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Harvard GazetteOfficial news from Harvard University covering innovation in teaching, learning, and researchNumber of those burdened by rental affordability hits record highPublic policy expert discusses possible ways to cut costs amid national housing crunch
Number of those burdened by rental affordability hits record high
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
8 min read
Public policy expert discusses possible ways to cut costs amid national housing crunch
Amid a nationwide housing shortage, a new report shows the number of those burdened by rental affordability has hit a record high.
As of 2023, 22.6 million renter households spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities, up by 2.2 million since 2019. More than half, or 12.1 million, of those spent more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, according to recent research by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard.
Worsening affordability affects renters across income groups. Middle-income renters, who earn $30,000-$75,000, comprised 41 percent of all cost burdened households in 2023. Those earning $75,000 and more were 9 percent. A full-time job is no guarantee that housing will be affordable. Indeed, 36 percent of fully employed renters were cost-burdened in 2023.
In this edited conversation, Chris Herbert, the center’s director, explains why renting continues to grow less affordable and what cities can try to do about it.
The number of households struggling with housing costs is at an historic high. What’s driving this?
There’s two things. Since 2021, we saw rents going up at double-digit rates in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. In 2023, they started to slow down. In 2024, they were growing at more like an inflationary clip, so “better.” That was a function of very strong demand from the pandemic. Supply couldn’t keep up and led to high rents.
It came on the backs of what had been deteriorating affordability for the last two decades. There was a quiet affordability crisis growing, which is, how many renters were cost-burdened.
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, we reached a peak around 2011 in terms of both numbers and share of renters who were cost-burdened. From there, things gradually got a bit better.
But underneath the surface, while the overall share of renters who were cost-burdened was edging down, the share of renters working year-round, full-time, at not great but not terrible jobs, we were seeing a sharp increase in the share of renters who were cost-burdened.
What was happening was the cost-burdened/housing affordability issue was really being democratized. It was spreading from just among the poorest households to more working folks, particularly young people.
There was a real worsening of the crisis since the pandemic, but it had already been getting worse, and particularly worse for working people.
The number of cost-burdened renters has hit another record high
Many more middle- and higher-income renters are struggling with housing costs. What accounts for that shift?
That’s kind of the $64,000 question. The most common answer people give is that we haven’t been building enough housing. To some extent, that’s true. Multifamily vacancy rates had gotten quite tight, particularly in the face of the pandemic surge. So, there was a sense that we didn’t have enough apartments.
That is a piece of the story, but we almost overemphasize it. The other part of the story is that the cost of producing housing units is very high. There’s this notion, “Build more houses, and the price will come down.” You have to bear in mind that builders only build housing if it makes economic sense to do so.
The expense comes in four big buckets: There’s land, and that’s where a lot of the conversation has been around zoning and the fact that we don’t have enough land zoned for high-density housing. And then there’s construction costs — that’s 60 percent of the cost of an apartment building. The land, typically, is only 20 percent. And then there’s the soft costs: architectural, engineering, and then, financing. Those costs go up with a difficult approval process. They’re about 10-15 percent of the cost, so not a big driver. But the financing costs, when interest rates go up to 7 percent, is a big driver.
Housing is expensive for a host of reasons, zoning being one of them, construction costs, and the fact we haven’t had improvements in efficiency in the construction sector, and then the complexity of the approvals process and the high cost of capital.
Boston mayoral candidates Josh Kraft and Mayor Michelle Wu said housing affordability will be a top issue in the upcoming election. Do mayors and cities have any real tools to bring down housing costs?
There’s been a lot of discussion and emphasis on the regulatory processes. How restrictive is your zoning? How onerous is your approval process? How hard is it for a developer to propose a reasonable scale development and get it approved and start work on it? A big thing cities are doing is relooking at their zoning. Cambridge has done various iterations of looking at their zoning.
Related to that can be the approval process: The affordable housing overlay in Cambridge says if you put forth a development that meets criteria in terms of setbacks and density and other factors, we’re going to approve it, and you don’t have to go through a whole process of design review. So, cities can do that.
How does that affect affordability? It reduces the soft costs. To the extent you’re giving me greater density, I may be able to get a better value of land. The challenge is that the land’s value is based on how many units you can put on it. And so, if you tell me I can put two units on it, and the land was worth, say, a million bucks, and then you say, “Now you can put 10 units on it.” That’s $100,000 a unit. I just saved a ton of money.
But as soon as you tell a developer you can put 10 units on it, the developer says, “I’ll pay 5 million bucks for that piece of land.” So, you don’t get as much savings from the density. All cities can do in that regard is try to make it so there’s not more friction and more pressure on prices to go up faster than they otherwise would.
You’re going to have a hard time solving the affordability problem through zoning. And if you’re talking about lower-income households or even moderate-income households, you’re going to have to talk about ways in which you’re going to subsidize the cost of that housing. That means cities have to find ways to get money.
Boston has been very good about linkage payments for commercial development generating a fair amount of money, as has Cambridge, and an affordable housing trust that gets money from that. They can use some general appropriations from their budget.
You can also look for special taxes. Boston put forward a transfer tax proposal that former Mayor Marty Walsh estimated would generate about $100 million a year in income for the Affordable Housing Trust. Mayor Wu pursued it, but the state legislature has stymied them.
A big issue for cities is how do we get more financial resources to help subsidize housing. One of the things cities can do is go catalog all the land they own. That land can be an important subsidy. Boston’s been doing that.
“A big issue for cities is how do we get more financial resources to help subsidize housing. One of the things cities can do is go catalog all the land they own. That land can be an important subsidy. Boston’s been doing that.”
Chris Herbert
And maybe spur innovation in the design of housing. Boston’s Housing Innovation Lab has been looking at how do we get more modular housing, more efficiencies of factory production and how can the City of Boston play a role in trying to help that get to scale.
Any promising policy ideas or positive trends on the horizon?
We’re definitely in a situation where we have to try a lot of things. There’s a lot of experimentation. There’s a piece in the Mass. state bond bill for a revolving loan fund. People have come to the realization that housing affordability has been a long-term problem that’s been a long time in the making, and so we have to have a long-term vision of how we address this.
One of the big ways in which housing inflates in value is through the inflation of land values. Houses depreciate, and so, the value of a house built in 2000 should be less today. But in fact, housing values around here are double what they were in 2000, and that’s all in the land value. It’s land values that capture a lot of the inflation in house prices. And so, one thing to do is to lock in land ownership long term to keep that inflation from affecting the occupants of the home.
The other piece is that if [property owners] manage housing at cost then you can start charging rents that are a lot more affordable. Combine that with public ownership or nonprofit ownership that could be exempt or limited property taxes, low-cost land, at-cost rents, and reduced costs from reduced property taxes, you can start to get housing that is affordable.
The House that will be homeHousing Day — one of Harvard’s most beloved traditions — marks a milestone for first-years
Surrounded by Kirkland House signs, the John Harvard Statue watches over the College’s annual Housing Day tradition in Harvard Yard.
Housing Day — one of Harvard’s most beloved traditions — marks a milestone for first-years
When first-year student Wilson Cheung and his four suitemates woke up at 7 a.m. on Thursday, they could already hear upperclassmen gathering in the Yard outside their dorm. They waited excitedly in their room as the sounds drew closer until finally, around 8:30 a.m., a loud group made their way up the stairs.
When Cheung heard chants of “C-A-B-O-T,” he briefly wondered if he was about to be sorted into Cabot House, but when the door opened it was a group of Adams House residents there to greet him enthusiastically and give him his assignment letter.
As he hugged a friend in front of the John Harvard Statue 15 minutes later, Cheung couldn’t stop smiling.
“My suitemate and I got Adams and we’re super happy,” he said. “Adams just finished its renovation, so we’re going live in a brand-new dorm. It’s also close to everything, right in the center of campus. It’s a very cool dorm.”
Dunster House residents play music and dance in the Yard before storming first-year dorms.
Photo by Dylan Goodman
Housing Day, when first-year students learn where they will live for the next three years, is one of Harvard’s most beloved — and rowdy — annual traditions. Upperclassmen representing the 12 residential Houses flock to Harvard Yard early in the morning to showcase their House spirit and friendly rivalry. At 8:30 a.m., upperclassmen storm the first-year dorms to deliver housing assignment letters and welcome their newest Housemates home.
Students danced and celebrated in front of the bronze John Harvard, many in coordinated outfits, such as blue T-shirts for Lowell House and burgundy beanies for Winthrop. Some Dunster House residents walked by playing trumpets and saxophones, while Leverett House residents, wearing green bunny ears, honked green plastic stadium horns. House mascots, like the Dunster House moose, Currier House tree, and Cabot fish, danced around and posed for photos.
Winthrop House residents Ikenna Ogbogu and Ebun Oguntola, both sophomores, rallied with the rest of their Housemates, dressed in burgundy shirts. Ogbogu, who was holding a sign that read “’Throp, what a W,” said he loves Housing Day because getting his housing assignment last year was a milestone in the Harvard experience.
A Winthrop House resident cheers.
Photo by Dylan Goodman
Jeffrey Yang ’26 (center) laughs with his fellow Adams House residents.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Wearing polar bear mascot costumes Pforzheimer House residents cross Garden Street on their way to Harvard Yard.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
“You’re part of a larger community with such so much more history than your freshman hall,” Ogbogu said. “Being on the other side now and being able to dorm-storm freshmen, dressing up, shouting in the morning at 7 a.m. is just really fun because you’re part of creating an experience for everyone here.”
Rakesh Khurana, Danoff Dean of Harvard College, paused to take selfies with a costumed group as he greeted students in the Yard. Khurana said the annual tradition is one of the most “incredible” experiences at the College.
“The Houses are what make Harvard College so distinctive,” Khurana said. “One of the things I love about this day is that this is when every House becomes a home for our students.”
“At a time when many of us feel like we need an injection of joy, Housing Day delivered just that,” said Hoekstra. “It’s magical to watch friendships — maybe lifelong ones — form right before your eyes.”
Outside Hollis Hall, Lowell House seniors Anoushka Chander and Una Roven, both in blue jackets, posed for a photo together while their Housemates flooded into the dorm. The seniors, who were holding a sign that read “take the L,” were feeling nostalgic to be experiencing the tradition for the last time.
“It’s just a great tradition to celebrate our House and the wonderful community that we have and each other,” Chander said. “It’s our last Housing Day to let people know they got the best House, and that it will be their home for the next few years.”
Their advice to first-years experiencing Housing Day for the first time?
“Just enjoy it,” Chander said.
“Yeah, enjoy it, any House you get will be awesome,” Roven agreed, then paused. “But Lowell is the best.”
First-year students await their House assignments as they watch the festivities below their residence hall.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Dressed as the Cabot House mascot, Max Wagner ’27 prepares to enter a first-year dorm room.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
A Currier House resident waves the House flag.
Photo by Dylan Goodman
After delivering a Housing Day letter to a first-year dorm, bunny-eared Leverett House students boo Dunster House residents as they exit.
Photo by Dylan Goodman
Amelie Lima ’27 holds up a Currier House sign.
Photo by Dylan Goodman
Adams House residents wave to first-years in their dorm rooms.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Niels Korsgaard ’25 (left) of Mather House rallies atop the John Harvard Statue.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
In Annenberg Hall Michael Young ’25 (from left), Naomi Whidden ’27, Emily Schwartz ’27, and Mila Ivanovska ’25 pose for a photo at the Dunster House table.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Harrison Warfel ’26 of Quincy House makes himself heard over the boisterous crowd.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Lowell and Eliot House residents show their spirit.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
An Eliot House resident in a mastodon costume rallies the group.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
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Ditching butter has a big impact. Climate change is changing the forest. The cost of homeowners insurance is screwy. Drug manufacturing costs could be lower. Harvard runs (or ran) on typewriters.
It’s going to get even harder to write (or at least type) like Sylvia PlathCambridge Typewriter, one of few shops left to buy, repair vintage machines, prepares to close doors after more than half a century
It’s going to get even harder to write (or at least type) like Sylvia Plath
Thomas Furrier.
Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Cambridge Typewriter, one of few shops left to buy, repair vintage machines, prepares to close doors after more than half a century
Ever since Tom Furrier announced he was closing Cambridge Typewriter the phone has been ringing off the hook.
“I’m going out on top,” hollered the 70-year-old on a recent morning at his storefront on Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington, where he moved the business, which has been around for more than 50 years, after buying it from his old boss in 1990. “I’m busier than ever.”
Furrier’s tiny shop is a mid-century relic, with the smell of ink wafting through the door, framed period ads on the walls, and dozens of vintage manual typewriters emblazoned with names such as Underwood, Remington, Smith-Corona, and Royal perched on shelves and sitting on the floor in sturdy cases.
Like so many businesses, Furrier’s was disrupted by the digital revolution of the 1990s. But recent years have brought a modest renaissance for the 19th-century communication technology as a wave of young customers with a penchant for manual typewriters boosted the store’s finances.
This new cohort joined the shop’s shrinking group of regulars, which over the years has included celebrated writers like Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough, novelist Celeste Ng (“Little Fires Everywhere”), memoirist Susanna Kaysen (“Girl, Interrupted”), and poet Louise Glück, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in literature — and generations of Harvard, MIT, and Boston-area students and faculty members.
Although his business is still robust, Furrier says he’s ready for retirement. Decades of lifting and fixing typewriters (about 30,000 by his count) have left him with worn cartilage in his hands and chronic back pain. After plans to sell the shop failed twice, he will shut down at the end of March.
It’s bittersweet.
“I’m really going to miss this place,” said Furrier, his work jacket showing stubborn grease stains and, in his pockets, his favorite tools: a spring hook and a small screwdriver to reach inside the machines’ nooks and crannies. “I’m going to miss my customers. My regular customers are very upset because now they’ll have to travel to southern New Hampshire, Rhode Island or southern Connecticut … But I’m just done.”
A forestry major and lifelong tinkerer, Furrier began as a typewriter technician in the 1980s, when he was 25. In those days he did mostly service calls at MIT and Harvard Law School, where he would fix machines used by scholars such as Laurence Tribe, Alan Dershowitz, and others, he said.
In recent years, others with links to Harvard have visited his shop, among them Tayari Jones, a 2011-2012 Radcliffe Fellow who became a typewriter devotee.
Jones’ encounter with Furrier was as serendipitous as it was consequential. Struggling with writer’s block, she visited the shop seeking inspiration.
“Tom made me into a convert,” said Jones, who teaches creative writing at Emory University, in a phone interview. “It wasn’t until I went to Tom’s that I discovered manual typewriters … Tom is the greatest typewriter doctor because he doesn’t run his shop like a museum. He’s not fussy and prissy about it. He’s very practical and down to earth. He wants us all just to have fun with the typewriter; just get it; put some paper in there; make some noise and make some art.”
“Tom is the greatest typewriter doctor because he doesn’t run his shop like a museum.”
Tayari Jones
Jones now writes on vintage manual typewriters. In fact, her 2018 award-winning best-seller “American Marriage” was produced entirely on a typewriter — one of the 11 in her collection, five of which she bought from Furrier.
“There’s so much pressure in the industry to be fast,” Jones said. “Using a typewriter made me feel like, I can slow down and work at my own pace … And there is something so satisfying about raising a racket when using a typewriter.”
Professors Jill Lepore and Leah Price visited Furrier’s shop as they were preparing for “How to Read a Book,” a seminar they co-taught a few years ago. The class asked students to think about the tools they use to take notes by recapitulating the history of note-taking technologies, Lepore wrote in an email. Students used clay and a stylus, paper and quills, typewriters and smartphones.
Lepore said she used the typewriters she bought from Furrier in a history class she taught in the fall.
“We visited Cambridge Typewriter some years back to stock up,” wrote Lepore. “I still use the three typewriters that I bought from him then … It’s harder and harder to find typewriters to use. When the ones I’ve got break down, or when I can no longer replace the ribbon, this crucial piece of the history of technology will be lost.”
Reached by email, Price, an associate in Harvard’s English Department and Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University, said she had sort of an epiphany at Furrier’s store.
“Visiting Tom’s shop helped me understand that coming up with ideas is the easy part,” said Price. “Repairing the tools that record and transmitting those ideas turned out to be surprisingly tricky, and banging out their thoughts on a typewriter keyboard helped slow down our students to a pace where they had to think before they wrote. Come the apocalypse, every Crimson journalist may want to know how to change a typewriter ribbon.”
“Visiting Tom’s shop helped me understand that coming up with ideas is the easy part.”
Leah Price
Visitors often come to Furrier’s shop as if it were a museum or a curiosity shop.
“If people come in by themselves, they come back with family or friends because they say, ‘You’ve got to come to see this shop,”’ Furrier said. “Or people come with their grandkids to show them that this is what they used to write with.”
Furrier said it took him by surprise when a younger crowd started appearing in the early 2000s. Some were aspiring writers who wanted to emulate legendary ones, like the customer looking to purchase a Hermes 3000, the model famously used by American poet Sylvia Plath. Others were looking for something computers can’t offer.
“To write on a typewriter is a totally different experience than writing on a computer,” said Furrier. “It’s a sensorial experience; the sounds of the click-clack, the feel of the keys and the paper, the smell of the ink. And there are no distractions. Typewriters only do one thing; you can’t multitask on it, and that’s a new thing to younger people.”
“It’s a sensorial experience; the sounds of the click-clack, the feel of the keys and the paper, the smell of the ink. And there are no distractions. Typewriters only do one thing; you can’t multitask on it, and that’s a new thing to younger people.”
Thomas Furrier
Reflecting on his career, Furrier said he most cherishes the friendships he made with writers and some customers, and a couple of stints as a typewriter consultant for period films, among them one by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris.
Other highlights include the time when actor Tom Hanks, a typewriter collector, gifted him an autographed Olympia SM4 machine with a typewritten letter asking him to “take good care of it and help it keep doing its job for another hundred years.”
And then there was being mentioned in the acknowledgment section by Jones in “American Marriage.”
To bid farewell, Furrier will hold a retirement party with typewriters for people to use on March 22 at the Fox Library in East Arlington. Longtime customers, friends, and the general public are all invited.
“It has been beyond my wildest dreams,” Furrier said of his career. “For a tinkerer like me, fixing typewriters has been fun and rewarding. I got to befriend some amazing writers and geek out about typewriters. And how many people can say they got movie credits and a book acknowledgement?”
On fiction, grief, and, most of all, ‘radical honesty’Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shares with readers the story behind ‘Dream Count,’ a novel she was scared she’d never finish
On fiction, grief, and, most of all, ‘radical honesty’
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shares with readers the story behind ‘Dream Count,’ a novel she was scared she’d never finish
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Photos by Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
For Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, fiction is a calling. Last week, the former Radcliffe fellow and 2018 Class Day speaker visited Harvard Square to mark another milestone in her vocation with the release of “Dream Count” — a book more than 10 years in the making.
The author of four novels, Adichie published her third, the critically acclaimed “Americanah,” in 2013. For a while, she worried there wouldn’t be another.
“Dream Count” is “actually quite an emotional moment for me because in some ways, I can’t believe that I’ve actually written a novel,” Adichie told a packed crowd gathered in the First Parish Church for an event sponsored by Harvard Book Store. “At some point, I wasn’t sure that I would ever write a novel again, and I was terrified. It was an unbearable thought. And so I feel this immense gratitude to be here, to have people actually come out, and hear me talk about this novel.”
“Dream Count” follows four interconnected women as they pursue love and self-discovery through hardships. The first, whose story opens the book, is Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer from a privileged background living in the U.S. The narrative also follows her hyper-independent cousin, Omelogor, living in Nigeria; Zikora, a Nigerian lawyer in Washington whose life isn’t quite going to plan; and Chiamaka’s Guinean housekeeper, Kadiatou, whose tragedy unites the characters.
“When it comes to fiction, the whole point of it is that you have to let go. You have to be willing to go wherever it takes you,” Adichie told the audience members who filled the church’s 600-seat meetinghouse space.
The backdrop is the pandemic, when, as Adichie puts it, “The world sort of stopped briefly, and it was so surreal and so unique, that people reacted in all kinds of ways.” Even so, the novelist had a lot more on her mind than just COVID.
The new book is “about many things,” Adichie said. “It’s about thinking about the other lives that we might have led. Sometimes, even when we’re content in our own lives, we still imagine other paths that our destiny could have taken us on. And I think it’s also about knowing about how much one knows oneself, about how much one knows other people.”
“Dream Count” was shaped in part by personal shocks that revealed hidden interior truths, Adichie said. In 2020, when her father died from complications of kidney disease, the intensity of her grief surprised her. Instead of the numbness she expected, she began weeping and pounding the floor.
“I started thinking about self-knowledge after my father died,” she said. “I found myself thinking about what love is, and one of my conclusions is that to love a person is to attempt to know them. But at the same time, I think we’re limited by how much we can, in fact, know even ourselves. The fact that we that we can surprise ourselves is just endlessly fascinating to me.”
During the Q&A portion of the event, longtime fans and new readers alike praised Adichie for her rich characters and narrative skills. Some sought advice for dealing with political uncertainty. One aspiring novelist wanted to know how to write fiction without giving too much away.
“I think you do have to give too much of yourself away,” Adichie answered. “Fiction is my vocation. I think it’s the reason I’m here … And so when I’m writing fiction, I don’t think about my audience. I really do feel as though I’m suspended in this just wonderful, magical place.”
She added: “When it comes to fiction, the whole point of it is that you have to let go. You have to be willing to go wherever it takes you. That I think, is the fundamental requirement of writing good fiction — a certain kind of truth, a certain kind of, what I like to call radical honesty.”
Adichie gave birth to her first child, a daughter, in 2016, followed by twin boys in 2024. Asked about balancing work with family life, she said, “Motherhood is the greatest lesson that I’ve had in my life, but it does come at a cost. It requires a kind of balance and things that you need to step back from for a while, and it just is the way it is. When I started to feel that I was in that horrible writer’s block space, I would make time to read poetry … I did that in service to my writing even though the writing was not happening. There are small ways in which you can still hold onto whatever it is that you want to achieve, even if you are not able to fully engage with it at the time.”
Johnny can read. Jane can read. But they may not fully comprehend.Ed School panel looks at how to reverse declining scores on recent ‘Nation’s Report Card’
Johnny can read. Jane can read. But they may not fully comprehend.
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Ed School panel looks at how to reverse declining scores on recent ‘Nation’s Report Card’
Educators have made significant progress in the science of reading in recent decades. Teachers know how to get students to the point where they can take on simple declarative sentences. So Johnny and Jane can read — but they have trouble comprehending more complex ideas. There is still much work to do, said experts at an Ed School panel in a webinar on Thursday.
Moderated by Pamela Mason, senior lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the panel highlighted the need to improve literacy outcomes in light of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — known as the “Nation’s Report Card” — which showed declines in reading scores for U.S. fourth and eighth graders.
“If you can’t read words off the page, you’re not going to understand what you read.”
Phil Capin
Assistant professor of education Phil Capin.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Experts discussed the science of reading, an interdisciplinary body of research, based on the Reading Rope concept, which teachers have been using since the 2000s to help children become skilled readers, capable not only of reading words but fully comprehending what they read. According to the reading rope model, many strands are woven into skilled reading, the biggest of which are word recognition and language comprehension.
Educators have succeeded in teaching word-recognition skills, such as phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition, but they are missing the mark in helping children learn language-comprehension skills, such as background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge, said professor of education James Kim. Educators need to use the reading rope model more effectively, he said.
“We know how to help kids climb easy structures,” said Kim. “We know how to help kids read familiar narrative texts like ‘The ants ate the chips at the picnic,’ but where we are struggling is in helping kids use that rope to climb very tall and very difficult structures. And you know what those structures are? They are NAEP scores.”
Phil Capin, assistant professor of education, agreed with Kim that educators could do more to help students develop comprehension skills, which are crucial to critical thinking and problem-solving. There is an array of skills and knowledge that contribute to successful reading comprehension, and they are all intertwined, he said. Early reading instruction and being able to read words are necessary, but they are insufficient for students to understand what they read. Both steps are critical.
“If you can’t read words off the page, you’re not going to understand what you read,” said Capin. “It should also be just as obvious that if you don’t understand what the individual words mean, you’re very unlikely to be able to understand the text.”
Vocabulary and background knowledge are the strongest predictors of reading comprehension, said Capin. Educators can find practice guides on how to help students build language comprehension skills at What Works Clearinghouse, an initiative of the Department of Education, he said.
“We’ve made progress in the science of reading simple text, yes. Now we need to make progress in the science of reading difficult science, math and English language arts text.”
James Kim
Professor of education James Kim.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Research has found that students engaged in active and purposeful reading and collaborative learning tend to achieve the best results. “If we want students to get better at reading and understanding texts, it’s critical that teachers take a step back and allow students the opportunity to engage successfully in reading difficult texts and to make meaning together,” said Capin.
Parents can do their part to help children learn to read and understand what they read, said Kim, by reading aloud more difficult books and teaching them new words. “We have to remember that reading to learn and preparing kids to read to learn can happen from birth, basically from the time the kids are born,” he said.
If anything, the declines in fourth and eighth graders’ reading scores underscore how hard it is for children to gain effective reading comprehension skills, said Kim. As part of the NAEP test, students have to read complex nonfiction texts that require high background knowledge.
“Do you know what we ask kids to read on the NAEP test?” said Kim. “We ask them to read about the U.S. Constitution. We ask them to read about the human body system. We ask them to understand what metamorphosis is, and that is what we have to do next as we think about making progress in the science of reading …
“We’ve made progress in the science of reading simple text, yes. Now we need to make progress in the science of reading difficult science, math and English language arts text.”
Rising econ star sheds light on power of exchange ratesOleg Itskhoki, now a Clark Medalist, returns to Harvard
Rising econ star sheds light on power of exchange rates
Oleg Itskhoki, now a Clark Medalist, returns to Harvard
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Oleg Itskhoki.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Exchange rates aren’t a hot topic in the U.S., due to the dollar dominating global trade and acting as the benchmark for all other currency valuations.
“But in most countries of the world, the exchange rate looms very large,” said Professor of Economics Oleg Itskhoki, Ph.D. ’09. “In smaller open economies like Canada, Australia, Switzerland, or even Great Britain and Japan, the exchange rate matters quite a lot. Talk with central bankers in these countries, and they’re often more interested in the exchange rate than in inflation.”
Itskhoki, a rising star in international economics, joined the Harvard faculty last summer. The Russian-born macroeconomist is best known for partnering with Dmitry Mukhin on a series of papers showing why exchange rates against the U.S. dollar don’t always move with macroeconomic fundamentals like consumption, productivity, and monetary policy. Instead, factors in a country’s financial markets are the dominant driver.
At the center of the analysis is a more accurate framework for understanding exchange rates between currencies worldwide. Itskhoki was recognized for his work with the American Economic Association’s 2022 John Bates Clark Medal, a prestigious award recognizing significant contributions by economists younger than 40.
“There are really two branches of international economics: international trade and international macroeconomics. It’s very unusual but Oleg has established himself as a leader in both. He’s just a tremendous intellectual force.”
Kenneth Rogoff
“But even if Oleg hadn’t won the Clark Medal, he would be someone we want in this department,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a professor of economics and Maurits C. Boas Chair of International Economics. “There are really two branches of international economics: international trade and international macroeconomics. It’s very unusual but Oleg has established himself as a leader in both. He’s just a tremendous intellectual force.”
Itskhoki, whose resume includes professorships at UCLA and Princeton, initially landed at Harvard as a Ph.D. student in the mid-’00s. His advisers included Elhanan Helpman, Ph.D. ’74; Pol Antràs; and Gita Gopinath (on leave since 2019 for leadership roles at the International Monetary Fund).
