worry and think about the last decade of life. But every decade we’re changing. We’re entirely different people.

Weissbourd: There’s so many different domains of change, right? And I think we do have a pretty strong belief in our culture that we can become more effective or competent, that we can become happier. There’s a billion-dollar self-help industry out there that is trying to make people feel better.

My work is primarily on moral development, and I don’t think we have strong notions of change in adult life, and that’s a real problem. There’s a notion in many parts of the country that you’re born good or bad, and you’re going to be good or bad your whole life, and I think we’d be a much healthier culture if we saw ourselves as having the capacity to love other people well and more deeply and empathize more deeply. You can have better relationships. And that’s probably the strongest source of happiness we have.

I would just say one other thing, and it’s really partly a question for all of you. But, I think sometimes people don’t think they change because the narrator doesn’t change. Meaning the person, the thing telling the story of their lives doesn’t feel like it changes. And when I ask people about their narrator, do they have the same narrator when they were 8 or 16 or 30 or 50? Most people think the narrator is the same. So if you think of the narrator as the self and the continuity of the self, I think that’s one of the reasons people often think we’re not changing.

Banaji: I’m remembering my good friend Walter Mischel’s theory of personality and this idea that we believe so much that we and other people are largely consistent across different situations. The lovely example that Walter gives is that we meet people in certain roles so we don’t even know the variability of those people. I know the janitor who stops by my office every evening as a janitor, I don’t know him as a father or as a jazz musician or whatever else. These things give us a false sense of continuity. And I think this spills over into feeling change isn’t present or happening when in fact it is. It’s like our skin. I think I’m right that the epidermis, once a month, we have a new skin and even in older people, it’s only a little slower. It’s every two months. But I don’t notice that and that might be an interesting metaphor for us, that something so close to us on our body that we see all the time is going through an entire regeneration every month, but we don’t notice it.

Waldinger: It’s interesting because I think we’re ambivalent about change, that the mind in many ways craves permanence. Rick, as you’re saying, we have this sense of the narrator being the same narrator when I was 8 years old and now when I’m in my 70s, and of course that’s absurd. I’m a Zen practitioner, and the core teachings of Zen and Buddhism is that the self is a fiction. It’s a helpful fiction that we construct to get through the world, but it’s actually fictitious, and constantly changing. But at the same time, as we want permanence, we want something fixed, we say, “Oh, I want to improve.” And so we get on this endless treadmill of self-improvement. So we really have quite a complex relationship with the idea of change, we human beings.

Weissbourd: I’m one of those people who do have a strong sense of self-sameness, that I am the same person when I was 8. Is that not true for you?

Waldinger: When I was 8, I really thought I could be Superman; and I had a cape and I had a Superman outfit, and I ran around and I jumped on and off my bed. I don’t do that anymore, Rick.

Laine Perfas: Maybe you should. Sounds like a great Saturday afternoon.

Banaji: You know, there’s a lovely piece that Robert Sapolsky, the neurobiologist, wrote, in, I think it was in the ’80s. I remember reading it and smiling because I was still in my 20s. And he said something like, “My research assistant colors his hair purple one week and green the other week. He listens to classical music and pop. He eats regular foods and weird foods.” And he said, “Look at me, I’ve had the same shoulder-length ponytail for the last 40 years and I only listen to reggae and so on.” And he concluded that piece by saying if you haven’t changed by a certain age for certain things, you never will. If you haven’t eaten sushi by the age of 22, you never will. If you haven’t had your nose pierced by 17, you never will. So there are certain things that, yes, it feels that way, but maybe there are bigger changes that happen later in life.

Waldinger: One thing that I’ve been impressed by as I study people getting older is that the big change is in our perception of the finiteness of life. That we all know we’re going to die from a pretty young age, but most of us say, “Ah, it’s way in the future” or “I’m going to be the exception here. I won’t die. Everybody else will.” And then what Laura Carstensen’s work shows, and many people’s, is that in about our mid-40s, we really begin to get a more visceral sense of the finiteness of life and that sense of our mortality increases from the mid-40s onward. You can document it pretty precisely and that institutes a whole set of shifts in how we see ourselves, how we see this narrator moving through the world, and how we see our time horizon. There are some things that are going to change just because of the fact of death.

Laine Perfas: It does seem like some people are very open to change, and they’re constantly learning and growing, But then there are other people who are very comfortable with how they are, even if other people maybe think they should change. It makes me wonder, are there some people who are more susceptible to change than others, or more open to it?

Banaji: As with almost any other psychological physical property, yes, there are individual differences and far be it for me to bring up anything political in this moment. But one of the differences between what we consider to be liberal versus conservative, the dictionary definition, is that one group looks forward and wants change and wants to leave behind old ways of doing things. And the other wants tradition and stability. There’s nothing good or bad here. These are both forces. But this is a real difference, I think, in almost every culture. I was born and raised in India, I’ve lived most of my adult life here, and in both cultures, I’ve seen these two big movements pull and push in opposite directions. And I guess at some level, I’d like to think theoretically that it’s good to have a bit of that pull and push.

Waldinger: And as I understand it, there’s some theory and some grounding in empirical data that some of this may be biologically based, that some of us are temperamentally more inclined to resist change. We humans are arrayed on a spectrum, perhaps even biologically, about how much we welcome versus resist change.

Banaji: I can’t help but mention my colleague Jerry Kagan. Jerry’s notion of temperament in early childhood, he had this view that there were certain personality dimensions that are biologically present in early childhood. And I really believe that some of those very much link up to what you’re saying, Bob. So for example, I have a sister who was very shy, anxious, would hold my little frock and hang behind me. And I was so extroverted that at age 6, I wanted to leave home and go off somewhere else. And I feel that this difference in shyness or anxiety or whatever you want to call it, has played a role in our political beliefs. I am open to new experiences. I meet very different people and packed a bag at 21 and with $40 in my pocket took off without knowing anybody in this country. She wouldn’t leave home without thinking for three hours about what she’s going to do. And this does lead to very different outcomes.

Weissbourd: Yeah, there’s some people who are temperamentally very risk-averse and there are other people who are risk junkies.

Laine Perfas: It is worth mentioning, you know, not all change that we experience is desirable or beneficial. You know, if we encounter trauma or negative experiences, if you’ve been in a really bad breakup and the experience leaves you cynical and love-averse. When we’re going through life and we’re experiencing negative experiences that might push us to change ourselves in ways that might be more harmful or cause us to withdraw, how do we wrestle with that tension versus still being open to the world, not really knowing what might happen?

Waldinger: A lot of my clinical work is psychotherapy. That’s my specialty; actually, I still, every day, I see a couple of people in psychotherapy. And what you see is tremendous variability in people’s willingness, interest in, and ability to make internal shifts in how they see the world and how they experience themselves. And some of that, Sam, is based on what you’re describing, which is some people have had negative experiences that seem to have really baked in certain ways of experiencing themselves in the world and certain expectations of the world and of people as being reliable or not reliable, as being intentionally harmful or basically good.

Weissbourd: I would say that most of us experience disillusionment at some point in our lives. My dissertation was on the disillusionment of Vietnam veterans, but I think it’s a very common experience. And I think people can respond to disillusionment by becoming bitter and withdrawing and cynical. They can also respond to disillusionment by developing a more encompassing understanding of reality and thriving, flourishing in the world. We have huge literatures on grief and trauma and depression. We don’t really talk enough about disillusionment, and I think it’s a powerful experience for a lot of people.

Banaji: My colleague Steve Pinker is very fond of pointing out to us something that I think is true, that we may think that we are not changing for the good, but whether you look at women’s rights, whether you look at homicide rates, unemployment, other measures of the economy, happiness — if you take even a 20-year view on most of them, there’s improvement. If you take a 100- or 200-year view, there’s no question that there’s a lot of improvement. Yes, there are pockets where things are getting worse. I’ll put climate in that box and make sure that we don’t forget that. But on many of these things, we are improving. And I come from a country that got independence in ’47, and the remarkable changes I’ve seen over the course of my lifetime in India are just mind-boggling. But our aspirations, I think, for better, which is a very good thing, I think often lead us to not see real progress that has also been made.

Waldinger: And to your point, our cognitive bias that’s built in, our bias to pay more attention to what’s negative and to remember what’s negative longer than what’s positive. When we’re younger, that changes as we get older, but that cognitive bias makes us vulnerable to having this sense that everything’s falling apart and inflamed.

Banaji: I myself showed that bias. When we began to do research on implicit bias, I said to my students, don’t even bother looking for change in it. It’s not going to change. It’s implicit. It’s not controllable. That’s the nature of this beast. We can focus on changing people’s conscious attitudes, but this thing is not going to change, not in my lifetime, and I was completely and utterly wrong on that because even implicit bias, which is not easy to control, we’ve seen something like a 64 percent drop-off in anti-gay bias in a 14-year period. This alone is mind-boggling. How did our culture change so dramatically? How did we go from being so deeply religiously based, all sorts of social pressures, how did grandparents and parents change? All of this happened in a 14-year period, not just on what we say and the rights we’ve given a group of people, but way deep inside of us, our implicit bias has changed.

Weissbourd: Mahzarin, I love this work you’re doing. I’m wondering if you can answer your own question, though. How did this happen?

Banaji: You know, I have many hypotheses, but being an experimentalist makes it really difficult to test these because it doesn’t lend itself to laboratory tests. I think both of you doing the work you’ve done may have better hypotheses, so I would love to hear what they are, but I have a few. The first one is that sexuality had going for it a very positive feature, and that is that sexuality is embedded in all aspects of our society at all levels. There are gay and straight people and everybody in between on the coasts and in the middle of the country, among the rich and the poor, among the educated and the less-educated. I think that’s one of the reasons. I also think that these biases were based in religion, and I think we are becoming a less religious country. So I think perhaps secularism has a small role to play, but I think primarily we are not segregated by sexuality, the way we are on age, the way we are on race. And so I think that just allows for the possibility of change.

Waldinger: One of the things I’ve been impressed by is how powerful stories are. Personal stories, like my son says he’s gay and then, whoa, I’m rethinking a lot of things. But also some of the stories, many people have talked about the influence of media and stories, shows about gay people. And I think that those emotional connections and those very personal stories move us in ways. It’s often when a senator or a congressperson has someone in their family with a mental illness that finally there’s some movement that lessens some of the national policy stigmatization of mental illness. It’s because people have it in their own lives and see it in their own lives in a way.

Laine Perfas: We’ve been talking about the ways that we pursue change or people are open to change. I want to talk a little bit about the people who do not embrace change and who might even fear it.

Banaji: Think about Brexit and also some of what’s going on in this country around immigration and just how much the fear of the outsider has been easy to evoke. There’s certain fears that are just right below the surface. Thinking about groups. It is one of those that I think is a very powerful and easy way to say we don’t want change because it’s so easy to evoke the idea that these people who are not us are going to take our stuff. Somebody just wrote me a week ago and said, do you think there’s a difference between foreign tourists and immigrants? And I said, yes, tourists give us money and we fear that immigrants will take our money. And of course there is a difference. But even within them, there are words that we use. I think this distinction in the word has gone away. But when I was younger, I remember that the word emigre would often be used to refer to white high-status immigrants. And immigrant would be the word to refer to non-white, poorer people coming to our country. So even there, we distinguish to tell ourselves that they come in different kinds, and one is to be feared and the other not.

Waldinger: We also assign these groups who are not us, we assign them the characteristics that we fear are part of us, and we don’t want any part of. So those other people are greedy, those other people are dirty, whatever epithets we apply are often reflections of what we don’t want in ourselves, and we notice glimmers of in ourselves. And so to resist those outsiders, to resist changes that come from the outside, is also saying I’m not going to let this stuff loose.

Weissbourd: I think change also involves grief sometimes and loss, it means a new way of being and foregoing a way of being that’s been very familiar, and the relationships in an old way of being, that you can change in ways that make it so it’s hard to be close to your high school friends. Or you can change in ways that may threaten your romantic relationship.

Laine Perfas: What I was thinking about as I was listening to all of you talk, it’s a fear of the unknown. If I change in some way, I can’t fully predict what that life for me will look like. If it changes, will I even recognize it anymore? Who am I? Do I belong? Is there still a place for me in this new and different world? And I think sometimes that alone can be enough to be like, maybe I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing. It’s a lot to think about.

Banaji: So you’re right, Sam, in bringing this up, because I’ve been worried about a particular issue. You said people for whom their life may not be what they were expecting it to be or had hoped to be, and I think about the group “men” as going through this. Of course, the world still is male-dominated and so on. We just have to look at the disproportionate number of men in power. But I’ve been worried a lot about men being left behind. As somebody who studies bias, I look for it everywhere, especially in places where we would not think to look. And there is something going on in this country. I don’t know how magnified it is elsewhere. But today, 60 percent of college-going people are women. And very soon it will be 65 percent. I think this is terrible for the country. I really believe that we need to hold this to 50/50. It’s not good for the group, but it’s not good for society. In 20 years, I think we will be in a position where we will really regret not having paid attention to this. And it’s not just going to college. There’s just many shifts that are happening for men, that are not getting attention and that I believe should, and it’s a kind of a change, but it’s seemingly having a negative impact on a particular group.

Waldinger: Could you say a little more about that? To hear you say this is really interesting.

Banaji: There’s a book that was written recently, and I wish I were remembering his name, but the book’s name is “Of Boys and Men.”

Laine Perfas: Richard Reeves.

Banaji: Yes, at the Brookings Institute. That book really changed my thinking. I had been feeling this. I had been noticing it because I teach in a concentration, a major, at Harvard that has been slowly turning much more female. And so I began to worry about it because I wondered like, where are the men? Why aren’t they coming to psychology? So when I was the director of undergraduate studies, I started to just collect some back-of-the-envelope data. I said to my colleagues, I’m very concerned about this. I brought it up once in an APA meeting, this is the American Psychological Association group of chairs of psychology departments. And I was slapped down by men and women who said, sorry, we don’t want to worry about this. I was just stunned that we would say such a thing. What can I say? I just feel that there’s now enough evidence that men are saying they’re feeling they’re being left behind. The data are, certainly for college. Now, I know that college is not the be-all and end-all of life and not everybody needs to go to college and so on. But you and I know that going to college changes your life’s trajectory, the way our society is set up currently. It is a very strong path to success. And we’re taking that away from one group of people. To see this happening deserves some attention, in my opinion.

Laine Perfas: I know we’ve been talking at the society level, so I want to bring it a little bit back to the individual. Is it more common for people to change intentionally and purposefully, like they’re pursuing a change in their own life? Or is it more common that we change subconsciously or just simply because of the life experiences that we have?

Waldinger: I would argue it depends on how much pain we’re in. If you have a motivation to change, a conscious motivation, you’re more likely to take steps that are hard and require persistence. But to do that, if things are good, you’re probably not likely to make conscious, deliberate efforts to change because things are good.

Laine Perfas: That’s really interesting. It makes me think about this pursuit of happiness: I still feel unhappy, therefore I’m motivated to constantly keep changing, even though it never actually makes me happier sometimes.

Weissbourd: That’s the kicker, right? That’s the irony, that all the pursuit of happiness often makes you less happy. I certainly agree with Bob about suffering, but I might land differently on the question, just in the sense that I do feel like we’re always evolving, whether we intend to or not. Early adulthood changes you. Parenthood changes you. Midlife often changes people. Aging changes people. So there are inevitable developmental changes that are happening.

Laine Perfas: I was going to ask if we ever get to a point where it’s good to just accept who we are and how we are and to be OK with where we’re at in life.

Weissbourd: I think we have a lifelong responsibility to shield other people from our flaws.

Banaji: I love how you said that.

Waldinger: I also think there’s a distinction between the responsibility to keep trying to be better, to spare other people our worst aspects. And I totally agree with you, Rick. And on the other side, because I see this as a psychiatrist, is this problem of low self-esteem. The Dalai Lama, when he started having more contact with Westerners, said that one of the most striking things for him was that Westerners are much more commonly beset by low self-esteem and harsh self-criticism, much more than the people he encountered in Eastern cultures. Partly because self-esteem is an issue of self-absorption, particularly low self-esteem. And so I think it’s both. I think that we have a responsibility to be better, but that there is also a path to greater self-acceptance, which makes us much more fun to live with when we talk about other people.

Banaji: I never heard the phrase “self-esteem” until I was 24 and arrived in America. And yet there is a positive side to it that I want to point out, and I think this is true of maybe not even Western culture, but the United States. I think Alexis de Tocqueville said something in his book on “Democracy in America” that America was not a better country than other countries, but it had this magnificent ability of looking at its flaws. I feel that this is one of the things that I have loved about this culture. That there is something public about looking at our flaws. And I think it’s the mark of a culture that’s evolving in a very positive direction.