All three faculty veterans partnered with Itskhoki on research related to trade, globalization, and inequality. A series of papers with Gopinath and the late economics professor Emmanuel Farhi turned a macroeconomic lens on the real-world impacts of border taxes.
“When you announce an import tariff, your exchange rate appreciates immediately and this actually hurts your exporters even before the tariff is in place,” Itskhoki explained. “Few people outside the economics profession appreciate the fact that an import tariff is, in fact, equivalent to an export tax — a very import and rather general insight from a 1936 paper by Abba Lerner that has been quite central for a lot of my research.”
But Itskhoki situates his work squarely in the tradition of Rogoff, a leading expert on international finance who served as the IMF’s chief economist from 2001 to 2003.
In 2001, Rogoff co-authored an influential paper advancing a unified theory to explain many of the big puzzles in international macroeconomics. The purchasing-power-parity puzzle, for example, concerns how prices for the same product can vary from one country to the next even when adjusted for exchange rates.
Starting in 2016, Itskhoki partnered with Mukhin, now with the London School of Economics, to rethink many of the puzzles related to exchange rates in Rogoff’s analysis. Itskhoki and Mukhin’s first paper, published in 2021, introduced a simple model that solved these puzzles while more accurately predicting exchange rates between currencies worldwide.
As for the purchasing-power-parity puzzle, Rogoff chalked it up to citizens’ preference for domestically produced goods. Itskhoki’s work offered additional insights.
“He fleshes out the role of financial markets as well as the importance of monopoly in modern economies,” Rogoff explained.
This puzzle-solving research agenda is far from concluded. Itskhoki and Mukhin just published the second major paper in their series, expanding their framework to challenge previous exchange-rate modeling that hinges on factors such as inflation, productivity, or consumer demand.
“We show that forces like demand for a country’s assets must be more important in shaping the exchange rate than forces related to supply of goods and monetary policy.”
Oleg Itskhoki
“We show that forces like demand for a country’s assets must be more important in shaping the exchange rate than forces related to supply of goods and monetary policy,” Itskhoki said.
Two more publications are also in the works, both available now as working papers. The first lays out how economic sanctions impact exchange rates, with the test case being valuations of the ruble following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The other draws on the whole series to offer guidelines for policymakers worldwide.
“Should countries form a currency union like the Eurozone?” Itskhoki offered. “What are the costs and benefits of abandoning independent currencies — of adopting a common monetary policy — but losing the exchange rate flexibility? Is it good for the central bank to set a floating exchange rate? Should they partially fix it? Fully fix it? It was odd to discuss these questions without a reliable framework that could reproduce the actual properties of exchange rates.”
How to escape your silo (spoiler: friendship helps)Co-authors of ‘What We Can’t Burn’ formed lasting bond even as they argued about best way to fight climate change
How to escape your silo (spoiler: friendship helps)
Co-authors of ‘What We Can’t Burn’ formed lasting bond even as they argued about best way to fight climate change
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Eve Driver and Tom Osborn agreed that the world urgently needed to ditch fossil fuels. But the Harvard College classmates, both engaged with campus conversations on climate change, saw very different ways of getting there.
Driver viewed the push for carbon-free energy sources as a historical analog to the Civil Rights Movement.
“But Tom was like, ‘No, this is much more akin to when we switched from horses and buggies to cars,’” Driver recalled.
Each slowly came to see the wisdom in the other’s perspective, with direct, and often difficult, conversations, proving the building blocks of a lasting bond. Driver and Osborn went on to publish “What We Can’t Burn: Friendship and Friction in the Fight for Our Energy Future” (2024). In a recent appearance at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, they read from the book and traded insights on fostering connections like the one they forged as Class of ’20 undergrads.
“When I discovered this book, I found it so moving that it entered my own research on friendship and politics,” offered Ethics Center Director Eric Beerbohm, the Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professor of Government and senior adviser of the FAS Civil Discourse initiative. “I told them, ‘You’ve almost created a genre here.’”
Osborn, who studied psychology, had been the teenage founder of a clean cooking fuel company in his home in Kenya. He was in high school when his mother was diagnosed with a respiratory tract infection, caused by inhaling smoke while cooking with charcoal, the local standard.
“I grew up in a setting where government doesn’t really work,” Osborn said. “I thought, if someone’s going to solve this clean cooking problem for my mom, it’s not going to be the government. It was going to take an entrepreneur to do it.”
Driver, who grew up in suburban Boston loving Ralph Waldo Emerson, remembered being skeptical of Osborn based, in part, on the name he chose for his company: GreenChar.
“The climate crisis demands radical and uncomfortable forms of cooperation between people with all kinds of reasons not to trust or talk to each other.”
Tom Osborn and Eve Driver
“I was very skeptical about greenwashing,” said Driver, now a Brooklyn-based writer and strategist focused on the clean energy transition. “There’s a lot of companies I was learning about that advertised themselves as green but were really not very green.”
“What We Can’t Burn” alternates between the voices of Driver and Osborn during their junior year at Harvard, a memoir-like format that captures how sparring partners can evolve into trusted pals who expand each other’s thinking. “The climate crisis demands radical and uncomfortable forms of cooperation between people with all kinds of reasons not to trust or talk to each other,” they write in the introduction.
The Feb. 27 conversation touched on an event, explored at length in the book, that nearly broke their relationship: Driver’s involvement in a fossil fuel divestment protest that halted a 2019 Kennedy School event featuring then-Harvard President Larry Bacow.
“I felt like that tactic was to some extent alienating,” said Osborn, now the co-founder and CEO of the Shamiri Institute, a public benefit organization delivering mental healthcare to young people across Africa. “I was just like, ‘If you’re going to be going around campus shutting down people, I don’t want to be friends with you.’”
Event moderator Ari Kohn ’26, a social studies concentrator and undergraduate fellow at the Ethics Center, asked about the particularities of maintaining their connection on campus. “My experience at Harvard has been that people have really self-segregated among people who have very similar beliefs as them,” said Kohn, who also co-chairs the Intellectual Vitality student advisory board.
Osborn attributed these divisions to the siloed nature of academia, with experts from different fields working separately: “The consequence of that is we don’t have a lot of modeling for what it takes to engage in these conversations outside of combative debates.”
“The consequence of that is we don’t have a lot of modeling for what it takes to engage in these conversations outside of combative debates.”
Tom Osborn
Debating Driver on the best way to decarbonize helped open his entrepreneurial mind to the role policymaking can play in bringing renewables to market, he said.
“I was guilty of the siloing that I was accusing people in academia of,” he confessed, citing the “heavily subsidized” SolarCity, acquired by Tesla in 2016, as just one example of a clean energy venture to get a boost from government partnerships.
“We both had a lot of authentic questions that we couldn’t really answer within our circles,” Driver said. “I was so inspired by so many of the academics and activists and writers I was reading. But at the same time, I knew there was a limit, just from a disciplinary perspective. None of them have ever built an energy company.”
Art as omen in turbulent timesIn new book, Joseph Koerner dissects reaction to 3 works created during political unrest
Joseph Koerner with Max Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait in Tuxedo” (1927) at Harvard Art Museums.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Eileen O'Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
8 min read
In new book, Joseph Koerner dissects reaction to 3 works created during political unrest
When Joseph Koerner first began teaching Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch at Harvard in the 1990s, he saw him as the “typical medieval artist” preoccupied with sin, chaos, and danger. But as Koerner uncovered more information about how Bosch’s works have been interpreted over the centuries by panicked people in times of political upheaval, the story began to shift.
“Now, one almost feels like one is looking to Bosch for what we are supposed to do under our own emergency situation,” he said. “Instead of being way back in the past, he seems to have become a cipher for the present and an omen for the future.”
Koerner’s latest book, “Art in a State of Siege,” seeks to capture “that feeling of looking at works of art as ‘omens’” by examining three images: Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (circa 1490-1500), Max Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait in Tuxedo” (1927), and an animated drawing by William Kentridge of a dead victim of state violence disappearing into the South African landscape (1993). Koerner writes about the political situations that inspired these works, and how they captivated historical figures from the Spanish King Philip II to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The book was partly inspired by a personal connection: Koerner’s father, the artist Henry Koerner, created works that addressed the trauma of the Holocaust. In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Koerner discusses shifting ideas of “the enemy” and other themes raised by the works.
Where does the phrase “art in a state of siege” come from?
It was coined by Kentridge in 1986 at a moment in South African history when the white apartheid government decided the unrest that they perceived themselves to be facing was of such magnitude that they had to suspend the rule of law indefinitely. In its first meaning, “siege” is a condition in which a city or fort is surrounded by enemy forces. But in modern-state formations, leaders in times of civil war can declare a state of siege where you treat your own people as if they’re enemies. Every modern constitution has some loophole in it, by which laws, rights, and privileges can be temporarily suspended. The sieges that figure in my book are of the latter type. What I’m exploring is less about the artists, and what they made and how they responded to siege, than about what art looks like in states of siege. The book tries to grasp a relationship between viewers and works of art in which the artwork vacillates between something that’s very dangerous, and something that might give some signal of what to do in terrible circumstances.
What makes Bosch’s tryptic “The Garden of Earthly Delights” so intriguing?
Famously, no one knows how the central panel relates to the outside panels. Is hell (in the right panel) a punishment for the central scene, or is the central scene a continuation of the Adam and Eve scene (left panel), one in which the Fall never happened and everything’s happy? No one has been able to definitively decide that, and on that hinges the whole painting. The question is: Is the image positive or negative? Are we looking at a friend or are we looking at an enemy?
“Amity finds no toehold in Bosch’s hostile carousel of love,” Koerner writes.
Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” (c. 1490-1500)
What kinds of enemies does Bosch depict?
He almost programmatically makes you not quite sure who the enemy is. Bosch wanted to magnify different siege conditions: the feeling that the self is besieged by sin; the feeling that Christian Europe is besieged by Islam; the feeling there’s a conspiracy of people called witches and heretics who are secretly occupying your town. Ultimately the enemy in Bosch seems to be the old enemy, Satan, who lies behind all devilry. But Bosch gives enough specifics that a person could take more concrete enemies and direct violence against them. In many of his paintings there’s a small, often slightly hidden, flag of the Ottoman Empire in the distance, as if to say, “This is what Europe will look like once the siege is over and the enemy has breached the gates.” There are also racial slurs and anti-Jewish slurs, and there’s even a sense that the poor in the city might be enemies.
You write about how viewers project their own experiences onto “Garden.” Could you talk about that?
In times when things are at their worst, Bosch suddenly comes into favor. One of the things I was fascinated by is how a group of right-leaning and Nazi intellectuals became obsessed with Bosch — there’s evidence from their letters. They realize they’re losing the war. They believe the crimes that they perpetrated are going to come back to haunt them. They already feel themselves to be victims. Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, and Mircea Eliade are having these conversations, and they look to Bosch to give them a sign of what’s going to happen to them. I found a memoir that Schmitt wrote while he was in prison in Nuremberg for possible war crimes, in which he’s imagining in his cell Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.” He sees the painting as the enemy because for him it’s liberalism, it’s free love, it’s a lawless world, a world in which every hell has broken loose. I found out that Schmitt was the first person to hear Wilhelm Fraenger’s crazy theory that “The Garden of Earthly Delights” is actually in favor of the pleasures that it represents, that it was painted for a secret group of free-love advocates called Adamites, ruled by a Jewish convert. So this idea existed that it was a Jewish work, and hedonistic. This scholarly error seemed very, very interesting to me.
What interested you about Max Beckmann and his self-portrait that’s at the Harvard Art Museums?
There’s almost no self-portrait in the history of art that is as boldly frontal as this huge self-portrait in the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Because it’s rather simple, the little details really start to get conversation going — like the cigarette in his hand, and the fact that he’s looking straight ahead. And the more you look at it, the more stuff comes out.
The painting was created at a moment when there was a break from the repeated failures as a parliamentary democracy in post-WWI Germany — a respite from the collapse into political chaos due to the fight between left-wing and right-wing paramilitarized groups. In 1927 Beckmann decides, in a moment of wild artistic optimism, to say, with the painting and an accompanying manifesto, that the artist is the one who creates balance and stops chaos by being the decider of the polity, and the decision that the artist makes is the work of art itself.
It’s not an unusual idea at the time that art is a power or force that can be weaponized. The Nazis, of course, famously weaponized art. It wasn’t by accident that Adolf Hitler was an aspiring artist, that Nazi leadership theorized Hitler and the Nazi movement as a “sculptor” using humans as their work of art. In 1937 the Nazi leadership mounted this very peculiar art exhibition to vilify, repudiate, and degrade works of art on display by calling that art “degenerate.” The idea was to put the enemy on display. In the aftermath of this “degenerate art” exhibition, Beckmann’s painting was put on auction and went via a Swiss dealer to Harvard Art Museums.
What is the value of studying art from times of political unrest?
Art has that characteristic of becoming relevant whether you like it or not. For the most part, people understand art in terms of victories: The artist is victorious over the problems that face them and becomes “the great artist.” And even the art historian, the person who shows how the artist won: In so doing, they win their own case in their book or article. My kind of art history is different than that. My art history is about art that comes up in times of trouble, in which there’s not victory but the potential for severe defeat. “Art in a State of Siege” is a way of showing, on a broader canvas, what art looks like, not under victory circumstances, but in troubled times.
Every picture tells a storyPhotographer Susan Meiselas shares how ‘44 Irving Street Cambridge, MA’ shaped her career
Photographer Susan Meiselas (left) speaks with attendees following the talk.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
Photographer Susan Meiselas shares how ‘44 Irving Street Cambridge, MA’ shaped her career
Susan Meiselas didn’t set out to be a photographer. The documentary photographer, filmmaker, and president of the Magnum Foundation was working toward her master’s degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1971 when she shot her groundbreaking “44 Irving Street, Cambridge, MA series,” which is now on view at the Harvard Art Museums.
Best known for her documentary photography of the late 1970s insurrection in Nicaragua and her photos of carnival strippers later that decade, Meiselas looked back on the Irving Street black-and-white prints during a recent gallery talk and shared how they helped shape the career that followed.
Initially, she said, she was focused on her degree when a course in photography “with a sociological bent” caught her eye. (She no longer remembers the name of the course.) For a class project, she chose to shoot the other inhabitants of her Cambridge boarding house.
“The camera was this way to connect,” she said. “I knew no one, and I began to knock on doors.”
Going around to the different apartments, she realized that each space in the old building “had a different character.” Seeing how the residents personalized their rooms, “I became fascinated by what they did with their space.”
Visitors gather to examine the photographs Meiselas discussed.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographersity
Even more captivating than the personal use of space, Meiselas found, were the interactions with her neighbors, whom she identified only by their first names. To start with, she would explain that she was a student, learning photography. “I’d ask them if there was a place in their room that they would sit for a portrait.” The results vary, with subjects settled into easy chairs or lounging on the floor, some in clean, well-lit areas and others surrounded by books and papers. Once she developed the photos, she’d return with a contact sheet to show her subjects. “That was the moment where something else for me happened,” she said. After her subjects had viewed the photos, she would ask them, “How do you feel about yourself?”
Those written responses, which can be read by accessing a QR code on the exhibit wall, make the installation complete, said Meiselas, who submitted the letters along with the photographs for class. “They wrote me either about how they felt about themselves, how the picture did or didn’t portray them.”
At the gallery talk, she read excerpts of those responses aloud. Her former neighbor Gordon, for example, is shown slumped in a chair, with books and a television behind him. “I wouldn’t have chosen to live alone. I was forced to,” he wrote, perhaps to explain his dejected posture. “That’s the way I am, somewhat distant. I get turned in on myself. I look at this place as a way station.”
In other samples of the QR-accessible text, another neighbor, Carol, responded to her photo, which shows her surrounded by her books. “I like to think my face conveys the way I feel during my most creative jam sessions: slightly dissatisfied at my slowness, slightly chagrined by the progress and quality so far lacking.” Another, Barbara, focused on herself: “My picture shows me … in my small world,” she wrote of the photo, which shows her typing at a desk, “looking out at everyone and everything.”
Those letters became Meiselas’s focus. “I didn’t leave class thinking ‘I’m going to be a photographer,’” she said. Instead, “I became fascinated by the camera as a point of connection.”
What interested her, she continued, was how the subjects responded. The experience also raised two themes that have become constants in her work: “the pleasure of the connection, and the problematic nature of the power of representation.”
Meiselas explored these themes recently in the book “Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography,” which she calls “an attempt to really look at photography as including others.” (The book was co-authored with UC Berkeley Professor of African American Studies Leigh Raiford; Yale University Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Laura Wexler; photographer Wendy Ewald; and Brown University Professor of Modern Culture and Media Ariella Aïsha Azoulay.) Such an examination is necessary, she said, because the relationship between the subject and the photographer can be fraught, balanced between “what’s positive and collaborative and inclusive and participatory, and what is more problematic.”
After the “Irving Street” project, Meiselas went on to get her education degree and teach. Working with elementary school students at an experimental school in the South Bronx, she again incorporated photography into her work. Using simple pinhole cameras, her students took photos of their surroundings and their neighbors “and made little books,” she recalled.
“They used images to tell stories. It wasn’t about the formalism of photography,” she said. “It was about the narrative and the connectivity. It was: Take your pinhole camera, go out on the street, meet the butcher…” Through these photos, Meiselas said she hoped to give her students “a notion of photography as an exchange in the world.”
Through all these projects, she sees the thread of relationship-building. Looking back once more on the “Irving Street” series, she noted: “This project has always resonated as the beginning of my practice.”
Photographs from Susan Meiselas’ “44 Irving Street, Cambridge, MA” portfolio are on display at the Harvard Art Museums through April 6.
NIH funding delivers exponential economic returnsReport finds all 50 states reap gains in patient health, job creation, research resources, business development
Credit: National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health
Sy Boles
Harvard Staff Writer
3 min read
Report finds all 50 states reap gains in patient health, job creation, research resources, business development
A new report from the nonprofit United for Medical Research (UMR) shows that every dollar of research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) delivers $2.56 in economic activity, a multiplier effect that extends the agency’s impact as the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world.
In fiscal year 2024, the report found, the agency awarded more than $36.9 billion to researchers, supporting more than 408,000 jobs and generating over $94.5 billion in new economic activity nationwide. The funding supports a broad range of institutions in states across the nation, including academic research centers, private companies, startups, and advocacy organizations.
The 2025 update noted NIH-funded research has improved patient health; boosted job creation directly and indirectly; supported the purchase of research-related goods and services; and produced spin-out companies that drive tax revenue and attract innovation-intensive businesses. The new report arrives amid growing concerns over future funding levels for the federal agency.
By fueling basic scientific research, the NIH helps the U.S. maintain its position as a leader in the global life sciences, medtech, and biopharmaceutical industries. Forty-six percent of all basic research in the nation is conducted at academic research institutions, and most of that work is funded by the federal government, according to UMR, a coalition of leading industry groups and research institutions, including Harvard University.
At Harvard, NIH funding supported the development of an AI tool called Clinical Histopathology Imaging Evaluation Foundation, or CHIEF, which made huge strides in diagnosing cancer and guiding treatment. Other NIH-funded projects include developing a procedure to repair once-untreatable eye damage; creating a new class of antibiotics to combat drug-resistant infections; finding new ways to fight depression; and deepening our understanding of neurodegenerative disease, among other projects.
The UMR findings come in the wake of a 2023 report showing the exponential economic impact of research funding in rural states. In the nation’s seven most rural states, NIH funding generates an average return of $2.30 for every dollar invested and supports an average of 2,300 jobs and $353 million in new economic activity per state.
That research also yielded important regional benefits. West Virginia has the nation’s highest overdose rate and suffered numerous outbreaks of HIV and hepatitis C in recent years, issues that have overlap owing to their links to hypodermic needles and other drug paraphernalia. West Virginia University researcher Judith Feinberg has used NIH funding to integrate care for substance use disorder and infectious diseases in local health centers.
“NIH research happens everywhere,” said UMR President Caitlin Leach. “Whether you are from a red state or blue state, there are very real economic benefits to your state because researchers there receive NIH grants. That NIH research funding saves lives and fuels local economies throughout the United States is a very powerful message.”
NIH funding, in fact, historically has been a bipartisan priority. The agency’s budget has grown by more than $17 billion since fiscal year 2015. UMR warned that a constrained NIH budget in fiscal year 2025 and beyond could decrease the agency’s effectiveness and potentially undermine the nation’s dominance in biomedical innovation and as a hub for training the next generation of scientists, physicians, entrepreneurs, and educators.
Wishing real world wasn’t starting to feel so much like her dystopian novelCeleste Ng discusses new book about mother and son, how the personal becomes political — and vice versa
Wishing real world wasn’t starting to feel so much like her dystopian novel
Celeste Ng.
Photos by Melissa Blackall
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
Celeste Ng discusses new book about mother and son, how the personal becomes political — and vice versa
The personal is political in Celeste Ng’s books. In her three best-selling novels, the Cambridge resident highlights Asian American characters and how issues around ethnicity and cultural origin can create tensions for them, both in their families and in the wider world.
Her third and latest novel, “Our Missing Hearts,” follows a mother and biracial son in a future Cambridge where behavior considered unpatriotic is criminalized and can result in children being taken from their parents. Here “un-American” art and books are banned, and an underground network of librarians keeps such books — and our knowledge of the past — alive.
The novelist noted her dystopian creation is starting to feel increasingly familiar amid all of the global headlines.
“I was really hoping the world would move further away from the novel,” said Ng ’02 during a conversation with Erika Lee, the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Faculty Director at the Schlesinger Library and Bae Family Professor of History. The event was part of the Kim and Judy Davis Dean’s Lecture Series at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
The seed of the novel was personal experience, rather than politics, she explained. “When I got the idea for this, it was focused on this mother, Margaret, a Chinese American woman and her son, who is mixed race, and goes by the nickname Bird,” said Ng, who is also the mother of a son. (She made a point of noting during the event that while her work draws from her life it is fiction, not memoir.)
At the time, she said, “I was doing a lot of book tours. I was on the road a lot, and I was thinking ‘Does he resent me being away from home so much?’” This, she acknowledges, is a return to familiar themes. “In ‘Little Fires Everywhere,’” her 2017 bestseller that was turned into a 2020 Hulu miniseries, “There’s a mother who asks her daughter to sacrifice quite a bit. I started asking what if the child wasn’t really on board? What is it that a mother who is creative might have to sacrifice for her child? What if a child saw his mother’s creative work as a rival for his mother’s time?”
That question led to her vision of a future dystopia, “maybe 1 or 2 degrees off of our reality,” she said. The harrowing vision “didn’t take a lot of imagining, honestly,” said Ng. “I really wish we as a country learned more from our history.”
In the book, one group — Persons of Asian Origin — are “particularly suspect,” Lee said. This mirrors the anti-Asian bias that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Ng was working on the book. But Ng said she’s “always been aware” of this bias.
Other people — specifically non-Asian people — weren’t, she found.
“When violence began against Asian Americans … a lot of people were really surprised,” said Ng. “The Asian people I know were not surprised. The violence against us was always imminent. But you don’t know what you don’t know. I wanted to highlight that, and as the COVID pandemic kept going, and we started to see a lot of the violence, it seemed important to bear witness.”
Being idealized — the flip side of being scapegoated — is not much better for Asian Americans, she said. “You’re the model minority. You’re used as this wedge to push other groups out of the center or even downward.”
These days, Ng said, people have been turned off by the news, and many have felt the need to withdraw. However, in this tumultuous time, art — including literature — can bridge the gap.
“Fiction can come in sideways. It can get around your immediate reaction to what might be the front page of the headlines.” Citing “resistance art” installations that dramatized the family separations of the first Trump administration, she said, “If you bypass the intellect and go straight for people’s emotions, sometimes you can spur people to action.”
Turning the discussion to the writing process, she acknowledged her first drafts are “very inefficient.” If every book begins with a question, she explained, “Writing the first draft is where I tend to figure out where my question even is.”
Along those lines, she rejectedthe idea of using AI in the writing process, particularly in the beginning of a project. Writing a first draft engages “the space where hopefully you were thinking about stuff,” she explained. “The more you use [AI], the less your brain gets exercised.”
Addressing the problems of tokenism — of being labelled “the next Amy Tan” — she talked about how many stories need to be told.
“There’s not a single story that encompasses not only all Asian Americans but all Chinese Americans, or Chinese American women,” she said. “We’re getting stories that are not especially about being Asian, but in which the character’s ethnicity and background experience are part of them and part of what shapes them, but maybe not the whole story.”
Ng concluded that in the end, people will see her work as inspiring.
“I want ‘Our Missing Hearts’ to be a story that gives people hope,” she said. “It is a novel, essentially, of me trying to find hope.”
Telling apples from ApplesHarvard Library search tool will understand intent behind the terms
Students using card catalogs at Widener Library, 1945.
Courtesy of Harvard University Archives
Tenzin Dickie
Harvard Library Communications
4 min read
Harvard Library search tool will understand intent behind the terms
In the 50 years since card catalogs moved online, the way we search for library materials has stayed much the same. Users enter keywords into a search, the system looks for those keywords and returns results.
As collections and data have grown exponentially, it’s become more complicated to finetune for the right results. If you search a library catalog for “the history of Apple,” you’ll get results mainly for the fruit rather than the company. The system only understands the words, not the meaning.
A Harvard Library team is building a new search tool to change that.
Using generative artificial intelligence and semantic search technologies, its new Collections Explorer will break through the limitations of keyword search to decipher the intent behind your words. It will allow you to ask questions and carry out your search in natural language.
What poems of Emily Dickinson’s include handwritten marginalia? What does Harvard have on the history of germ theory development? Tell me about the Black empowerment movement in America.
Imagine asking any of these questions, exactly as they are worded, on the library’s website and getting the results you’re really looking for. Soon, you can.
Pioneering a new model of search and discovery
With more than 20 million physical and digital items in dozens of formats — from ancient manuscripts to journal articles to one-of-a-kind maps and original poetry recordings — finding the right item for your research in Harvard’s vast collections is a complex endeavor.
For librarians and technologists at the library, the rise of generative AI presents an opportunity to tackle this problem while challenging conventional thinking about traditional library search.
Martha Whitehead, University librarian and vice president for Harvard Library, recognized that library searches needed to evolve, and she charged her team with finding a way to incorporate AI into search.
“How can Harvard Library model what is possible in this brave new world of library discovery enabled and enhanced by AI?” she asked.
Collections Explorer is slated to launch publicly in the fall.
Photo by Scott Murry
Partnering with Mozilla.ai, the nonprofit’s division dedicated to open-source and trustworthy AI, a Harvard Library team lead by Stu Snydman, associate University librarian and managing director of Library Technology Services, got to work.
“Keyword search is now 50 years old. With our new discovery system, we demonstrate how recent generative AI technologies, such as large language models (LLMs), can intersect with established AI technologies to create a powerful tool for finding and discovering information,” Snydman said.
Harvard Library’s three-month partnership with Mozilla.ai led to a prototype for a new AI-driven search tool, Collections Explorer. Built by Library Technology Services, the tool uses generative AI to search across repositories and collection formats. Its alpha release, which just completed user testing, is slated to launch publicly in the fall.
Using Collections Explorer
The Collections Explorer is intuitive and transparent. Suppose you’re curious about Chinese artwork at Harvard. You can type in your question — “Does Harvard hold any artwork from China?” — as if you’re talking to a librarian.
Along with results from the Harvard Art Museums’ archives and collections of Chinese calligraphy and painting, you’ll also see illustrations of Chinese plants from a global botanical illustration collection. The results include explanations of why they’re a match for your prompt.
The Explorer also suggests additional prompts, such as “Notable Chinese paintings and sculpture at Harvard University” or “Exploring the Chinese art treasures housed at Harvard.” Serendipity and creativity are built into the system.