Laine Perfas: Thinking about the coming new year, ’tis the season for New Year’s resolutions and all of these dramatic statements of changes that people are going to make. I’m curious what you all think is beautiful about change and how it can have a healthy place in our lives as we think about changes we might want to make this upcoming year?

Waldinger: Zen perspective? Change is absolutely inevitable. Change is constant. Change is the only constant. And the more we resist change, the more we suffer. There’s a phrase I like, it says, “Let go or be dragged.” That there is just constant movement of the universe and of us as individuals as part of the universe. So I would say, it’s like gravity. It’s just here, it’s with us.

Banaji: But which direction it goes in, the change it’s going to have? That, I think, is for every single one of us to continue to try to shape as best as we see it. And I think in that sense, this year is going to be even more important than other years.

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

Waldinger: Yeah. What fun.

Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. To find a transcript of this episode and to listen 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 design by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University, copyright 2024.

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For Ayodele Casel, tap dancing is like a second language — or third, for the woman who grew up both in the Bronx and Puerto Rico. 

“It is a very improvisational form that is informed by your lived experience … where you grew up, the music you grew up listening to, the music that you respond to, the languages that you speak,” said Casel, 49, a renowned actress and dancer as well as a former Radcliffe fellow. “It’s power to communicate across like barriers of other languages or cultures.” 

Casel’s new production, “Diary of a Tap Dancer,” will have its premiere run Dec. 12-Jan. 4 at the American Repertory Theater. The play weaves together Casel’s unique brand of rhythmic tap with song and a narrative that traces her career as well as those of often forgotten female dancers throughout history. 

Casel recalls the first time she saw a tap performance. One of her high school teachers showed her video of a performance by Hollywood dancing legend Ginger Rogers alongside her equally famed partner Fred Astaire. 

“I just remember tunnel vision, like all of a sudden everything went away. And I was just looking at them float through the screen,” she said. “I thought, ‘Man, that is so cool!’”

Casel was hooked. She began immersing herself in classic movies that featured the form. 

But it wasn’t until she was at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts that she actually tried it. In her sophomore year, she began studying tap under veteran dancer Charles Goddertz. She also befriended Baakari Wilder, a hoofer who would become famous for his starring role in the Tony-nominated musical “Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk.” 

As she watched hoofers like Wilder, she found herself increasingly drawn to it. Hoofing is a style of tap developed in African American communities that uses makes greater use of stomps and stamps to create unique and more expressive percussive rhythms. 

Casel says she was so taken with hoofing that she took the advice of other dancers and went to a construction site to get a piece of discarded plywood to use as a dancing surface so she could hear her rhythms more distinctly. (Cassel still recalls the hassle of getting her board on the subway to take it home.) 

The style still deeply influences Casel, who won the Hoofer Award from the American Tap Dance Foundation in 2017. 

In 2019, Casel brought her talents to Cambridge for the first time, becoming the 2019–2020 Frances B. Cashin Fellow at Radcliffe. At Harvard, Casel worked to put together an earlier version of “Diary” — one that was a one-woman history of female tappers. 

“The project I submitted was this idea of creating a theatrical work that centered the lives of the Black women tap dancers from the ’30s to the ’50s, whose stories aren’t widely known, and whose stories were almost really completely lost to history,” she said. 

“I just felt like as a woman of color in these tap shoes, that it was my responsibility to bring them with me so that as folks get to learn about me, they also inevitably learn about them,” she added. 

“I just felt like as a woman of color in these tap shoes, that it was my responsibility to bring them with me so that as folks get to learn about me, they also inevitably learn about them.”

Ayodele Casel

Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, echoed the importance of uncovering the legacies of those history has forgotten. 

“It was here at Radcliffe that an early version debuted in February 2020,” she said. “More than just a theatrical work, ‘Diary’ contributes to a more complete history of a remarkable American art form by centering the lives of unnamed women within a broader context. I am eager to join so many others in the audience at the A.R.T. to celebrate this history and Ayodele’s considerable talent.” 

After seeing Casel’s Radcliffe presentation, A.R.T. Director of Artistic Programs Ryan McKittrick asked her to develop the project for their stage. Since then, it has come to include an ensemble cast of actors and dancers, directed by longtime Casel collaborator Torya Beard. 

And although Beard herself has a history as a dancer and choreographer, she wants to be clear that the show’s story about the lives of Casel and the other women tappers lies at the heart of the project.

“‘Diary’ is really rooted in personal narrative, and there is embodied storytelling. [But] when we’re talking about like an Ayodele Casel project, I don’t think it exists without music, and perhaps, at least right now, it doesn’t exist without tap dancing, but this is not a dance concert.” 

Find tickets and more information on “Diary of a Tap Dancer” online here. 

Both campaigns agreed the presidential election was unprecedented with only an extremely narrow slice of the electorate up for grabs and the Democrats having to retool strategy and organization for a new candidate in the final stretch. And the thing that may have made the biggest difference was how and where you talked to undecided voters.

Senior staff from the Harris and Trump campaigns gathered at Harvard Kennedy School Friday to explain their thinking at critical junctures during the 2024 election. The postmortem, organized by the Institute of Politics, has been held after every presidential election since 1972.

Jen O’Malley Dillon, who had managed President Joe Biden’s 2020 and 2024 campaigns before taking the helm of Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign after Biden dropped out in July, acknowledged the considerable difficulty they faced trying to shift a political operation built for one candidate to another with a little more than three months left in the race.

“But when the call came and the president said he was getting out, we really did flip the whole thing without knowing exactly how to do it,” she said. “And then the vice president was so strong out of the gate that I think it made momentum a little bit easier for us to pick up on and gave us a little bit of space to figure out the stuff we hadn’t worked out yet.”

“When the call came and the president said he was getting out, we really did flip the whole thing without knowing exactly how to do it.”

Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden campaign manager

The Harris team said they knew from the start that they would be facing significant headwinds because the economy was emerging as a top issue, and voters felt the Biden-Harris administration had not done enough to address the inflation rate.

Beyond that, the Harris campaign leaders walked through other challenges they faced.

They pushed back on the accusations by pundits that they took certain demographic groups, like Black and Latino men, and younger voters, for granted, assuming that Harris’ race and gender would override economic or national security concerns.

“We weren’t running this campaign as an identity politics campaign,” said Quentin Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager for Harris. “We came out of the gate talking to everyone. If you think the economy sucks, it doesn’t get better if there’s a Black candidate.”

At the same time, Fulks said, “It didn’t help that the Trump campaign was obviously targeting these voters and making them feel … whether it be through [an anti-] trans ad, ‘She’s for they/them and Trump is for you,’ they were making her seem as if she was out of touch and out of line with their issues.”

Where the Harris team saw the biggest shift in support was among third-party voters, particularly those who had been dissatisfied with both Biden and Trump. Once Harris got in the race, however, “those voters snapped back very quickly” to the Democratic side, said Harris pollster Molly Murphy. Surprisingly, older voters, a group that Biden had always done well with, ended up being much more supportive of Harris than the campaign expected.

Responding to a common complaint from progressives that Harris’ elevation to the top of the ticket without a primary process was undemocratic, Fulks noted there were just 107 days left after Biden dropped out in which to identify a new candidate, unify the party, and launch an entirely new campaign before Election Day.

To hold an open primary and bypass Harris, Biden’s preferred choice, would have risked alienating Black women, a key Democratic Party voting bloc, and meant fielding a lesser-known candidate with no infrastructure, he said.

“I hear your concern, and I’m not saying that … open primaries are not important, but I also think [the campaign was] such an anomaly [that] it would have almost been virtually impossible to have an open primary of any success that would have put the Democratic Party in a position to be able to defeat Donald Trump,” he said.

Trump did unconventional things like attend mixed martial arts fights to show those voters he understood them and was reaching out.

Chris LaCivita , Trump campaign co-manager

The Trump team said that early on one of their biggest challenges involved negative impressions of Project 2025, a collection of conservative policy proposals pushed by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups.

Voter concern started to gain traction while Biden was still in the race, especially on TikTok, and it caught the Trump team by surprise. That worry grew to alarm after seeing persuadable voters start to move in response to reports about it and Trump blowing up in anger over news stories tying the document directly back to him, they said.

“Obviously, we recognized that it was an issue, and we needed to kill it quickly,” said Chris LaCivita, co-manager of the Trump campaign.

In fact, Project 2025 was one issue where Democrats had a leg up on the Trump team, but by the time the Harris campaign began to focus on it, noted Tony Fabrizio, a veteran Republican pollster, the race had evolved, and that earlier stickiness and momentum was very hard for Harris to reclaim.

Both sides agreed that communication strategies may have made the biggest difference in 2024. The Republicans proved more effective at crafting and amplifying messages that resonated with 2024’s undecided voters. With so few up for grabs this election, finding and persuading those folks was critical.

Seeing that these voters were part of a larger, growing cohort of Americans who had unplugged from network and cable television, the Trump campaign invested heavily in targeting “streamers” (those who exclusively used streaming services), fans of internet-only programs, and listeners of entertainment podcasts, Fabrizio said.

And it’s why candidate Trump did unconventional things like attend mixed martial arts fights to show those voters he understood them and was reaching out, LaCivita added.

The media asymmetry turned out to be a decisive advantage for Republicans this year, but maybe not for much longer, Fabrizio said.

“Republicans were always more distrustful of what we’ll call the mainstream media than Democrats or independents. And so, what happened is, when the technology became available for alternative sources of information, Republicans were the first ones to flock to it because they weren’t happy. It’s the reason why Fox [News]exploded, it’s the reason why so many online sites are right-of-center sites,” he said. 

There are signs the left is also becoming disillusioned with mainstream media after controversies over endorsements at The Washington Post and The LA Times led to the cancellation of more than 250,000 subscriptions, and plummeting ratings at CNN and MSNBC post-election. Younger voters now turn increasingly to TikTok and other online platforms for news, an arena in which the Trump campaign conceded that the Harris team outplayed them. Most importantly, a recent Gallup poll shows only 31 percent of Americans still trust the media.

“That means there’s a chunk of Democrats that don’t trust the media anymore,” Fabrizio said. “As that distrust grows across the partisan spectrum, you’re going to see a greater proliferation of news sources and information sources, both on the right and the left. It’s just going to take a little bit more time for the left to get to where the right has been for several years about the news media.”

The roads, walkways, and collections throughout Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum bear the names of influential local philanthropists, landowners, and politicians. A new name, Flora, now joins the ranks of those being honored for their roles in shaping the history of the region.

In October, the city of Boston approved changing Bussey Street, named after merchant Benjamin Bussey, to Flora Way in honor of an enslaved woman who lived on an area estate in the 18th century.

Bussey, a sugar, coffee, and cotton merchant in the late 1700s and early 1800s, built much of his wealth through the trans-Atlantic trade of products produced by enslaved workers. He eventually retired from that business and turned his attention to farming.

“He accumulated all these small farm holdings and put it together into what is the Jamaica Plain side of the Arnold Arboretum,” Ned Friedman, director of the Arboretum, said. Friedman is the Faculty Fellow of the Arnold Arboretum and Arnold Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.

In 1842 Bussey donated to Harvard College his estate, which was combined in 1868 with land donated by New Bedford whaling merchant James Arnold for the creation of the Arboretum.

Bussey is one of several philanthropists identified in the University’s 2022 Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery report as a beneficiary of enslavement. Friedman said the Arboretum has been actively considering how best to acknowledge its past while looking to the future.

“We have a Bussey Hill; we have a Bussey Brook Meadow. We want to honor Benjamin Bussey for his philanthropy, because I feel personally that writing him completely out of history removes the historical context,” said Friedman of Bussey’s complex legacy.

The idea to remove his name from the street, he said, didn’t originate with the Arboretum. Last spring, a group of neighbors across Jamaica Plain and Roslindale came together to suggest the change. They came up with five alternatives to Bussey. The list included Flora and two other enslaved people, Dick Welsh and Cuffe, along with transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, who wrote fondly of the hemlocks and pines on the site, and botanist Shiu-Ying Hu, Ph.D. 1949, a highly respected emeritus senior research fellow at the Arboretum.

“I would have been happy with any of the five names that they suggested,” Friedman said. “I just stepped back and let the community do their business.”

Ultimately, organizers reached a consensus to select Flora — a woman enslaved by William Dudley, the son of Gov. Joseph Dudley.

The Dudley estate was located in current-day Roslindale on Weld Street and included a small commercial farm. Flora was one of four people enslaved on the property, and the only woman.

Not much is known about Flora, other than records that detail her purchase price of 40 pounds and the fact that Dudley bought shoes and an apron for her. The only other record of Flora is a probate file showing her sale by Dudley’s estate, again for 40 pounds.

“Flora was connected to what is now the Arnold Arboretum, a place that holds a commitment to public health and accessibility and is intentional about creating equitable access to urban green space,” said Sara Bleich, the University’s inaugural vice provost for special projects in charge of the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative at a renaming ceremony at the end of October.

The name change signifies not only Harvard’s acknowledgment of the past, but also a promise to strive for a better future.

“Flora Way is just part of a bigger set of conversations we’re having here about justice, about equity,” Friedman said.

The Arboretum, which is free and open to the public and receives millions of visitors each year, is surrounded by several “environmental justice” communities, where 40 percent or more of the residents are people of color and median incomes fall below city averages.

City-run entrances to the park from those neighborhoods have fallen into disrepair, with gates welded shut and stone walls covered in graffiti. Friedman, and Harvard, have been advocating for their renovation, and in some cases, pledging to support efforts financially.

“Access is really important,” Friedman said. “Because that’s part of what I think matters a great deal about whether people feel welcome.”

Of the nine entrances to the park, five are slated for renovation, including Poplar Gate at the intersection of the new Flora Way and South Street, which is set to be completed within the next month or two.

“Renaming this street to Flora Way makes a powerful statement that Flora mattered,” Bleich said. “Reckoning with past history gives us a fuller view of what came before us, the injustices done that society needs to be held accountable for, and how this should shape our future for the better,” she added.

Since the release of the Legacy of Slavery report, efforts continue across the University to implement recommendations and continue digging into the past. To learn more, a historical tour of 10 stops around Cambridge that explore the University’s connections to slavery is available, and the full report is online.

The Arnold Arboretum is open every day from sunrise to sunset.

Laila Lalami reached for her phone early one morning and found a baffling notification. If she were to leave her house right then, it said, she could make it to YogaWorks by 7:30 a.m.

The award-winning novelist did not immediately leave for yoga class. Instead, she spent the day pondering technology and its access to people’s unexpressed thoughts and unrealized actions. The experience, now more than 10 years in the past, left her with the idea for her forthcoming novel.

“I turned to my husband, and I said, ‘Pretty soon, the only privacy we’re going to have is in our dreams,’” Lalami recalled at a recent Writers Speak event hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center. “Then I thought, ‘What if someday even that boundary starts to become porous? What might happen?’”

Lalami, author of “The Moor’s Account” (2014) and “The Other Americans” (2019), read an excerpt from “The Dream Hotel,” available in March. Moderator James Wood, professor of the practice of literary criticism, also asked her about multilingualism, narrative structure, and finding inspiration in everyday life.

Even after publishing four novels, Lalami — the 2023-2024 Catherine A. and Mary C. Gellert Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute — said she still describes herself as a “guest” in the English language.

The trilingual author grew up speaking both Arabic and French in post-colonial Morocco. Enrolled at a French primary school, her introduction to the written word came via French children’s classics like “Tintin” and “Asterix.” As an English major at Université Mohammed-V in Rabat, Lalami began to resent how early French education had prevented her from developing that initial literary connection to Arabic. 

“I developed a dislike of writing in French,” Lalami said. “I felt that the more I did it, the more I felt awkward doing it. It felt to me there was a bizarre sort of colonial gaze that I could not detach from the writing.”

Now working in English, Lalami still feels a sense of estrangement from the language. But she’s able to channel it into her creative process. As a writer, she sometimes imagines her dialogue is taking place in Arabic and she is translating it to English. This was particularly the case with her second novel, “Secret Son” (2009).

“If the story is successful, we forget to question things like what language they are speaking,” Lalami said.

As for narrative structure, Lalami spoke to the tendency of starting her books in the middle of a story, including multiple character perspectives and adding elaborate backstories. 

She stumbled upon the approach “organically” with her first novel, “Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits” (2005), which opens with the capsizing of an inflatable boat carrying four Moroccans across the Strait of Gibraltar. From there, the narrative shifts between each of the characters, detailing their lives before and after the crossing. 

“I started writing the story of this character as he’s going through this journey, and the story kept getting longer because I was doing these flashbacks about his life before he got onto that boat,” Lalami explained. “I thought, ‘Well, what happens to this other person that’s sitting next to him?’ So I decided to write a story about them.”

Similarly, “The Other Americans,” her fourth novel and a National Book Award finalist, begins with a car crash and unfolds through nine different first-person accounts. Wood, who is also a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker, noted the rich details that bring the book’s immigrant characters to life — from the main character, a Moroccan man who names his California business “Aladdin’s Donuts,” to his wife’s confusion over an English sign that reads: “Don’t even think about parking here.” 

“If we think of the fiction of immigration, it’s so centrally about varieties of estrangement, right?” Wood said. “It’s about trying to see things with new eyes.”

Lalami said she loves building characters’ backstories right down to the smallest detail. “As somebody who constantly feels as an outsider, I’ve come to realize that it’s very much the outsider-ness that makes me a writer,” she said. “That feeling of being on the outside looking in.”

The outsider perspective is what prompted Lalami to write “The Moor’s Account,” which won the American Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The novel is the fictionalized memoir of Estevanico, an enslaved Moroccan on the ill-fated 1528 Narváez expedition to Florida. His name appears only in passing in historical records, inspiring Lalami to reconstruct his backstory before and after the expedition. 

During the Q&A session, a student asked Lalami about the steps on her journey to becoming a writer, which included a linguistics Ph.D. program and a stint at a majority-male tech company. 

Lalami responded with the same advice she gives to students in MFA programs: Every life experience can become material for fiction. Case in point? Her forthcoming novel features a female main character working at a large tech company.

“That is what helps you become a writer, is that feeling that you’re kind of weird and different from everybody,” Lalami said. “Don’t ever try to be like everybody else. Embrace that weirdness, because that’s what fiction comes out of.”

Alan Garber was installed as Harvard’s 31st president in a celebration attended by colleagues, University leaders, and family and friends Saturday at the Harvard Art Museums.

Provost for almost 13 years, Garber was named president in August, after serving as interim leader since January, and has navigated the University through a period of extraordinary challenges and intense scrutiny. Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, pointed to Garber’s character and experience in praising him for meeting the moment.

The University’s new president “is a person of deep learning, strong values, bedrock integrity, and a fierce commitment to academic excellence,” she said.

Garber, an economist, physician, and health policy scholar, opened his remarks by thanking those in attendance, including his wife and children, for preparing him for his new role. Among those gathered for the ceremony were past Harvard presidents Larry Summers, Drew Faust, Larry Bacow, and Claudine Gay.

“Nothing fortifies quite like a room full of colleagues and dear friends, including my partners in the work and my predecessors in the Holyoke chair,” he said. “This is, in some ways, an inverted lecture. Each of you has taught me important lessons that have guided me to this point.”

He went on to note that the University is facing uncertain times that will require both robust collaboration and an unwavering commitment to integrity and excellence, including in its pursuit of the research and teaching that define its mission. Success will depend in part on embracing risk, he said.

“An excessive aversion to risk is a risk in and of itself. We must keep in mind, always, that the mistakes we have made — individually and collectively — may have been plentiful, but we have our long history to celebrate because they have not been fatal. Assuming that this trend continues, our history demands that we plan — boldly — for a very long future. We need to think not only in years and decades, but also in centuries.”

He added: “We forfeit opportunities when we feel as though the University cannot make a move without considering every possible ramification, without fully understanding every possible consequence. In a world that confronts us with challenges and opportunities more frequently than ever before, we will need to move forward with greater alacrity — and to correct course more quickly — than has been our custom.”

Faust, who as president named Garber provost in 2011, recruiting him from Stanford University, described a colleague whose hunger for knowledge is deep and inspiring.

“Alan is interested in everything, curious about everything … he is an intellectual and a practitioner, a thinker and a doer,” she said, nodding to Garber’s experience in medicine, economics, and policy, as well as his love for the arts and humanities. “At a time when trust in institutions generally, and in higher education in particular, has eroded so markedly, Alan radiates trustworthiness.”

William F. Lee, who preceded Pritzker as senior fellow of the Corporation, praised Garber as a leader of “unflappability and humility” who has demonstrated a “fundamental and unwavering determination to advance the best interests of the institution and the broader Harvard community.”

Vivian Y. Hunt, president of the Board of Overseers, said that Garber’s long record of contributions to the University reflects his strengths as a person and a leader.

“Since being formally elected to this presidency this summer, you continued to carry the mantle of leadership with humility, heart, spirit, humor, resilience, and resolve,” Hunt said.

The ceremony included the presentation by Garber’s predecessors of several insignia of the office. Dating to the 17th century, the insignia are traditionally given to each new Harvard president. Faust said that the tradition was not just an opportunity for Garber to pledge his leadership to the community, but also for the community to pledge its support to him.

“It’s a ritual that encompasses all of us, not just the man of honor,” said Faust, the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor. “We affirm our support for Alan as he embarks on his presidency, and as he navigates through change and through storm. And we pledge our commitment to doing all we can to ensure that Harvard thrives and the pursuit of veritas prevails in the decades and the centuries to come.”

The impact of that commitment extends far beyond campus, Garber noted, citing the promise of young scientists, pioneering research by recent Nobel laureates, and the service of Harvard veterans.

“The work done at Harvard — the good it does in the world — the good it will do in the world — is wonderfully abundant,” he said.

The ceremony concluded with a benediction by Rabbi William G. Hamilton of Congregation Kehillath Israel and the singing of “Fair Harvard” by Carolyn Y. Hao ’26.

Ceramicist Roberto Lugo shared his work and his best advice with students who dropped by his residency at the Office for the Arts in mid-November.

“I really want to demystify that idea that art is only for people who have those gifts or people who have historically had access to it,” Lugo said in an interview. “For me, art is for everyone. One of the most satisfying parts about art is seeing someone figure out something that they offer that they didn’t think they did.”

The Puerto Rican artist, activist, and educator, whose pots can be found in a growing number of museum collections, worked with more than a dozen undergraduates — most of them women of color — over two days of campus workshops. Each visitor was offered a chance to work on cups or tiles, with Lugo providing generous coaching on everything from perfecting patterns to painting over gray clay. He even opened up about his Philadelphia upbringing and the inspiration he draws from hip-hop.

“During each workshop with undergraduates, Roberto inspired students to think about their lives and cultural backgrounds as a starting point and an indicator of what makes them unique,” observed Kathy King, director of the Ceramics Program and Visual Arts Initiatives at the OFA. “He then asked them to think about the words that came to mind, creating a visual vocabulary to decorate both cups and tiles with florals, text, and colorful patterns, among other things.”

Institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art  have acquired Lugo’s work in recent years. Tiffany Onyeiwu ’25, who has a concentration in film and visual studies, is a frequent visitor to these spaces and was excited to meet the artist behind some of her favorite pieces.

“It’s been really inspiring to see an artist who has such a significant part of themselves embedded in their work,” said Onyeiwu, who attended both of the workshops Lugo offered. “Contemporary ceramics is becoming more prevalent in American culture, which is something that I’m excited and grateful for.”

Lugo also engaged with the community during a packed public lecture Monday evening at Harvard’s Ed Portal in Allston.

The event opened with performances by Salome Agbaroji ’27 and Elyse Martin-Smith ’25, social studies concentrators who delivered rhymes loaded with clever pottery references. Martin-Smith commemorated the 19th-century work of David Drake, a Black potter who produced a body of vessels while enslaved in South Carolina. Agbaroji, the 2023 National Youth Poet Laureate, captured attention with witty lyrics that cautioned listeners to “just stay out of the kiln” if they can’t “take the heat.”

“I was trying to write something that was very accessible and engaging to honor what pottery is and also honor the hip-hop culture that is so heavily infused in Roberto Lugo’s work,” said Agbaroji.

Lugo’s presentation covered some of his most popular artwork as well as the people, music, and life events that affected his creative process. While most of Lugo’s art takes inspiration from European and Asian ceramic practices, he is also deeply influenced by Mexican and Peruvian ceramics as well as the textile traditions of Indigenous communities of the Americas.

“One of the specific things that is a challenge for me is that a lot of those communities are still struggling for representation of their own culture,” he said. “Even though I’m inspired by it and some of my work is influenced by it, I quite often stick to formats that are in many ways tropes or familiar visual elements from ceramics history. I try to be very thoughtful with where I borrow from, because I don’t want to replace a culture.”

Another of Lugo’s trademarks is pottery that incorporates portraits, from historical figures such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. to influential musicians like Biggie Smalls and Erykah Badu. Lugo linked his penchant for portraiture to growing up amid Philadelphia’s great mural scene, with walls featuring people of color.

“Since I didn’t have any art history in school, that was really my perception of what art was,” Lugo said.

More recent works mix traditional methods with broader representative narratives. His “Orange and Black” series, for example, plays on ancient Greek glazed terracotta with modern depictions of city life.

Back at the Ceramics Program studio, Lugo shared a testament of the connective powers of artwork. “As an artist, there’s many different ways to engage with people outside of your own body,” he said. “One of them is through the physical artwork itself. There’s the display of the artwork and how it interacts and engages with people. There’s the educational facet to it, which is giving people the autonomy to make their own artwork. And then there’s the conversations that get created through both education and art-making. For me, that’s where the magic happens.”

Penny Pritzker ’81, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, reflected on a year of transition and challenge for the campus community and outlined her plans for the year ahead in a recent conversation with the Gazette. Pritzker touched on engagement efforts underway at the Corporation, including a new approach to inform the next presidential search, and shared her perspective on ongoing work across the University to advance constructive dialogue and bring the community together.

A leader in business and philanthropy and former U.S. secretary of commerce, Pritzker joined the Harvard Corporation in 2018 and was elected senior fellow in 2022. She also served on Harvard’s Board of Overseers from 2002 to 2008.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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We’re coming toward the end of the semester and the end of a difficult year for Harvard and for higher education. How do you reflect on where we are now and how you and the Corporation are thinking about the year ahead?

Let’s not sugarcoat it — it’s been a painful and challenging year for Harvard, and I believe it’s important to acknowledge that even as we’ve begun to build for the future. We’ve faced relentless scrutiny about every aspect of the University, from stakeholders inside and outside the institution. We’re dealing with deep divisions that have emerged in our community due to the war in the Middle East. We are addressing longstanding challenges related to constructive dialogue on our campus and beyond, and we are cognizant of the need to ensure that a wide range of opinions and perspectives can be heard on campus. All of us on the Corporation are grateful to President [Alan] Garber and his team for charting a path through these difficult challenges. I feel optimistic that we are making progress, at the same time as all parts of the University are driving forward remarkable progress and excellence in our teaching and research mission.

Reflecting on the year, what are the lessons that the Corporation is taking on board and how are you planning to respond to those?

There are many lessons. We’ve certainly sought to listen and learn from the community. We have heard the community’s desire for greater transparency. We’ve heard concerns that the Corporation hasn’t engaged with the community sufficiently — and that feedback has informed our approach. We have made an intentional commitment to strengthen engagement and communication. My fellow Corporation members and I have participated in faculty town halls, regular dinners, and small group meetings with faculty members, meetings with the various task forces, and robust engagement with alumni on campus, locally and through virtual events around the country. In the last few weeks I met with the co-chairs of the Presidential Task Forces on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias and on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias, and I have been on campus often to meet with faculty, students, administrators, including at events around the Harvard-Yale game.

It is important to ensure we have the pulse of the community and that we are listening intently to the stakeholders in our community so that we understand how to best support Alan and his leadership team in advancing the priorities of the University. We understand that for the well-being of all our students, our community, and our mission, we need to be more open. So, our engagement will continue particularly as we approach discussions around advancing key academic or other priorities, as well as, importantly, the next presidential search. We know in such a dynamic institution that neither the Corporation nor the administration has all the answers. That is why listening, engaging, and taking advice are so critical.

“I feel optimistic that we are making progress, at the same time as all parts of the University are driving forward remarkable progress and excellence in our teaching and research mission.”

On the presidential search, you recently announced a new committee to look at the process moving forward. How is the Corporation thinking differently about the next search?

The new Presidential Search Process Committee will provide advice to the Corporation about best practices for the search for the 32nd president of Harvard, which will begin in late spring of 2026. The work this committee is undertaking, including engagement across our community and externally, will inform how we ultimately undertake that search. Everything from who should be on the search committee, to how faculty and the broader community are engaged. What kind of external support do we need to undertake the search? The mandate for this committee is broad and our interest in advice is sincere.

I will say that our last search was both robust and wide-ranging. We consulted extensively and considered a wide range of candidates before selecting Claudine Gay, who was unanimously selected as the right choice at that time. But we recognize circumstances have changed and we need to think about the search with that in mind and how we best proceed from where we are. We approach this with a lot of humility and a determination to get the right leadership for an institution we all care about so deeply.

Can you say more about the new committee?

In the months ahead, this committee will engage our community to hear thoughts and considerations on how we undertake the next presidential search. They will also continue to gather information on how other institutions conduct these types of searches and look broadly for best practices. The membership is made up of three members of the Corporation — Biddy Martin, Ken Frazier, and Diana Nelson — and three members who will bring perspectives from outside the Corporation: Sylvia Burwell, who is on the Board of Overseers and was president of American University; Patti Saris, who is a former president of the Overseers and federal judge; and Brad Bloom, who has been a successful business leader. All three are alums who have contributed a wide range of other service to the Harvard community.

Alan Garber has been widely praised for his leadership during a tough period. How would you reflect on his presidency so far?

I believe Alan Garber is doing an outstanding job. He has been thoughtful and intentional in advancing our mission and priorities, as well as leading in ways to heal and strengthen our community during a very challenging period. This isn’t just my view, as I also hear this from faculty, alumni, and other leaders. He has helped the community come together, set in motion important initiatives to tackle hate and to encourage and foster open inquiry and constructive dialogue, and all the while helped move forward our incredibly important teaching and research mission.

What would you say has been the hallmark of his leadership to this point?

What we hear from people within Harvard and from many outside is that Alan engages with authenticity and without defensiveness. He is willing to acknowledge that Harvard is not perfect and that of course we have more work to do. I believe Alan is well-positioned to bring the community along with him as we address these challenges.

A great example of this is the work he set in motion on constructive dialogue and open inquiry. In this area, Alan has encouraged deans and faculty to create opportunities for debate and discussion across difference. He and Provost [John] Manning deserve huge credit for that and for leading the work on institutional voice and open inquiry. The report of the working group led by Tomiko Brown-Nagin and Eric Beerbohm brought into sharp focus the problem of students and faculty self-censoring and the implications of that for an academic community.

At the same time, Alan and the entire Corporation are deeply dedicated to ensuring that we center academic excellence in Harvard’s teaching, learning, and research mission. As chief academic officer when he was provost and now as president, Alan firmly believes in the work that happens in classrooms and labs as the core of our mission. So, you see, we can strengthen our community, bridge the divides that exist, and model the very forms of constructive dialogue that are vital to a place like Harvard, while simultaneously celebrating and advancing the teaching, learning, and scholarship that are core to our mission.

“It is important to ensure we have the pulse of the community and that we are listening intently to the stakeholders in our community so that we understand how to best support Alan and his leadership team in advancing the priorities of the University.”

How should the University be considering engaging with the new political landscape in Washington?

While we don’t know precisely what proposals that affect higher education will look like, we believe that engaging with leaders in Washington is critical. Harvard and institutions of higher education across the country must continue to make a strong case for the effective and strong partnership between higher education and the federal government. We cannot take it for granted. This is a partnership that has offered considerable return for the American people in the form of medical discoveries and treatments, insights and innovations that provide personal opportunity for so many in our country, and research and extraordinary innovations that power the U.S. economy as well as improve U.S. competitiveness in critical industries and across the globe.

Fundamentally, in this time of great change I believe that higher education can do more to expand opportunity for many, whether that’s economically or from a well-being standpoint.

Alan has been in Washington on six occasions in the last year, and I know he is planning to continue his advocacy for this partnership in research funding, financial aid, and other areas. This is work that has my support as well as that of all the other fellows.

It’s been widely discussed that the portrayal of Harvard from some outside the University bears little resemblance to the day-to-day experience of those living, working, studying, and researching within the community. Do you feel that some things get lost in the noisy swirl around higher education right now?

Yes, it is frankly striking to be on campus and to speak with hundreds of students, faculty, and others over the course of the last year. The focus here remains — as it has always been — on the pursuit of excellence on every front. Supporting that campus environment is something the fellows take incredibly seriously, and several times throughout this semester — so far — we’ve been reminded of what is possible here at Harvard.