Ask the tool “What does Harvard have on the history of germ theory development?” and along with results from the library’s collections, the system suggests you try: “How did public education campaigns of the 19th century intersect with germ theory?” or “What are techniques for antiseptic surgery?” Each new prompt opens a new possibility for inquiry.
“With Collections Explorer, our new discovery system for the AI age, Harvard Library meets the needs of its community and the public in new and innovative ways,” Whitehead said. “We look forward to the next 50 years.”
Letting the portraits speak for themselvesNew exhibit elevates overlooked voices as it explores hope, change, and how we see other
Artist Robert Shetterly ’69 and Brenda Tindal, chief campus curator.
Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
New exhibit elevates overlooked voices as it explores hope, change, and how we see others
In 2002, two Harvard affiliates, artist Robert Shetterly ’69 and the late Harvard Medical School Professor of Neurology S. Allen Counter, launched portraiture projects driven by a desire for change. Shetterly, disillusioned by the U.S. government’s decision to go to war in Iraq, had turned to painting people who inspired him as a form of protest and solace. Meanwhile, Counter, the founding director of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, wanted to address issues of representation by diversifying the portraits displayed across Harvard’s campus.
“Every one of the people I paint has a particular kind of courage that meets a particular moment,” Shetterly told chief campus curator Brenda Tindal in front of an audience at Cabot House. “They take the risk, often, of being either ostracized by society or legally entangled, something that’s going to put them in some oppositional relationship with large segments of this country. I am so drawn to that. It’s because of that courage that we have social justice.”
“Every one of the people I paint has a particular kind of courage that meets a particular moment”
Robert Shetterly
Portraits of Regina Jackson (left) and Pauli Murray by Robert Shetterly. The use of quotes was partly inspired after Shetterly learned that most gallery attendees only spend seven seconds in front of a painting. He wanted to encourage viewers to slow down and look.
Last week, the Office for the Arts, the Harvard Foundation, and the Harvard College Women’s Center staged an exhibition at Cabot that highlighted portraits of Harvard affiliates from both projects. Titled “Seeing Each Other: A Conversation Between the Harvard Foundation Portraiture Project and Americans Who Tell the Truth,” it included paintings from Shetterly and the Portraiture Project’s Stephen Coit ’71.
In honor of Women’s Week, the portraits spotlighted female changemakers, including former U.S. Treasurer Rosa Rios ’87, musicologist Eileen Southern, civil rights activist Pauli Murray, ethnomusicologist Rulan Pian, youth development advocate Regina Jackson, and former Maine State Sen. Chloe Maxmin ’15. Portraits of Counter and W.E.B. Du Bois, the first Black Ph.D. to graduate from Harvard, are also included.
“History reminds us that the fight for gender equity has often been strengthened by allies who have used their platforms to challenge injustice and uplift the voices of those most marginalized,” said Habiba Braimah, senior director of the foundation, introducing the conversation between Tindal and Shetterly. “By showcasing their portraits alongside the extraordinary women we honor tonight, we acknowledge that meaningful progress is achieved through both advocacy and solidarity, reinforcing the idea that the pursuit of gender equity has always been and must remain a shared responsibility.”
Robert Shetterly’s newly unveiled portrait of Sherrilyn Ifill.
At the exhibition opening, Shetterly also unveiled a new portrait of civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill, former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who was Steven and Maureen Klinsky Visiting Professor of Practice for Leadership and Progress at Harvard Law School from 2023 to 2024. In the portrait, Ifill, wearing a blue suit jacket, gazes outward with a thoughtful expression, chin resting on one hand.
Having attended Iffil’s 2024 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture at Harvard, Adaolisa Agbakwu ’28 remembered being moved by the lawyer’s analogy of the Civil Rights Movement as a cycle of planting and harvest — laying groundwork so future generations can reap the benefits.
“The portrait’s warm and the cool undertones spoke to me of this almost solace within her but also this fiery passion and energy that she has toward her work and dedication to the cause that she exhibits in everything she does,” Agbakwu said.
In his discussion with Tindal, Shetterly said that what began as a plan to create 50 portraits for his series has since grown into a collection of more than 200. Shetterly took his first art course at Harvard — a drawing class in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.
“What I noticed was that when I had to look at something — my own hand, an apple, a pencil, an old shoe, a glove — in order to draw it, I had to really see it for the first time,” Shetterly recalled. “That changed my life.”
Shetterly paints on wood panels with brushes, palette knives, and his fingers, and uses a dental pick to carve a quote from his subject into the wood above their likeness. The use of quotes was partly inspired, he said, by hearing that most gallery attendees only spend seven seconds in front of a painting and wanting to encourage viewers to slow down and look.
“Having the words incised into the surface gives them a slightly different weight than if they have been painted on the surface,” Shetterly said. Once in the painting, they seem to be a little bit stronger, more organic, as though they really come from the person in the painting.
Coit, who has contributed more than two dozen portraits to the Harvard Foundation Portraiture Project, told the audience that he feels his role is to showcase what his subjects want to reveal about themselves.
“When I was painting somebody I would say, ‘What do you want to say in your portrait?’” Coit said. “We’d think about the background, we’d think about what they were wearing, we’d think about the expression on the face, and they would create it with me. I always felt my job was a little bit to create a kind of immortality, so it felt like they were in the room with you, delivering that message.”
House pride from A to ZHousing Day is more than a tradition, as first-years soon learn
Housing Day is more than a tradition, as first-years soon learn
On March 13, Cambridge residents may catch a glimpse of glittery green-eared bunnies racing through Harvard Square, or a pack of polar bears lumbering from Radcliffe Quad as screams of “Domus!” echo across Harvard Yard.
Not to worry. It’s just another Housing Day at Harvard.
For the uninformed, on Housing Day first-year students are awakened in the early hours with news of where they will be living for the next three years. The sorting is randomized, and the residences are as distinctive as the individuals who inhabit them.
Here are some of the unique sources of pride of the 12 traditional Houses plus the Dudley Co-op, from A to Z.
Life-changing brain tech, but with a chilling caveatFellow’s paper draws from history to urge caution on brain-computer interfaces
Life-changing brain tech, but with a chilling caveat
Sy Boles
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Fellow’s paper finds a warning in dark chapter in U.S. history
On Jan. 28, 2024, Noland Arbaugh became the first person to receive a brain chip implant from Neuralink, the neurotechnology company owned by Elon Musk. The implant seemed to work: Arbaugh, who is paralyzed, learned to control a computer mouse with his mind and even to play online chess.
The device is part of a class of therapeutics, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), that show promise for helping people with disabilities control prosthetic limbs, operate a computer, or translate their thoughts directly into speech. Current use of the technology is limited, but with millions of global cases of spinal cord injuries, strokes, and other conditions, some estimates put the market for BCIs at around $400 billion in the U.S. alone.
A new discussion paper from the Carr Center for Human Rights welcomes the potential benefits but offers a note of caution drawn from the past, detailing unsettling parallels between an era of new therapies and one of America’s darkest chapters: experiments into psychological manipulation and mind control.
“In the past, there have been actors who were interested in controlling people’s minds,” Lukas Meier, the paper’s author and now a fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, said in an interview. “It’s not implausible that in the future there will be such actors, at whichever level, state or private sector, who might attempt the same but with improved technology.”
“It’s not implausible that in the future there will be such actors, at whichever level, state or private sector, who might attempt the same but with improved technology.”
Lukas Meier
Meier, a former technology and human rights fellow at the Carr Center, was referencing the Cold War, when scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain participated in a dangerous race for control of the human mind. In 1953, in response to allegations that the North Korean, Chinese, and Soviet governments had successfully brainwashed American prisoners of war, then-CIA Director Allen Dulles authorized MKUltra, the CIA’s controversial attempt at eliciting confessions and controlling people’s behavior.
“That was indeed their aim; they just didn’t get very far, as far as we know,” Meier said.
According to Meier’s report, in one project, subjects were made to listen to recordings on a loop, including during drug-induced sleep, in an attempt to alter their personalities. In another experiment, subjects were given strong electric shocks multiple times a day for weeks at a time, sometimes while they were on psychoactive drugs. Some subjects lost key memories or even the ability to speak a second language; some lost the ability to walk or eat without support. Many suffered lifelong physical or mental consequences.
The CIA’s methods were crude, Meier said, but if the more advanced methods of the 21st century steer clear of the worst effects of MK Ultra, they have the same implications for self-determination, consent, and mental privacy. For instance, parents in China sounded the alarm in 2019 over schoolchildren wearing devices that tracked their brainwaves to improve their focus. In more theoretical applications, researchers have explored reconstructing images from the brain signals of people wearing BCIs.
“With these technological capabilities, we move dangerously close to inadvertently enabling one of the main goals of Cold War intelligence programs: the eliciting of information from subjects who are not willfully cooperating,” Meier writes.
“With these technological capabilities, we move dangerously close to inadvertently enabling one of the main goals of Cold War intelligence programs: the eliciting of information from subjects who are not willfully cooperating.”
Lukas Meier
Meier speculates that in addition to decoding our thoughts, BCIs could be used to change our behavior. He describes research showing that some patients receiving deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease experience manic symptoms, including a 2006 case in which a patient with no previous criminal record broke into a parked car when the stimulator was activated, then returned to normal when the stimulation stopped.
“Making somebody without any criminal record break into a car seems to be a pretty strong interference,” he said, adding: “We’re not at a point where you could create this effect at will. It can happen as a byproduct, but I don’t think anyone could predict which type of neuromodulation applied to which area of the brain could produce this effect, at least not with any accuracy.”
Despite Meier’s misgivings, he supports the continued development of BCI technology in the U.S., in part to stay ahead of global adversaries.
“It is during times like these, in particular, that technological innovations which are becoming available to the opposing parties are at high risk of being misused in order to gain an advantage,” he writes in the paper. “The dire consequences of the manifold attempts at developing techniques for mind control during the Cold War should act as a warning. The two dangerous ingredients are recurring: a resurgence of bloc confrontation and the availability of innovations employable for interfering with the human brain. We may not be able to rely on technological limitations thwarting efforts at mind control a second time.”
Did a socially awkward scientist set back airborne disease control?In talk on new book, Carl Zimmer theorizes key researcher’s discoveries were undercut by his personality
Did a socially awkward scientist set back airborne disease control?
Carl Zimmer.
Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
In talk on new book, Carl Zimmer theorizes key researcher’s discoveries were undercut by his personality
In the “Great Man” theory of history, outsized personalities make things happen. But when it comes to public acceptance of the science behind airborne diseases, Carl Zimmer hypothesized, a boring and unpleasant personality may have slowed progress.
Zimmer, the 2016 recipient of the Stephen Jay Gould Prize for his contributions to the public understanding of evolutionary science, did not set out to tell the story of one such person as he tracked our “long, slow, very difficult realization that the air around us is alive.” But in a recent talk about his new book, “Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe,” he kept returning to former Harvard researcher William Firth Wells.
“Air has always been captivating and mysterious to us,” said Zimmer as he walked the audience at the Science Center through the main thread of his book: the discovery — and ultimate acceptance — of the concept that pathogens can be transmitted through the air.
In ancient Greece, Hippocrates first proposed the theory of “miasmas,” bad air that by itself carried sickness, rather than microorganisms carried by air, said Zimmer. Even more than a century after the discovery of microbes, in the 1830s when cholera struck Europe, the idea that the disease was transmitted through the air was not taken seriously. That began to change with the research of scientists such as Gottfried Ehrenberg, who in the 1830s began the first systematic study of microorganisms, and Louis Pasteur, whom Zimmer credits with “championing the germ theory of disease.”
But air continued to be overlooked in responses to disease outbreaks. “Again and again these diseases were linked to microorganisms that were spread in food, in water, through sex … but not in the air.”
“Again and again these diseases were linked to microorganisms that were spread in food, in water, through sex … but not in the air.”
Enter the work of Wells, who with his wife, Mildred Weeks Wells, a medical doctor, began to experiment with a centrifuge. Wells’ earlier work, cleaning water to raise disease-free oysters, had led him to experiment with the device, and in 1934, while lecturing at the Harvard School of Public Health, he used one to sample the air of the hall three times. The first time was after he dispersed a sneezing powder in the air, the second once that powder had taken effect, and the third after the students had left. Cultivating the samples he gathered in the centrifuge, he found what he considered powerful evidence that human exhalations spread microbes through the air.
Unfortunately, Zimmer said, “It was a terrible lecture.” Quoting a note by the dean of the School at the time, David Linn Edsall, he read, “This is the type of work Wells does extremely badly.” Further describing Wells as the type of person who could “talk for hours,” Zimmer went on to chronicle how the professor’s off-putting personality repeatedly cost him positions, setting back what should have been groundbreaking research.
At Harvard, Wells developed his theory of airborne infection and discovered that airborne pathogens could be killed by ultraviolet light. However, conflicts with his boss, Gordon McKay Professor of Sanitary Engineering Gordon Maskew Fair, over credit for these discoveries got him fired.
It was a pattern that would repeat for the rest of Wells’ life. At the University of Pennsylvania, where he next worked, he created “infection chambers” — airtight chambers that allowed researchers to control the ventilation reaching the animals inside — and again showed how airborne pathogens cause disease and how UV could destroy these pathogens. This research helped protect a school in 1940, when a measles outbreak hit Philadelphia. But when World War II broke out, and military researchers were desperate to keep soldiers healthy, the unpleasant Wells was once again excluded.
Only the arrival of his former assistant, Richard Riley, helped salvage his career. Together, they created a version of the infection chamber in a Baltimore Veterans Administration hospital. Isolating patients with tuberculosis, they controlled their ventilation — siphoning their air, and thus their contagions, into a separate chamber where guinea pigs were held. Sure enough, the animals contracted the disease, confirming the validity of Wells’ hypothesis. Unfortunately, before the research could become universally accepted, Wells fell ill from cancer and also started exhibiting psychotic episodes. In a cruel irony, he was treated and died in that same Baltimore VA hospital.
Taking questions about the future of such research — and about how dependent it is on the personalities of researchers and of so-called great men, Zimmer was not optimistic. “We’re a long ways off from the Wellses, but this kind of work takes years. It’s hard work. … And the pathogens don’t care.”
Zimmer is the adjunct professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale and writes the “Origins” science column for The New York Times. The event was part of the FAS Division of Science’s Harvard Science Book Talks.
How planned major U.S. foreign aid cuts expected to shake out abroad — and at homeFormer diplomats see unnecessary deaths, lost opportunities for American corporations, workers, and diminished geopolitical influence
Officials inspect a donation of food aid during a January 2024 ceremony in Harare, Zimbabwe.
How planned major U.S. foreign aid cuts expected to shake out abroad — and at home
Former diplomats see unnecessary deaths, lost opportunities for American corporations, workers, and diminished geopolitical influence
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
6 min read
Many more people around the world will unnecessarily die of AIDS and starvation; American farmers will take an economic hit; Russia and China will strengthen ties with less-developed nations formerly friendly with the U.S., forging new political loyalties — and potentially reaping future economic gains.
This is some of the possible fallout from the Trump administration’s recent decision to make deep cuts in programs for foreign aid, such as USAID and the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, according to a panel of former diplomats.
“We are going to have to think about different ways of doing things,” said Reuben E. Brigety II, former U.S. Ambassador to South Africa in the Biden administration on Feb. 27 during the first of a planned series of online discussions organized by the Harvard Center for International Development (CID) with government leaders, policymakers, and NGO experts that will examine the future of American foreign aid.
“There is no scenario in which American international or domestic interests are better served absent the robust presence of American leadership abroad. None.”
Reuben E. Brigety II, former U.S. Ambassador to South Africa
Brigety noted that the pullback will loosen ties between the U.S. and large parts of the global community, with multiple consequences, both expected and unexpected.
“None of this changes the fact that pandemic diseases know no borders,” he said. “None of this changes the fact that there are going to be emergencies” that will require international coordination.
A forecast by Richard A. Boucher, former U.S. ambassador to Cyprus, was more pointed. “People are going to die,” he said, listing AIDS and starvation as threats, as well as death “at the hands of murderous regimes over whom we don’t have influence” because of our withdrawal of aid and diplomacy.
Boucher, who was also former deputy secretary general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and U.S. assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, said that other nations, less aligned with our interests, may rush in behind us.
“If we don’t have that seat at the table, China is going to step in,” he said. “We’re going to lose influence globally; we’re going to lose influence individually; and the United States is going to be poorer for it.”
Brigety agreed. “There is no scenario in which American international or domestic interests are better served absent the robust presence of American leadership abroad. None.”
That kind of stepping up, he said, “helps access to foreign markets for American goods.” In addition, partnerships with foreign governments grant us “access [to information on] very specific threats to American interests, including American lives.”
Former U.S. Ambassador to Greece and Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt offered an example: In sub-Saharan Africa, he said, “USAID’s Power Africa program spent about a billion since 2013 facilitating and de-risking power generation.”
This was done with U.S. corporate partners, including Chevron and ExxonMobil, “American companies who were leveraging Power Africa activity to expand their markets,” said Pyatt, who is also former assistant secretary of state for energy resources. The results thus far? The program has “leveraged $29 billion” for the United States’ corporate partners.”
Boucher pointed out that American farmers benefit from the billions of dollars’ worth of grain that USAID buys to distribute abroad, as do American workers who travel to help build and manage new infrastructure created through foreign aid.
“America has always wielded influence because we had the money and the power. Take away the money, it means we’re walking on one leg,” he said.
As we withdraw, Brigety continued, all the Chinese have to say is: “‘See, you can’t trust the Americans.’”
Discussion moderator Fatema Z. Sumar, executive director of the CID, shifted the conversation to other future forecasts.
PEPFAR, Brigety explained, not only strengthened African healthcare as it distributed drugs and services to combat AIDS, but also strengthened that of the continent with lasting results. “Some of the earliest and best research on the planet about how to address COVID in the midst of the pandemic happened in South Africa.”
In the field of energy, the panelists outlined logistical and other challenges.
The U.S. has spearheaded the deployment of $5 billion in energy assistance to Ukraine, the majority of which came from the 29 other countries and multilateral organizations involved, Pyatt said. “But it is only USAID that has the grant-making authority, the power to push that money out the door,” he said.
“It worries me greatly that we have dismantled this capacity — because the next time, imagine there’s a Chinese attack on Taiwan — we’re not going to have the toolkit to accomplish this.”
We are losing “the institutional memory of those who were able to do this work,” he said.
Boucher added, “You don’t have the influence if you don’t show up.” Historically “we were the ones who able to go in and talk to people and make things happen.”
Instead, Brigety reiterated, that means China, Russia, and private organizations will step in, with Pyatt listing U.S. government institutions such as the Development Finance Corporation. Among those are former private USAID contractors, he said.
“If I were a USAID contractor whose 80 percent of funding just got yanked, I would immediately set up office in Jeddah [Saudi Arabia], in Dubai [UAE], and in Doha [Qatar], and probably Kuwait,” he said. “Many of those Middle Eastern countries see the economic opportunities on the continent and are interested not only in benefiting from it, but also realize that in order to benefit you actually have to help develop those economies.”
Sumar asked the panelists what they would say to students who have been preparing for careers in public service.
“The career has certainly become more challenging,” said Pyatt. Still, for those who may still be able to land jobs in the shrinking sector, “it’s a fabulous career,” he said.
“I can’t imagine anything in the private sector that delivers the level of psychic rewards that come from representing a country that is perceived to be the good guy in a contested international environment.”
You went to the doctor and came out feeling worsePsychologist who studied ‘medical gaslighting’ explains how caseload pressures contribute to the problem and when we should call it something else
“If we use the term ‘gaslighting’ when intent is absent, we’re missing the opportunity for compassion for providers,” says psychologist Alexandra Fuss.
Photo by Dylan Goodman
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Psychologist who studied ‘medical gaslighting’ explains how caseload pressures contribute to the problem and when we should call it something else
Patients struggling with hard-to-detect conditions, such as long COVID, or with symptoms whose causes modern medical testing has trouble pinning down, such as irritable bowel syndrome, can feel dismissed when a doctor says they can’t find a cause for the ailment, or — worse — when they suggest that the condition may be all in the patient’s head. This is commonly known as “medical gaslighting,” a problem that is hardly new but which social media has amplified in recent years.
Alexandra Fuss, director of behavioral medicine in inflammatory bowel disease at Mass General and an instructor in psychology at Harvard Medical School, teamed with colleagues from the University of Michigan and the North Carolina-based Rome Foundation Research Institute to explore the issue for an article published in the journal Translational Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
In this edited interview, Fuss highlights the authors’ conclusion that most cases of medical gaslighting do not include an intent to deceive and should be called something else: “medical invalidation.” She also speaks to how growing caseload and paperwork pressures on doctors might be contributing to the problem.
How did the issue of “medical gaslighting” get your attention?
The term has blown up on social media, and, as a psychologist, I hear about it in sessions with patients.
Is there some medical hubris involved, when a provider can’t find a concrete reason for symptoms, so believes there isn’t one?
That’s part of it, and connects back to some thinking, “If it’s not something I’m seeing on a medical test, it’s probably psychological.” But we have to recognize that there’s also huge pressure on all healthcare professionals, especially M.D.s, to be experts, have answers, and to know everything. It can be difficult to say, “I don’t know.” But there’s so much room for growth if you say, “I’m not sure, but I’m going to work with you and we’ll figure it out together.”
You question whether “gaslighting” is the right term. Why?
There’s a lot of debate in the literature about the role of intent in gaslighting. Some authors say there has to be intent — to make somebody question their lived reality and defer to the perpetrator’s point of view — in order to have gaslighting. Others say it’s not about intent, it’s about the end results, and that whenever there’s a power differential, there’s potential for gaslighting.
We believe intent is key for true gaslighting. Whether consciously or subconsciously, I want you to see things my way and I’m going to question your experiences and throw you off of equilibrium so that you do.
If we use the term “gaslighting” when intent is absent, we’re missing the opportunity for compassion for providers. The vast majority have no intent to harm anybody. They are doing their absolute best to be healers and helpers. But sometimes there is “medically invalidating” behavior. It’s not intentional, but it’s still invalidating and it’s still harmful. And saying, “OK, this was invalidating,” rather than “gaslighting,” opens the door to asking, “How can we repair these relationships? How can we prevent this from happening?”
Can you talk more about how pressure on doctors might contribute to the problem?
These pressures start with hospital and organizational-level leaders who set the policies that ultimately impact the physicians working within these systems. Physicians are consistently pressured on productivity, to see as many patients as possible and often in as little time as possible. Also, studies show physicians are devoting upwards of 50 percent of their day to documentation, typically spending time outside of work to get everything done. They have to be stewards of healthcare resources and make sure patients aren’t getting unnecessary, expensive tests, and that resources are being used on the right people. There’s pressure all around them. It’s not surprising then that burnout rates are so high, affecting over half of physicians in practice. While it’s certainly helpful for providers to have skills in work/life balance, it’s unfair to say that this is completely on them and ignore the impact of the system they work within. Changes starting at the top can make a much bigger impact.
How does that pressure affect interactions with patients?
It leads to vulnerabilities for invalidation to happen. If, let’s say, a doctor has a heavy caseload that day and only 15 minutes for a visit with a patient and the patient takes the majority of the time talking, that doesn’t leave a lot of time for the provider to ask, “How are you doing with this?” Or to make those empathic statements that build trust: “I believe you, tell me more about what’s going on.” Without the time and space for the doctor to explain things, the patient is left filling in the blanks, which might look like, “Oh, my doctor is washing their hands of me” or “They waved me off.” If some of that pressure wasn’t there, these situations could be avoided.
Americans used to move around a lot, chasing opportunity. No more.Yoni Appelbaum argues legal, political hurdles over past 50 years have had troubling economic, social consequences
Americans used to move around a lot, chasing opportunity. No more.
Yoni Appelbaum argues legal, political hurdles over past 50 years have had troubling economic, social consequences
long read
Excerpted from “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity” by Yoni Appelbaum, lecturer in history and literature, ’14.
America is a nation of migrants. No society has ever been remotely so mobile as America at its peak. In the late 19th century, the heyday of American mobility, roughly a third of all Americans changed addresses each year. European visitors were astonished, and more than slightly appalled. The American, Michel Chevalier observed in 1835, “is devoured with a passion for locomotion, he cannot stay in one place.” On Moving Day, when leases expired in tandem, the greater part of a city’s population might relocate to new quarters between sunup and sundown, in a great jumble of furniture and carts and carpetbags. On average, Americans moved far more often, over longer distances, and to greater advantage than did people in the lands from which they had come. They understood this as the key to their national character, the thing that made their country distinctive. “We are a migratory people, and we flourish best when we make an occasional change of base,” explained one 19th century newspaper. “We have cut loose from the old style of human vegetation, the former method, of sticking like an oyster to one spot through numberless succeeding generations,” wrote another.
Every American has ancestors who decided to stop being oysters. The earliest of them came across Beringia and quickly peopled the land. Millennia later, people arrived from Europe and were just as quick to spread out, dispossessing those who had come before. But they did not simply arrive in one place and put down roots. Having come to this land, they never stopped moving. They loaded the cart, the wagon, the steamer trunk, or the moving van. They left the towns where they grew up to plant settlements, and then their children left those towns in turn to begin anew. In different eras, they headed in different directions: meadowlands and marshes, to graze their cattle; market towns, to ply their crafts; factories, to earn a wage; prairies, to lay claim to the land and till the soil; booming cities, to open a shop of their own. They went in search of economic opportunity, or liberty, or community. They went because they were forced to go, or because they sought freedom and equality. They went because they could not stay where they were, or because they did not want to. But they went.
The ceaseless migrations of the population shaped a new set of expectations. “When the mobility of population was always so great,” the historian Carl Becker observed, “the strange face, the odd speech, the curious custom of dress, and the unaccustomed religious faith ceased to be a matter of comment or concern.” A mobile population opened the possibilities of pluralism as diverse peoples learned to live alongside each other. The term “stranger,” Becker wrote, in other lands synonymous with “enemy,” instead became “a common form of friendly salutation.” In a nation where people are forever arriving and departing, a newcomer can seem less a threat to the settled order than a welcome addition to a growing community: “Howdy, stranger.” Mobility has long been the shaper of American character and the guarantor of its democracy.
Americans turned migration from the last resort of the desperate and the destitute into the exercise of a fundamental right. The Puritans arrived on American shores in the 17th century, they justified the abandonment of their proper homes and stations with the audacious claim that relocation can sometimes be respectable, or even laudable. They soon codified this right, the right to leave, into law. Their towns, though, were semi-sovereign entities, policing their boundaries, selecting their members, and regulating the behavior of their populations. Anyone could leave, but not just anyone could stay. Two centuries later, as the young United States pushed west, it would add a complementary liberty, if only to some the right to belong. Together, these ideas constituted a new and transformative freedom. Instead of allowing communities to choose their own members, Americans decided to allow most individuals to choose their communities.
A mobile population opened the possibilities of pluralism as diverse peoples learned to live alongside each other.
As Americans moved around, they also moved up. The extraordinary geographic mobility of the United States drove its equally distinctive levels of social and economic mobility. Though the process of moving was always wrenching, the pain of relocation real, people who went to new places often found new beginnings, new connections, new communities, and new opportunities. They had the chance to break away from stultifying social hierarchies, depleted farmland, and dead-end jobs. On average, migrants have always grown more prosperous than those who stayed in place, and conferred better futures on their children — a correlation that, remarkably, has remained robust across four centuries, in a society that has changed in countless other ways.