This includes the eight Harvard College students selected as Rhodes Scholars in recent weeks. Harvard Medical School Professor Gary Ruvkun was named a Nobel laureate. Earlier this semester, we had the announcement of a new AI-driven cancer diagnostics tool developed by HMS researchers. Just last month, we saw the launch of the Lavine Learning Lab at the A.R.T., with support from Jonathan and Jeannie Lavine, which will strengthen engagement between public high schools and the A.R.T.’s groundbreaking theatrical programming.

These are all exciting developments and recognitions. They are also powerful examples of how our community provides the opportunity for our students and faculty to pursue excellence, and along the way impact lives well beyond the boundaries of our campus.

Advancing excellence is where President Garber is focused and the Corporation is fully supportive. Together, we are listening and learning. The University is on the right track and making progress under Alan’s leadership. Of course, we will face hurdles and challenges. But let’s step back. Harvard is a special place and a special community. All of us are committed to the mission of excellence in teaching, learning, and research, as well as to the goal of ensuring the well-being of all members of our community — students, faculty, staff, and more.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with my peers at dinner and in class about religion. I grew up very Christian, but when I came to Harvard, I started questioning a lot of the beliefs I grew up with: Maybe what I believed to be true wasn’t exactly what I thought it was. 

When I look at Christianity now, as much as I see a message of love, I also see a lot of issues with the way that it’s practiced. I wanted to become more open, learning more about my friends’ religions and also getting involved with multiple different populations. There are so many people with so many different mindsets and beliefs here and so I felt like it was the best place to explore. 

At one point, I was bordering on being agnostic or spiritual, but one thing that stuck with me is the fact that I never once thought that I didn’t want to believe in something. Even after I spoke to so many people, I find importance in religion, not just because it’s something you should follow, but because it’s just nice to have faith in something even if it might not be real. I think it’s an important comfort for some people that they might not be able to find it anywhere else. 

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I took a class called “Microbial Symbioses,” and I’m not a STEM person but that class really expanded my mind. We saw the different ways we interact with bacteria or microorganisms, and the way society tends to see microbes as enemies. We tend to be germophobic and sanitized. We tend to see them as related to plague and illness. But this class showed that we live because of microbes. Everything that is living interacts with microbiology. Even in coral reefs, the microbes allow the coral to survive. 

One of the chapters we read talked about how hospitals usually keep their windows shut. But because of the way microbes flow in the air, it is better to have open windows in hospitals. There have been studies that show having open windows in hospitals allows patients to recover faster. We tend to see health as correlated with sanitation. We don’t want to get infected. But this class was reframing it as having people infected with the correct microbes, microbes that are beneficial, as opposed to not being infected. It’s an interesting way of reshaping medicine. 

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Last summer I was going to do research on noodles. It was the most bizarre and random topic I could think of. I was really confused when I was writing my proposal. There were so many theories, so many methodologies, so many different ways of doing it. There was so much information out there. HOLLIS was swarming me with texts. 

So I was going to Friday dinner at Pfoho, and I happened to meet a Dining Services worker whom I see every week. It just so happened that day they were serving a cuisine that was native to her. And she was talking to me about the food, where it came from, and how happy she was to see her own local traditions being represented. She gave me a whole backstory about her upbringing, her recipes, her life experiences. I was amazed by her passion and the joy she had in talking about food. And then that got me thinking: “What if I throw away all that theory for a second, and I just steep myself in good old ethnography? Forget the theory, forget all these big academic ideas. Listen to the stories, learn from them, collect them, make sense of them later.” That’s what I did. So for the past three months, I’ve been doing noodle research in Japan, Mongolia, Korea, and Greece. I went through a typhoon, I went to the mountains, got lost on a bus, I went through all sorts of different things. It was amazing, an absolute blast. And it all started with me getting answers to a question I didn’t know I had. 

You expect the best conversations to be in class, to be with your professors, to be with your teaching fellows, to be with your classmates. And that’s true, you know. They give you wonderful conversations. But sometimes, it’s the places you least expect that you get the most out of. To that end, I always say that conversation is about two things: It’s about trust, and it’s about humility. You need to be humble enough to learn from anyone and everyone you meet. Also, from that trust, from that bond between people that gets you talking not just from the mind but from the heart. Get them to share what really means something to them. That’s something that really changed my life this summer. 

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During the summer, when we first got our rooming assignments, I found I was going to be in a room with four different girls. This is a hallway situation, so there’s one shared bathroom. We had three singles and one double. All of us obviously wanted a single, including myself. And because I’m very introverted, I didn’t know how to say it to them. So I sucked it up. Me and this other girl were like, “You know what? Let’s stop fighting. We’ll be in the double together.” When I got here, I wasn’t in the best mood because of this entire situation. But I ended up loving all of them. I love the hallway situation. We actually opened our suite doors so that we would have one long suite together. And I’m so close with all of them. I don’t know where my introvertedness went to — it’s definitely still there — but I’m definitely so much more extroverted than I was in high school. I love my roommate, and I really like everybody in the hallway. I don’t know how I got here. I’m so extroverted now, and I’m so social. 

Even if you’re in a room of four girls you’ve never met in your entire life — one is international, we’re from everywhere all over the country — even if it’s completely random, there’s so many different ways to get along and connect with them, even if you’re so introverted like I was in high school. I’ve loved my experience at Harvard so far, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it for my next four years. And I’m actually planning on blocking with them. I’m not really the type to say my thoughts very much. Even if I have opinions, I just keep it to myself so that there’s no conflicts. But my roommates are very straightforward. They will come to me and be like, “No. Speak your truths. Say your things. Don’t keep it to yourself.” That made me a lot more open with all of them, and that definitely improved our relationship.

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Last year, I took a class, “Race, Gender, and Performance.” Growing up in a very traditional Asian household, the ideas of sexual orientation and gender are not really talked about. I started from knowing what a man is and what a woman is. I didn’t really understand the psychological aspects of gender. After this class, my perspective changed, in the sense that I’d thought that gender was really a biological factor, but I realized it’s something that changes between different individuals. Despite the fact there are psychological differences between people, there’s actually a very logical explanation for a lot of things. That’s what I learned through the different gender theories in the class. When I was growing up, the idea of studying gender and race seemed like a waste of time, especially because my parents valued hard technical classes like STEM, math, physics, etc. Learning gender theory helped me understand individuals who don’t relate to heterosexual norms. 

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Coming in, I was looking to do a major where I made the most money. I talked to a lacrosse teammate, and he told me I should focus on what I’m interested in. I should enjoy my time here as much as I can. The major doesn’t matter. You could go find a job where you’ll make money, and with a major that you’re interested in, you can find a job that you’re interested in as well. That was probably the best piece of advice I’ve gotten here. That made me change the way I look at how I’ll do school over the next few years.

— As told to Danny Laughary ’25, Harvard Correspondent

Every week, Harvard Medical School neuro-oncologist Annie Hsieh treats patients with gliomas — the most common type of brain cancer, including the deadliest, glioblastoma.

After Hsieh’s neurosurgeon colleagues remove a glioma surgically, it often looks like none of the cancer is left behind, she says. Radiation and other treatments may follow. Yet gliomas tend to come back, not just at the original site but in distant parts of the brain, threatening neurological harm and, in some cases, death.

What happens in the brain to encourage these tumors to regrow there, while only rarely appearing in other parts of the body? The question has stumped scientists for decades and made gliomas one of the hardest-to-treat cancers. It’s also a mystery that physician-scientist Hsieh has long wanted to solve.

Now, she and HMS collaborators have filled in a piece of the puzzle by providing the first look at the types of neurons in the brain that connect to gliomas. 

The team’s findings were reported Wednesday in PNAS.

Profiling the identities and properties of such glioma-innervating neurons in mice provides new insights into what drives these cancers’ formation and spread in the brain. The findings can also help researchers devise new treatment strategies to stop these tumors from coming back. 

“This is a first step that provides a visual explanation for why the tumors can be everywhere in the brain,” said Hsieh, first author of the study and HMS instructor in neurology at Mass General Hospital. “We can now see where the connected neurons originate, study how they integrate with gliomas, and look for opportunities to interrupt growth.”

“It’s fascinating how the neural network functions and how these super-scary tumors integrate with and infiltrate the entire nervous system.”

Annie Hsieh, neuro-oncologist 

The study overcomes a long-standing obstacle to visualizing and analyzing the neurons that link with gliomas and demonstrates a way to advance the study of interactions between tumors and the nervous system more broadly.

Hsieh conducted the work when she was a research fellow in neurobiology in the lab of Bernardo Sabatini and in cell biology in the lab of Marcia Haigis in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS. Haigis and Sabatini are co-senior authors of the study.

How gliomas hack the network

Gliomas arise from glia, cells that perform essential functions in sculpting and maintaining neural circuits. Scientists already knew that neurons form synapses onto glioma cells, but they couldn’t see where the other ends of those neurons (the cell bodies) are in the brain. That obscured the neurons’ identities.

Hsieh and team successfully traced the glioma-innervating neurons back to their sources using a rabies virus engineered to infect only specific cells of interest and to light up those cells when it gets in. The virus travels from the tumor cell back through the neuron that connects to it.

The researchers injected human glioma cells into the brains of mice and waited for neurons to connect with the tumors. They then applied the rabies virus to light up cells of interest. Soon, they had a picture illuminating the mouse brains showing all the glowing neurons that led to the glioma.

The maps revealed that the gliomas hook into existing patterns of neuronal wiring.

“The wires are already there; the gliomas just connect to them,” Hsieh said. “They hijack what’s already in place rather than forming their own arbitrary connections.”

And those neurons originate from across the brain, the researchers observed.

“They come all the way from the interior part of brain to go to the tumor,” Hsieh said. “It’s fascinating how the neural network functions and how these super-scary tumors integrate with and infiltrate the entire nervous system.”

Unmasking neurons’ secret identities

The team found that most of the glioma-innervating neurons extending from the far reaches of the brain are the type that makes glutamate, a major brain chemical that excites neurons. This finding aligns with previous observations that neuronal excitation stimulates glioma growth, and that neuron-glioma communication involves glutamate.

Subsets of the far-reaching glioma-innervating neurons, though, showed signs that they make both glutamate and another chemical called GABA, which inhibits neuronal activity. In some brain areas, glioma-innervating neurons from near the tumor site appeared to be largely GABAergic.

The results suggest that neurons that interact with glioma cells are more diverse than currently appreciated. The implications of this for tumor growth and spread are not yet known.

“We see that the tumor is connected to everywhere. Whether these connections provide a path for them to go everywhere is something we need to study,” Hsieh said.

The team probed the electrical properties of the glioma-innervating neurons and found certain differences between them and similar neurons in brains without glioma. Such variations between normal and glioma-innervating neurons or between neuron-neuron and neuron-glioma interactions offer valuable clues to researchers like Hsieh, who seek ways to intervene in cancerous processes while preserving normal function.

The need to develop glioma treatments is urgent, Hsieh said. Researchers have tried to treat gliomas with drugs that work for other types of cancers, but most of them have failed, she noted. 

“By unraveling the drivers of glioma-neuron interactions and identifying unique mechanisms, we can explore strategies to interrupt them, potentially stopping the tumors in their tracks and preventing their return,” Hsieh said.

Although she knows it will be many years before discoveries made in the lab translate into therapies for her patients with glioma and others around the world, Hsieh remains optimistic that these latest insights can help move the field forward.

“It’s not close to the clinic yet,” she said, “but it’s one inch forward.”

Additional authors include Sanika Ganesh, Tomasz Kula, Madiha Irshad, Emily A. Ferenczi, Wengang Wang, Yi-Ching Chen, Song-Hua Hu, Zongyu Li, and Shakchhi Joshi.

This work was supported the National Institutes of Health (including National Cancer Institute award K12CA090354), Howard Hughes r Institute, Lubin Family Foundation Scholar Award, American Academy of Neurology, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Ludwig Center at HMS, and Glenn Foundation for Medical Research. Confocal images were acquired at the Core for Imaging Technology & Education at HMS, and fluorescence in situ hybridization was performed by the Neurobiology Imaging Facility at HMS.

Haigis received research funding from Agilent Technologies and ReFuel Bio; serves on the scientific advisory boards of Alixia, Minovia Therapeutics, and MitoQ; is on the editorial boards of Cell Metabolism and Molecular Cell; and is a consultant and founder of ReFuel Bio.

For Jo Keefe, the trembling hands and trouble walking were bad, but it was the nausea that was truly debilitating.

“For two or three years, I was having nausea for several hours every day,” said Keefe, a retired lawyer living in New Hampshire who suffers from Parkinson’s disease. “I’d wake up in the morning feeling sick and I couldn’t make any plans at all. Fortunately, I was retired, but I wasn’t planning on this for my retirement.”

Parkinson’s is a neurodegenerative disorder affecting cells that control movement. Patients and the doctors who treat them have long known that severe gastrointestinal issues — nausea, abdominal pain, diarrhea, constipation — are a feature of the condition, in some cases preceding neurological dysfunction by decades. But in recent years research around the disease has started to point to a connection that is more than incidental. The gut, experts say, may be where Parkinson’s starts.

Such a model, if supported by future research, would revolutionize our understanding of the nation’s second most common neurodegenerative disorder, opening a path for specialists to help patients like Keefe before neurological symptoms appear. It would also have the potential to inform treatment of other neurodegenerative disorders, including some of the most devastating in human health.

“What if you were able to get your screening colonoscopy and be told there’s a sign that you’ll progress to Parkinson’s unless we intervene now. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had a way to intervene now?”

Trisha Pasricha, specialist in neurogastroenterology and director of clinical research at Beth Israel’s Institute for Gut-Brain Research

“Everyone’s goal is to find an early biomarker for Parkinson’s and our hope is that we can find one in the gut,” said Trisha Pasricha, a specialist in neurogastroenterology and director of clinical research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Institute for Gut-Brain Research. “What if you were able to get your screening colonoscopy and be told there’s a sign that you’ll progress to Parkinson’s unless we intervene now? And wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had a way to intervene now? There are many steps that need to happen, but that’s the goal.”

Central to Pasricha’s vision is the gut’s enteric nervous system, which contains as many neurons as the spinal cord and presides over digestive processes that function as the body’s intake department: proteins, carbohydrates, alcohol, drugs, fiber, agricultural pesticides, hormones given to livestock, chemicals used in food processing, bacteria, viruses, and on and on. The system processes signals about what we’ve consumed and how to respond: throw it back up or move it along; speed it up or slow it down.

Also key: a focus on the two-way nature of the gut-brain connection. Stress caused by the perception of potential danger can cause digestive ills, for example, while signals from the gut’s own nervous system, the enteric nervous system, can spur the brain into mobilizing the body via hunger, cravings, nausea, and pain.

“The enteric nervous system is this large network that runs throughout the gut,” Pasricha said. “It’s constantly signaling, influencing our mood, our wants, our needs. Some of the earliest animals had an enteric nervous system well before anyone developed a brain, well before anyone developed a central nervous system, because we all had to eat. It’s like the OG of our bodies.”

The gut-brain connection goes both ways. Stress caused by the perception of danger can cause digestive ills, for example, while signals from the gut’s enteric nervous system can spur the brain into mobilizing the body via hunger, nausea, and pain.

The gut is also home to the microbiome, a symbiotic community of thousands of species of bacteria and other microbes whose chemical byproducts promote health by protecting against pathogens and regulating immunity. Except, that is, when the balance fails, and symbiosis turns to “dysbiosis,” in which the chemicals released by our microbial companions interfere with healthful processes. Researchers have only scratched the surface of the microbiome’s complexity, but they’ve identified shifts in the gut microbial community — some bacteria populations rise and others fall — not only in Parkinson’s but in Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

“Parkinson’s disease is very well known and that galvanizes a lot of research,” Pasricha said. “What we often find in science is that when we understand mechanisms behind one disease, it teaches us lessons that we can apply to the other diseases too.”

Theories of the case

There is some variation in Parkinson’s disease, which affects nearly 1 million Americans, but the most common form of the condition, sporadic Parkinson’s, is believed to stem from a complex interaction of environmental and genetic factors.

The disease develops over decades and is caused by a misfolded protein — alpha-synuclein — accumulating in dopaminergic neurons, which play a key role in regulating movement, cognition, and emotion. This process leads to the disease’s characteristic tremors, followed by slowed movements, altered gait, and impaired balance. The impact on neck and facial muscles slurs speech. Patients can experience difficulty swallowing, leading, in later stages, to the need for a feeding tube. The degeneration can spread to other types of neurons and, in some cases, contribute to dementia.

In 2016, researchers examined samples of gut tissue taken from Parkinson’s patients before they developed symptoms. They found alpha-synuclein present in the gut as early as two decades before it appeared in the brain. Additional studies have offered clues to how the protein might travel to the brain, showing that peptic ulcer patients who underwent vagotomies — severance of the main nerve connecting the gut and the brain — experienced significantly lower incidence of Parkinson’s disease.

These findings have led some scientists to embrace the idea that alpha-synuclein appears first in the gut in some forms of Parkinson’s. There, the protein — or changes associated with it — may create disturbances in the enteric nervous system, causing severe constipation, gastroparesis, and other hallmark Parkinson’s gut symptoms. It then moves up the vagus nerve to the central nervous system, where it begins the assault that leads to neurodegeneration.

In September, Pasricha and colleagues added to that emerging picture, linking damage to the mucosa that lines the upper small intestine to Parkinson’s disease. The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that among more than 9,000 patients with no signs of Parkinson’s when they were examined, those with mucosal damage experienced a dramatically increased risk — 76 percent — of later developing the disease.

Subhash Kulkarni, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and co-author on the paper, cautioned that while the results are intriguing, much work remains. Scientists still don’t know for sure what alpha-synuclein does in the gut, he noted, and the protein has also been found in the skin and salivary glands.

“These are initial forays,” Kulkarni said. “The relevance of these proteins in the gut to Parkinson’s is still not well understood.”

Beyond Parkinson’s

Laura Cox arrived at Brigham and Women’s in 2019 for postdoctoral studies on the microbiome, focusing on multiple sclerosis, a neurodegenerative condition in which the immune system attacks the myelin insulation that sheathes nerve cells. She worked in the lab of Howard Weiner, the Robert L. Kroc Professor of Neurology, who kept a plaque on his desk that read “Cure as many diseases as possible.” She took that admonition to heart.

“We said, ‘If we’re going to do the microbiome and MS, we’re going to work with our neighbors across the hall,’” said Cox, today an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and the Brigham’s Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases. “A really important thing that’s emerging is that there is clear evidence that the gut microbiome can influence neurologic disease.”

In addition to MS, Cox’s lab works on Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and ALS, trying to decipher how gut microbes influence diseases that a few decades ago were thought to be confined to the brain and central nervous system. What she and other experts have found is that “dysbiosis” — shifts in the microbiome favoring one species of bacteria over another — occurs in each condition. And some of the same names keep popping up: Bacteroidetes, Akkermansia, Blautia, and Prevotella, among others.

Neurologist Laura Cox works on MS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Part of her aim is to illuminate how these conditions might be affected by gut microbes.

One area of intense focus is “dysbiosis,” shifts in the microbiome favoring one species of bacteria over another, and some of the same names keep popping up: Bacteroidetes, Akkermansia, Blautia, and Prevotella, among many others.

These bacteria ingest and secrete metabolites that protect or harm health as they live, reproduce, and die, and can trigger neurodegeneration in two major ways, according to Cox. They can interfere with immune function that otherwise might remove harmful proteins such as the amyloid beta that accumulates in Alzheimer’s disease. They can also boost inflammation, an important contributor to the neurological damage in Parkinson’s disease.

“What we found in Alzheimer’s was that Bacteroidetes drove immunosenescence and it blocked this important repair process in which microglia go into the brain and clear out plaques,” Cox said. “In Parkinson’s there’s really strong evidence that the gut microbiota contribute to disease by driving inflammation.”

There are three routes through which gut metabolites affect the brain, according to Francisco Quintana, a professor of neurology at the Brigham whose lab studies the gut-brain axis and neurodegeneration. As in Parkinson’s, they can travel via the nervous system and the vagus nerve. They can also move directly to the brain via the bloodstream, crossing the blood-brain barrier. Third, they can activate immune cells in the gut that travel to the brain and release signaling molecules called cytokines. Those molecules can also cross the blood-brain barrier and trigger the brain’s own immune cells into action.

“I don’t know if it is cause or consequence, but if we model that gut flora, there might be effects on central nervous system pathology — and I think that’s extremely exciting,” Quintana said. “The gut affecting our central nervous system health, our brain health, gives us a unique opportunity to track the brain.”

Forward thinking

In 2020, Aaron Burberry was a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of then-Harvard Professor Kevin Eggan, who had developed a strain of mice that replicated the rare but fatal neurological disease ALS.

Burberry and Eggan created a second population of mice for a lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. These animals were genetically identical to the first set and exposed to similar environmental conditions — same food, same light-dark cycles — but they never developed the ALS-like immune response and nervous system inflammation of their predecessors. That divergence sparked a scramble to understand the difference between the two populations, with the evidence eventually pointing to the microbiome. Some microbes present in the guts of Harvard mice were absent in the Broad Institute mice, the researchers discovered.

Burberry and Eggan also found that manipulating the microbiome with antibiotics or fecal transplants from the Broad mice improved or prevented ALS symptoms in the Harvard mice. Burberry, now a professor at Case Western Reserve University, has built on those results, recently identifying a protein produced by immune cells in response to gut microbes that drives up an immune factor called Interleukin 17A, which triggers inflammation in the genetically engineered mice. The FDA has already approved a drug targeting IL-17A, for psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis, that potentially could be repurposed for ALS. In addition, human trials testing fecal transplant in early ALS patients have begun in Europe.

Work toward gut-based therapeutics for other brain diseases is also moving forward. Rudy Tanzi, an Alzheimer’s specialist and the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Child Neurology and Mental Retardation at Harvard Medical School, is developing a “synbiotic” to boost microbiome health. The synbiotic combines probiotics — healthy bacteria — and prebiotics, high-fiber compounds that encourage their growth. Meanwhile, Quintana is using the tools of synthetic biology to engineer microbes — bacteria, yeast, and viruses — to deliver medication that tamps down inflammation before it becomes a problem.

“We might never be able to tell whether it is actually the microbiome exacerbating it or whether it is just reacting to a deeper perturbation in the body,” Quintana said. “But we can look: Is there something in the microbiome that I can use as a biomarker? Can we exploit the microbiome, or perturbations in the microbiome, to develop novel therapies?”

Democrats and Republicans don’t see eye-to-eye on much. And they often don’t agree on various aspects of renewable energy. But a recent report finds there is one area in which they’re pretty much in sync: how certain national proceeds should be divvied up. 

Results of a recent national poll shows most rank-and-file members of both parties think some revenue from renewable energy produced on federal land should go to states and local communities adjacent to these projects. Right now, it all goes to Washington, D.C. 

The agreement surprised Dustin Tingley, the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and deputy vice provost for advances in learning, who led the survey. 

“I figured that there would be bipartisan support just because of the way people talked about it, but I never expected those sorts of numbers,” Tingley said. “It tells me there are a lot of very reasonable people, common-sense people, in both parties.”   

The nationally representative survey of 2,000 Americans, conducted last spring, showed that 91 percent of Democrats and 87 percent of Republicans, along with 87 percent of Independents and 88 percent identifying as “other,” support distributing revenues from solar, wind, and other renewable energy projects sited on federal land to host states and the nearby communities most likely to be impacted by them.  

Further, a large majority — 83 percent — said they believe renewables on federal lands have the potential to contribute to U.S. energy needs either “greatly,” or “somewhat.” The party breakdown of those responding “greatly” or “somewhat” was 93 percent Democrat, 72 percent Republican, 82 percent Independent, and 78 percent “other.” 

The survey also contained questions about how such funding might be allocated, with respondents suggesting 21 percent to local governments, 27 percent to the federal government, 22 percent to the state, and 30 percent to ecological restoration. 

The results were published in a recent report, “Federal Land Leasing, Energy, and Local Public Finances,” written by Tingley and predoctoral research fellow Ana Martinez, with support from Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability’s Strengthening Community Cluster.  

The poll responses reinforce the report’s contention that federal lawmakers should, in this case, do something that climate activists generally don’t recommend: follow the path forged by fossil fuels. 

Some 30 percent of the country’s land area is owned and managed by the federal government, mostly the Bureau of Land Management. Coal, oil, and other fossil-fuel-extraction operations pay significant rent and royalties to the government: $7 billion in 2023. Federal law also requires revenue-sharing payments to state and county governments, which amounted to some $4 billion that year.  

That money, Tingley said, provides critical support for public programs, including schools and county governments. With the exception of some offshore wind installations and the nation’s relatively few geothermal plants, revenue from renewable energy projects on federal lands goes directly to the U.S. Treasury. 

As of April 2024, the report said, 41 wind, 53 solar, and 67 geothermal projects were permitted on public lands, which, when all are built, will generate 17.3 gigawatts of power, about enough to power 13 million homes. At the end of 2023, there were 150.5 GW of wind and 137.5 GW of solar in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Energy. 

The different treatment of revenue-sharing between different types of energy generation makes no sense, either to Tingley or to many in the industry and in those nearby communities, said Tingley, who, in drafting the report, also conducted interviews with stakeholders. 

“At first, honestly, I couldn’t believe it,” Tingley said about his reaction when he understood the discrepancy. “It’s just so odd. And no matter the angle — if I looked at it as if I’m the Biden administration or a Democrat, or as if I’m a Republican, I was left just puzzled about why it was set up this way.” 

Tingley eventually gave up trying to figure out the logic and put it down to a quirk of recent political history. After all, when relevant legislation on solar and wind permitting was being drafted, the U.S. had little renewable energy, so it was a difference that perhaps didn’t matter much. 

Today, the situation has changed. Many more wind and solar projects have gone up. And the prospect of getting a significant revenue share might generate local support for renewable power at a time when the nation’s plans to fight climate change demand an increase in installations.  

Tingley pointed out that, though members of the two parties might align on this issue as a practical matter, the philosophy behind that agreement likely comes from different points of view. 

“There are tons of renewables in Republican areas, and I think people there ask, ‘Why are we keeping all the money with the feds?’” Tingley said. “On the Democrat side, you’re trying to push renewables. And then there’s a common-sense, kind of ‘plain jeans’ feeling of ‘Why are we treating different types of energy differently to begin with?’” 

Tingley said the agreement on the topic appears to extend from the grassroots to Congress, where proposals have been drafted on both sides of the aisle. Those proposals, however, have languished for reasons that are unclear. Any shift would take money from the federal budget, but the figures are small enough that they shouldn’t be deal-breakers, Tingley said. 

In addition, he pointed out, passage of such legislation would signal to voters that Washington still can pass common-sense policies that benefit ordinary people and local communities, in this case those on the front lines of the energy transition. 

“We’re not talking Wall Street; we’re talking Main Street and people living in rural areas,” Tingley said. “People on both sides, when presented with reasonable policy, will support it. There’s not enough of that being brought home by our elected officials because each side just wants to win for their own purposes rather than win for the American people.”  

Technically, when doing something nice for another person you’re not supposed to think about what’s in it for you. Yet it turns out putting others first is one of the kindest things you can do for yourself. In “The Biology of Kindness: Six Daily Choices for Health, Well-Being, and Longevity,” Harvard’s Immaculata De Vivo and co-author Daniel Lumera explore the scientific evidence that prosocial behavior can unlock longer, healthier, happier lives. We asked De Vivo — who holds posts at Radcliffe, the Medical School, and the Chan School of Public Health — to help us develop the following quiz based on her book.

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At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Dec. 3, 2024, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Helen Vendler was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Helen Vendler, Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, was born Helen Hennessy into a devout Boston Irish Catholic family in 1933. She died on April 23, 2024, at 90 years of age and is survived by her beloved son, David; her daughter-in-law, Xianchun; and her grandchildren, Killian and Céline (Harvard Class of 2020). Vendler is interred on “Harvard Hill” in Mount Auburn Cemetery.

The New York Times called Vendler a “Colossus of poetry criticism.” That is true, but how she would have smiled at the image of herself bestriding those turbulent seas! A truer image of her is as a formidably learned proponent of the educational importance of poetry — a knight of poetry, as one colleague described her, riding out to do battle for bards. She was also the most gracious and generous of colleagues, delightful in conversation, meticulous and cheerful in curricular deliberations. Her kindnesses to students and visiting scholars are legendary.

Vendler inspired generations of students at Harvard and beyond with her exquisite sense of poetic form and her swift grasp of what a poet is doing as an artist. Of her many famous books, she seemed proudest of her textbook for students, refined over years, “Poems, Poets, Poetry.” She wrote for everybody, showing newcomers to Elizabeth Bishop or John Ashbery how amply these poets reward close attention. To lifelong specialists on earlier poets, whether Shakespeare or Milton, Herbert or Keats, she revealed new and unsuspected strata of meaning. No other critic of our time, or, indeed, of the past century, has written about poetry with such illuminating power.

Proficient from girlhood in Latin, Spanish, Italian, and French, Vendler might have gone to any elite college then open to women but was forbidden by her devout parents to attend a secular institution. She therefore matriculated at Boston’s Emmanuel College, where she graduated summa cum laude in chemistry and mathematics. Proceeding on a Fulbright Fellowship to the Catholic University of Louvain to study mathematics, she soon changed to the arts and, in pursuit of them, traveled widely in Italy and France. To prepare for the Ph.D. program in English at Harvard, Vendler enrolled as a special student at Boston University. There she formed a lifelong friendship with her teacher Morton Berman (1924–2022), with whom she shared a passion for music and with whom she would later renew her travels in Europe.

At Harvard in the 1950s, when open hostility to women was the norm, Vendler still found wonderful teachers, among them the Miltonist Douglas Bush, the literary theorist I.A. Richards, the Renaissance scholar Rosemond Tuve (a visitor), and especially John Kelleher, creator of the field of Irish studies in the United States. Kelleher’s example inspired the future spokesperson for Irish poetry and world authority on William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney.

After taking her Ph.D., in 1960 Vendler went to Cornell University with her then husband, the philosopher Zeno Vendler. Later, as a single mother, she taught freshman writing at Cornell before moving on to appointments at Haverford, Swarthmore, Smith, and Boston University. She always wrote at night, after her son David had gone to bed. Her growing reputation as the finest critic of her generation brought her the honor of being the long-serving poetry critic for The New Yorker. In 1980 Vendler was invited to Harvard but, out of loyalty to embattled colleagues at BU, continued there in alternate terms until she joined Harvard in 1985. She was appointed William R. Kenan Professor of English in 1986 and later served as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and as a Senior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 1990 she became Harvard’s first woman University Professor.

Vendler’s books have all become classics, including the stimulating volumes from her five invited lecture series. In her 2001 Haskins Lecture for the American Council of Learned Societies, she quotes Joseph Conrad on “that mysterious power … of producing striking effects by means impossible of detection which is the last word of the highest art.” Not impossible of detection to Vendler, however, who wrote brilliantly on George Herbert, authoritatively on Emily Dickinson, fundamentally on Wallace Stevens, and indispensably on Seamus Heaney, Nobel Laureate and Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Her landmark study of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets reveals time and again what centuries of commentary have missed. For example, our former summa in chemistry says the phrase “Time’s best jewel” in sonnet 65 describes not the beloved’s natural beauty but rather its “carbonized allomorph.”

The most challenging English-language poets of the past century have been Americans, successors of Wallace Stevens (who studied at Harvard from 1897 to 1900), on whose long poems Vendler achieved pioneering feats of exposition, as she did with the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Langston Hughes, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Lucille Clifton, James Merrill, A. R. Ammons, James Wright, Frank Bidart, Nobel Laureate Louise Glück, Rita Dove, Lucie Brock-Broido, and the Boylston Professor Jorie Graham, whose genius Vendler recognized early.

Vendler’s many honors include the presidency of the Modern Language Association; 28 honorary doctorates; the Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor the federal government confers in the humanities; plus election to the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, which awarded her its Jefferson Medal, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which, last year, awarded her its Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Belles Lettres and Criticism. In 2023 Magdalene College, Cambridge University, of which she was an Honorary Fellow, commissioned an oil portrait of her in which she wears on a chain her Irish grandfather’s pocket watch. Vendler’s greatest delight — after her family — was the esteem in which she was held by poets whose work she revered, especially Seamus Heaney and Jorie Graham, who became close friends. She once quoted Czeslaw Milosz to the effect that every achieved poem is a symbol of freedom. This is rarely true of criticism, but it is always true of hers.

Respectfully submitted,

Homi Bhabha
Stephanie Burt
Stephen Greenblatt
Elaine Scarry
Gordon Teskey, Chair

Climate experts expect a second Trump administration to feature multipronged attacks on recent years’ climate change progress, with battles in the courts, in Congress, and involving the enormous administrative power vested in the presidency.

Supporters of efforts to reduce planet-warming fossil-fuel emissions should begin to focus on working to keep gains already made and prepare for a slowdown in progress, according to a panel of specialists gathered at a Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability discussion Nov. 26 on likely changes ahead as a new administration prepares to take over.