There were no guarantees. However green the grass appeared, many Americans crossed to the other side of the fence, only to find it withering beneath their feet. Boomtowns turned to ghost towns; entire industries became obsolete. And mobility was never uncontested. Waves of immigrants faced discrimination from those who had come only slightly before, turned away from communities they sought to join just because they were Irish, or Italian, or Jewish. Laws excluded the Chinese, and vigilantes hounded them from their homes. Women seldom enjoyed the full privilege of mobility, constrained by social strictures, legal barriers, and physical dangers.
And even after the end of slavery, Black Americans had to fight at every turn to exercise their mobility in the face of segregation and racist violence.
But members of all these groups, and others besides, kept moving whenever they were able, because they understood the link between mobility and opportunity. Where racists and nativists sought to keep new arrivals out, they insistently demanded to be let in. And when the first move didn’t work out, Americans of different backgrounds could always see some more promising destination beckoning them onward. They could light out for the territory, hit the road, stake their claim, or make a brand-new start of it in a city that never sleeps. Our culture is thick with the clichés of mobility.
The freedom to move opened space for political and religious diversity. People unhappy with the decisions their communities made were not locked into endless feuds, but could, with a minimum of capital, move to a place they found more congenial, voting with their feet. Social identities, too, were transformed from heritable characteristics into self-fashioned choices. The voluntary communities Americans created led to a remarkable flourishing of religious and associational life as new arrivals invested effort in building up relationships, making America a nation of joiners. Freed from the heavy weight of tradition, of the constraints of habit and precedent, the new nation became famed for its entrepreneurship and innovation and for the rapidity of its economic growth. Mobility distinguished the United States from the relative stasis of Europe. American institutions were tuned for the perpetual motion of the population, adapted to individuals relocating again and again in search of greater opportunity. The most distinctive features of the young republic all traced back to this single, foundational fact: Americans were always starting over, always looking ahead to their next beginning, always seeking to move up by moving on. Mobility has been the great engine of American prosperity, the essential mechanism of social equality, and the ballast of our diverse democracy.
But for the last 50 years, the engine of American opportunity has been grinding to a halt, throwing society into crisis. Americans have grown less likely to move from one state to another, or to move within a state, or to switch residences within a city. In the late 19th century, the heyday of American mobility, a third of all Americans might have changed addresses each year. In the 1940s and 1950s, about a fifth of Americans moved annually. By 2021, only one-twelfth of Americans moved. The drastic decline in geographic mobility is the single most important social change of the past half century, and perhaps the least remarked.
In 1970, about eight out of every 10 children turning 20 could expect to earn more than their parents did; by the turn of the century, that was true of only half, and the proportion is likely still falling.
What killed American mobility? There is no shortage of suspects. People have always been most mobile while they’re relatively young, and the country is aging. The median American was just 16 years old in 1800 and 28 in 1970, but more than 38 today. The spread of occupational licensing might have made it more costly to find jobs in new places. Or perhaps the answers reflect positive trends. As more women have gained entry into the workforce, two-career households might have found it increasingly difficult to relocate. The prevalence of joint custody makes it harder for members of divorced couples to move. More Americans own their homes, and renters have always been more mobile. Maybe Americans are just growing more successful and better able to locate jobs and communities that meet their needs, reducing their impulse to move someplace else. Maybe they are relying on remote work to stay where they are.
But none of these answers can possibly explain the broad, persistent declines in geographic mobility by itself, or even if you add them all together. The country may be older, but the drop has been particularly steep among younger Americans. The spread of occupational licensing is real, but most jobs aren’t licensed, and it accounts for perhaps 5 percent of the total decline. Two-earner households may be less mobile, but their mobility has declined in tandem with that of other groups. Mobility is down not just among homeowners but also among renters, and its decline antedates the rise of remote work. And just look around. Do Americans look happier and more satisfied to you?
But there is one more set of suspects, and the evidence for their guilt is damning: American mobility has been slowly strangled by generations of reformers, seeking to reassert control over their neighborhoods and their neighbors. At the beginning of the 20th century, reformers sought to apply the fruits of science and reason to manage growth, reimposing order and control on a jumbled and chaotic landscape that mixed shops and apartments in among the houses, and occupants of varied ethnicities and income brackets. Their chosen tools were building codes and restrictive covenants and zoning ordinances, designed to segregate land by use and class and race. New Deal bureaucrats next took up the cause, requiring local jurisdictions to apply these tools to their communities and putting new construction firmly under the purview of government. Then, in the postwar decades, skepticism of big business and big government led a new generation of activists to empower individuals and groups to challenge decisions made by bureaucrats. This varied lot of reformers acted from a wide mix of motives, some laudable and others despicable. Some would probably appreciate what they have wrought, while others would be appalled at the unintended consequences of their work. But taken together, the reforms that they enacted have created a peculiarly dysfunctional system. Almost all new construction in the United States now requires government approval, and anyone with sufficient time and resources and education can effectively veto that approval, or at least impose great expense and delay. The result is that in the very places that need it most desperately, housing has become prohibitively difficult to build. If the freedom to move was originally secured by allowing Americans to choose their own communities, then it has been undone by a series of legal and political changes that restored the sovereignty of local communities and allowed them again to select their own members.
These changes took hold so gradually that most Americans are unaware of how radically they have altered their society. For most of our history, a highly mobile population moved toward opportunity. When a place prospered, it quickly swelled with new arrivals. Builders rushed to meet the demand with housing. Farms gave way to clusters of houses, which turned into town houses, which sprouted into apartment buildings or even high-rises. But in today’s burgeoning metropolises and boomtowns, restrictions have effectively frozen the built environment. As a result, housing has grown artificially scarce and prohibitively expensive. A fortunate few can still afford to move where they want. Most people, though, would have to pay so much more for housing in prospering cities that offered better jobs that relocation would leave them worse off overall. Americans aren’t moving anymore, because for so many moving threatens to cost more than it delivers.
The costs of our national sclerosis are frightening to contemplate. More Americans have stopped starting new businesses. Between 1985 and 2014, both the total share of entrepreneurs in the population and the share of people newly becoming entrepreneurs fell by half. More Americans have stopped finding new jobs. Switching jobs frequently when you’re young correlates with occupational and economic mobility, but the share of people switching industries, occupations, and employers has fallen dramatically, particularly among younger workers; they’ve grown less likely to work for four or more employers by the time they’re thirty and more likely to work for just one or two. And more Americans are ending up worse off than their parents. In 1970, about eight out of every 10 children turning 20 could expect to earn more than their parents did; by the turn of the century, that was true of only half, and the proportion is likely still falling.
As grim as the economic indicators might be, the measures of social health are even more alarming. Compared with Americans at the beginning of the 1970s, the average American today belongs to about half as many groups. Church membership is down by about a third, as is the share who socialize with folks around them several times a week. A majority of Americans tell pollsters that their social isolation has left them anxious and depressed. Americans are having fewer children. And while half of Americans used to think most people could be trusted, today only a third think the same. So Americans aren’t starting new businesses, switching to better jobs, or climbing the social ladder the way they used to. They’re not joining groups, gathering in prayer, having kids, or hanging out the way they used to. They don’t even trust each other anymore. They are, in a word, stuck.
Study finds replacing butter with plant-based oils cuts premature death risk by 17 percent
Ryan Jaslow
Mass General Brigham Communications
4 min read
Substituting butter with plant-based oils daily may lower risk of premature death by up to 17 percent, according to a new study out of Mass General Brigham, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Broad Institute.
The researchers examined diet and health data from 200,000 people followed for more than 30 years and found that higher consumption of plant-based oils — especially soybean, canola, and olive oil — was associated with lower total, cancer, and cardiovascular disease mortality, whereas butter use was linked with increased risk of total and cancer mortality. The results are published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
“What’s surprising is the magnitude of the association that we found — we saw a 17 percent lower risk of death when we modeled swapping butter with plant-based oils in daily diet. That is a pretty huge effect on health,” said study lead author Yu Zhang, research assistant at the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a student in the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard Chan School.
Butter is rich in saturated fatty acids, while plant-based oils have more unsaturated fatty acids. There have been many studies on dietary fatty acids, but fewer studies have focused on their primary food sources, including butter and oils.
“Even cutting back butter a little and incorporating more plant-based oils into your daily diet can have meaningful long-term health benefits.”
Daniel Wang, Brigham and Women’s
The new study analyzed dietary data from 221,054 participants in the Nurses’ Health Study, Nurses’ Health Study II, and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. Every four years, the study participants answered questions about how often they had certain types of food. The researchers used the data to estimate participants’ consumption of butter and plant oils, including butter and margarine blends, spreadable butter added to food and bread, and butter used in baking and frying. Intake of plant-based oils was estimated based on the reported use in frying, sautéing, baking, and salad dressing.
The researchers also identified participants who had died and their causes of death. Using statistics to compare death rates across different diet intake levels, the researchers found that participants who ate the most butter had a 15 percent higher risk of dying than those who ate the least. In contrast, those who ate the most plant-based oils had a 16 percent lower risk of death than those who ate the least.
“People might want to consider that a simple dietary swap — replacing butter with soybean or olive oil — can lead to significant long-term health benefits,” said corresponding author Daniel Wang of the Channing Division. Wang is also an assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition at the Chan School and an associate member at the Broad Institute. “From a public health perspective, this is a substantial number of deaths from cancer or from other chronic diseases that could be prevented.”
The researchers also did a substitution analysis, which mimics how swapping butter for plant oils would impact health in a feeding trial. They found that substituting 10 grams of butter a day (less than a tablespoon) with equivalent calories of plant-based oils could lower cancer deaths and overall mortality by 17 percent.
“Even cutting back butter a little and incorporating more plant-based oils into your daily diet can have meaningful long-term health benefits,” Wang said.
One limitation of the study is that the participants are mainly health professionals, so they might not represent the U.S. population as a whole, the researchers said. In the future, they’d like to study the biological mechanisms underlying why this dietary change has such a large impact.
In addition to Zhang and Wang, Mass General Brigham authors include Katia S. Chadaideh, Yuhan Li, Yuxi Liu, Eric B. Rimm, Frank B. Hu, Walter C. Willett, and Meir J. Stampfer. Additional authors include Yanping Li, Xiao Gu, and Marta Guasch-Ferré.
This study was supported by research grants from the National Institutes of Health.
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At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on March 4, 2025, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Donald Lee Fanger was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
Donald Fanger liked to say that he was privileged to have worked in the golden age of American academic life. His many friends, colleagues, students, and readers bear witness to his outstanding contributions, formal and informal, to it as scholar, teacher, mentor, and citizen. Fanger’s education at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard and his faculty positions at Brown, Stanford, and Harvard certainly placed him in centers of academic prominence. His career advanced swiftly and decisively. He became a full professor while still in his 30s and devoted nearly 70 years to building vibrant communities in his fields and universities.
As a young professor at Brown (1962–1965), Fanger founded an important series of publications that brought the best of Russian literary criticism back into print. At Stanford (1966–1968) he directed the new Slavic languages and literatures division and set it on a true course before leaving for Harvard. Once here he helped steer his two departments, Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature, toward new projects and orientations, including engagement with recent theories of literature. As one of few comparatists with fluency in Russian and a profound understanding of Russian culture, he helped to broaden the range of inquiry in both of his fields. His talent for sharing his love of literature made it possible for him to work with colleagues in other disciplines and, through his many reviews in public-facing journals, to extend his insights to non-academic audiences. While building his departments, he reached out internationally to bring students and scholars to Harvard. One search found him traveling to Poland to recruit the prominent young poet Stanisław Barańczak and then tenaciously battling to bring him to Harvard. Many wonderful dinner parties in the Fanger home helped welcome newcomers and visiting writers to the Harvard community. He remained a treasured interlocutor and active scholar in the 26 years that followed his retirement in 1998.
As a teacher, Fanger excelled in the seminar room and in the lecture hall. His mellifluous baritone and elegant, precise English made his courses unforgettable in both venues, as did his rigorous preparation, insightful readings, and ability to engage his students, regardless of their level of expertise. He worked with historians to offer large courses on Russian civilization for the undergraduate Core Curriculum Program and taught memorable lecture courses on a range of topics, including Dostoevsky, urban fiction, and theory of comedy. His advanced seminars on Russian realism and on 20th-century prose thoroughly prepared their participants for careers in scholarship and teaching.
Fanger’s own scholarship (three books and over 40 articles, primarily on Russian literature), like his teaching, grew from his lifelong fascination with the intricacy and often unresolvable complexity of literary texts. Written in remarkably subtle, controlled, but often dazzling prose, these studies seemed to be working simultaneously on a variety of levels. With his fluency in multiple languages, keen eye for textual detail, and attention to patterns within and across works, he made literary works come alive in new and unexpected ways. He had a particular fondness for experimental fiction, which he transposed into demonstrations of how familiar, canonical texts arose from their authors’ daring innovations in theme and structure. Believing that criticism rises toward the level of the material it addresses, he worked exclusively with challenging texts, framing his inquiries broadly in historical, social, and cultural contexts. His first book, “Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol” (1965), took the urban mythmaking of three writers who worked independently and showed how Dostoevsky, who knew their writing, developed its themes and techniques (the grotesque, the sensational, the unnatural) to craft a poetics of the city, which Dostoevsky called “fantastic realism.” Fanger’s second book, “The Creation of Nikolai Gogol” (1979), remains our most insightful and profound book on Russia’s first great prose writer. Fanger took the salient property of Gogol’s life and texts, elusiveness, and made it the key to interpreting not just Gogol’s texts but also his life and literary milieu. A pioneering contribution to literary criticism, literary sociology, and literary biography, the book won Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss Award in 1980. A year later, Fanger was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Fanger’s third book, “Gorky’s Tolstoy and Other Reminiscences” (2008), took him to a new period, the early 20th century; a new author, Maxim Gorky; and a new literary problem, how we remember figures who contribute to the literary process with much more than their imaginative writing. Gorky, one of the most popular Russian writers of the early 20th century, is now remembered primarily for his efforts in defense of Russian culture during the turmoil of the post-Revolutionary years and for the part he played in normalizing Stalinist literary politics in the early 1930s. But Fanger turned to Gorky’s works that have best stood the test of time, his insightful memoirs of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and others, selecting the most incisive of them and, with illuminating annotations, making them a reflection on writerly selection, arrangement, and interpretation. The volume became a casebook on Gorky’s legacy not as a myth or figure but as a talented creative artist.
Fanger’s many articles present readings of individual texts or contribute to the understanding of specific theoretical problems. A significant number of them address the principal agents in the making of literature: authors, readers, censors, and critics. Taken together they constitute a lifelong meditation on the literary process and on literature as an institution.
Fanger was married for 46 years to Margot Taylor Fanger, who passed away in 2001. In 2006 he married Leonie Gordon, who survives him. He leaves his three children with Margot, Steffen Fanger, Ross Fanger (Allyson Fanger), and Kate Fanger (Jeremy Jackson); six grandchildren; a stepson, Nicholas Gordon (Alison Haskovec); and three step-grandchildren.
On Nov. 8, 2024, a memorial gathering brought together many friends and family members to celebrate Fanger’s wit, erudition, endearing personal charm, and exceptional capacity for love and friendship.
Respectfully submitted, Julie A. Buckler Michael S. Flier Stephen Greenblatt Justin Weir William Mills Todd III, Chair
Finding insights in history for war in UkraineScholars say that Russia may appear to be gaining upper hand currently, but challenges lie ahead
Ukrainian soldiers install explosives near the front line in the Donetsk region.
Scholars say that Russia may appear to be gaining upper hand currently, but challenges lie ahead
When Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, President Vladimir Putin frequently invoked history, falsely claiming his goal was to “denazify” Ukraine and harkening to the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II to rally the nation behind him.
History and its misuse have been central components of the war in Ukraine since its inception, Ukraine and Russia scholars observed during an online discussion Monday. But, they argued, looking at the actual record of the past can offer valuable insights into the current conflict and where it might be headed.
Serhii Plokhii, Mykhailo S. Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History, noted the war began on Feb. 24, 2022, not long after the Kremlin published an essay in which Putin falsely claimed Ukraine had occupied Russian territory and that Ukrainians had no culture or history independent of Russia.
Though Putin appears to be gaining the upper hand at the moment, the conflict could ultimately backfire on Russia in the long run.
War often has a “profound” effect on a country’s sense of national identity and on its state- and nation-building process, said Christopher Miller, ’09, a professor of international relations at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
The most significant and lasting impact of the Russia-Ukraine war will be felt in Ukraine and what it has done to “further catalyze” and consolidate a nation-building process that Ukraine began before 2022.
“Ukrainians are more convinced than ever of the need to have two fully separate polities.”
Christopher Miller, Tufts University
“That speaks to the dilemmas that I think Russia finds itself in,” said Miller. “Having started a war on the thesis that Russia and Ukraine were, if not the same country, at least part of the same history, as Putin set it out in his [essay] in the summer of 2021, ending up in a situation in which Ukrainians are more convinced than ever of the need to have two fully separate polities.”
Miller said a war-weakened economy is unlikely to bring Russia to heel soon. The Russian government was well prepared for the conflict, making sure it had little debt and lots of savings and military stockpiles to draw from. Ordinary Russians haven’t experienced a decline in their standard of living — and some even feel better-off than before the war, because the Russian government has maintained aggressive social spending, and strong hiring by defense factories has boosted wages.
Through “creative accounting” Russia has been able to “hide a lot of the cost of the war” by borrowing heavily from Russian banks and government sources, which has insulated its economy from the war’s full impact — for now. But Russia’s financial troubles still loom on the horizon as “the likelihood that those loans get repaid is low,” he added.
A controversial proposal between Ukraine and the U.S. to divide Ukraine’s mineral reserves embodies a growing trend in recent years among the major world economies that have gone from seeing trade as “a positive-sum dynamic” to seeing trade as having “very clear zero-sum dynamics” that have forced “a new politicization of the international economy in ways we have not seen for some time,” said Miller.
For some, the negotiations to end the Russia-Ukraine war, which President Trump seeks to broker, have drawn comparisons to the Yalta Conference, the historic “Great Powers” meeting of 1945 held in then-Soviet Crimea, noted Plokhii, who is also director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.
It was there that President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin unilaterally mapped out the post-World War II global order, partitioning Germany and handing the Soviets a “sphere of influence” in Eastern Europe.
Unlike the current peace talks, the West at Yalta focused on ensuring some security for Poland and other territories under Soviet control, Plokhii said.
“What we are seeing today is that the interests of Ukraine … have been sacrificed” by decisions being made by outside forces, he said. “The lessons of Yalta still stand today: No lasting peace without those who are involved and affected the most.”
Atul Gawande named featured speaker for Harvard Alumni DayAcclaimed surgeon, writer, and public health leader will take the stage at Harvard’s global alumni celebration on June 6
Atul Gawande named featured speaker for Harvard Alumni Day
Acclaimed surgeon, writer, and public health leader will take the stage at Harvard’s global alumni celebration on June 6
Laura Speers
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
Renowned surgeon, best-selling author, and public health leader Atul Gawande, M.D. ’95, M.P.H. ’99, will be the featured speaker for Harvard Alumni Day, the annual University-wide celebration of the global alumni community hosted by the Harvard Alumni Association on June 6.
Driven by a relentless curiosity about how health systems function — and where they fall short — Gawande has devoted his career to rethinking not just how medicine is practiced, but how it is delivered to improve health outcomes for all. As a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Gawande has fostered the next generation of physicians and health professionals. As assistant administrator for global health at the U.S. Agency for International Development under the Biden administration, he spent the past three years leading efforts to expand access to care, control health threats, and reduce disparities in life expectancy globally.
In addition, Gawande is widely recognized for his writing, which has broadened public awareness and understanding of modern health challenges and solutions across a wide range of topics. A contributor to The New Yorker since 1998, he has authored four New York Times best-sellers, including “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.”
“Atul Gawande is one of the most influential thinkers, writers, and innovators in health and medicine today,” said President Alan M. Garber ’77, Ph.D. ’82. “From advancing surgical safety to expanding access to high-quality care worldwide, he brings a deeply humanist perspective to his work and is dedicated to ensuring that healthcare policies and systems prioritize the people that they serve. I can’t think of a more fitting voice to inspire our alumni as they continue their own efforts to make a difference in the world.”
“I’m excited to return to Harvard,” said Gawande. “This is a community like no other — in its history, discoveries, and impact. And I’m continually inspired by alumni of all ages driving change for the common good, both within their local communities and around the world.”
Gawande has long been a force in health systems innovation, mobilizing people to take on entrenched challenges. His research has led to breakthroughs in patient care, including the widely adopted WHO (World Health Organization) Surgical Safety Checklist, a 19-item protocol credited with reducing surgical mortality rates by nearly half. Recognizing a critical gap from this work, he co-founded the nonprofit Lifebox in 2011 to make surgery safer by providing pulse oximeters to operating rooms worldwide. In 2012, he founded Ariadne Labs, a joint center at BWH and Harvard Chan School, to develop scalable solutions to some of health care’s most complex problems. He is currently an Ariadne Labs distinguished professor in residence.
He was a member of President Joseph Biden’s Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board and co-founded CIC Health, a public benefit corporation that supported pandemic response operations nationally. From 2018 to 2020, Gawande was the CEO of Haven, a joint venture launched by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase to revolutionize healthcare delivery.
A recipient of numerous honors, including a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, Gawande is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and was named one of the 100 most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy and Time magazine.
“A surgeon with the heart of a storyteller, Atul Gawande has a rare gift,” said HAA President Moitri Chowdhury Savard ’93. “He shows us that medicine is not just a science, but a profoundly human endeavor — one that demands reflection, empathy, and continuous improvement. Through his writing, research, and leadership, he challenges us all to ask: ‘How can we do better?’ I know his words will resonate with the alumni community as we reflect on what it means to lead lives of connection and purpose. It’s truly a privilege to have him join us.”
A Harvard homecoming
“I came to Harvard as a medical student and found an extraordinary community that has pushed me to think better, work better, and try for more than I ever imagined,” said Gawande. “Nothing that I have done since — surgery, innovation, writing, public health — was expected or possible without this place.”
Raised in Athens, Ohio, by physician parents who emigrated from India, Gawande has said that going into medicine felt so inevitable that he did everything he could to avoid it. He studied biology and political science at Stanford, then politics, philosophy, and economics as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Even at HMS, his approach was unconventional — deferring admission for three years, then stepping away to work on healthcare reform in the Clinton administration.
After earning his medical degree and completing his second year of surgical training, Gawande’s next steps took him not to the laboratory, as was expected, but across the quad to Harvard Chan School, where he later earned a master’s degree.
It was during his surgical residency at BWH that The New Yorker first invited Gawande to write for them. Rather than play it safe, he tackled one of medicine’s most uncomfortable realities: medical errors — including a serious one that he had made. His many articles since then, unflinching in their examination of issues from end-of-life matters to skyrocketing health care costs, have redefined the public discourse on health.
“We are thrilled to have Atul Gawande join us for Alumni Day,” said Sarah Karmon, executive director of the HAA. “While the world around him — around us — advances at a rapid pace, he reminds us that true progress isn’t about scientific or technological innovation alone. We must also rethink how we care for each other. Atul’s work, whether in the operating room or on the written page, exemplifies knowledge in service to the broader community and demonstrates the difference that one person can make in the lives of others.”
Harvard Alumni Day will take place on campus and virtually on June 6. All alumni are invited to attend. For more information, visit alumni.harvard.edu/alumni-day.
Why new qubit may give ultrafast quantum computing a boostMicrosoft discovery appears to be more stable, robust option
Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow and professor, University of California at Santa Barbara.
Why new qubit may give ultrafast quantum computing a boost
Microsoft discovery appears to be more stable, robust option
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
Microsoft announced last month it had created a “topological qubit,” which the company says can power a quantum computer more reliably than previously developed quantum qubits and which they believe will speed development of ultrafast quantum computers capable of tackling the toughest computing challenges, far beyond the capability of even supercomputers built through conventional means.
The decades-old field of quantum computing seeks to harness the unusual forces at play at the subatomic level. Key is the idea of “superposition,” that something can be in two states at once.
In classical computing, information is stored as bits, either a 1 or a 0. In quantum computing, superposition means that information can be stored in a qubit as a 1 or a 0 or a combination. This increases the computer’s power exponentially.
In December, for example, Google unveiled a quantum chip that completed a computation in just five minutes that would take a conventional supercomputer 10 septillion years.
Microsoft’s topological qubit is constructed of indium arsenide and aluminum, which becomes a superconductor at very low temperatures. It is the result of nearly two decades’ work by a Microsoft team led by Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow and professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
In this edited conversation, Nayak, who got his start in physics as a Harvard College undergraduate in the late 1980s and early 1990s, spoke with the Gazette about the advance and about his experience treading the sometimes-difficult path of discovery.
How is Microsoft’s new qubit — the topological qubit — different from ordinary ones?
A qubit is a quantum mechanical two-level system. It’s something that can be a 0 or a 1, like a regular bit, but because of quantum mechanics, it can also be a superposition between 0 and 1.
That happens when you get down to microscopic enough scales and, as features on microprocessors have been getting smaller and smaller, we have been getting to the limit where quantum mechanics is going to start to matter for classical computing. That’s a problem because you want 0s and 1s to be very well-defined and not fluctuate in an unwanted way. But it turns out that’s also an opportunity.
Richard Feynman — and others — recognized as far back as the 1980s that nature is ultimately quantum mechanical so, if you want to simulate nature, you need to simulate it with what we call a quantum computer.
So problems in quantum mechanics, such as simulating materials like high temperature superconductors, or in chemistry, such as simulating catalysts that could be used for nitrogen fixation to make fertilizers or break down microplastics, those kinds of material and chemistry problems mostly have to be solved by experimental, high throughput, trial and error. It’s expensive and time-consuming.
With a quantum computer, you could simulate those things because it operates and takes advantage of the same underlying physical principles that nature uses.
The danger, though, is that your qubits will be like Schrödinger’s cat. It can’t, in the real world, simultaneously be a superposition of being dead and alive because the environment effectively gets entangled with it and collapses the wave function.
So, the qubits will eventually — or in some cases pretty quickly — lose the superposition. Then you lose all of the extra juice that you get from quantum mechanics. That’s part of what quantum error correction is supposed to solve.
“Actually holding that physical processor in my hand, and feeling the reality of it, that was pretty cool.”
A topological qubit is based on the idea that, given that you need to do error correction and you are worried about the fragility of quantum states, the more you can have that occur at the hardware level, the better the situation you’re in.
The idea is that the quantum mechanical states — the quantum mechanical wave functions — have similar mathematical structures, and if you can engineer, or find in nature, a physical system which organizes itself into quantum mechanical states in which those wave functions have that topological structure, then the information you coded will be very stable — not infinitely stable, but extremely stable and potentially without other very painful tradeoffs.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be huge; it doesn’t have to be slow; and it could be easy to control, because the amount of control signals that you have to put in is generally smaller. It’s hitting a sweet spot of embedding a lot of stability and rigidity to the wave functions without other painful tradeoffs.
So, it’s a more stable, a more robust system than the qubits being used now. How close is this to powering an actual computer?
Our ultimate goal is to have a million-qubit quantum computer. That’s a scale at which quantum computers are going to be able to solve these valuable problems, like new materials and chemistry.
It was in thinking about scale that we charted the roadmap we have. We didn’t want any solutions or any technologies that could only get to 100 or 1,000 qubits. Today, we only have a handful of qubits, as you saw on the chip that we’ve been showing off, but we have a roadmap to much larger systems.
We entered into a contract with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Details aren’t public, but we have promised to deliver something pretty serious, that’s going to have fault tolerance, on a pretty aggressive timeline. It’s not going to be a million yet, but it’s going to be far enough along the road that it’s going to be very clear that we can get all the way there.
Life’s short. This is something I want to see in years, not decades, and our CEO does too.