President-elect Donald Trump has said he plans to ramp up oil and gas production, roll back the Inflation Reduction Act, end Biden administration regulations aimed at cutting carbon emissions and moving the nation away from fossil fuels, and withdraw once again from the Paris Agreement on climate change.

There may, however, also be some bright spots ahead, the experts said, stemming from some states continuing to push for carbon-free energy, the economic momentum behind ever-cheaper clean technology, and from the desire by American businesses to profit from the sale of green products and technology to the world.

“There’s a lot of interest in what lies ahead with the new administration and Congress,” said James Stock, vice provost for climate and sustainability and director of the Salata Institute. “This is pretty complicated, and it’s multifaceted.”

The second Trump administration, with a pro-business bent and taste for deregulation, will bear hallmarks of the first, but with control of the White House, Congress, and a friendly majority on the Supreme Court, the action likely will be more aggressive, said several panelists.

One prime target for the new administration will be 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act, perhaps the nation’s most ambitious efforts ever to fight climate change. That legislation includes billions of dollars in tax credits, subsidies, and other financial incentives that aim to make carbon-free energy more attractive.

Although some 80 percent of the funding authorized by the legislation has been spent or is under contract, the Biden administration is pushing to get as much money out the door as possible before Inauguration Day, according to Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law and faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program.

That might not be enough, she said, as, with control of Congress as well as the White House, there may be attempts to “claw back” money already awarded and to revise or repeal the law. Among the most endangered targets is the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicle purchases, she said.

The administration can do quite a lot without having to go through Congress or the courts, Freeman said. At the president’s direction, government agencies tasked with administering climate-related legislation can ease rules or change direction via the governmental regulatory process.

They can alter the government’s position in lawsuits and begin new suits against those pursuing climate-friendly action, as occurred in the first Trump administration, which encouraged an antitrust lawsuit against four automakers that were negotiating with California on auto emissions standards. Similar suits can be pursued against states that challenge federal initiatives, against environmental nonprofits, and against business groups that cooperate to help create a level playing field for competition.

Freeman said these efforts don’t even have to be successful to damage U.S. climate efforts. A widespread “chilling effect” will stem from the attacks themselves, regardless of merit, that may prompt people and organizations to be less aggressive in their activities, or to choose not to fight back.

“This version of the Trump administration, Trump 2.0, is not just prepared to roll back federal regulations, but to target the states and the private sector actors that actually want to replace the gap left by the federal government,” Freeman said. “If that happens to come to fruition, I think that is much more dangerous and much more far-reaching, even if it’s ultimately unsuccessful. All that litigation will help to chill activity, will help to scare people off, and intimidate action, and will also grind it to a halt by tying it up in litigation.”

The hourlong virtual event, “What Does Trump 2.0 Mean for Climate Change,” was moderated by Stock and included Freeman; Robert Stavins, the A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy and Economic Development at the Harvard Kennedy School and head of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements; and Peter Tufano, Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School.

Stavins, who had recently returned from the annual international climate talks, held this year in Baku, Azerbaijan, said Trump’s re-election loomed over the talks and was a regular topic of conversation among the delegates and other attendees. If Trump again moves to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the timeframe for withdrawal would mean that the nation would no longer be part of the global talks by early 2026.

Other countries, including the U.K., the European Union, and China, indicated they would step up efforts at global leadership in the absence of the U.S.

Beyond withdrawing from the Paris accord, Stavins said that some in Trump’s orbit want the U.S. to withdraw from the underlying treaty that establishes the international framework to collectively address climate change, the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed in 1992.

Internationally, Stavins said, there is also concern that Trump’s stance may embolden other nations to follow suit.

The churning and uncertainty around the issue are what will be most damaging to the business community, Tufano said. Businesses generally look for opportunities to make a profit, which can occur in the climate space — though profitability will decline if IRA incentives are lost — but stability is key. In the absence of stability, Tufano said, business leaders often will wait to make decisions until the situation stabilizes.

“Businesses react negatively to volatility and uncertainty,” Tufano said. “The amount of jawboning and social media pressure and other kinds of pressure that can be put on firms cannot be underestimated.”

While some industries may be content to slow activities with respect to climate change until the business environment shifts again, some industries can’t afford to, Tufano said. Insurers are already on the front lines of the climate crisis and will still have to respond to climate-related weather disasters regardless of whether their connection to a shifting climate is in political vogue.

Similarly, the low price of installed wind power has made windy states such as Iowa and Texas prime locations for wind farms, a trend unlikely to be reversed. The fight to contain emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane may also be past the tipping point where political opposition can stall efforts to curb emissions.

The recent launch of methane-sniffing satellites that share their data publicly provides a roadmap for natural gas companies to target leaks, a relatively straightforward task once the leaks are found, Stavins said. The fact that they can then sell gas that otherwise would leak into the atmosphere provides a powerful incentive to lower methane leaks, helping both their bottom line and climate efforts, Stavins said.

“We’re likely to see a lot more action in the oil and gas sector in the United States, but in other countries as well because it’s become newly profitable to fix those leaks,” Stavins said, “a point of optimism.”

Many Americans feel like the spin and outright lying in politics has gotten worse in recent decades. And that it’s not a good thing.

Bill Adair agrees. The founder of PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, fact-checking website, looks at the problem in new book, “Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy.” He was on campus recently to detail his thoughts in an event at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

“For many years, no political journalist that I’d ever worked with nor myself had ever asked a politician: Why do you lie? And so it’s sort of this topic that is omnipresent and yet never discussed. I decided to discuss it, and I decided to ask politicians about it,” said Adair, the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University.

“They make a calculation — am I going to gain more from making this statement that is false than I’m going to lose. It’s that simple.”

Following several years of research and reporting, Adair ended up zeroing in on about a half dozen people’s stories in his book as case studies that reveal what he calls “truths about lying.”

He also laments that calling out the fabrications and misinformation has not worked to alter the behavior of political actors and that the internet has made it all worse.

“Lying is not a victimless crime. When politicians choose to lie, there are often people who suffer, and often an individual who suffers a great deal, often someone whose reputation is damaged, whose life is turned upside-down,” he said.

At the event, Adair told the story of Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher and writer who had been put in charge of an advisory board within the Department of Homeland Security in 2022 meant to help combat the spread of false information online. She ended up resigning under pressure after opponents of the board spread conspiracy theories online that her real goal was to crack down on free speech.

Adair also recounted the tale of Eric Barber, a city councilor from West Virginia, who became radicalized through Facebook to join the group that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Adair said that despite serving jail time, Barber still believes that the 2020 election was stolen and Donald Trump won.

Adair also discusses the case of Stu Stevens, a strategist for the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign. Stevens’ group produced an ad making the false claim that then-President Barack Obama was responsible for Jeep shifting production from Ohio to China. Jeep officials publicly stated that claim was false, noting that the company was expanding operations in China but “the backbone of the brand” would remain in the U.S. Adair said Stevens refused to admit the ad was wrong, insisting “it’s technically true.”

So why do politicians bend the truth? And where did it start? According to Adair, it’s a very calculated decision.

“They make a calculation — am I going to gain more from making this statement that is false than I’m going to lose?” he said. “It’s that simple. They want to build support for the base, and they believe that lie, in some small way, will help them do that.”

While both sides lie, Adair says his research finds Republicans do it more often. He writes in his book that from 2016 to 2021, 55 percent of the statements made by Republicans and investigated by PolitiFact were false, while 31 percent of those made by Democrats were.

“I asked that question of a whole bunch of Republicans and former Republicans who were willing to talk to me, and I heard a lot of answers,” Adair said. “One was that it’s just become part of their culture.”

“We went state by state, and we found that in half the states there are no political fact-checkers. That’s like having interstate highways where there’s no risk of getting a speeding ticket.”

Denver Riggleman, a former GOP congressman from Virginia, told Adair that Republicans view their work as part of an epic struggle, and that in that struggle anything is OK.

Adair took pains, however, to underscore that Democrats also lie. For example, a PolitiFact check on Joe Biden in May finds he wrongly stated that the rate of inflation he inherited when he took office was much higher than it actually was.

Overall, he went on to say, fact-checking is not working.

“Fact-checking is not stopping the lies. Fact-checking is not putting a serious dent in the lies,” Adair said.

Adair pointed to a study he’s been a part of at Duke, about states where there is state and local fact-checking.

“There’s plenty of fact-checkers who check politicians when they are running for president, but what about the senators and governors and members of the U.S. House?” he said. “We went state by state, and we found that in half the states there are no political fact-checkers. That’s like having interstate highways where there’s no risk of getting a speeding ticket.”

That leads Adair to his first recommendation.

“We need to be creative in getting [fact-checking] to more people, in using it as data so that we can suppress misinformation,” he said. He added that in addition to increasing the volume of fact-checkers in underreported areas, there needs to be more conservative organizations doing their own fact-checking.

“This can’t just be for people who listen to NPR and read The New York Times,” he said.

Adair suggests that AI might help fact-checkers by allowing them to track lies across multiple platforms. He also pointed to efforts by Facebook to fact-check posts on their site.

“I think that we need to reboot how we do this and how we think about this, because the lies are running rampant,” he said.

President-elect Donald Trump’s longstanding plans to hit China with stiff tariffs would likely deal a blow to China’s already faltering economy, but it could also trigger some unintended negative consequences for the U.S. economy and foreign relations, economists say.

Trump warned last week that on his first day back in office he will impose 25 percent tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada and an additional levy of 10 percent on Chinese imports. (He said during the campaign he would hit China with tariffs of 60 percent or more.) He said the nation’s largest trading partners need to take swifter, harsher action to halt the flow of illegal migrants and drugs into the U.S.

A revived trade war would further destabilize China’s economy, but economists and tax experts caution it would also harm the U.S. economy by increasing prices for American consumers and could lead to supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, and a currency war with China. In addition, it could provide China with new opportunities to get closer to traditional U.S. allies in Europe, the U.K., Australia, and Japan.

Rana Mitter, S.T. Lee Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations at Harvard Kennedy School, spoke with the Gazette about how China is viewing the prospect of new tariffs and preparing to respond. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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The Chinese economy is already facing headwinds from a battered housing market and sluggish consumer demand. How is Beijing viewing the possibility of another trade war with the U.S.?

There are at least two different strands of thinking, which point in different directions. One of them is extreme concern about the way in which a tariff policy could essentially make China’s global export drive much more difficult to achieve, particularly into U.S. markets, which still remain very important despite the political difficulties between the two countries.

The other is much more about medium-term thinking. Some think that the imposing of tariffs could be the beginning of some new, hard-nosed, realistic negotiation with the United States, which could end up being a version of the Phase One trade deal that did exist under the first Trump administration. I would say the first is more dominant, as far as I can tell. But that second thought, that there might be an opportunity for China, is not absent.

What worries China the most right now?

I think the biggest fear on the Chinese side at the moment is uncertainty on what the phrasing of “60 percent tariffs on goods coming in from China” actually means — or the most recent statement that there might be an additional 10 percent. Defining where goods come from isn’t simple; there are different rules of origin; there are different components. Many products that are very popular in the U.S. and the world — Apple smartphones would be a very good example — have many components from China.

So, the question is: What does it actually mean to impose 60 percent tariffs? Until you know the answer to that question, you can’t very easily plan for it. I suspect that is part of the intention. The aim is to make it clear what direction of travel is on this issue, not to give a detailed, laid-out plan as to how it’s going to operate. And for many of the Chinese, I suspect they see this as the starting point for negotiation, and they see a new Trump administration wanting to be on the front foot in terms of that negotiation.

In 2023, China fell behind Mexico as the top supplier of U.S. imports. The value of China’s share of U.S. imports in semiconductors, smartphones, and laptops was 35 percent lower than when Trump first imposed some tariffs in 2017. How damaging could a U.S. tariff of 60 percent or more be to China’s economy? And could China make up for that elsewhere?

First of all, yes, it would make things difficult. Clearly, export of manufactured goods into the United States is a very significant part of China’s economy. But it’s worth remembering that other key markets, including the European Union and Japan, are also part of China’s strategy of selling to highly developed, advanced economies. Nonetheless, the U.S. is a very important market, and in fact, even during the last few years of U.S.-China political controversy, trade figures between two sides have actually often gone up rather than down. So, it is significant, there’s no doubt about that.

In terms of opening up new markets, there’s certainly very, very strong efforts, and have been for some years, to try and do that.

Think about the signature policy that China has used in terms of international exports and foreign direct investment, what’s been known as the Belt and Road Initiative [a global infrastructure development plan to connect Asia with Africa and Europe to strengthen China’s geopolitical and economic influence]. In the last year or two, the term GDI, Global Development Initiative, has been much more widely used by the Chinese for the next phase of their plans.

The aim is essentially to create new and higher value markets in emerging economies — Southeast Asia, Latin America, and to some extent, Sub-Saharan Africa, although the latter is still of more interest in terms of raw materials than it is in terms of new markets for sales. Or think about EVs (electric vehicles), both Chinese exports of EVs and the export of intellectual property, including Chinese technology, to areas like Southeast Asia is becoming a bigger factor than it would have been four or five years ago even.

Nonetheless, these are still small markets compared to the number of Chinese goods that are sold into very advanced markets like the United States — half a trillion dollars according to U.N. figures.

Trump has been promising for some time to impose additional tariffs if re-elected. Has China been preparing for that possibility?

Yes, they’ve been preparing for quite some time for this possibility. Since it became clear that President Trump would likely be the Republican candidate, and then could quite possibly win, there has been plenty of strategizing in Beijing about what that outcome would mean in a whole variety of areas, including security, as well as trade.

On trade, the question of how China tries to move to protect their markets and also deal with the shaky state of the domestic economy has been a really key question. But there is no clear answer yet.

If you look at the economic policies the Chinese government has undertaken in the last few months, it involves repeated use of fiscal stimulus to try to stimulate domestic consumer spending. But since China is very, very determined to maintain a global trade surplus, it’s going to be much harder for them to use domestic consumption as a means of boosting the economy. So, exports still really matter.

Getting around that involves a policy decision they don’t want to make: to release large amounts of the savings that ordinary Chinese have in their accounts, reduce their trade surplus, and redirect spending into the domestic consumer market. That is something that has been advocated by Chinese policymakers for more than 20 years. They always step back from it because, in the end, exporting more has seemed more politically attractive and a solution more suited to where they are at the moment in terms of global supply chains.

Which countries stand to benefit most from a decline in Chinese imports to the U.S.? Is anyone poised to step in to meet U.S. demand?

You put your finger on the key issue. Filling that gap in short order will be very, very difficult. There is a reason that China has become so dominant over 30 years. If there was some reason — terrorists or a conflict or something else — that made China no longer viable, then India is probably one place that would attract investment on that front. But it would take time to bring its supply chains and its technical capacity up to standards.

Vietnam, but of course Vietnam borders China, and it’s possible that issues with supply-chain problems might well affect Vietnam more directly. There are also places where you can get niche manufacturing of various sorts done. But in terms of that kind of higher-value-added manufacturing, that demands technical skills, lots of components, supply chains, those are very complex things.

A slightly different issue, but not unrelated, is the dominance that Taiwan has on the very-high-end semiconductor market. That’s still a very vulnerable part of a global supply chain and that will remain relevant in terms of trying to shift capacity from China. Because it’s never just about China, it’s also about the things that get sent to and sent from China as part of the wider manufacturing process.

Harvard economist Larry Summers recently said if the U.S. takes a broad brushstroke approach to tariffs on imports, that may provide Beijing with a ready excuse for China’s own internal economic problems, further straining U.S.-China relations. Do you share that view?

I think that’s quite plausible, but I’d say there’s another “yes, and.” It also provides an opportunity for something else that China could do that the U.S. would find unattractive.

What’s being proposed is not just a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods, but also 25 percent on all goods from Mexico and Canada. [And Trump said during his campaign that European Union nations might also face tariffs.] That gives China an opportunity to talk to the EU, to talk to mid-sized, independent economies like Australia, the U.K., Japan, and say, “Because we are all being targeted by these tariffs at different levels, it makes more sense for us to find some common cause.”

It would be a real reversal if the United States chose to undertake a trade policy that got the Chinese and Europeans closer to each other rather than the U.S., as is traditional, being close to its democratic allies.

So that may be an unintended consequence that could have lasting harm to the U.S. well beyond spiking prices for American consumers?

It opens an opportunity for China that doesn’t exist at the moment but would exist if there was a very wide-ranging, broad-brush approach on tariffs imposed on all imports. Since all advanced economies do import as well as export, they’re going to find themselves very vulnerable.

And if they feel the United States is trying to prevent exports into the U.S. rather than encourage them, they will look to other large markets. There aren’t that many of them of that size and even larger in the world, but China is very clearly one of them.

In his new book, Edwin Frank ’82 charts the history of the 20th-century novel through 32 key works, from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” and H.G. Wells’ “The Island of Dr. Moreau” to Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” and W.G. Sebald’s “Austerlitz.”

The Gazette interviewed Frank — founder and editorial director of the publishing house New York Review Books — about “Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel,” including why he selected certain titles, controversial omissions, and his hopes for the future of the art form. This interview was edited for clarity and length.

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Your book traces the trajectory of the 20th-century novel through 32 titles. What made, in your view, those works and authors exemplary of that century?

The authors in the first and largely the second part of the book are authors who represent new beginnings and new ways of thinking about the novel. H.G. Wells invents a certain kind of popular fiction. André Gide invents a certain kind of art novel that stands apart from the popular 19th-century novels. Kipling and Colette are looking at what it is to be at the start of a new century and to be young people, and what it means to hope for a new world or to be impatient with the old world. I include Gertrude Stein and Machado de Assis because they represent new ways of writing that emerge in the New World, which of course, has a shorter history of producing novels. Most of those writers were at the beginning of the last century young people, and I wanted to map the new terrain, and these writers serve to do that.

In a way, the book has behind the scenes a single character: the 20th-century novel. You could say that at the beginning she dresses Edwardian style, not always happily, and by the end, she’s wearing a bomber jacket. I wanted to explore the changes that took place over the course of a lifetime of the novel as literary form.

In the second part of the book, the novelists are dealing with issues having to do with the conclusive destruction of the Victorian ways of life by World War I. They know they live in a new world altogether, one where all sorts of old codes have been destroyed, and the question is how to chronicle this new world.

“I thought that the book should be introducing people to wonderful writers who are less well known to the Anglosphere and suggesting ways in which books that sometimes seem daunting to read are entirely engageable books and still very much alive.”

Were you worried that many of the novels you chose are not well known and that those that are well known are not even read by many people?

I thought that the book should be introducing people to wonderful writers who are less well known to the Anglosphere and suggesting ways in which books that sometimes seem daunting to read — let’s say Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities” — are entirely engageable books and still very much alive. I saw that as being, frankly, part of my own story of expanding publication and translation of books from different parts of the world so that readers learn to read across barriers that once seemed challenging.

You include American authors Ralph Ellison, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. Why not William Faulkner or others that some may see as glaring omissions?

The conception of the book was international, and the presence of American writers had to be circumscribed. And even so, certainly the largest contingent of writers in the book reflects my own linguistic competence. I speak briefly about Faulkner and state his importance. Several people said that the omission of Dos Passos is, just from the point of view of the international novel, perhaps the most glaring one because along with Faulkner and Hemingway, Dos Passos is undoubtedly the single most influential American writer on writers abroad in the last century. The panoramic novel he invents is a major genre, and I’m very fond of Dos Passos. It was with some regret.

With Stein, I wanted to suggest that she does pass on to, certainly Hemingway and Faulkner, a sense of American literature as posing a question of scale; what kind of sentence can be big or small enough for the almost unimaginable uncertainties that the new world opens up. We often forget how provisional a country America was, and perhaps still is. Stein realized how an open form could particularly address that situation. As she famously said, “There is no there there.” That is Stein’s sort of peculiar genius. Even if we don’t think of her as having written a book that is as beloved as any of those writers’ books, she made a remarkable contribution.

There are other novels I wrote about, but they ended up on the cutting-room floor. For example, Naguib Mahfouz’s “The Cairo Trilogy,” which looks back to 19th-century European novels, but also introduces a heady, lyrical, almost fantastical dream narrative that he takes from the ancient tradition of Arabic writing. And then there is also the surrealist Louis Aragon, who didn’t make the cut. I regret that because I wanted to bring out how surrealism, largely neglected or seen as a visual art in the Anglophone world, was a major contributor to the novel in the 20th century. Magical realism came out of surrealism.

What influence, if any, did the novels written in the 18th and 19th centuries have in this literary form in the 20th century?

The novel is a popular form starting really in the 18th century. But in the 19th century, it becomes truly popular, and the growth of literacy and industry allows novels to be produced on a larger scale for a larger audience. In a way, the 20th-century novel is impatient with the novel’s success. It’s impatient to prove that the novel is a fully serious form of art and not just a popular form of art. The novel is also skeptical of the political and social arrangements that have emerged in the 19th century; wanting more freedoms for individuals, sexual freedoms, artistic freedoms, and freedom to talk about the whole range of lived experience. If the 19th-century novels tend to balance the claims of self and society, saying that that balance is the precondition for a life of, as Freud would say, “ordinary unhappiness,” or even perhaps a happy life, in the 20th century, that balance becomes suspect, and the novel explores the ways in which things can be set out of balance.

What do Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” or Elsa Morante’s “History,” which are in the last part of the book, say about the end of the century?

The last part was the part where books surprised me most often. I didn’t quite know how I was going to end the book. I thought it should end the way a pop song ends, by fading out, but you have to fade out on a strong chorus. As it happened, the book was writing me as much as I was writing the book. Those post second World War books end up as a person does: entering middle age and looking back at a history that is in many ways already set. There are novels that stand as models of innovation, but they are now older novels. You get to a book like “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” whose very title announces itself as a book of a century, though it never mentions the 20th century, but it is a book, in some sense, about what is the meaning of these 100 years that we have lived through. And that struck me a good deal. Books like Georges Perec’s “Life: A User’s Manual” or Elsa Morante’s “History,” or García Márquez’s novel have a quality of trying to sum up, and I hadn’t really anticipated that. I was getting to the end of my book, and I suddenly realized that, in fact, a lot of books from the last part of the century were about summing up; they were about ending.

What are your hopes and concerns about the future of the novel and its place in the cultural conversation?

I would worry that the novel becomes a sort of a special property of the educated classes, that it becomes a little precious and loses its connection to the larger life of society and to a whole range of different kinds of people who have emerged in modern societies.

It strikes me that here in America we are living through changing times, and it’s remarkable to me how few novels there are that deal with — as Dickens, a brilliant stylist in his own right — financiers, scallywags and shameless politicians and what you will. I hope that those novelists do emerge. People always talk about how people no longer have the stamina to read long books, but then you have George Martin’s books, which are very long indeed, and people seem to gobble them up. Those books have a range of characters and events that shows an appetite to be comprehensive. And recently, Karl Ove Knausgård’s “My Struggle” too. I think, to some extent, that the literary novel is still a little overshadowed by the sheer range of accomplishment in the previous century and is struggling to find a new footing, a new sensibility and a new way of responding to the new world that we inhabit.

In introducing the final panel, Gene Sperling, who directed the National Economic Council for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, remarked, “This is not a roast.”

But the recent economic policy conference marking Lawrence H. Summers’ 70th birthday was often roast-like — although always affectionate — interspersed with anecdotes from computer labs during Summers’ student days, the halls of Washington, D.C., and the president’s office in Mass Hall. Pointed comments about economic concepts prompted laughter, as did Summers — seated in the front row — who offered some good-natured rebuttals to the ribbing.

The gathering featured panels on Summers’ impact on modern finance, labor and public economics, and macroeconomics and policy. Speakers described a colleague and friend who has had a deep impact on those around him. His trademark probing questions have pushed others to think deeper, while his public positions have made a difference on topics as disparate as the recent rise and fall of inflation, passage of the Affordable Care Act, and his early recognition, in 1992, of the importance of educating girls in the developing world.

“No one was talking about this, but Larry did, and he single-handedly took that issue from something that education ministers care about to something finance ministers care about,” said former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, “And we all know the power difference between those two posts. Literally millions and millions of girls owe a change in their lives and futures to that speech.”

Today, Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and the Frank and Denie Weil Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Kennedy School. His career spans studies at MIT and Harvard; the World Bank, where he was chief economist; the U.S. Treasury department, where he was secretary from 1999 to 2001; Harvard’s president’s office from 2001 to 2006; and the National Economic Council, which he directed from 2009 to 2011 under Obama.

Panelists painted a portrait of a scholar and public servant who is an innovative thinker and fearless in his thoughts and beliefs: Summers at one point remarked about a fundamental concept he still disagrees with, to knowing laughter. “I’ve lost that argument with the world, largely. I’m aware of that, but not to the extent of giving it up.”

Jason Furman, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and HKS’ Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy, described Summers’ ability to extract knowledge from those around him by focusing on a single issue or question and probing it until he was satisfied he had learned all he could. UC Berkeley Professor Brad DeLong said Summer’s questioning style went both ways: People learned more than facts and figures from him. They learned how to think differently.

“Larry’s nearly unique edge, I think, is an extremely, extremely sharp eye for what pain points are about to become salient, over and over seeing when things are changing in the macro economy so we really need to change our models to deal with skating where the puck is going to be,” said DeLong, who has been a co-author with Summers. “Because the important questions are about now and the next decade. You write even a good paper about an important question in macro from a decade ago, and you have written a paper about an unimportant question.” 

Sandberg, who graduated from Harvard Business School in 1995, said Summers’ impact on her career has been profound. She met him as a student, he advised her thesis, gave her a job at the World Bank when he was chief economist, and later at the Treasury, where she was his chief of staff. Through her career he was always willing to listen, she said, and she knows he listened to others even when they were facing public scrutiny, a time when many would shrink from associating with them.

“He never worried that he would somehow get dragged into someone else’s mess. He just showed up,” Sandberg said. “I know all of us here showed up for this day because Larry has shown up for us.” 

Increasing the ratio of plant-based protein in your diet may reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease, finds a new study led by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

According to the researchers, these risk reductions are likely driven by the replacement of red and processed meats. The researchers also observed that a combination of consuming more plant protein and higher protein intake overall provided the most heart health benefits.

While global dietary guidelines recommend higher intake of plant protein, the ideal ratio of plant to animal protein has remained unknown. The study is the first to investigate this ratio and how it impacts health, specifically heart health.

Risk reductions are likely driven by the replacement of red and processed meat with several plant protein sources, particularly nuts and legumes.

“The average American eats a 1:3 plant to animal protein ratio. Our findings suggest a ratio of at least 1:2 is much more effective in preventing cardiovascular disease. For coronary heart disease prevention, a ratio of 1:1.3 or higher should come from plants,” said lead author Andrea Glenn, visiting scientist in the Department of Nutrition. Glenn worked on the study as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Chan School and is now an assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU Steinhardt.

The study was published Dec. 2 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The researchers used 30 years of data on diet, lifestyle, and heart health among nearly 203,000 men and women enrolled in the Nurses’ Health Studies I and II and the Health Professionals’ Follow-up Study. Participants reported their dietary intake every four years. The researchers calculated each participant’s total protein intake, measured in grams per day, as well as their specific intakes of animal and plant proteins. Over the course of the study period, 16,118 cardiovascular disease cases, including over 10,000 coronary heart disease cases and over 6,000 stroke cases, were documented.

After adjusting for participants’ health history and sociodemographic and lifestyle factors, the study found that eating a higher ratio of plant to animal protein was associated with lower risks of cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease. Compared to participants who consumed the lowest plant to animal protein ratio (~1:4.2), participants who consumed the highest (~1:1.3) had a 19 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 27 percent lower risk of coronary heart disease. These risk reductions were even higher among participants who ate more protein overall. Those who consumed the most protein (21 percent of energy coming from protein) and adhered to a higher plant to animal protein ratio saw a 28 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 36 percent lower risk of coronary heart disease, compared to those who consumed the least protein (16 percent of energy). No significant associations were found for stroke risk and the ratio; however, replacing red and processed meat in the diet with several plant sources, such as nuts, showed a lower risk of stroke.

The researchers also examined if there’s a point at which eating more plant protein stops having added benefits or could even have negative implications. They found that risk reduction for cardiovascular disease begins to plateau around a 1:2 ratio, but that coronary heart disease risk continues to decrease at higher ratios of plant to animal protein.

According to the researchers, replacing red and processed meat with plant protein sources, particularly nuts and legumes, have been found to improve cardiometabolic risk factors, including blood lipids and blood pressure as well as inflammatory biomarkers. This is partly because plant proteins are often accompanied by high amounts of fiber, antioxidant vitamins, minerals, and healthy fats.

“Most of us need to begin shifting our diets toward plant-based proteins,” said senior author Frank Hu, Fredrick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at Harvard Chan School. “We can do so by cutting down on meat, especially red and processed meats, and eating more legumes and nuts. Such a dietary pattern is beneficial not just for human health but also the health of our planet.”

The researchers pointed out that the ratios they identified are estimates, and that further studies are needed to determine the optimal balance between plant and animal protein. Additionally, further research is needed to determine how stroke risk may be impacted by protein intake.

Other Harvard Chan authors included Fenglei Wang, Anne-Julie Tessier, JoAnn Manson, Eric Rimm, Ken Mukamal, Qi Sun, and Walter Willett.

The Nurses’ Health Studies and Health Professional Follow-up Studies are supported by National Institutes of Health grants UM1 CA186107, R01 CA49449, R01 HL034594, U01 HL145386, R01 HL088521, U01 CA176726, R01 CA49449, U01 CA167552, R01 HL60712, and R01 HL35464.

Shriya Srinivasan danced with precise steps, using graceful flicks of her wrists to depict a heroine holding a mirror and applying makeup and perfume, her expressions lit by hope and excitement. Behind her, centuries-old Indian watercolors depicted similar heroines.

The assistant professor of bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences was performing a bharata natyam dance about a common archetype in Indian paintings and dance — a vasakasajja nayika, or heroine eagerly preparing to meet her lover — for a recent event at the Harvard Art Museums. Before the dance, she explained to the audience how the brain’s prefrontal cortex heightens feelings of excitement and anticipation in love by tapping into memories and activating reward centers.

“As a dancer, I aim to enter the emotional and physiological state of the character I am playing, inducing a faster heart rate or slowing the breath, to simulate anxiety or deep loss, for example,” she said. “Mirror neurons in the viewer then assimilate these cues and allow them to resonate with the emotional experience and catharsis of the character.”

Srinivasan combines her passions for science and dance as director of Harvard’s Biohybrid Organs and Neuroprosthetics Lab and co-founder and artistic director of the Anubhava Dance Company, an Indian classical dance ensemble that performs nationally.

A recent collaboration between the lab and Anubhava led to the creation of an app that allows audience members to feel dancers’ movements through a smartphone’s vibrations, a project featured last month on the PBS Nova docuseries “Building Stuff.”

“The scientific question at hand was: How can we enhance the experience of dance, reaching beyond just audio and visual input into tactile or other forms of sensory input?” Srinivasan said.

Her research and development team, which included Isabella Gomez ’24 and Krithika Swaminathan, Ph.D. ’23, developed custom sensing devices that are placed on the ankles of Anubhava dancers to capture and classify their complex footwork into patterns. A smartphone app transmits the movements into audience members’ hands. Srinivasan says the technology has the potential to make dance performances more accessible for the lay viewer, as well as visually- or hearing-impaired people.

“Choreographing a piece is akin to designing a system — both involve carefully crafting elements to achieve a specific effect.”

Shriya Srinivasan

To make the haptic feedback stimuli convey the feel of the footwork, researchers set the vibrations to different intensity levels. Light, flowing movements were represented by vibrations targeting surface-level mechanoreceptors in the skin, while more intense, punchier movements penetrated to deeper skin layers, Srinivasan explained. The project culminated in a dance titled “Decoded Rhythms” for an audience at the ArtLab, where Srinivasan did a 2023-2024 faculty residency.

“For me, dance and engineering are similar in process,” Srinivasan said. “Choreographing a piece is akin to designing a system — both involve carefully crafting elements to achieve a specific effect. Just as engineers design a system to meet certain requirements, dancers create choreography to evoke a particular emotion or reaction from the audience. It’s about problem-solving and design.”

Srinivasan, who grew up dancing bharata natyam under the tutelage of her mother Sujatha Srinivasan, established Anubhava in 2015 with co-founder Joshua George in the hopes of creating a space for Indian forms in the American dance world while also merging arts, science, and humanities onstage.

“There’s a high level of rhythmic and mathematical complexity that goes into the choreography that we produce that might not always translate to an audience if they’re not familiar with the style of music that we utilize, or if they’ve not been trained in the dance form,” George said.

Since this collaboration, Srinivasan said Anubhava has been diving deeper into neuroscience, psychology, and mental health, incorporating portrayals of emotions such as fear and anxiety, which she said are not commonly explored in Indian classical dance tradition, into their recent performances.

“I find it immensely fulfilling to engage in work at the intersection of disciplines,” Srinivasan said. “Exploring a problem from different perspectives can help you envision solutions that aren’t visible from traditional silos.”

Srinivasan is especially interested in further research on how physiological changes in the body of a dancer portraying emotions onstage might evoke a similar response in audience members.