It sounds like there were a number of major hurdles. What did you find most challenging?
In trying to make topological qubits, the situation for us in some ways was like going back to the early days of classical computing when people were building computers with vacuum tubes.
Semiconductors weren’t well understood, so there was a lot of fundamental research going on to understand what they are exactly. Sometimes they look like metals and sometimes they look like insulators. The fact that you can tune them in between is where their power is: the switchability and control.
People had to understand what properties were intrinsic and what properties were just due to some devices being dirtier than others. That led to the development of the transistor, but the first applications were years away — it was a while before it was computers — then came integrated circuits and you’re off and running.
We understood that you had to have the right material in order to get this new state of matter. We also understood at a reasonably early stage that the material had to have certain properties. It was going to have to be a hybrid between a superconductor and a semiconductor. It was going to need to put together many of the nice properties of a semiconductor and many of the cool properties of a superconductor. And we’d have to do this without introducing too many impurities or imperfections in the process.
Once we realized that was the first problem, the zeroth order thing that you can’t even get to “go” until you solve, and focused a lot of effort on that, then we were in a much better place.
“Our ultimate goal is to have a million-qubit quantum computer. … We didn’t want any solutions or any technologies that could only get to 100 or 1,000 qubits.”
Of course, in early days there’s going to be a lot of wandering around trying to figure it out. But I think the first step to solving a problem is clearly formulating what the problem is. If you don’t have a precise formulation of the problem, you’re probably not going to get to the solution. A very precise statement of the problem relied heavily on our ability to simulate these devices.
But we couldn’t use off-the-shelf simulations that people use in the semiconductor industry. The ideal thing would be if we had a quantum computer, which could simulate materials, but we didn’t have that.
So we had to develop custom, in-house simulations that enabled us to figure out the right materials combination and, of course, how to develop the synthesis and fabrication methods to make these new material types.
The third piece of that is testing. Once we had those three pieces, that wasn’t a guarantee of success, but that at least meant that we had a really good game plan and the ability to start turning the flywheel.
How did it feel to actually hold the chip in your hand?
It was pretty amazing, but when I first got chills down my spine was when I started seeing the data from one of these chips, where it looked like we expected it to. That was within the last year and one of those moments where there were absolutely chills down my spine and I said, “Oh, wow.”
In 19 years of work, there were setbacks, but especially in the last, let’s say, four years, there were a lot of moments where I said, “We actually kind of know what we’re doing here, and I see a path forward.”
There were a couple of times when we surprised ourselves with how fast we were able to go. But, without a doubt, actually holding that physical processor in my hand, and feeling the reality of it, that was pretty cool.
When you graduated from Harvard College in the early 1990s, your degree was in physics?
Yes, my undergrad degree was in physics at Harvard. I was there ’88 to ’92, and it was fantastic. I lived in Dunster House. I was back there last year to visit one of the labs. I got to run along the Charles River that morning and just walking from the hotel through Harvard Square over to the Jefferson Lab brought back a lot of good memories, though the Square has changed a lot.
I’m still in touch with my roommates and close friends from my time at Harvard. We have a WhatsApp thread that we all stay in touch on.
There’s not a lot of faculty there now who were there when I was a student, but there are a few emeritus professors and lots of great new faculty there, whom I didn’t know as a student but have known professionally as a physicist over the last 10 to 15 years.
You got started on this specific path with your doctoral work at Princeton?
I trace it back to some things at the end of my last year in Princeton, that’s when I first headed down this path. When I was an undergrad, I was interested in things vaguely like this, but quantum computing wasn’t really a field.
There’s been skepticism from some quarters expressed about your data. How do you answer the skeptics who say they don’t believe your results?
First, skepticism is healthy in science. It’s a normal part of the process, and anytime you do something really new, there should be skepticism.
We presented a lot of new results at the Station Q conference. It’s a conference that we have regularly, almost every year, in Santa Barbara that brings together over 100 people from across the field, from both universities and industry. There were one or two scientists from Harvard and also from Google and Intel.
The people who were at the conference heard about it for 90 minutes, got to ask questions, and were there for the rest of the conference to ask questions in informal discussions and over coffee, over dinner, and so on. But the rest of the community hasn’t heard it yet, hasn’t seen a paper yet, and there are a lot of questions.
So, there’s a group of people who’ve had a lot of exposure to the latest results, and that group is excited and has given very positive feedback, both on the work and the results. People who haven’t heard all the latest results are skeptical, and that’s natural.
I’m going to give a talk at the American Physical Society Global Summit — this is the 100th anniversary of quantum mechanics, the 100th anniversary of Schrodinger discovering his equation. I’m giving a talk there, and a lot more people will get to hear about our latest results.
We’re also putting out a paper in roughly the same time frame, so a lot more people are going to have a chance to see the very latest data and judge for themselves.
What happens next?
We put out a paper that lays out a roadmap. It’s not everything that we’ve shared with DARPA, but it’s the part that we think that we can make publicly available. We’re full speed ahead.
We are interested in these really big problems that ultimately come down to understanding nature better.
Some of my earliest work in physics involved trying to understand high-temperature superconductors. That was a big deal when they were first discovered because superconductivity was thought to be a phenomenon that only occurred at extremely low temperatures.
Then it was discovered that you can actually have things become superconducting above liquid nitrogen temperatures. It’s not fully understood why or how that happens, so our ability to make better versions of it or things that work at even higher temperatures is limited because we don’t even know where to look.
So I’m excited that some of these big scientific problems from the beginning of my career that I knew were important but didn’t know how to make progress on are things that we’ll be able to attack now with a quantum computer.
When the woods are your climate change labFor these researchers, Harvard Forest is a labor of love, and that love is changing
Senior investigator Emery Boose and Director of Outreach & Education Clarisse Hart study changes in the Harvard Forest.
Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
9 min read
For these researchers, Harvard Forest is a labor of love, and that love is changing
David Orwig tries not to think of changes in the natural world as “better” or “worse.” He just sticks with “different.” And after decades of warming winters, Harvard Forest today is decidedly different.
“Every day, walking around this forest is just dramatically different than it used to be,” said Orwig, who has worked at the 4,000-acre forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, since 1995 and today is senior ecologist. “When I first started working here, it used to be dark, green, lush, and shady. Now I take groups out there, and the overstory trees are letting in a lot more light. It’s gray in the understory, and there’s a whole new layer of birch coming in that was not here even 10 years ago.”
To Orwig and his Harvard Forest colleagues, climate change’s impacts aren’t an abstraction, and they aren’t a problem for tomorrow. That’s partly because climate change is studied there, but it’s also because many in the tight-knit community view their work as a labor of love. And it’s hard not to notice when your love is changing.
“We all have a landscape that we share here and care deeply about,” said Clarisse Hart, education and outreach director. “I guarantee that every single person who works here can tell you several parts of this land that are meaningful to them. We’re constantly out on the land together and experiencing these changes together.”
Black birch have begun to flourish in place of fallen hemlocks.
Hart points out the woolly adelgid on a hemlock branch.
The forest, founded in 1907, attracts researchers from around the globe because of its exceptional trove of collected data. It has temperature and precipitation information going back to the 1960s, with comparable data collected in the nearby town of Amherst going back to the 1830s. Having records collected over such a long period allows climate trends to emerge despite the normal variation in daily or annual weather figures.
“We now have enough data to say that the long-term trends toward a warmer and wetter climate, which is what the climate scientists have predicted for our part of the world, is being borne out,” said Emery Boose, senior scientist and information manager at the forest. “There may be some other trends as well. There’s evidence that there may be more variation from year to year. And precipitation, we’re starting to see evidence of extremely heavy, short duration rainfall, especially in the summer months, not tied to a large storm like a hurricane.”
Harvard Forest has about 100 research projects going at any one time, Boose said, ranging from small studies lasting just a single field season to ongoing efforts that are passed from one scientific generation to the next.
Experiments are installed along the dirt roads crisscrossing the forest, with some dug into the forest floor, artificially heating the soil to understand how ant and microbial communities might change in a warming world.
Others are hung off metal towers extending into and above the forest canopy, with cables and tubes running to nearby shacks where shelves of instruments examine gas exchange between the forest and the atmosphere.
“In the Southwest, the climate-and-tree story is one of drought and fire. It’s more in your face,” said Jonathan Thompson, senior ecologist and research director. “We have analogies for those things, but instead of drought and fire, it’s happening here through longer-term changes in climate interacting with invasive pests.”
The instruments also confirm things the researchers already know from personal experience: Winters are coming later despite this year’s more prolonged cold, and the snowpack is thinner. The fading winter cold gives way to summer heatwaves, more wildfires, and torrential rainstorms.
Signs of damage from the woolly adelgid, a small, invasive, aphidlike insect.
“My wife and I have been here for 40 years now, and we like to ski. Both anecdotally and in measurements, there’s a trend that snow doesn’t last quite as long and isn’t quite as deep as it used to be,” said Boose. “Plus, we’re both avid ice skaters and in 2023 for the first time I can remember one of the lakes in nearby Phillipston didn’t freeze over completely. I can’t ever remember that happening. We used to get one to two feet of ice.”
Other Harvard Forest administrators and scientists have similar stories: October 2023 passed without a frost until Halloween, and winter’s bitterest weeks are either milder (last winter logged no days below zero degrees Fahrenheit) or are reduced to a handful of days.
The stories vary by circumstance and experience, but they all point to the fact that the forest isn’t waiting for the debates to conclude in Washington, D.C. It is changing, with the most dramatic shifts affecting the very character of the forest.
“There’s nobody who hasn’t noticed that the hemlocks are dying,” Hart said. “I think what’s happening here is very real for all of us, and we could flop down and despair — seriously we could — but we’re also bolstered by a real sense of wonder at the resilience of ecosystems, at the way that trees work, the way these systems function.”
Hemlocks don’t just grow in a forest. They shape it, controlling the flow of energy via dense, multilayered branches that intercept much of the light that hits the canopy. Their fallen needles acidify the soil, keeping out competitors and forming a spongy carpet. They regulate temperature, shielding the snowpack from the spring’s strengthening sunshine and shading summertime streams to provide habitat for cold-water fish like trout.
When Orwig first came to Harvard Forest as a postdoctoral fellow, its hemlocks were healthy, but there were signs of change in the offing. So he traveled to southern Connecticut to glimpse the forest’s future.
He set up 40 monitoring plots to understand the woolly adelgid, a small, invasive, aphidlike insect that had arrived in Connecticut a decade earlier and was pushing north. The one thing that tends to keep them in check is cold temperatures.
Over the last two decades, however, the weeks of deep cold that used to be a feature of New England winters have moderated. So, the adelgid, a native of Japan, thrived in the milder landscape and started moving north to claim new territory.
Black birches give the forest a different feel, shady and green by summer, but sunny and open in the winter.
“We started with about 850 hemlocks,” Orwig said of his Connecticut plots. “There’s fewer than 50 left.”
Orwig continues to monitor those stands in hopes of finding “lingering hemlocks,” trees resistant to the adelgid that might serve as founders of a new, healthier population.
“I used to think I had two trees that were resistant in my plots, but when I went back several years later, they were both dead,” Orwig said. “There’s just not great evidence for resistance out there.”
Meanwhile, the woolly adelgid has spread relentlessly north, arriving in Massachusetts in 1988 and continuing into Southern New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont.
Hope remains that resistant trees might still emerge, that an introduced insect predator might prove successful — several states have released them — or that a succession of cold winters, as occurred in 2004-2005, will knock down the population and give existing trees a chance to recover.
David Orwig (center) walks with Boose and Hart. Orwig marvels at the forest’s resilience, but says he will miss hemlocks as they continue to die.
Those hopes may seem slim, but Orwig points out that he never even thought Harvard Forest’s hemlocks would survive until now.
“I had envisioned that within 10 years, Massachusetts would all be dead and that hasn’t happened,” Orwig said. “That’s a good thing, but they’re still infested, and they still continue to decline.”
Dying hemlocks are usually replaced by deciduous trees, black birches in Harvard Forest’s case. Those trees give the forest a different feel, shady and green by summer, but sunny and open in the winter. The differences include soil chemistry — slightly basic as opposed to acidic under the evergreens — and an altered flow of nutrients from rapidly decomposing, fallen leaves versus more enduring evergreen needles.
“Everything changes, the microenvironment, the snow and rain that the trees intercept, all kinds of things,” Orwig said. “But forests are resilient, and we often see dense thickets of black birch come in. That’s a different forest, but it will rapidly grow. It may store carbon very quickly but uses water very differently.”
Though Orwig marvels at the forest’s resilience and insists that natural change is neither good nor bad, he still admits he’ll miss the hemlocks at Harvard Forest and in the old-growth forests he studies across New England.
“I love being in a hemlock forest. I like how they smell. I like how they feel when you walk around on the spongy earth,” Orwig said. “And I do feel great loss when we lose vast areas of forest due to an introduced insect. It is painful to see 300- to 400-year-old hemlocks being killed off.”
Others tally generational loss on top of personal concerns. Future generations, they fear, may not even know what they’re missing.
“I can remember being an undergraduate traipsing through these forests, and they are different now, but I don’t know how to convey that,” said Harvard Forest Director Missy Holbrook, the Charles Bullard Professor of Forestry.
Holbrook described a concept called “shifting baselines,” the idea that we each form our own sense of what we consider normal based on personal experience. Coming generations will have a different baseline than we do, Holbrook said. And that can impact everything from the scientific questions that are asked to how conservation programs are designed to what restoration efforts are undertaken.
“If you’ve never experienced an old-growth forest or a hemlock forest, it’s not in your realm of imagination,” Holbrook said. “I remember when we had snowier winters consistently, and my son will not have that frame of reference. So, climate change is affecting me: It affects me when I raise my son and when I teach. And climate change is accelerating, not slowing.”
What exactly is a republic anyway?Government professor looks at long history, evolution of form of governance in class that’s drawing high interest in current moment
Enrollment for “What is a Republic?” has quadrupled since Professor Daniel Carpenter (pictured) last taught the course two years ago.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Government professor looks at long history, evolution of form of governance in class that’s drawing high interest in current moment
“These peculiar people call themselves republicans.”
Daniel Carpenter, the Allie S. Freed Professor of Government, presented his class with an image of emotional demonstrators waving red, white, and blue flags. Except there were no ruby-red MAGA hats in this contemporary newspaper photo.
“They were gathered, dressed in yellow for maximum visibility, to chant: ‘Not my king!’” Carpenter explained.
These self-styled British republicans, opposed to the 2023 coronation of King Charles III, proved the perfect opening for Carpenter’s spring 2025 “What is a Republic?” The Gen Ed offering, also available online via Harvard Extension School, has struck a chord in the current political moment. Enrollment has quadrupled since Carpenter last taught the course two years ago, with more than 250 in this semester’s class.
“The course description was fascinating because it highlighted that a republic is actually something pretty specific,” said student Michael Zhao ’25, a double concentrator in computer science and government from California. “It’s a system where power flows through representation from the people and is held in public offices rather than by individuals.”
Carpenter’s lectures will culminate with a deep dive into the 18th-century founding, and centuries-long evolution, of America’s particular approach to republican governance as well as a study of the Third and Fifth Republics of France. But first, Carpenter is guiding students through historic iterations of republics and proto-republican systems, with their varied approaches to organizing power — vested in elected and non-elected offices alike.
Many of today’s governing institutions, including Congress and parliaments around the world, owe much to ancient Rome during its republican period (roughly 509 B.C.-27 B.C.). No longer ruled by kings, Roman men were entrusted with electing representatives to various assemblies. The same era saw elected and appointed officeholders charged with managing public resources like infrastructure and tax revenue.
“How to balance responsiveness to popular sovereignty with institutional stability. How to maintain trust in government. How to keep officeholders accountable. These are questions that have challenged republican governments for millennia,” Zhao said.
Even non-representative systems inspired some of the key institutions of modern republics. Medieval Europe saw the first Catholic bishoprics (or dioceses) rising from the ashes of former Roman provinces. These clerical districts did not practice representative government, Carpenter told his students. But the republican state-builders of subsequent ages couldn’t help but copy the complex administrations of the wealthiest bishoprics.
“One way of thinking about European development is to look at where these different bishoprics begin to form,” Carpenter said while referring to a map of Europe in the early sixth century. “It’s a pretty good predictor of where universities are going to pop up. It’s a good predictor of where urbanization will start happening. It’s a good predictor of medieval trade.”
Accountability is a central tenet of any healthy republic, with elections being a crucial check. But one of the earliest innovations in holding power to account was available even to women, the poor, and other marginalized groups by the medieval era.
Carpenter teaches his course in the Harvard Art Museums’ Menschel Hall.
“How do people below the nobility engage in politics?” Carpenter asked. “One of the few, but very lasting, modes of representation is the petition.”
Republican Rome had various practices and venues for raising complaints. But evidence shows petitioning gaining a foothold in what Carpenter called the “hierarchical, profoundly unequal, and decentralized world” of sixth- to 12th-century Europe.
Soon audits and oaths also caught on as additional ways to keep the powerful in check and more responsive. “These institutions also developed heavily in the most advanced bishoprics and cathedral chapters,” the professor noted.
In addition to attending lectures, students in the course attend weekly discussion sections and tackle an ambitious reading list. Week one assignments included the Declaration of Independence and some of the best-known Federalist Papers. Week two found the students immersed in both classic and contemporary histories of ancient Rome — home to one of the longest-lived republics in human history.
“I really appreciate the rigor I’m getting from this course,” said Jack Flanigan ’27, a social studies concentrator from New York City. “His style of teaching is expansive and draws together a lot of different strands of scholarship into one coherent narrative.”
One text that left a big impression was Niccolò Machiavelli’s “Discorsi,” with the Italian Renaissance political philosopher drawing lessons from the gradual rise and less-gradual fall of Rome’s republic.
“Machiavelli wrote about the importance of having a mixed regime,” said Joshua Eneji ’28, a Texas native weighing concentrations in history, literature, and government. “He said you can’t have only one form of government, or it’s bound to fall. It needs to be intertwined with multiple forms of government so that it’s stable.”
It’s been 20 years since Carpenter, an expert on bureaucratic politics and the administrative state, introduced this study of republics. “You get to learn about the separation of powers, the working of assemblies, the importance of offices, and other institutions not necessarily emphasized in other government courses,” said Carpenter, who is now writing a book based on the class.
Interest in the subject has climbed. “Certain things people took for granted for decades or centuries are being destabilized,” the Government Department chair offered in an interview. “So Harvard students want to know: What are these things being destabilized at the moment? How did they first stabilize? And how do they begin to fall apart?”
One thing that can hinder this pursuit, Carpenter told the class, is clinging to ideas formed by the politically charged realities of 21st-century America. His first lecture touched on the “lazy trope,” ubiquitous on social media and within certain think-tanks, that America is a republic, not a democracy — or a democracy, not a republic.
He chalked it up to a mix of partisanship and presentism. “It’s a historical accident that one of our political parties happens to be named Republicans — and the other happens to be named Democrats,” he said. “And of course, neither of those parties were with us at the founding.”
“I beg of you,” he continued, “to let go of your predilections by saying, ‘Oh, I really want this to be a democracy’ or ‘I really want this to be a republic.’ It’s possible that it’s both.”
Sense of isolation, loss amid Gaza war sparks quest to make all feel welcomeNim Ravid works to end polarization on campus, across multicultural democracies
Sense of isolation, loss amid Gaza war sparks quest to make all feel welcome
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Nim Ravid works to end polarization on campus, in multicultural democracies
Part of a series of profiles focused on community-led efforts to promote dialogue across campus.
When he was 15, Nim Ravid and his family left their native Tel Aviv and made a work-related move to Woodbridge, Conn., for a couple of years. He loved what he found there.
“It was a transformative experience for me,” said Ravid, now a College senior concentrating in economics. “I love the multicultural nature of this place. In this country, you’re surrounded by people who are very diverse and have different opinions. Even within the Jewish community there is massive disagreements … The cultural diversity here was one of the reasons why I wanted to come back.”
When Ravid was accepted into Harvard, he looked forward to experiencing the same exhilaration he felt when he first came to the United States. But things turned out very different. During his first weeks on campus, he learned that some were avoiding him because of his nationality and his stint in Israel’s Defense Forces, where he spent four years of mandatory service and a few months as a spokesperson for the head of the legislative Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
After the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks, Ravid’s sense of feeling like an outsider grew as tensions on campus mushroomed amid the ongoing protests over the war in Gaza. Many Israeli students experienced shunning and social exclusion inside and outside the classroom, Ravid said.
“I decided to embark on a mission to build spaces on campus that would allow people who share the same values, despite having different beliefs, to come together, hear one another, and learn from each other.”
In addition to isolation, Ravid struggled with devastating loss — three friends attending the Nova Music Festival were killed by Hamas forces. He decided to use his pain “as a fuel for action” to change campus culture and make it more inclusive and welcoming to all. Another motivation, he said, was his dreams for a brighter tomorrow in the Middle East, in which Israelis and Palestinians could live and prosper together.
“During my first days here, I was very excited to share my experience and looked forward to meeting people here to kind of dream together of a better future in the Middle East,” said Ravid.
“After experiencing such a difficult social exclusion, I decided to embark on a mission to build spaces on campus that would allow people who share the same values, despite having different beliefs, to come together, hear one another, and learn from each other. Since then, I’ve been on a quest.”
Ravid’s mission included informal efforts to bring together Jewish and Muslim students, but the tensions between the pro-Palestine and pro-Israel groups made it hard to recruit people willing to sit together and talk.
With help from some professors, Ravid found a few like-minded Arab and Muslim peers who joined his endeavors, and now the group comprises Israeli, Jewish, Muslim, and Arab students. Together, they have hosted private dinners, small dialogue circles, and conversations with speakers from both sides of the conflict. The group decided to make their events private to promote more open participation away from the public eye.
Michael Sandel, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, who helped moderate some group discussions, praised the students for their attempts to bridge the campus divide. In an email, he recalled the group’s origins and emphasized Ravid’s role.
“In the fraught aftermath of Oct. 7, a number of Harvard students from Israel and from Arab and Muslim countries came together, quietly and informally, to discuss the Israel-Palestinian conflict and ways of building dialogue,” wrote Sandel. “Nim was an impressive leader of this effort. He displayed an ability to bring people together, and to cultivate the ability to listen with sympathy and mutual respect.
“Nim has since broadened his mission of promoting respectful dialogue on the Harvard campus,” Sandel added. “He is a born leader and a force for good — at a time when not only our campuses but also the world needs voices for community, civility, and mutual understanding.”
Ravid sits on the Harvard Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias as one of its two student representatives. He has also been a member of the Intellectual Vitality Initiative, which aims to foster academic freedom, free expression, open inquiry, and civil discourse.
Although Ravid remains committed to his efforts to bring people together, he recognizes it is an uphill battle.
“It’s been tremendously difficult to get people to come to these events, but I’m inspired by some Arab friends who despite immense social pressures still come,” he said. “This initiative is a product of the work of students who are dedicated to creating a better Harvard for all. We want to create a Harvard where no one is treated differently based on their identity, whether it’s race, gender identity, country of origin, or political views.”
After graduation, Ravid said he plans to continue bringing people together, which has become a life mission. Polarization is poised to be the biggest challenge of the next century as democracies become more racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse, he said, and the way to overcome it is by fostering respectful dialogue across differences.
“For a multicultural democracy to function, one of the first pillars is that different people from different communities have to be able to effectively communicate with each other,” said Ravid. “When that cannot happen because one community is shunned, excluded, or not invited to take part in a dialogue, that prevents a multicultural society from operating effectively.”
New hope for repairing eye damage once thought untreatableStem cell therapy safely restores cornea’s surface in clinical trial
Ula Jurkunas performs the first CALEC surgery at Mass Eye and Ear.
New hope for repairing eye damage once thought untreatable
Stem cell therapy safely restores cornea’s surface in clinical trial
Ryan Jaslow
Mass General Brigham Communications
5 min read
A Mass Eye and Ear-led clinical trial of a procedure that took stem cells from a healthy eye and transplanted them into a damaged eye safely restored corneal surfaces in 14 patients who were followed for 18 months.
The stem cell treatment for blinding cornea injuries — called cultivated autologous limbal epithelial cells, or CALEC — was developed at Mass Eye and Ear. It consists of removing stem cells from a healthy eye with a biopsy, expanding them into a cellular tissue graft in a novel manufacturing process that takes two to three weeks, and then surgically transplanting the graft into the eye with a damaged cornea.
“Our first trial showed that CALEC was safe and the treatment was possible,” said principal investigator Ula Jurkunas, associate director of the Cornea Service at Mass Eye and Ear and professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. “Now we have this new data supporting that CALEC is more than 90 percent effective at restoring the cornea’s surface, which makes a meaningful difference in individuals with cornea damage that was considered untreatable.”
The cornea is the clear, outermost layer of the eye. Its outer border, the limbus, contains a large volume of healthy stem cells called limbal epithelial cells, which maintain the eye’s smooth surface.
When a person suffers a cornea injury, such as a chemical burn, infection, or other trauma, it can deplete the limbal epithelial cells, which can never regenerate. The resulting limbal stem cell deficiency renders the eye with a permanently damaged surface where it can’t undergo a corneal transplant, the current standard of care for vision rehabilitation. People with these injuries often experience persistent pain and visual difficulties.
National Eye Institute
This need led Jurkunas and Reza Dana, director of the Cornea Service at Mass Eye and Ear, to explore a new approach for regenerating limbal epithelial cells. Nearly two decades later, following preclinical studies and collaborations with researchers at Dana-Farber and Boston Children’s, it was possible to consistently manufacture CALEC grafts that met stringent quality criteria needed for human transplantation. The clinical trial was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Mass General Brigham Institutional Review Board, and the first patient was treated in 2018 at Mass Eye and Ear. Successful completion of the trial was accomplished through close coordination between Jurkunas’ surgical team and the cell manufacturing facility at Dana-Farber.
One limitation of this approach is that it is necessary for the patient to have only one involved eye so a biopsy can be performed to get starting material from the unaffected normal eye.
“Our future hope is to set up an allogeneic manufacturing process starting with limbal stem cells from a normal cadaveric donor eye,” said Jerome Ritz of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Connell and O’Reilly Families Cell Manipulation Core Facility, where the stem cell grafts are manufactured. “This will hopefully expand the use of this approach and make it possible to treat patients who have damage to both eyes.”
Researchers showed the procedure completely restored the cornea in 50 percent of participants at their three-month visit, and that the rate of complete success increased to 79 percent and 77 percent at their 12- and 18-month visits, respectively. With two participants meeting the definition of partial success at 12 and 18 months, the overall success was 93 percent and 92 percent at 12 and 18 months. Three participants received a second transplant, one of whom reached complete success by the end visit. An additional analysis of the procedure’s impact on vision showed varying levels of improvement of visual acuity in all 14 patients.
CALEC displayed a high safety profile, with no serious events in either the donor or recipient eyes. One adverse event, a bacterial infection, occurred in one participant eight months after the transplant, due to chronic contact lens use. Other adverse events were minor and resolved quickly following the procedures.
The procedure remains experimental and is currently not offered at Mass Eye and Ear or any U.S. hospital, and additional studies will be needed before the treatment is submitted for federal approval.
The trial is the first human study of a stem cell therapy to be funded by the National Eye Institute, a part of the National Institutes of Health, and was the first stem cell therapy in the eye in the U.S. Other research collaborators include Jia Yin at Mass Eye and Ear; Myriam Armant of Boston Children’s Hospital; and the JAEB Center for Health Research.
In the interim, future CALEC studies should include larger numbers of patients at multiple centers, with longer follow-ups and a randomized-control design.