“There are vast opportunities to study why the world makes us feel the way we do. When I experience art, it evokes a certain emotional response in me. Understanding why is deeply fundamental to the work of an artist, but doing so with the lens of science gives me this tangible way to say, ‘OK, if I modulate ABC, I can get somebody to feel XYZ.’ To me, that’s nuanced insight.”

In 1981, fresh out of medical school, physician-scientist Bruce Walker began his internship at Massachusetts General Hospital. One day, a young patient showed up with an unusual cluster of infections and cancers. Baffled and powerless to treat him, Walker and his colleagues could only watch as the patient quickly succumbed to the mysterious condition.

“I distinctly remember the first case we saw at Mass General,” said Walker, who is the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard. “The attending physician said that although we didn’t know what this condition was, we probably would never see another case like it.”

Two weeks later, another patient came in with the same set of symptoms. It quickly became clear to Walker and his colleagues that they weren’t dealing with a rare disease — it was the beginning of a new epidemic.

The baffling condition was acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) — the most advanced stage of infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which attacks and destroys infection-fighting immune cells. By 1993, HIV had become the leading cause of death in Americans aged 25-44 years.

In the 40-plus years since it was identified, scientists have made notable progress against HIV, transforming the infection from a death sentence into a manageable chronic condition, one that affects some 1.2 million people in the United States and nearly 40 million worldwide.

This decades-long quest for a cure for HIV has also yielded broader insights that have implications for the treatment of COVID-19, cancer, and other diseases.

From molecular insights to frontline medicines

Since the identification of HIV as the cause of AIDS, basic science and animal research have played a critical role in illuminating the virus’ complex behavior.

Some of the pivotal studies toward unraveling the structure, biology, and behavior of HIV have emanated from labs across Harvard Medical School. Using a range of imaging techniques, Stephen Harrison’s lab has identified key portions of HIV and studied the evolution of HIV antibodies, which is critical to understanding how the immune system interacts with the virus. The work of Joseph Sodroski, Bing Chen, and Alan Engelman has elucidated how HIV enters host cells and interacts with cell receptors, studying the structure and behavior of the virus’ protein envelope during this process.

This research has illuminated how HIV integrates its genetic material into host cell DNA, a crucial step in the virus’ life cycle. These insights have enhanced vaccine and therapeutic development by revealing how broadly neutralizing antibodies work and guiding the design of new immune-targeting strategies.

Early analyses of patient samples revealed that HIV is a human retrovirus — a type of virus that converts its RNA into DNA upon infecting a host cell. This tricks the host cell into copying the virus’ genetic material into its DNA as part of the cell’s normal replication cycle. The maneuver enables it to use the host cell machinery to make more viruses. HIV specifically goes after CD4 T lymphocytes or so-called helper T cells. These white blood cells coordinate immune response by signaling other immune cells to fight invaders. The virus begins by hijacking the cells’ molecular machinery to assemble thousands of viral particles, which go on to infect other CD4 T cells, spreading the pathogen throughout the body.

Today, the standard treatment for HIV is antiretroviral therapy (ART) — a combination of HIV medications, typically taken daily, that disrupt the virus’ replication cycle. When taken consistently, ART can lower the amount of actively replicating virus in the body — or viral load — to undetectable levels, lowering risk of transmission and allowing people with HIV to live nearly as long as uninfected individuals.

ART has also proved to be useful as a pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) — an approach that can prevent up to 99 percent of sexually transmitted HIV infections from developing after exposure. Notably, a new class of medicines has raised hopes as a game-changer in HIV prevention. Two recent clinical trials of more than 7,500 cisgender men and transgender and nonbinary people showed that twice-a-year injections with the long-lasting drug lenacapavir prevented HIV infections in nearly all participants.

Yet, millions around the world are already infected. Once inside the body, HIV persists because of its remarkable ability to hide within healthy CD4 T cells, where it can lie dormant for years without triggering an immune response, said Daniel Kuritzkes, HMS Harriet Ryan Albee Professor of Medicine and chief of the division of infectious diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Although these latent reservoirs of HIV do not actively produce new virus particles, they can reawaken at any time, leading to active HIV infection. This chronic immune activation among infected people — even when the virus is kept at bay — can amplify the risk for several chronic conditions.

“People living with HIV often have elevated markers of inflammation,” Kuritzkes said. “This chronic immune activation can predispose people to long-term complications, including cardiovascular illness.”

Indeed, research has shown that people with HIV have a somewhat elevated risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, kidney disease, and certain types of cancer. Now, the latest research from Advancing Clinical Therapeutics Globally — a global network of experts conducting HIV research — has found that daily use of statins could reduce risk of cardiovascular disease in people living with HIV by 35 percent. This pivotal work was conceived by and led by Steven Grinspoon, HMS professor of medicine and director of the Metabolism Unit at Mass General Hospital.

While this offers a path toward managing HIV-related complications, Kuritzkes emphasizes that the ultimate quest of research efforts remains achieving sterilizing immunity through a vaccine that halts the virus in its tracks, preventing infection from taking hold in the first place.

The roadmap to a vaccine

With some 1.3 million new infections a year, a vaccine remains the best way to end the HIV epidemic, said Dan Barouch, the William Bosworth Castle Professor of Medicine at HMS and director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

“We should use all of our prevention and treatment tools, including education and pre-exposure prophylaxis with antiretroviral drugs, to prevent HIV, but to really end the epidemic, we need a vaccine,” Barouch said.

Despite great strides with PrEP, Barouch notes, it will only reach high-risk individuals, and as many as half of new HIV infections occur in people who are not designated as high risk. Thus, Barouch notes, even if PrEP were available for free and accessible to everyone in the world, which is far from reality, it would still invariably reach a ceiling of population efficacy.

Yet, after 40 years of effort, the HIV vaccine field is at a crossroads. Since the dawn of HIV research, there have been hundreds of attempts at vaccine design, and dozens have made it to early-stage clinical trials, but only five have been tested in large-scale clinical trials.

“There is a lot of exciting basic, preclinical, and early clinical research, but currently no vaccine candidate has a clear trajectory for advanced clinical development,” Barouch said.

Why?

First, the ability of the virus to shapeshift within the host and across the population. The virus mutates rapidly, resulting in an astonishing genetic diversity not seen with any other virus.

“With HIV, you are not targeting a single virus, you’re targeting millions of different viruses,” said Barouch.

Another problem is the fact that the virus integrates itself into the host genome quickly — within days following infection — then goes into hiding, establishing a latent reservoir that can reactivate at any time. This means that a vaccine needs to induce rapid immune response that counters viral maneuvers very rapidly. No other virus seeds reservoirs so quickly, and no other vaccine has been capable of inducing such rapid defense.

Finally, the virus is cloaked in an envelope of sugar molecules — or glycans — that render it largely impervious to antibodies. There are only three or four targets on HIV that render it vulnerable to antibodies. Thus, for antibodies to work, they must be hyperprecise to latch on to these hotspots in order to disrupt the viral shield. This, Barouch notes, may be one of the greatest hurdles to developing a potent enough vaccine.

Among the most recent efforts was a vaccine developed by Barouch and Johnson & Johnson that was tested in Africa and in South and North America. The approach used a so-called “mosaic” platform optimized using computational biology to target multiple strains of the virus.

The researchers used computer design to create a mosaic antigen in the lab. The trial, which concluded in 2021, showed the vaccine had great safety but low efficacy — around 14 percent. A vaccine needs to be at least 50 percent effective, but ideally 70 percent or more, Barouch noted, meaning that it would have to prevent at least seven out of 10 infections.

Despite the disappointing results, Barouch said, the findings helped refocus the field of HIV vaccine research on the importance of neutralizing antibodies — the types of immune proteins that are capable of disabling rather than merely recognizing the virus.

To that end, Barouch and team have redoubled their efforts to design vaccines that create precisely such broadly neutralizing antibody response as well as spark a robust T cell response, thus activating both major arms of the immune system.

Lessons from elite controllers

In the early 1990s, researchers noticed a tiny subset of HIV-infected patients who were living healthy and symptom free without medication. These patients, who came to be known as elite controllers, had undetectable viral levels in their bodies. Their immune systems were powerful enough to naturally keep the virus from replicating. Between 0.15 and 1.5 percent of HIV-infected individuals are estimated to be elite controllers.

“In these individuals, the immune system is able to suppress HIV replication,” said Yu, whose lab focuses on the molecular and cellular mechanisms behind this remarkable immune response, with the hope of harnessing these insights to develop new antiretroviral treatments for HIV. “And in a rare subgroup, the immune system may even eliminate all cells infected with replication-competent HIV, curing the infection entirely.”

When Gaurav Gaiha, then a first-year student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, learned about elite controllers, he was captivated by the concept of using insights from these unique individuals to develop an HIV vaccine.

At that time, a prevailing scientific theory was that elite controllers had an exceptionally powerful T cell response to HIV. However, when Gaiha began comparing the T cell responses in elite controllers to that of people living with progressive HIV, he discovered something surprising: While T cell function in elite controllers was important, there was another important piece to this biological riddle. Gaiha therefore shifted his focus and instead began to zero in on the specific regions of the virus that these T cells were targeting.

In a 2019 study, Gaiha, Walker, and colleagues applied network theory to tackle this question. They treated each amino acid in the viral proteins as a node in a network, allowing them to quantify how central each amino acid was to the protein’s function. Their findings offered a breakthrough: T cells in elite controllers consistently targeted critical regions of the virus protein network — areas that were essential for its survival and losing or mutating them would significantly hinder the virus’ ability to replicate.

“It’s similar to key players in a network,” said Gaiha, now an assistant professor of medicine at HMS and a principal investigator at the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard. “Key players keep the network connected, while others may be more on the periphery. If T cells target key player amino acids from these critical regions of viral proteins, you may have a chance to control the virus for a long period of time without therapy.”

These insights, Gaiha noted, have implications beyond HIV — they helped guide COVID-19 vaccine developments that stimulate T cells and induce a robust and long-lasting immune response.

Encouraged by promising results in humanized mice, Gaiha and Walker are now collaborating with two biotech companies to translate these insights into a viable HIV vaccine. The group’s viral vector-based vaccine candidate is set to enter a first in human clinical trial in Zimbabwe and South Africa in early 2025, while a second RNA-based vaccine trial is meant to begin in 2026 at Mass General.

“I am hopeful that we will see good outcomes from these initial vaccine trials,” said Gaiha. “But more importantly, I am looking forward to learning key lessons that will guide us, so we can continue to refine. We’re in this for the long haul.”

Ripple benefits beyond HIV

The search for a cure continues, but the sinuous 40-plus-year journey has fueled advances well beyond HIV.

For starters, many of the successes in the identification, testing, and treatment of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that ignited the COVID-19 pandemic, were built on knowledge and hard-earned experiences with HIV.

“Research on HIV really paved the way for the advances that were made with COVID, by laying the platforms for vaccine development that, in particular, the vectors that were used to generate immune responses, the mechanisms for rapid diagnostics, the understanding of viral pathogenesis — all were really contributed by work that had been done on HIV,” Walker said.

“If it wasn’t for the decades of HIV research, we would not have had the COVID-19 vaccines so rapidly,” Barouch said.

HIV research also equipped scientists with the tools and know-how to unravel viral structures and monitor the behavior of viruses inside their hosts. This work also led to the development of animal models that allow researchers to study how the body responds to vaccines and treatments and laid the foundation for the modern-day infrastructure needed to conduct clinical trials.

HIV research has catalyzed understanding of immune system function in myriad ways. For example, recent advances in gene therapy and CAR T cells were heavily influenced by research conducted in HIV infection.

“Fundamental mechanisms of how the immune system can recognize, engage, and target virally infected cells were first discovered in the context of HIV infection, and a lot of this progress has subsequently been translated to alternative disease contexts,” said HIV researcher Xu Yu, professor of medicine at HMS and a principal investigator at the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard.

For example, gene therapy uses lentiviruses as vectors to deliver therapeutic genes into the target cells.

“These lentiviruses are very similar to HIV, and a deeper understanding of HIV allowed researchers to use lentiviruses for therapeutic gene transfer,” Yu said.

HIV research also helped advanced the field of CAR T-cell therapy, which uses genetically engineered immune cells for the treatment of blood cancers. One of the first CAR T-cell studies was done in the context of treating HIV infection, more than 20 years ago.

“Experience gained with CAR T cells in this setting was instrumental in advancing them for oncologic indications,” Yu said.

Gund Hall, it is safe to say, was overdue for an update after weathering 50 Cambridge winters.

The iconic Quincy Street home of Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is open after a major renovation this year, its most significant since the building opened in 1972. While the changes may not be readily apparent, the need was.

The hall’s concrete-and-glass stepped exterior, which encloses GSD’s beloved five-story, central studio area known as “the trays,” had badly deteriorated over the years, allowing moisture and cold air to seep in, and heat to escape. The space was so inefficient, it consumed nearly half of the building’s total energy. Before rainstorms, students covered their desks with tarps.

“The main purpose of this work is to get rid of the leaks once and for all. This building, for the 52 years it has been open, has always leaked. When it rains hard, you see the buckets everywhere,” said David Fixler, a lecturer in urban planning and design at GSD who chairs the faculty building committee, which has been advising on this first phase of what will be a multiyear project.

Other improvements include boosting the amount of natural light coming into the trays and making the adjacent outdoor terraces wheelchair-accessible for the first time.

For decades, the building’s unique design, as well as its historic and educational importance to GSD, have presented major obstacles to undertaking any substantive restoration that would fix these persistent problems without compromising the look and feel of the original design by Australian architect John Andrews, March. ’58.

Gund Hall Project Fact Sheet

15,475

Square feet of studio tray glazing area

1,617

Panels of glass

160,830

Total square footage of Gund Hall, excluding terraces

28%

Amount of floor area taken up by studio trays

46%

Building’s total energy consumption attributed to studio trays

“When John Andrews was originally tasked to design a new facility for the Departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design, he surprised his clients with a unique building that was at once solid and transparent and that prioritized the student body, united within an enormous, light-filled, single space,” Sarah M. Whiting, dean and Josep Lluis Sert Professor of Architecture at GSD, said in a statement. “Though much has changed since Gund Hall first opened in 1972, the careful rehabilitation of the structure underscores the school’s commitment to this same priority: our students.”

Gund, like other examples of mid-century Brutalist architecture, was constructed before the 1973 global “oil shock” and widespread awareness of climate change. It features large surfaces of exposed concrete, many windows, and is not well-insulated, all of which make it less than well suited to the harsh climate of New England.

“Philosophically, one of the compelling things about brutalism is the structure is the building. What you see is what it is. There’s nothing hidden,” said Fixler, an architect who specializes in mid-20th century building conservation. That means “sometimes they fail spectacularly, and they’re hard to fix.”

Nearly all of the original windows were badly degraded and couldn’t be salvaged. Above, clerestory windows on the roof were replaced with triple-glazed windows.

The curtain walls on each end of the building now have windows made from custom vacuum-insulated glass, a state-of-the-art material not widely used in North America. They provide energy efficiency and noise reduction comparable to traditional triple-glazed windows without the bulk, allowing the new windows to hew very closely to the original window profiles and glass sizes, while delivering two to four times better energy performance than standard glass. They will yield future savings in both carbon and dollars spent on utilities.

The project takes an aging facade that “had the problems of its time to a facade that is the best-performing glazing system anywhere,” said project architect George Gard, MAUD ’14, of Bruner/Cott Architects. The firm has restored other mid-century buildings at Harvard, including Smith Campus Center and Peabody Terrace.

With so many Brutalist-era buildings around the country now confronting similar challenges because of age, the School hopes the project serves as a model for others, by identifying innovative technology, techniques, and materials and helping define best practices.

“We see a lot of future potential as it becomes more common. And we hope that, this project being a high-profile building on Harvard’s campus, can be part of a growing acceptance of this technology,” said Gard.

Given the project’s unique complexity, Fixler, a conservation architect for many decades, has been incorporating the renovation into his teaching.

“What I find heartening is that [among] the students, there’s a growing understanding that it’s a really responsible thing to do to recycle old buildings, whether you like them or not, and to use that opportunity to test new ideas to make them more resilient, make them more sustainable,” he said.

Not everyone appreciates Brutalist behemoths like Gund Hall or Boston City Hall, often called one of the country’s ugliest buildings, or thinks they’re worth preserving.

“One of the biggest challenges, frankly, is getting people to understand why these are good, interesting buildings, and getting people to love them — because so many people hate them,” he said.

“There are a lot of people, especially younger people of the generation that I’m teaching now and my kids, [who] think these buildings are cool. But an awful lot of people of my generation just don’t.”

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.