“We feel this research warrants additional trials that can help lead toward FDA approval,” said Jurkunas. “While we are proud to have been able to bring a new treatment from the lab bench to clinical trials, our guiding objective was and always will be for patients around the country to have access to this effective treatment.”
This research is funded by National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health.
Disclosures: CALEC is patent-pending. Jurkunas and Dana have financial interest in OcuCell, a company developing living ophthalmic cell-based therapies for treating eye disease. Armant serves on the scientific advisory board for OcuCell. Ritz receives research funding from Kite/Gilead, Novartis, and Oncternal, and serves on Scientific Advisory Boards for Astraveus, Garuda Therapeutics, Smart Immune, Tolerance Bio, and TriArm Therapeutics. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.
Cancer? No, thank goodness, it’s just high cholesterol.Cardiovascular disease remains nation’s top cause of death, but patients seem too casual about prevention, experts say
Cancer? No, thank goodness, it’s just high cholesterol.
Joseph Woo (on screen, from left), Ami Bhatt, Tommaso Danesi, Jorge Plutzky, and Melody Mendez in conversation.
Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Cardiovascular disease remains nation’s top cause of death, but patients seem too casual about prevention, experts say
Heart disease — America’s No. 1 killer — has a surprising problem, according to cardiovascular disease experts. It’s not scary enough.
“You get a cancer diagnosis, and everybody moves. They move heaven and earth. Families move. People move,” said Ami Bhatt, chief innovation officer at the American College of Cardiology. “You say, ‘heart disease’ and people don’t move in the same way.”
The attitude of many, if not most patients, is that they’ll get to it. They’ll improve their diet after the holidays, and they’ll start that exercise program once the weather warms up. All of this needs to change.
That was the message from Bhatt and other cardiovascular surgeons and experts in heart disease prevention and medical innovation who came together Feb. 26 at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to sound a wake-up call.
They pointed out that cardiovascular disease’s continued status as the country’s leading cause of death despite decades of progress means much work remains. There have been dramatic advances in areas such as minimally invasive surgery and transplant surgery, while visions of the near future feature a growing use of artificial intelligence that leverages all of medical knowledge in real time to provide patients increasingly personalized care.
But when it comes to prevention, the prospect of a disease diagnosis tends to elicit only a casual response among patients, leaving those who deal with it daily scratching their heads.
“This happens to me every single week in the clinic when I’m seeing patients,” said Joseph Woo, chair of Stanford Medical School’s Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery and associate director of Stanford’s Cardiovascular Institute. “I try to remind them that cardiovascular disease kills more Americans every year than every single cancer combined, and if they ever heard they had a cancer inside, regardless of how slow-growing a cancer it would be, they would want it out or treated right away.”
“I try to remind them that cardiovascular disease kills more Americans every year than every single cancer combined.”
Joseph Woo
Jorge Plutzky, director of preventative cardiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said the problem may stem from the fact that many aren’t aware that cardiovascular damage isn’t a result of old age but accumulates over decades. He said patients should not wait until they have to be treated but to “know their numbers” — LDL or “bad” cholesterol, blood pressure, weight, and sleep quality — from an early age.
He recalled conversations with patients who view cholesterol-lowering meds skeptically and juxtaposed them with a recent a conversation with a 28-year-old cardiology fellow who decided to start taking statins because his LDL cholesterol, while not high, was not in the optimum range.
“That frames a lot of the challenge for us because what does that cardiology fellow at the Brigham know that that patient doesn’t know?” said Plutzky, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Bridging that gap is really at the core of effectively communicating what the issue is and why you want to do it. Doctors aren’t initiating a statin early because they think it’s harmful. They’re initiating early because they think there’ll be benefits.”
“Doctors aren’t initiating a statin early because they think it’s harmful. They’re initiating early because they think there’ll be benefits.”
Jorge Plutzky
Last week’s event, “Understanding heart disease: Advances in risk assessment, diagnosis and treatment,” also featured Tommaso Danesi, section chief of valve surgery and director of the Endoscopic Valvular Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The event, a Dr. Lawrence H. and Roberta Cohn Forum, was moderated by Melody Mendez, an anchor and reporter at NBC10 Boston, and hosted by the Chan School’s Leadership Studio.
Panelists discussed a variety of developments in cardiovascular disease care. Perhaps most dramatic is a heart transplant technique that uses a machine to keep the donor heart pumping during transport to the transplantation site rather than being stopped and stored on ice while moving from donor to recipient. The transplant is completed with the heart still beating, which improves patient recovery time.
Endoscopic surgery has also advanced significantly, with heart valve replacement requiring just a three-inch slit and allowing patients to go home after four days. Physical function returns to baseline after just two to three weeks, Danesi said, compared to two to three months with traditional open-heart surgery, in which the entire chest cavity is opened.
Advances have also come in nontraditional areas, Bhatt said. Wearable fitness devices, for example, can be considered a sign of rampant “consumerism” but also can be viewed as a way for patients to gain agency over their health and know at least some of their numbers, a positive development in an area like cardiovascular disease.
Similarly, Bhatt said, the rapidly expanding use of the latest generation of weight-loss medications by patients without a clinical diagnosis has been disparaged as a sign of vanity, but it’s also the case that the drugs — and their associated weight loss — have been associated with improved health.
“Our population is getting healthier,” Bhatt said. “You don’t have to be a full-fledged diabetic with heart failure, or risk, to benefit from GLP-1.”
“Our population is getting healthier. You don’t have to be a full-fledged diabetic with heart failure, or risk, to benefit from GLP-1.”
Ami Bhatt
New drugs, techniques, and technology define the recent past and near future of cardiovascular disease, but age-old problems persist, Plutzky said. Patients routinely skip screenings that could identify problems in advance and, even when prescribed medication, many stop taking it because life’s pressures intervene: They move; their prescription runs out and they can’t get a refill; or they have trouble connecting with a doctor.
One answer Plutzky described is to use “navigators” to augment the care and attention of physicians between office visits. The navigators reach out to patients and provide intermediate follow-up after surgery to implant a stent to keep a blood vessel open, for example, or when a patient is struggling with rising LDL cholesterol levels or blood pressure.
“It’s quite shocking, the extent of undertreatment we find, even in an excellent system like ours,” Plutzky said. “We can immediately say, ‘OK, that prescription is now waiting for you. Here’s the basis for why you want to do that, and let’s get you back into treatment.’”
Plutzky said the approach spares busy doctors the need to address prescription refills — a mundane but important part of the patient’s treatment — provides contact and encouragement to the patient in the months between appointments, and as community-based outreach, helps lower barriers to access.
“This strategy has been extremely effective in terms of getting people into the right treatment,” Plutzky said. “It doesn’t rely on education, affluence, or other things. It simply says this person’s LDL is very high, they should be on treatment, and we can get that initiated in a fairly simple and effective way.”
Exploring superconducting electrons in twisted grapheneCould up the game of lossless power transmission, levitating trains, quantum computing, even energy-efficient detectors for space exploration
Exploring superconducting electrons in twisted graphene
Could up the game of lossless power transmission, levitating trains, quantum computing, even energy-efficient detectors for space exploration
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
4 min read
Abhishek Banerjee (from left), Philip Kim, and Zeyu Hao.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Superconductors, materials that can transmit electricity without resistance, have fascinated physicists for over a century. First discovered in 1911 by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who observed the phenomenon in solid mercury cooled with liquid helium to around minus 450 F (just a few degrees above absolute zero), superconductors have been sought to revolutionize lossless power transmission, levitating trains, and even quantum computing.
Now, using specially developed microwave technology, a team of researchers from Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Raytheon-BBN Technologies has revealed unusual superconducting behavior in twisted stacks of graphene, a single atomic layer of carbon. Their research was published in Nature.
Graphene was discovered in 2004 by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, earning them the Nobel Prize in physics a few years later. In 2018, an MIT team led by Professor Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, one of the authors of the new paper, discovered superconductivity in a stack of twisted bilayer graphene.
“This seminal work showed that a small twist between two layers of graphene can create drastically different properties than just a single layer, and since then, scientists have also found that adding more layers of graphene with a small twist can lead to similar superconducting behavior,” said Zeyu Hao, a Ph.D. student in the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences working in the Kim Group lab at Harvard and one of the paper’s co-lead authors. The researchers’ most striking finding is that the superconducting behavior of electrons in twisted stacks of graphene differs from conventional superconductors such as aluminum. That difference “calls for careful studies of how these electrons move in sync — this ‘quantum dance’ — at very low temperatures,” Hao said.
Understanding why electrons pair up instead of repelling each other, as they naturally do due to their negative charge, is the key to uncovering how superconductivity arises. “Once electrons pair strongly enough, they condense into a superfluid that flows without losing energy,” said Abhishek Banerjee, co-lead author of the paper and a postdoctoral fellow in the Kim group. “In twisted graphene, electrons slow down, and the interaction between them somehow mixes with quantum mechanics in a bizarre way to create a ‘glue’ force that binds them in pairs. We still don’t fully understand how this pairing works in this new class of superconductors, which is why we’re developing new ways to probe it.”
One such approach is to measure the resonant vibration of the superconducting electrons — a “superfluid” of paired electrons — by illuminating them with microwaves, which is a bit like “listening to the tune” of the superfluid, said Mary Kreidel, co-lead author of the paper who worked with Mallinckrodt Professor of Applied Physics and of Physics Robert Westervelt at Harvard and Kin Chung Fong at Raytheon BBN Technology.
“It’s similar to playing a glass harp,” said Hao. “Instead of blowing over bottles filled with varying amounts of water to produce different notes, we use a microwave circuit as the ‘bottle,’ and the ‘water’ is the superfluid of paired electrons. When the amount of superfluid changes, the resonant frequency shifts accordingly. Essentially, we’ve made our glass bottles using this microwave resonant circuit, and the water is basically the electrons paired up to condense into a superfluid, where the electrons can flow without losing energy.”
“When the weight and volume of the superfluid — essentially the density of paired electrons—changes, so does the musical tone,” said Kreidel.
From these frequency shifts, the team observed unexpected clues about how these electrons might be pairing up. “We learned that the adhesive force between electrons can be strong in some directions and vanish in others,” said Ph.D. student Patrick Ledwith, who works at Harvard with George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics Ashvin Vishwanath. This directionality resembles what’s seen in high-temperature superconductors made from oxide materials — still a puzzle to scientists, even after 40 years of study. “Perhaps our findings with twisted graphene can shed light on how electrons perform this quantum dance in other two-dimensional superconducting materials,” said Professor of Physics and Applied Physics Philip Kim, the lead scientist on this work.
While graphene technologies can’t yet be mass-produced, the researchers see wide-ranging potential. Kreidel, now a postdoc at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, points out that such materials could help build ultrasensitive, energy-efficient detectors for space exploration. “In the near vacuum of space, there’s very little light,” she said. “We want small, lightweight detectors that use minimal power but have extremely high resolution. Twisted graphene may be a promising candidate.”
This project was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
Did the TikTok ban go too far?Law School debate examines potential national security threat, 75-day extension issued by Trump
Moderator Jonathan Zittrain (from left) and Anupam Chander listen as Alan Rozenshtein (far right) shares concerns about TikTok and its potential threat to national security.
Law School debate examines potential national security threat, 75-day extension issued by Trump
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
There may be no smoking gun yet, says law Professor Alan Rozenshtein about the potential national security threat posed by the social media app TikTok, “but the gun is assembled, it’s loaded, it’s on the table, and it’s pointed. You’re much closer to this nightmare scenario than you might expect.”
Rozenshtein, who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School, spoke at a Harvard Law School event Monday with Anupam Chander, Georgetown Law professor. The two debated the U.S. law requiring ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent, to sell the app to a U.S. firm or face a nationwide ban, and the 75-day extension granted ByteDance by President Trump, which will run out on April 5.
Rozenshtein felt it was far from perfect but generally supported the law Congress passed last year, noting that TikTok, which specializes in playing personalized series of short videos, could harvest a huge amount of information on its 170 million American users for counterintelligence purposes. And the Chinese government, through ByteDance, could pressure TikTok, which is algorithmically driven, to modify its algorithms in ways that would be adverse to America’s interests, he added.
“Imagine that the United States and China get into a shooting war over Taiwan,” said Rozenshtein. “Suddenly the concern would be that TikTok would be flooded with pro-Chinese, anti-Taiwan and anti-American content. Given that TikTok is not only very popular, but for young Americans, it is increasingly the main source of news, that’s very concerning.”
On the other side of the debate, Chander criticized the TikTok law because of its speculative nature and potential First Amendment violations. In its suit against the law, TikTok claimed it violated the First Amendment’s speech protections. The Supreme Court rebuked TikTok’s claims in a ruling on Jan. 17, two days before the ban was to go into effect.
“In Professor Rozenshtein’s description, the problem was all speculative,” said Chander. “It was the possibility that we might get into a shooting war. They might then use the app to manipulate us in favor of China, neglecting our sense of patriotism, undermining democracy, etc., or they might convince us that Taiwan is really Chinese and therefore should properly belong to China, which are the kinds of highly speculative things that First Amendment law typically has not tolerated.”
Chander and Rozenshtein pondered the possibility of another extension to give TikTok more time to find a way to comply with the law.
Chander said Trump could use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a federal law that allows the president to regulate international commerce during a national emergency triggered by a foreign threat.
“If I were in the White House Counsel’s Office, I would use IEEPA,” said Chander. “I would say, ‘You have to keep the lights on TikTok because otherwise people will move to RedNote.’”
RedNote, another Chinese social media platform, saw an increase of American users in the wake of the TikTok ban. According to experts, RedNote could pose more security risks than TikTok because RedNote stores its data in Chinese servers, unlike TikTok, which stores American users’ data in Texas. And RedNote gets closer scrutiny from the Chinese government, being subject to censorship efforts — TikTok says it is not.
The two social-media apps, however, are not alike. TikTok specializes in entertainment and instructional video and viral cultural trends, and RedNote, which started as a shopping platform, focuses on user tips on travel, makeup, fashion, and shopping.
Asked about the possibility of a one-year extension, Rozenshtein expressed concerns about the overreach of executive power. “If we have learned anything, it is that the one-way ratchet of executive power and the ability to rewrite laws has some serious downsides,” he said.
Both Chander and Rozenshtein agreed that the U.S. government should have addressed national security concerns over TikTok a while ago and not after it became widely popular. They shared concerns about the quick way Congress approved the TikTok law after several years of inactivity.
“The Biden administration had the power to require divestiture of TikTok since it came to office,” said Chander. “It stopped negotiating the mitigation arrangement with TikTok in August 2022. The administration had that power for years and sat on it.”
Chander said that the TikTok bill was motivated by concerns over espionage and propaganda, but citing the words of former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, who co-sponsored the bill, said “the greater concern was about the propaganda threat.”
As for the bill’s approval, Chander cited comments by Gallagher, who said that the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, followed by the proliferation of pro-Palestinian views and antisemitic content on the platform, helped the bill pass with bipartisan support in March 2024.
For Rozenshtein, even if critics argue there is no evidence of TikTok’s content manipulation, the threat is real. Even if the law has flaws, it was the best thing that the U.S. could do, he said.
We’re already forgetting what 2020 was like5 years later, sociologist urges us to confront lessons from pandemic
Eric Klinenberg.
Photos by Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
5 years later, sociologist urges us to confront lessons from pandemic
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
In 2020, signs and social media posts praising essential workers were ubiquitous. Now, you hardly ever hear talk about the people who put themselves at risk to keep the country going during the pandemic. In his book “2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed,” sociologist Eric Klinenberg reminds readers not to be so quick to forget how the pandemic changed us and the impacts we’re still dealing with today.
Klinenberg brought this conversation to Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center, where he was joined in a panel discussion by Rochelle Walensky, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Professor I. Glenn Cohen, the faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics; and Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, the John H. Watson Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
“So many things happened so fast in 2020 and it’s been hard for us to grab them all.”
Eric Klinenberg
“So many things happened so fast in 2020 and it’s been hard for us to grab them all,” Klinenberg said. “We’re in such denial, we’re in a rush to move on, we’re forgetting what it was like to live through that dysfunction, that dysregulation. We’re forgetting about the deaths we incurred.”
Klinenberg’s book flashes between in-depth profiles of individuals across the seven boroughs of New York City and sociological analysis of the pandemic. It explores the inequalities that were exacerbated by the crisis, including for low-income families and kids in the Bronx who struggled to access remote learning or replace the free and reduced school lunches on which they relied.
It also explores the ways in which the pandemic eroded our trust in leaders. In one chapter, Klinenberg tells the story of a family whose daycare didn’t inform them of its reopening out of fear of contracting COVID from the child of an essential worker. In another, he focuses on Daniel Presti, a Staten Island bar owner who refused to close his doors in late 2020. Presti was radicalized after feeling the federal government wasn’t doing enough to protect business owners struggling in the wake of lockdown rules.
“I think one of the issues around trust and distrust that we need to talk more about is we’re living in different information environments, and I think there are growing concerns that vital statistics that we need to make sense of who we are and what’s happening, what might happen next, are becoming harder to trust and control,” Klinenberg said in the panel discussion.
Panelists Jeannie Suk Gersen (from left), I. Glenn Cohen, Klinenberg, and Rochelle Walensky.
Walensky, who was tasked with making recommendations to protect public health during her CDC tenure, spoke to Klinenberg’s portrayal of the tradeoffs that decision-makers like herself had to make. She remembered a school board meeting in her hometown of Newton, Massachusetts, where a mother said she was being asked to respect coronavirus policies at the cost of her son’s future.
“She said, ‘If my son doesn’t wrestle next semester, he’s not going to college,” Walensky said. “And then all of a sudden, health is just one thing at the table, and there are really other poignant, important considerations that when we are monocular on health and health alone, we are not considering for the long-term health of a society.”
She added that as a public health official, the costs of infectious diseases are always disproportionate to the vulnerable.
“I remember being on CNN at one point, when the president got COVID. And they were talking about all the famous people in the White House … who [were] infected in the Rose Garden, in the Senate. And I thought to myself, and I said out loud, actually, ‘What about the butlers and the workers in the White House who are going home to multigenerational families who, when you say words like isolation and quarantine, you know they have no capacity to do what you’re asking of them?’”
Klinenberg ends his book as he began the talk — urging people not to move on too quickly from a life-changing event.
“Although the calendar has turned,” he writes, “the story of 2020 is far from over, and its potential to move us in different directions is not yet tapped dry.”
Klinenberg is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in Social Science and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University.
Think top 1% benefit most from U.S. inequity? Maybe not.Book by Musa al-Gharbi argues left-leaning knowledge workers in education, law, media voice support of social justice but have conflicts of interest
Think top 1% benefit most from U.S. inequity? Maybe not.
Book by Musa al-Gharbi argues left-leaning knowledge workers in education, law, media voice support of social justice but have conflicts of interest
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Who benefits most from inequality in the U.S. today? According to Musa al-Gharbi, it’s the very people most likely to identify as anti-racist, feminist, and LGBTQ+ allies.
Al-Gharbi, a Stony Brook University journalism professor, outlined key arguments from his “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite,” in a campus appearance earlier this month. The 2024 book holds that the 21st century’s left-leaning knowledge workers are sincere in their commitment to social justice. They just don’t acknowledge how those beliefs conflict with others they hold dear.
“We also think that our perspectives should count more than the person checking us out at Stop & Shop,” argued al-Gharbi, who earned his sociology Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2023. “We think we should have a higher standard of living than the people delivering packages to our doorsteps. And what’s more, we want our children to reproduce our own social position or to do even better than us.”
The “we” in the book’s title, al-Gharbi said, pertains to a subset of Americans he calls “symbolic capitalists.” The term, borrowed from the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, refers to people working in fields like human resources, education, finance, law, and media.
“As a shorthand, you can think of people who don’t provide physical goods and services,” al-Gharbi said. “If you’re in this room, chances are you’re a symbolic capitalist — or aspiring to be one.”
“We think that our perspectives should count more than the person checking us out at Stop & Shop. We think we should have a higher standard of living than the people delivering packages to our doorsteps.”
The 21st century brought a shift in how these highly educated, mostly white professionals talk about race, gender, and sexuality, he said. The book uncovers a historic cycle of similar trends, including the “politically correct” fever of the late 1980s and early ’90s. Origins of the so-called “Great Awokening,” as al-Gharbi calls it, are situated in the Occupy Wall Street movement of the early 2010s, with its famous “We are the 99 percent” mantra.
Many in this last group are symbolic capitalists who profit handsomely off the superrich, he said. “Are the billionaires drafting their own PR to help absolve themselves of blame and paint themselves as solutions? Are they doing their own legal paperwork and moving the money around?” asked al-Gharbi.
Add to that the expert analyses employed in areas from court cases to news coverage, for a fuller picture of the group’s cultural primacy — and outsize influence. Symbolic capitalists also dominate all three branches of the federal government, with 100 percent of the judiciary, about 70 percent of the House, and more than 90 percent of the Senate, al-Gharbi pointed out.
“Here’s a fun fact,” he said. “Every single Democrat who’s won the White House since Jimmy Carter has been one variety of symbolic capitalist: a lawyer.”
“We Have Never Been Woke” opens with al-Gharbi’s first impressions of New York’s “racialized caste system” after moving from his conservative Arizona hometown in 2016.
“You have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you,” he writes. “It’s mostly minorities and immigrants from particular racial and ethnic backgrounds who fill these roles, while people from other racial and ethnic backgrounds are the ones being served.”
So why don’t members of the latter group see themselves as elites? “A lot of our professions are explicitly oriented around holding the elites to account,” al-Gharbi explained. But researchers have found those within these fields perpetuate a form of credential inflation to protect their own status while excluding outsiders.
Using journalism as an example, al-Gharbi noted the high number of Ivy League graduates currently working at prestigious outlets like The New York Times. “This matters,” he said. “Because if the elites you’re supposed to be holding to account are your classmates from Harvard, or your neighbors, or your former lovers, then that radically changes how you go about the job.”
“Woke” discourse is an additional tool symbolic capitalists can use to advance their interests, al-Gharbi argued. Affluent suburban and urban professionals wield “mocking, censoring, and deriding” language not only to morally justify their own privilege. They use it to paint some of America’s most disadvantaged as undeserving racists, sexists, and homophobes.
“And this kind of behavior creates an opening for political entrepreneurs, usually associated with the right,” he concluded, with “political correctness” following a trajectory similar to the “woke” backlash unfolding today.
“We haven’t really tried persuasion,” answered al-Gharbi, who writes for publications including the Guardian and the American Conservative. “If I want to convince people that, say, bombing Syria is a bad idea, it doesn’t do a lot of good to write in an outlet like Al Jazeera where everyone already agrees. You need to go to the people who want to bomb Syria and explain to them why that’s a bad idea in a way they will find persuasive.”
How much sleep do you need?And what you can do to get it
A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.
Elizabeth Klerman is a sleep researcher and a professor of neurology.
It varies by person. Generally, it’s how much you get if you don’t have an alarm clock or someone to wake you up. See how much sleep you are getting after three or four days when no one wakes you and you don’t quickly get out of bed after you wake up (so you may fall back asleep). That might be how much you “need.” You can’t sleep unless you need to, not even when you’re bored — unlike eating chocolate cake, which you can do when you’re not hungry.
“Our body takes a while to figure out it’s time to go to bed. If you remember when you were a kid, you got a bath, you read a book, and the lights were low. The kid’s body says, “Now I know it’s time to go to sleep.”’
If you wake up and you’re not feeling rested, even after several nights of eight hours of sleep, you should consider seeing a sleep doctor. Not feeling rested could signal everything from narcolepsy to hypersomnia to sleep apnea. I’m not talking about how rested you feel the minute you wake up. Different parts of your brain wake up at different rates, so it’s not expected that you immediately feel totally alert. See a doctor if you’re waking up in the middle of the night or if your bed partner complains that you’re snoring loudly or that you’re kicking a lot.
Not everybody can get all the sleep they want at night. If you can take a nap, especially if you’re working the night shift, that’s good.
If you’re having problems falling asleep, don’t watch a horror movie before bed. No caffeine beforehand. Your body takes a while to figure out it’s time to go to bed. If you remember when you were a kid, you got a bath, you read a book, and the lights were low. The kid’s body says, “Now I know it’s time to go to sleep.” So when people are having problems going to sleep, we sometimes suggest doing something calming before getting into bed.
Melatonin is not regulated by the FDA. It’s a supplement, so you don’t know if what’s on the bottle is what you’re getting. I cannot suggest that people take melatonin unless they get pharmaceutical-grade. Other drugs, like more conventional sleeping pills, such as benzodiazepines, are not supposed to be taken long-term. They’re short-term solutions for a particular stressor.
For insomnia, long-term cognitive behavioral therapy is the way to go. As for sleep podcasts or sound machines, if that’s what works for people, I’m not going to object, especially if the sound turns off after a little while. Eye masks and earplugs, as long as they don’t block out something like a fire alarm, are fine with me.
— As told to Anna Lamb/Harvard Staff Writer
Decoding David Lynch’s ‘familiar yet strange’ cinematic languageFilm Archive pays tribute with 3 films that ‘need to be seen on the big screen’
Decoding David Lynch’s ‘familiar yet strange’ cinematic language
Sarah Lamodi
Harvard Correspondent
7 min read
Film Archive pays tribute with 3 films that ‘need to be seen on the big screen’
Last month, news of legendary filmmaker and artist David Lynch’s death rocked the film world. Lynch’s enigmatic feature films, such as “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive,” and his television epic “Twin Peaks” challenged viewers during their initial releases and continue to inspire critics, writers, and artists.
This weekend, the Harvard Film Archive will commemorate Lynch’s legacy with a series of three films spanning his career. Sabrina Sutherland, a producer who had worked with Lynch since the 1990s, will present the screenings and participate in a conversation about “Twin Peaks” and its controversial prequel.
Ahead of the series, we asked Film Archive Director Haden Guest to speak to Lynch’s effect on moviemaking, and why we keep returning to his strange, yet familiar, world. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Most of Lynch’s work is unexpected and even unnerving, but audiences keep coming back for more. Why do you think that is?
Lynch’s films have remarkable cross-generational appeal; younger audience members are equally as invested as older audience members. Our calendar was already printed, and we’d already announced the screenings before his sudden death in January. What’s remarkable is our screenings were immediately sold out, and they would have been at any time in the past years. His films are so incredibly entertaining, aesthetically rich, absolutely beautiful, and yet at the same time, dark, gripping and even frightening. In Lynch’s films we find a rare, unmatched mixture of polar qualities; of naivete and terror, beauty and abhorrent violence, that we encounter in the art of such figures as Francis Bacon, Kōno Taeko, or Sylvia Plath. This makes Lynch one of the great American filmmakers of the late 20th and early 21st century, without a doubt.
Lynch is able to unleash and to embrace cinema’s potential to explore the uncanny, that thing Freud defined as both familiar and strange. In “Blue Velvet,” for example, the setting is a small town that seems to be this white-picket-fenced, small-town America that is revealed to be shaped by dark, sinister forces lying not just in its shadows, but in full daylight. I remember seeing “Blue Velvet” in a multiplex theater when I was 16 years old, too young for sure, and people were just shocked. They did not know what they were seeing. I remember people being quite upset, others laughing hilariously. And at that time, I was also confused. It’s quite a dark, violent, and psychosexually intense film. But it shaped my imagination and is one of the reasons I am where I am now, teaching film history and curating the HFA cinematheque. I just screened “Blue Velvet” in a course I am teaching, “The Art of Film,” the introduction to cinema for my department, Art, Film and Visual Studies.
Lynch is comparable to another legendary filmmaker, Luis Buñuel, whose films also still retain the power to shock, surprise and delight audiences because of their audacity, and singular approach to image and narrative and sound. There are few filmmakers whose work retains such energy and ability to speak directly to the viewers, to grab them by the shoulders and look right into their eyes. Like Buñuel, I don’t think that Lynch’s power has diminished at all. If anything, it’s grown stronger.
We can’t forget that Lynch is equally important for television. “Twin Peaks” is perhaps one of the most influential television shows of all time. There have been so many attempts made, rarely successful, to make television more cinematic. Lynch is one who understood how to do that, because of his understanding of the limits and possibilities of television, and his deep understanding of and fascination with Americana which came, partially, from his childhood in rural 1950s America. I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that, with “Twin Peaks,” he brought to the mainstream a kind of narrative complexity and mystery that had never been done before.
Lobby cards for (from left) “Eraserhead” and “Wild at Heart” and a still from “Fire Walk With Me.”
Courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive
Why screen “Eraserhead,” “Fire Walk With Me,” and “Wild at Heart,” out of all of Lynch’s films?
We have beautiful vintage 35 mm prints of all three titles — plus a number of other Lynch films — in the HFA collection. Seeing these films on 35 mm is a rare, I would even say revelatory, experience that our audience understands and appreciates. The black and white in “Eraserhead” is incredibly sensual. It’s richly textured, it makes expressive use of shadows and smoke and dark, dank places. These are films that need to be seen on the big screen and with an audience.
I also like the idea of having films from different periods of Lynch’s career. It’s fascinating to see elements from “Twin Peaks” already vivid in “Eraserhead.” The iconic patterned “waiting room” floor, for example, comes from that early film. The films screening this weekend share a dreamlike quality that makes them incredibly captivating and allows them to follow a logic entirely of their own. It allows the audience to let go, perhaps, of expectations they have about what a film should be.
What does it mean to have lost someone like David Lynch?
Lynch is of the same, rarely attained stature of a filmmaker like Alfred Hitchcock, Agnès Varda, Robert Bresson, or Ozu Yasujirō in the sense that he is recognized and celebrated not only as a filmmaker, but as a persona whose visionary art is understood to be a direct expression of his world view. “Lynchian” became a term unto itself — like how you would say something is “Hitchcockian.” There are few filmmakers whose sensibility was so recognizable and influential that it was understood that they’d invented a language of cinema that was entirely their own. That’s a pretty high bar, right? There are very few filmmakers who’ve done that in uncompromising ways without just recycling old tricks; they’re actually doing something new.
“His films created this world that was so uniquely his own. He invented and inhabited it through his uniquely dedicated practice. Which came first, I don’t know.”
Lynch started as a painter and as a sculptor, and I feel like it was that sensibility, the idea of creating a world of one’s own — starting on a canvas of the size and shape that you choose — that was the same with his cinema. His films created this world that was so uniquely his own. He invented and inhabited it through his uniquely dedicated practice. Which came first, I don’t know. All those special elements came together to forge his unique cinematic imagination.
Writing on Lynch tends to be pretty much limited to close readings of his films, and I think there’s a lot more to be said. It’s terrible that he’s no longer with us, but with that comes the sense that we need to reassess his work. How we do that is something I’m really looking forward to, and it starts this week with the HFA screenings.
4 things we learned this weekHow closely have you been following the Gazette? Take our quiz to find out.
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Lots of women don’t trust AI. An orange a day might stave off the psychiatrist. One thing everyone should know about heart disease. More choice isn’t always a good thing. Take our news quiz to see how much you learned from the Gazette this week.
Abraham Verghese, physician and bestselling author, named Commencement speakerStanford professor whose novels include ‘Covenant of Water’ to deliver principal address May 29
Abraham Verghese, physician and bestselling author, named Commencement speaker
Stanford professor to deliver principal address May 29
4 min read
Abraham Verghese, bestselling author, Stanford professor, and infectious disease doctor, will be the principal speaker at Harvard’s 374th Commencement on May 29.
“Throughout his remarkable career, Dr. Abraham Verghese has followed his wide-ranging interests to carve a unique path distinguished by breathtaking creativity, outstanding achievement, and exemplary service and leadership,” said President Alan M. Garber. “He has pursued excellence across disciplines with an intensity surpassed only by his humanity, which shines brilliantly through his works of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as his work as a clinician and teacher. I count myself among his legion of admirers, and I cannot imagine a better individual to inspire the members of our Class of 2025 as they contemplate their futures.”
Verghese is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University. Devoted to humanizing the physician-patient relationship, he is the founder of Presence, an interdisciplinary center at Stanford focused on championing the human experience in medicine. He’s also the founder of the Stanford Medicine 25, an initiative designed to foster bedside exam skills for learners and for medical professionals. Learning to “read the body,” as Verghese describes it, not only allows physicians to recognize phenotypic information that is before them but also serves as an important ritual that enhances the doctor-patient relationship. Verghese has devoted his academic career to teaching the next generation of physicians the critical importance of empathy, human connection, and compassion in healthcare.
In addition to his work as professor and physician, Verghese is an acclaimed writer. His first book, “My Own Country,” a memoir about his experience caring for patients in a rural community at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, was a 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a Time magazine best book of the year. His second memoir, “The Tennis Partner,” was a New York Times notable book. In 2009, he published “Cutting for Stone,” a novel that spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list and was picked as one of Amazon’s “100 Books to Read in a Lifetime.” In 2023, he published “The Covenant of Water,” a New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club selection that Netflix is adapting for an upcoming series. In addition to his memoirs and novels, Verghese’s work has been published in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.
Verghese was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Indian parents, both of whom were teachers. He completed his medical education in India at Madras Medical College. He moved to the United States to complete his medical residency at East Tennessee State University. Following a fellowship in infectious diseases at the Boston University School of Medicine, he returned to East Tennessee State as assistant professor of medicine and special fellow in pulmonary diseases.
In the early 1990s, he took time off from medicine to earn an M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. After Iowa, he returned to academia as professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, El Paso, and published his first book. He went on to become the founding director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, before moving to Stanford in 2007.
Verghese received the Heinz Award for outstanding contribution to arts and humanities in 2014. In 2016, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama for his focus on patient-centered healthcare and for contributing to the nation’s understanding of the humanities. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Verghese will receive an honorary degree during the Commencement ceremony in Tercentenary Theatre.
Students walk across the Weeks Bridge, which connects Harvard’s Cambridge and Allston campuses.
Harvard file photo
5 min read
Presidential initiative backs efforts to encourage, facilitate constructive dialogue
Through meals, discussion, and games, four student-led projects will kick off this spring in hopes of convening students from different backgrounds and viewpoints to encourage tough conversations and bridge divides.
The projects are funded by the President’s Building Bridges Fund. The initiative, launched in the fall, sought projects focused on building community across faiths, cultures, and backgrounds.
“I am inspired by the passion and creativity our students bring to fostering dialogue across difference,” said President Alan M. Garber. “Changing our culture is a bold but achievable goal that will require sustained effort throughout the University. This first round of projects represents an important step toward realizing our ambition to enable each person at Harvard to explore contested terrain as readily as common ground and to create meaningful connections that lead to intellectual, personal, and social growth.”
The four awarded projects are focused on cultivating conditions for difficult conversations. Some projects will bring students together in small groups to discuss issues of policy and religious law, while others are designed to challenge participants’ worldviews. The goal: create space for dialogue on complex issues and topics outside of the classroom.
“We are pleased to have received so many thoughtful proposals from both undergraduate and graduate students across the University,” said Sherri Charleston, chief diversity and inclusion officer. “The projects selected brought the mission and purpose of the President’s Building Bridges Fund to life in ways that we are confident will have a real impact on our campus this spring.”
Summaries of the projects
Building Understanding Between the Jewish and Muslim Communities at HLS (Harvard Law School)
Laying the foundation for future events and informal opportunities, Jewish and Muslim student leaders at HLS will host a luncheon forum open to all students titled “Linked Traditions: Islamic and Judaic Law.” The event will feature a Jewish and Muslim faculty member (or graduate student) who will engage in a substantive discussion on the two linked legal traditions, as well as explore sources of law, institutional frameworks, and modern issues in each tradition.
Questions Left Unanswered (Harvard College)
This weekly dinner and small group discussion series will bring together College students from diverse intellectual and cultural backgrounds. Over the course of 10 sessions, students will focus on major modern controversies, bringing together students with opposing views for thoughtful small-group discussions about difficult topics. Each session will feature a leading thinker in the field, who will be invited to guide the discussion. By combining intellectual rigor with community-building, this initiative aims to foster a deeper sense of empathy, understanding, and collaboration among participants.
Fostering Intergroup Collaboration and Intellectual Vitality Through a Cooperative Online Quiz Game at Harvard (Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences – Psychology)
Through Tango, a cooperative online quiz game grounded in realistic conflict theory and intergroup contact theory, this initiative will offer opportunities to examine the challenges of polarization and tribalism. Designed to foster mutually beneficial cooperation, Tango pairs participants from diverse backgrounds in a collaborative problem-solving environment. The questions asked are designed to challenge participants’ worldviews and create meaningful intergroup discussion, thus reducing outgroup animosity and promoting mutual respect across lines of division.
Policy Bridges: Fostering Constructive Dialogue Across Ideological Divides (Harvard Griffin GSAS – Biological Sciences in Public Health, HSPH, and Biomedical Informatics, HMS)
This three-panel discussion series will focus on a pressing policy issue for the 21st century (Climate Policy, Technology Policy, and Health Policy). The sessions will include small and large discussion groups where both the audience and the experts jointly discuss and identify the common ground and shared values that inform each perspective represented. The goal of the work is to provide a space to facilitate constructive conversations that help bridge ideological gaps, promote mutual understanding, and identify common ground on pressing policy matters.
Building relationships between affinity groups whose interests and views on important issues might diverge
Investing in intellectual excellence
Acting against discrimination, bullying, harassment, and hate
Fostering constructive dialogue on campus about interfaith issues, intercultural issues, or some combination of the two
“Both task forces recognized the importance of providing opportunities for students to build cross-cutting community outside of the classroom and to learn skills around constructive dialogue,” said Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor, and a member of both Presidential Task Forces. “These projects respond to the recommendations of the task forces by providing those opportunities in a variety of different contexts.”
Better than the book?Faculty recommend their favorite reads adapted for the silver screen … and maybe even improved in the process
Faculty recommend their favorite reads adapted for the silver screen … and maybe even improved in the process
Sy Boles
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
“The book was better.” In any conversation about a film adaptation, someone is bound to say it. But some books were just meant to be adapted, and some adaptations say new and interesting things about the source material. Just in time for Oscar season — which features several Best Picture nominees based on books, including “Conclave,” “Nickel Boys,” and “A Complete Unknown” — we asked Harvard faculty and staff to share their favorites.
Angela Allan
Associate Director of Studies and lecturer in American literature, economic history and popular culture
‘Misery’
Stephen King
Allan recommended two classics that are well-loved on both the page and the screen.
“I love Stephen King’s 1987 horror novel ‘Misery,’ which has a pretty straightforward plot: Best-selling romance novelist Paul Sheldon is held captive by his ‘No. 1 fan’ Annie Wilkes, who wants him to write a novel just for her. Oh, and Annie happens to be a murderer! But what I also admire about the novel is that it’s such a great meditation on what it means to be a writer. I’ve read it a few times and taught it here at Harvard, and while it’s a very fun read — but definitely not for the squeamish — there’s a lot more to it. Stephen King wrote it after he had a streak of best-sellers in the 1980s (and the streak is still going), so this drama between Paul and Annie is really an examination of fame, success, and the impact on literature. The 1990 film with James Caan and Kathy Bates, who won an Oscar for Best Actress, is a faithful adaptation, but you lose some of the insight about writing and reading in the translation from page to screen.”
‘L.A. Confidential’
James Ellroy
“My other pick is a novel that’s partially about the film industry. As a lover of film noir, I really enjoyed James Ellroy’s 1990 novel ‘L.A. Confidential,’ which is a gritty homage about the moral rot of 1950s Los Angeles hidden behind Hollywood glamor. I’ll be honest, as crime fiction goes, there are a lot of ugly and shocking things in the novel’s elaborate — and at times, overwhelming — plot. And there are certainly no real heroes, since it focuses on the corruption within the police department, but it’s a masterpiece of character development. The 1997 film, which was nominated for Best Picture (I think it should have beaten ‘Titanic’), is one of the best adaptations of a novel I’ve ever seen. It significantly edits the plot to make it more film-friendly, but it absolutely nails the characters and feel of Ellroy’s Los Angeles. For something that’s so much about the illusions of Hollywood, the adaptation makes the story its own while also capturing its essence.”
Derek Miller
Professor of English, Director of Graduate Studies
‘Jack Reacher’ series
Lee Child
Miller has been working his way through the mystery/thriller “Jack Reacher”series, starring an ex-military police officer who wanders the U.S. “with just the clothes on his back and a toothbrush in his pocket.”
“The mysteries themselves are often of merely marginal interest,” Miller said. “I have appreciated instead the slow changes in Child’s technique and thematic interest from book to book. In one volume, Reacher’s obsession with coffee inspires a paragraph-long encomium to a diner’s cup of joe. Another book meditates on the psychology of a driver who would stop for a hitchhiker as imposing as Reacher. A third discourses on the evolutionary biological advantages that make our hero such a fierce warrior. It’s pop fiction, full of stock phrases and situations — every time Reacher gets into a car, he ‘racks the seat back’ to make room for his large frame — but usually executed with skill and verve.
“Little wonder that the series has inspired two films starring Tom Cruise (controversially, given Cruise’s small physical stature) and now a third season of streaming television on Amazon Prime. On the big or small screen, the essentially melodramatic structure of Child’s stories — a Manichean worldview, stock characters and situations — stands out more starkly than in the comparatively digressive novels and short stories. Yet whether on screen or on the page, the series and the character represent well some of the pleasures of popular entertainment: vividly drawn heroes and villains; swift, suspenseful plotting; and a writer continually experimenting with the possibilities within his successful formula.”
Version 1.0.0
Martin Puchner
Byron and Anita Wien Chair in Drama and of English and Comparative Literature
‘The Hoods’
Harry Grey
Puchner says there’s nothing particularly special about the 1952 semi-autobiographical novel that Grey wrote when he was in prison and gives an account of a Jewish gang from New York’s Lower East Side during Prohibition. It’s the adaptation that really shines.
“What is striking is how two Italians, the director Sergio Leone and composer Ennio Morricone, transformed this work into a masterpiece, the 1984 film ‘Once Upon a Time in America.’ They understood that film is essentially an operatic genre, that it’s driven by the interplay of scenic images and music on a grand scale, and that dialogue and acting are secondary. Years earlier, they had pioneered this operatic approach to film with the Western, producing their early masterpiece, ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (1968), in which images and music have equal weight. The dialogue of that movie runs to about 15 pages, a small fraction of a regular screenplay.”
David Levine
Professor of the Practice of Performance, Theater, and Media
‘American Psycho’
Bret Easton Ellis
Levine said he generally finds movie adaptations to lack something in translation. “The Hollywood idea that if it works as a book, it’ll definitely work as a film just seems so deeply misguided. The book-to-film adaptations I’ve really enjoyed are the ones that either bring life to meh novels, or adaptations that are so off-kilter they place the novel in a new light. A good example of the latter is Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ ‘American Psycho,’ which takes Ellis’ relentlessly anhedonic novel and braids its strands of humor into something extraordinarily lively and rich. (Predictably, Ellis hated it).”
Brittany Gravely
Publicist & Designer, Harvard Film Archive
‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’
Joyce Carol Oates
Gravely recommended a short story rather than a book, calling Oates’ 1966 piece “exquisite.”
“Spending only a few pages painting the angsty suburban life of a teenaged Connie, the bulk of the short story is dedicated to a spellbinding showdown between the girl and a stranger whose unnerving menace gradually metastasizes into a grim nightmare,” she said.
Filmmaker Joyce Chopra adapted the work into the 1985 movie “Smooth Talk.”
“Chopra develops the buildup, fleshing out Connie — played by Laura Dern, who even Oates said was ‘dazzlingly right’ — and her emotional experience. Dern depicts Connie’s bursting out of suburban girlhood like a lanky, beautiful fledgling — excited, contradictory, narcissistic, afraid. The film also deepens the roles of each family member and their individual dynamics. Even the perpetually half-renovated home in the middle of nowhere — mentioned maybe in a sentence or two — becomes a central, crucial presence. More dramatically, Chopra changed and complicated Oates’ presumably fatal ending to an offscreen, unnamed horror that Connie survives.
“While maintaining the quirkiness, the terror, and the stark symbolism within Oates’ story, Chopra crafts it into a work of immersive naturalism, letting audiences get to know Connie and unconsciously root for her before the scary turn of events. In the film’s form, the original ending would have taken over the film and become its focus; whereas by letting Connie’s story continue — in a heartbreaking final scene of adolescence lost — all those twisting emotions, reactions, and relationships linger and drift toward any number of futures the viewers are left to envision. There is no exact duplicate when adapting literature to film, but there is taking perfect prose and allowing it to grow within an appropriate cinematic container, as Chopra did so tenderly with Oates’ tale.”
Food, water — and a friendly faceHealth professionals view social contact as basic human need. Now researchers have tracked neurological basis for it.
Ding Liu (right), a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Catherine Dulac (left).
Health professionals view social contact as basic human need. Now researchers have tracked neurological basis for it.
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
Health and medical professionals have come to view social connection as a fundamental human need akin to food and shelter. In fact the U.S. Surgeon General highlighted social isolation as a major public health concern in 2023.
However, the mechanics of how loneliness or instinctive social need is encoded in the brain are unclear. A new study published in Nature, “A Hypothalamic Circuit Underlying the Dynamic Control of Social Homeostasis,” explores the neurological basis for this need, uncovering the systems that govern the desire for company.
“Recent studies, including ours, suggest that social needs are similarly important for the health of animals as other [basic] needs,” said Ding Liu, a postdoctoral researcher in the Catherine Dulac Lab and Nao Uchida Lab in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Center for Brain Science, who led the study.
Moreover, the inability to engage in fruitful social interactions is one of the most debilitating aspects of mental illnesses such as autism, depression, and schizophrenia, said Dulac, the Samuel W. Morris University Professor.
She noted that while researchers do not understand why this is so, gaining a mechanistic understanding of how the brain regulates the urge to be with other people will provide critical information on healthy and diseased brain states associated with social context.
What if the desire for social interaction was not driven by wanting to feel good but avoiding feeling bad — as is the case with hunger and thirst?
To understand the need for social interaction, Liu and his team turned the conventional approach on its head. “A generation of research has been talking about the rewarding nature of social behavior,” said Liu, citing such compounds as dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin, which are released by social interaction and produce feelings that reward this interaction.
Instead they asked: What if the desire for social interaction was not driven by wanting to feel good but avoiding feeling bad — as is the case with hunger and thirst? Researchers have identified neurons that trigger such drives associated with aversive experience.
“For example, if we are looking for the ‘hunger neurons,’ we should look for the neurons that are active during the time we are deprived of food, rather than the feeding period,” explained Liu.
Hypothesizing that the need for social behavior may be more like those for hunger or thirst, the team focused on neural activity in the hypothalamus, the site of neurons governing these other needs.
Aiming to identify the neurons triggered by isolation, the researchers created a scenario. By isolating mice for several days, they identified two distinct periods: the deprivation phase (when the mice were alone) and the reunion phase (when the animals were once again together).
They then observed, using activity-based gene expression and in vivo calcium imaging, which neurons become active during periods of “social seeking” (that is, the deprivation phase), and “social satiety” (the reunion phase).
Complicating their findings was the discovery that if mice are deprived for too long, their response changes. “If you isolate the mice for more than four weeks, they start to dislike social behavior,” he said. Isolation has become the norm, and having company is disruptive, he hypothesized.
The researchers also looked at how sensory inputs contribute to social need in mice. In one experiment, mice were physically separated from siblings but could see, hear, and smell them through a perforated divider. But the end result was similar to that of the social isolation experiment, suggesting touch stimulation is indispensable for the fulfillment of social need.
To explore this further, the researchers created a touch preference experiment, in which mice could choose to enter a tunnel lined with soft cloth or one of bare plastic. The mice had a clear preference for the cloth tunnel after social isolation.
“At least for mice,” concluded Liu, “touch is a super important modality to sense the change of social environment.”
This, he noted, may have direct relevance for humans. “For humans, touch is a very important part of social behavior as well,” he said. “We hug each other; we shake hands; and in intimate relationships we even have more touch-based behavior.”
These days, when more and more of our interactions are on screens rather than in person, such research may unlock clues to how we humans react. For people “overwhelmed by the internet,” hypothesized Liu, “touch is one thing that is missing.”
“Studying why we need to socialize helps us understand the biological and psychological foundations of human behavior,” said Mostafizur Rahman, a postdoc in the Dulac Lab and one of the paper’s authors. “By exploring these roots, we can better understand how social bonds influence our mental health, and relationships with others.”
Concluded Dulac: “Our discovery of similar neural circuit architectures to encode social need and physiological needs such as the needs for water, food, and sleep directly illustrates how fundamental social interactions are for healthy lives.”
This work was supported in part by funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Art from all cornersOffice for the Arts celebrates 50 years with storytelling, music, dance, poetry, and more
The Harvard University Band performing for the Office for the Arts 50th birthday celebration at Sanders Theatre.
Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Office for the Arts celebrates 50 years with storytelling, music, dance, poetry, and more
As a first-year, Tiffany Onyeiwu ’25 was excited to learn about the ceramics studio in the Quincy House basement. Onyeiwu had loved art in high school, but sacrificed taking classes in favor of rigorous courses that she felt would strengthen her college applications. The idea of creating again was irresistible.
“As I nestled my hand onto a neatly kneaded lump of clay on the potter’s wheel, chaos ensued,” Onyeiwu told an audience at Sanders Theatre. “Slip started moving everywhere, splattering across my limbs. But finally I found my center and got everything under control. I danced with the clay in that moment, directing it but also listening to its energy, spinning and turning and moving in a continuous rotation.”
President Alan Garber shared how his early interest in photography expanded his world.
With support from the OFA, Maranatha Paul ’26 produced a short film.
Professor of the Practice of Theatre Diane Paulus ’88 and Karina Cowperthwaite ’19 discussed their parallel career trajectories that brought them to the American Repertory Theater.
Actor Courtney Vance ’82 and his daughter, Bronwyn Vance ’28, told their stories.
Kate Vandermel ’25 performed an operatic rendition of the Harvard College mission statement.
African dance troupe Omo Naija X Wahala Boys brought action to the stage.
Many students had similar experiences to share at the OFA’s 50th birthday celebration this month, an evening filled with storytelling and performances in music, dance, poetry, and more. Students, administrators, and alumni took turns reflecting on their involvement with the arts on campus.
“The OFA is an idea and a promise,” said Office for the Arts Director Fiona Coffey. “The OFA is a declaration that the arts are not ancillary, but vital to a Harvard education. The OFA is confirmation that knowledge and pedagogy are produced in traditional academic classrooms and also in art studios, in music rehearsal rooms, and on stages.”
Maranatha Paul ’26 said he was awestruck the first time he read Shakespeare’s “Othello” in high school — a moment that inspired him to pursue writing seriously. Paul is now an English and Theater, Dance & Media joint concentrator, and has worked on student-written theater productions and produced a short film with support from OFA funding.
OFA Director Fiona Coffey invited audience members who saw themselves as “champions of the arts” to switch on flashlights they had received when entering the theater.
“When you read a short story or a poem or you go to see a film or watch a play, what you’re effectively witnessing is someone’s perspective of the world,” Paul said. “Not a single human being has ever seen your perspective on anything. There’s no telling who you might inspire, who might be seen by you. So just write it, get out there, and see what happens.”
President Alan Garber spoke about how his childhood interest in photography expanded to a love for films after he got a job working at a movie theater in high school while saving up to buy a camera.
“I think that’s something that art does for all of us,” Garber said. “The aperture, once open, tends to widen, tends to let in more work done in more ways, to include more artists. Each encounter causes us to see and appreciate the world in a different way, and to see and appreciate people in different ways.”
Professor of the Practice of Theatre Diane Paulus ’88 and Karina Cowperthwaite ’19 discussed their parallel career trajectories from on campus theater involvement to the American Repertory Theater. Actor Courtney B. Vance ’82 spoke about getting his start in theater at Harvard, while his daughter BronwynVance ’28 spoke about first hating, then loving, the piano.
The event also featured performances by Harvard Bhangra, African dance troupe Omo Naija X Wahala Boys, 2023 National Youth Poet Laureate Salome Agbaroji ’27, Mariachi Véritas, and others. Former OFA directors Jack Megan and Myra Mayman were recognized for their leadership, and Kate Vandermel ’25 and Henry Wu ’25 performed an operatic rendition of the Harvard College mission statement on voice and piano.
At the end of the show, Coffey invited audience members who saw themselves as “champions of the arts” to switch on tiny flashlights they had received on entry. In an instant, Sanders Theatre transformed into a shimmering galaxy of twinkling lights.
“Artmaking is born from courage, the courage to be vulnerable, to expose your soul, to see others and to be seen, to step into somebody else’s shoes, her voice or perspective, with compassion, openness, and humility,” Coffey told the students. “Be brave, work hard, dream harder, and let your light shine. We need more of your light in this world.”
‘A voice that must be heard’Grammy winner, Mexican classical composer Gabriela Ortiz on taking inspiration from folk music, ‘Glitter Revolution’ protests
Grammy winner, Mexican classical composer Gabriela Ortiz on taking inspiration from folk music, ‘Glitter Revolution’ protests
She is a classical composer who is heavily influenced by the folk music and instruments of her native Mexico. Along the way, some teachers and others judged her works to be too exotic.
But at the Grammys this month, Gabriela Ortiz’s “Revolución Diamantina,” inspired by Mexico’s 2019 eponymous “Glitter Revolution” feminist protest targeting gender violence, took home three awards, including one for performance for conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and one for Ortiz herself for composition.
Ortiz, 60, will join Alejandro L. Madrid, the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music, on Wednesday for a conversation on campus about her long career and her latest projects. Ortiz, who just finished a season as Carnegie Hall’s composer in residence, has long dedicated her work to infusing the sounds of Mexico into classical music.
“My childhood was around music all the time, and my parents founded this incredible group called Los Folkloristas, dedicated and devoted to promoting the music of Mexico,” she said. Band rehearsals with folk instruments from across Latin America served as the soundtrack of her home. “I felt very grateful and lucky to be able to listen to this incredible music and to learn how to play it,” she added.
Well-known in Mexico and throughout Latin America and Europe, Ortiz has been active in the U.S., drawing various orchestra commissions in Los Angeles and New York, according to Madrid.
“Arguably she is the most successful Latin American composer of today,” he said. “She’s the one that’s probably receiving some of the most important commissions of orchestras in the United States and in Europe.”
“Revolución Diamantina” was Ortiz’s first full album of orchestral works. She composed the ballet, also her first, in collaboration with her brother Rubén Ortiz-Torres, professor of visual arts at UC San Diego, and Pulitzer Prize-winning Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza, the M.D. Anderson Professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston.
“I always wanted to write a ballet. In another life I would have been a flamenco dancer because I love flamenco. I love dance in general. It’s my second passion,” Ortiz said. When she received the commission from the LA Philharmonic, she knew it was her chance to write a ballet about a significant topic.
Her brother’s artwork involving glitter paint led her to think about Mexico’s recent protest movement for women’s rights and legal protections.
“What brought them together was their interest in the feminist wave in Latin America and how it’s manifested in Mexico with this moment that was called the ‘Glitter Revolution,’ where women took to the streets demanding equality of rights and an end to violence against women,” Madrid explained.
The feminist movement began as a series of protests in 2019 after a 17-year-old girl reported she had been raped by four police officers. Demonstrators smashed bus stops, shattered windows of police stations, and painted graffiti on historic monuments. The crowds of mostly women demanded an end to gender violence in a nation where 10 women are killed a day on average and in a region where 98 percent of gender-related murders go unprosecuted.
The revolution earned its name from the fact that protesters showered police officers with glitter.
“I understand that kind of violence because I wouldn’t want to be in the place of the mother that has to deal with a dead daughter,” Ortiz said.
Although working in LA at the time of the marches, Ortiz solicited recordings from protesters and received thousands of responses. “At some point, I wanted to produce something with those recordings,” she said. The recordings would later inform her award-winning ballet, which included a dramaturgy written by Garza.
“Revolución Diamantina” is far from Ortiz’s first project focused on contemporary issues, Madrid said. The composer’s “Únicamente la verdad” (“Only the Truth”) revolves around the mythical origin story of Camelia la Texana, a character in the band Los Tigres del Norte’s narcocorrido “Contrabando Y Traición” (“Smuggling and Betrayal”). Ortiz has also written a choral composition called “Yanga,” about a 16th-century African prince who escaped enslavement and founded a free town in Mexico.
“She’s always writing about things that are very important in terms of our current world, but also in terms of politics,” Madrid said. The music professor is eager to introduce Ortiz to the Harvard community and discuss an upcoming showcase of “Revolución Diamantina” in Boston.
The campus event is being sponsored by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Department of Music, the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures, and the Consulado General de México en Boston.
Madrid hopes students “get a sense that this tradition also belongs to them and there’s a woman who’s composing, is part of this tradition, and is in conversation with all of these artists from all over the world.”
Ortiz has broken many glass ceilings in Mexico, Madrid said; she “has a voice that must be heard.”
Older adults at highest risk for suicide, yet have fewest resourcesStudy highlights imbalance in targets of online suicide prevention efforts
Older adults at highest risk for suicide, yet have fewest resources
Study highlights imbalance in targets of online suicide prevention efforts
Katrina Fu
Mass General Brigham Communications
3 min read
Older adults, particularly those aged 75 and older, have the highest rates of suicide of any age group, yet a new study finds that well-known national suicide prevention organizations do not provide easily accessible resources targeting this population.
The study was led by researchers at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital. Their findings, published this month in The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, highlight the urgent need for suicide prevention efforts that address the unique healthcare needs of older adults.
“As clinicians and researchers in geriatric psychiatry, we frequently work with older adults who express suicidal thoughts,” said senior author Ipsit Vahia, chief of the Division of Geriatric Psychiatry at McLean, a member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system. “Our team was interested in understanding how an older adult in the community may seek resources around suicide prevention and what they are likely to find. What we uncovered was an imbalance in who online suicide prevention efforts are targeted toward, and a great unmet need for older adults.”
The work, carried out in the Technology and Aging Laboratory at McLean, was driven by the fact that older adults are increasingly using internet resources to seek health information. Investigators focused their online search on well-recognized, nonprofit organizations or federal agencies that appear on the first page of a Google search, intending to replicate the natural search process of older adults using the internet.
Their findings revealed that resources targeting older adults were scarce and not easy to find, even though most of the websites they came across acknowledged the high risk of suicide among this population.
Adults aged 75 and older have one of the highest suicide rates (20.3 per 100,000) according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC estimates have revealed declines in suicide rates in several age groups under 34 years old in recent years, whereas the rate in adults over 75 has increased.
This may be due to social isolation and loneliness, underrepresentation in research, and systemic implicit biases against older adults, according to Vahia.
“Public-facing suicide prevention campaigns have a record of effectiveness, and the need for such campaigns targeting older adults is greater than ever,” he said. “Our hope is that shedding a light on this imbalance may lead to major suicide prevention organizations considering ways to make their resources more easily accessible to older adults.”
Regarding next steps, the team emphasized that addressing the disparities in suicide prevention efforts for older adults will require targeted campaigns and tailored prevention programming that factor in their unique healthcare needs, and can be featured on easily accessible, online platforms. They add that increased funding and research focused on late-life suicide prevention is needed.
Vahia receives current research support from the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Once Upon a Time Foundation, and the Harvard Dean’s Initiative on Aging. The study was funded by an unrestricted gift from the Eric Warren Goldman Charitable Trust and the McLean Technology and Aging Lab.
The team behind the teamFrom analyzing statistics to setting out chairs, student managers help carry the sports they love
Photo illustration by Judy Blomquist/Harvard Staff; photos by Dylan Goodman
From analyzing statistics to setting out chairs, student managers help carry the sports they love
Behind every great team are student managers. To the coaches and players, they are indispensable, arriving well before the first whistle and staying long after the final play. Their duties are broad and are constantly evolving, from analyzing statistics to filling up water bottles. They embody the same commitment and passion as the athletes they support. They are the team behind the team.
To the managers themselves the role is more than a job — it’s a way to stay connected to a sport they love (and sometimes played themselves), contribute to something bigger than themselves, build relationships, and for some lay the foundation for a career in sports.
Debora Ortega-Maldonado ’26
Football Team
Debora Ortega-Maldonado.
Ortega-Maldonado, who took her high school manager’s job to Harvard football, is proud of the two Ivy Championships the team has earned during her watch.
“The most rewarding part of my job is getting to see how all the practice the team does and all their hard work is transferred over to game day,” she says.
Ortega-Maldonado is at every practice and game. Unlike the players, who follow strict schedules, managers set their hours themselves, balancing their responsibilities with an equally, if not more, time-consuming commitment.
Michael Poirier, J.D. ’25
Men’s Basketball Team
Michael Poirier.
“I’ve wanted to work in the NBA since I was a kid, so this has only reinforced that dream,” says Poirier.
A former player at Lakehead University, Poirier now plays a pivotal role in the inner workings of the men’s basketball team while balancing his studies as a 3L at Harvard Law School. His managerial work ranges from watching game films and tracking statistics to assisting with recruiting materials. Even small matters like setting up chairs during timeouts fall to him.
“It’s one of my favorite parts of my Harvard experience,” he says of his role as a student manager.
Tommy Amaker, the Thomas G. Stemberg ’71 Family Endowed Head Coach, emphasizes the vital role students like Poirier play in the program: “Our student managers are as important as anyone in our basketball program. They work incredibly hard and show an unwavering commitment. Our success is directly tied to our managers.”
Claire Pak ’26
Women’s Lacrosse Team
Claire Pak.
For Pak, the best part of working with the women’s lacrosse team is the relationships she has built with players and coaches. She has “gotten incredibly close to many girls on the team,” says the Quincy House resident.
Pak supports the team “in every way,” managing equipment, filming practices, inputting and analyzing key statistics, and making sure the snack bin is always full. The work requires sacrifice. She spends from eight to 12 hours each week with the team and sacrifices her weekends to travel to games.
“It’s all worth it,” she says.
Devon Wills, the Carole Kleinfelder Head Coach for Harvard Women’s Lacrosse, says, “Our student managers, especially Claire, … are the backbone of our team, ensuring that all the little details are taken care of at practice and on game days so we can focus on performing.”
Andrea Tchinda ’27
Women’s Basketball Team
Andrea Tchinda.
Tchinda had played her sport in high school and arrived at Harvard knowing she wanted to work with the women’s basketball team. The summer before her first year, she emailed Carrie Moore, the Kathy Delaney-Smith Head Coach for Harvard Women’s Basketball, to be sure she would be able to start as a manager on her first day. She stresses the importance of believing in the team’s mission and working toward maximizing their goals.
“A lot of times this means putting the team before yourself, even though you are not a player or a coach,” she says.
Moore recognizes this commitment, explaining that Tchinda “has a love for the game of basketball, but also a genuine love for our players and staff.”
Andrew Arkow ’27
Men’s Tennis Team
Andrew Arkow.
As the men’s tennis student manager, Arkow finds himself handling everything from video analytics and logistical support to operating the scoreboard and picking up freshly strung rackets.
Arkow is also a member of the team, but his connection to Harvard tennis runs even deeper — his brother, David, played for the Crimson from 2020 to 2024.
“Tennis has always been a big part of my life,” he says. The extra work as student manager is worth it — to help make the coaches’ and players’ “lives a little less stressful.”
Harvard startup creating a new class of antibioticsCompounds show promise against drug-resistant infections, diseases
Kinvard Bio co-founder Ben Tresco inspects a colony of drug-resistant bacteria.
Harvard startup creating a new class of antibiotics
Compounds show promise against drug-resistant infections, diseases
Kirsten Mabry
Harvard Correspondent
7 min read
When penicillin, the first antibiotic approved for widespread use, became available in the 1940s, The New York Times reported it as “the most powerful germ killer ever discovered.” In 1945, many of the scientists involved in developing it were awarded a Nobel Prize for its significant impact on medicine. Humans had entered the antibiotic age, in which they could survive any number of infections and illnesses that had once been fatal.
But today, the picture has become much more complicated.
Antibiotics work by binding to or harming different parts of a germ’s structure. Penicillin, for example, binds to a part of the bacterial cell wall and degrades it. But germs are smart, and over time they can develop resistance mechanisms — like changing the target of an antibiotic so it can no longer bind properly or pumping the antibiotic out of the germ’s cell walls. These resistance mechanisms get passed on to other germs, meaning antibiotics once effective against an infection may not be any longer.
That has created one of the most serious health crises of our time. Antibiotic resistance, according to the World Health Organization, was responsible for more than a million deaths worldwide in 2019 and contributed to nearly 5 million deaths. Meanwhile, new classes of antibiotics are being approved at very low rates. Between 2017 and 2022, just a dozen antibiotics were approved worldwide and only two of those were from new classes that work in a different way than existing medicines.
Enter Kinvard Bio, a biotechnology company that on Monday announced its launch out of the Myers Lab in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. The startup is creating a new class of antibiotics in the hopes of treating drug-resistant infections and diseases.
Andrew Myers, the Amory Houghton Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard, had already established himself as one of the world’s pre-eminent synthetic chemists when he decided to focus much of his lab’s efforts on addressing the global health crisis caused by antimicrobial resistance. Chemists have long come to Harvard to learn from Myers. And for over a decade, those scientists have contributed to innovations that can impact this significant unmet health need.
The lab’s research is not only creating new compounds that could alleviate an intractable problem but also cultivating the next generation of scientists who can continue confronting the challenge. Kelvin Wu, a Kinvard Bio co-founder who co-led the research team as a graduate student in the Myers Lab, hopes the company’s platform will help solve the “resistance crisis,” he says. “Antibiotic discovery is a global problem that I personally am very worried about.”
Kinvard Bio CEO Lloyd Payne echoed Wu’s concerns about treatment options becoming more limited. “There is a critical need for continued innovation to deliver new antibacterials into the pipeline to ensure that we are able to successfully treat challenging drug-resistant infections for generations to come.”
The new medicines that Kinvard Bio are developing focus on the bacterial ribosome, an antibiotic target that is highly clinically validated, according to Payne. Though there are already a number of antibiotics that target the ribosome, Kinvard Bio’s antibiotics — called the oxepanoprolinamides — are structurally preorganized for highly effective binding to the target.
“The bacterial ribosome is an incredibly important target as it is clinically validated and essential across a broad range of clinically relevant pathogens, but the important thing — and this really is key — is the fact that the oxepanoprolinamides bind to the ribosome in a highly differentiated way,” Payne said. “There is further work to do to progress the program into human clinical trials, but this binding mode affords promising potential for the avoidance of pre-existing resistance to currently used antibiotics.”
The Myers Lab has been working on developing this class of compounds for more than a decade. But they have even deeper roots — dating back to the 1960s, not too long after penicillin ushered the world into the antibiotic age. In 1964, the Federal Drug Administration approved lincomycin — an antibiotic isolated from a soil microbe — a significant breakthrough, says Payne, because, at that time, it was an alternative for people allergic to penicillin.
“This was an underexploited class of antibiotics that was ripe for revitalization,” said Wu.
Myers’ team received funding and other support from Harvard’s Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator to help further their work, including the synthesis and testing of new compounds, leading to a 2021 paper in Nature.
For some elements of the design, the team had to invent entirely new chemistry. “One of the reasons that this program has been successful is our ability to put the molecules together very efficiently. Using chemical synthesis, we can start with simple building blocks and then stitch them together into a really complex molecule,” said Ben Tresco, Kinvard Bio co-founder, who led the research team along with Wu as a graduate student in the Myers Lab. “The reason these molecules are so different from their predecessors — the other molecules that bind in this site — is that they are so well optimized for binding to the bacterial ribosome.”
In 2024, the team received a $1.2 million grant from the Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator (CARB-X) and additional support from the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator to further develop the antibiotics. Kineticos Life Sciences, an investment firm focused on companies in oncology, rare diseases, and antimicrobial resistance, through its relationship with CARB-X, was introduced to the technology via Harvard’s Office of Technology Development (OTD). Kineticos incubated and funded the company through the Kineticos AMR Accelerator Fund I.
“OTD was instrumental in making sure that investors were aware of what the research team was working on and that there was great potential for a new company to be formed,” said Curtis Keith, the chief scientific officer at the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator.
Early preclinical studies have shown the antibiotics are active against a broad range of pathogens implicated in a range of infections, including those resistant to other antibiotics.
The startup is initially building a pipeline focused on acute and chronic infections associated with high unmet patient need, such as bacterial pneumonia, complicated urinary tract infections, and chronic respiratory infections, with the aim of developing both intravenous and oral formulations. Both routes of drug delivery are important because oral antibiotics can be effective in reducing hospital admissions and lengths of hospitalization. Spending more time in a hospital increases the risk of acquiring new infections. Eventually, applications could expand to include notoriously challenging chronic infections such as nontuberculous mycobacteria lung disease.
According to Keith, the science is in line with what the Myers Lab is all about — applying synthetic chemistry to tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges. “They’re not just conducting chemistry that will remain in the lab; the research team is focused on developing practical solutions that could lead to effective and accessible antibiotics.”
Research reported in this article is funded by the National Institutes of Health and by CARB-X, whose funding for this project is provided in part with federal funds from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response; Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority; Wellcome; Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research; and the UK Department of Health and Social Care as part of the Global Antimicrobial Resistance Innovation Fund.
Stepping into the hot centerTarek Masoud’s ‘Middle East Dialogues’ sparked many conversations — including about importance of having them
Tarek Masoud’s ‘Middle East Dialogues’ sparked many conversations — including about importance of having them
Part of a series of profiles focused on community-led efforts to promote dialogue across campus.
A week after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on Israel, Middle East expert Tarek Masoud led a well-attended forum with policymakers and scholars on the causes of the war and what might happen next in the conflict-ridden region.
Masoud, faculty director of the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School, thought he was doing his part to educate and promote civil discourse on a divisive topic. A few weeks later, however, an HKS student complained in a Boston Globe op-ed piece that Harvard needed to do more to teach her about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Masoud was hearing similar complaints around campus and was taken aback.
“My first thought was to be very angry because I had been working hard to provide learning opportunities for our community on this issue,” said Masoud, Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance. “But I later concluded that there was a deeper truth to what the student was saying, that in fact we hadn’t fully engaged in a real debate about this very thorny issue.”
In response Masoud launched the “Middle East Dialogues” series last spring to hold conversations between people from across the political spectrum of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Masoud wanted the events to explore the historical, political, religious, and cultural complexities of what was going on. But he also wanted to model how to have hard conversations about hard topics on campus.
“Every single one of these speakers was being brought here not to be, quote-unquote, platformed or praised, but to be interrogated.”
“What students are really hungry for is to hear the most important arguments on either side,” said Masoud. “And instead of putting the speakers on panels, I was going to sit with them one on one and really probe their arguments. I wanted to create a space for us to give full voice to the debate.”
And debate there was. The discussions drew accolades and criticism, with some of the harshest rebukes directed at Massoud for inviting Jared Kushner ’03, President Trump’s son-in-law and former Mideast adviser, and Dalal Saeb Iriqat, Arab American University Palestine professor of diplomacy and conflict resolution, as guest speakers. Some objected to Kushner’s lack of credentials, and others blasted Iriqat for her controversial comments on X, which described the Oct. 7 terror attack as a “normal struggle for freedom.”
In hindsight, Masoud said had he seen Iriqat’s posts beforehand he might not have invited her. The pushback against her visit included hate mail addressed to him and calls to cancel the event. But he ultimately decided to go ahead, noting her views represent those of a significant contingent of others around the world and so should be aired and closely examined.
“Every single one of these speakers was being brought here not to be, quote-unquote, platformed or praised, but to be interrogated,” said Masoud. “We have all kinds of visiting dignitaries and powerful people who come through Harvard, and oftentimes we just celebrate them and celebrate our proximity to them. That’s never what we should do. We should be civil and respectful and even friendly, but also relentless in holding their feet to the fire.”
The entire Dialogues project was a testament to Masoud’s belief in free inquiry and intellectual diversity, according to Derek Penslar, William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and director of the Center for Jewish Studies.
“Tarek’s speaker series on Israel/Palestine has done exactly what Harvard needs at this time — bringing together public figures and experts representing different views, fostering lively exchange and respectful disagreement, and not shying away from difficult issues,” Penslar wrote in an email. “Tarek’s intellect, energy, and kindness are inspiring.”
Students want to hear alternative points of view, and faculty and administrators should provide them with opportunities to hear a variety of perspectives, Masoud said.
“The majority of our students are earnest seekers of the truth,” said Masoud. “The fact of the matter is that it’s our responsibility to our students to not do the easy thing, which is to tamp down anything that’s disagreeable. There’s this old American dictum that says that you shouldn’t talk about politics or religion at the dinner table. Well, if you say we shouldn’t talk about politics or religion at Harvard, you might as well close Harvard.”
Masoud plans to continue with the Dialogues in the spring, but he’s broadening it to other hot topics such as the competition between various Arab countries and Iran, the power race between the U.S. and China, and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
“In an intellectual environment like this, that’s full of very high-powered, highly intelligent people who are all trying to make a difference in the world, you’re going to have a lot of contested ideas, a lot of debate, a lot of argument,” said Masoud. “Talking about these things does not make us happy, but these hard conversations have the potential to increase human happiness if they get us closer to the truth and closer to solutions to these very hard problems.”
Ex-Trump adviser criticizes Biden’s pre-Oct. 7 engagement in the region, defends Israel’s actions in Gaza
What are the prospects for Ukraine?Former top Ukrainian diplomat says options appear narrow as U.S. aggressively pushes for ceasefire deal with Russia
A Ukrainian soldier launches a drone from a shelter in partially occupied Toretsk, the site of heavy battles with the Russian troops in the Donetsk region.
Iryna Rybakova/Ukraine’s 93rd Mechanized Brigade via AP
Former top Ukrainian diplomat says options appear narrow as U.S. aggressively pushes for ceasefire deal with Russia
Three years after Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. is now aggressively pushing both countries to reach a ceasefire deal. But critics of the Trump administration as well as most European nations are asking: At what price to Ukraine?
The U.S. has proposed a deal in which Ukraine would divert $500 billion in rare-earth mineral profits to Washington in exchange for aid but without a security guarantee. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, falsely attacked by Trump as a “dictator,” has thus far refused to sign the accord.
On Monday, the Trump administration voted against a United Nations resolution condemning Russian aggression against Ukraine and calling for the withdrawal of Russian forces. U.S. diplomats introduced a resolution calling solely for an end to the conflict. Both measures passed.
In this edited conversation held before the U.N. vote, Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s chief diplomat from 2020 to 2024 and now a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, shares his views on the war and Ukraine’s future.
In December, you said you remained optimistic about Ukraine’s position. How do you feel today?
Less optimistic. I personally, and Ukraine as a whole, we underestimated the pressure that Trump and his administration will begin to exert on Ukraine given his desire to strike a quick deal. We believed, based on our experience with President Trump during his first tenure, that he would be more balanced toward both Ukraine and Russia in this under these circumstances.
French President Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, plan to bring a proposal to the White House this week that would install 30,000 European troops in Ukraine to provide security, with the U.S. providing only backup support, possibly in the form of air and missile defense. If it comes to fruition, would that be enough to deter Russia?
Look at the size of Ukraine. Disperse 30,000 troops across the map, and you will see that it’s peanuts. The front line in the Russia-Ukraine war is essentially 3,000 kilometers [about 1,860 miles] long. Thirty thousand troops will not suffice to cover that line and that means they cannot serve as peacekeepers in the traditional understanding of this concept because they will not be able to stand between Russian and Ukrainian armies to prevent them from fighting.
So, we should not consider this idea as a real means of guaranteeing disengagement of forces. It is not a security guarantee; it is not even a security assurance, nor a stabilization force. It is just reassuring presence on the ground. Is the presence of such troops a good idea in principle? It is. Is it a real means of stopping the war? No, it isn’t.
We have to be realistic. Ukraine’s army is 1 million strong. About 400,000 troops are actively engaged in combat on both sides. Thirty thousand troops, even supported by air cover, can change very little. The second thing is that Russia most likely will be vehemently against this idea because, in their eyes, it will be the legitimization of at least some NATO armies on the ground in Ukraine. So, it’s a good idea, but I just don’t see how it can help to end the war.
Dmytro Kuleba.
Photo by Jodi Hilton
Trump officials are pressing Ukraine to agree to turn over a share of profits from Ukraine’s rare-earth mineral deposits in exchange for aid as part of ceasefire negotiations. Zelensky has said he won’t sign such a deal. Does he have much choice at this juncture?
Ukraine’s room for maneuvering is extremely narrow, to say the least. The main problem here is purely diplomatic. Russia has many gestures it can make to please or to engage with Trump and to show their constructiveness which are unrelated to the war itself. They released a U.S. citizen, which is, of course, welcome. This allowed President Trump to project strength and to demonstrate that a new attitude toward Russia pays off.
Ukraine does not have that luxury. Everything Ukraine has to offer or can do is related to the war. This puts Russia and Ukraine in completely different positions vis-a-vis Trump and his administration. This is the problem that Zelensky is facing.
Two hundred something drones attacked Ukraine just a couple of days ago. Did we hear a word of condemnation coming from the United States? No, we didn’t. This is what Putin will continue to do. He will continue to do something for Trump that does not slow down the pace of his aggression against Ukraine, and Zelensky will continue to fight against the unfair agreement without having anything else to suggest to Trump as an alternative. This is kind of the deadlock that Ukraine is currently in.
Will or should Zelensky step down if it brings about an acceptable agreement, as he’s offered?
We should be very clear: Ceasefire is not the end of the war. To the credit of the Trump administration, they have a very reasonable goal to establish a ceasefire as potentially a precondition to ending the war. But they’re only focused on this.
The reality is that establishing ceasefire is possible, but very difficult. Making it hold would be close to impossible, and ending the war is not looming on the horizon. Two completely different strategic goals.
Trump wants a ceasefire as a manifestation of his strengths and ability to strike the most difficult, challenging deal. Putin may agree to that, but his strategic goal of defeating Ukraine will remain unchanged. How to prevent him from doing that is not where the thinking of U.S. and Western strategists is — they did not really go that far. If, by the way, the notion of the West is still relevant at all.
Territory, money, and membership for Ukraine in NATO are the main issues on the negotiating table. What’s the best outcome Ukraine can hope for if the U.S. won’t provide further support?
Although I’m not a part of the government anymore, I’m still Ukrainian, and I cannot dwell on what kind of concessions Ukraine could make because that would simply weaken Ukraine’s position.
If Ukraine could be assured that there is a chance that putting NATO and territory issues on hold without legally recognizing that they are off the table, and Putin would stick to that agreement, that could work.
The problem is that everything we know about Russia suggests that it’s not going to stick to its word, and it will use any kind of pause or break just to prepare for the new attempt to destroy Ukraine. The issue is there is zero trust in Putin. Trump and his people manifest their belief that Putin can be trusted, and an agreement is possible, but everything we know about him suggests the opposite.
Would it be wise for Ukraine to consider ceding portions of its territory to Russia in exchange for an end to hostilities?
Putin’s goal remains unchanged. He wants the whole of Ukraine. He will ask President Trump: Who can guarantee that four years later the U.S. position will not reverse? There is no such guarantee that President Trump can give him. He can be promised that Ukraine will not be in NATO, but if Ukraine continues to exist as an independent nation, in Putin’s view, Ukraine will still end up in NATO five, 10 years later.
This is what this whole war is about. In dealing with another nation, it is fundamentally important to understand what its end goal is. The problem is that Putin knows what his end goal is, and the West doesn’t.
There is nothing easier in diplomacy than drawing lines on someone else’s map, deciding someone else’s destiny. We’ve seen it so many times in human history and also applied to Ukraine. Unfortunately, drawing these lines with a country that wishes to destroy another country is not a solution because it’s not going to hold. This is the fundamental issue: What will make the deal hold, if it is achieved at all?
Keeping cool when debate turns hotInaugural global Ethics Center conference features scholarship, presentations on fostering civil, productive dialogue
Inaugural global Ethics Center conference features scholarship, presentations on fostering civil, productive dialogue
Americans today are wrestling with how to turn down the heat when discussing politically and morally charged topics.
Students, professors, and education professionals from around the globe assembled at Harvard this month to chart their way to more productive discussions — and better relations. The inaugural Challenging Barriers to Civil Discourse conference, hosted by the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, featured scholarship on fostering open, honest exchanges across deep divides.
It’s a pursuit central to a healthy democracy, said Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “Civil discourse is one of my top priorities,” she told conference-goers. “Universities play a unique and critical role in modeling constructive dialogue, and I believe that our classrooms and campuses can — and should — serve as laboratories for meaningful engagement across differences.”
Several panelists provided practical tips drawn from Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), an umbrella term for methods used to resolve disputes without litigation. Julia Kolak, an instructor in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and clinical ethics fellow at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, offered a powerful account of the “values extraction” approach she uses when frictions arise between patients and clinicians.
Kolak told of mediating clashes that arose when women refused treatment for nonviable (and life-threatening) ectopic pregnancies, or when the family of a critically ill patient (suffering from cardiac arrest and septic shock) resisted end-of-life care. She works to unearth the principles guiding all parties, without elevating those with medical expertise. “When we treat others as capable of dialogue,” she offered, “it really changes the affective grip of conflict.”
Nicholas Buck onscreen at the conference.
Other conference speakers drew on historic wisdom. Nicholas Buck, a philosophy lecturer from American University, borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr.’s writings to illustrate why institutions should shift their focus from managing disagreement to building a sense of mutual belonging — what King called “the beloved community.”
One conference-goer asked how King’s ideas intersect with the worldwide rise of anti-intellectualism. “It seems to me it comes from a sense of exclusion,” Buck replied, circling back to King’s communal vision.
Philosopher Jeffrey Dunn invited attendees to join him for a little soul-searching. The associate director of the Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University raised the critical question: “What is the long-term goal of this work?”
“It’s not really about changing views; it’s about building empathy or understanding for the other side,” he said. “Robert Talisse, the political philosopher, has a book where he argues that the way to increase empathy is not to discuss politics together, but to actually do nonpolitical things like play pickleball or join a softball team.”
The conference provided a taste of the sort of programming regularly offered by the FAS’ Civil Discourse initiative. It also marked a soft launch for the Ethics Center’s research and design studio, a hub for sharing civil discourse innovations.
“We hope this lab will advance basic research on civil disagreement, contribute to pedagogy, and advance social scientific measures of constructive dialog,” said Eric Beerbohm, the Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professor of Government and leader of the Ethics Center and the Civil Discourse initiative.
The fellows encountered a wealth of scholarship applying specifically to campus life. Marie Newhouse, an associate professor of law, philosophy, and public policy at the University of Surrey in the U.K., drew on Oxford philosopher Teresa Bejan’s “Mere Civility.” The 2019 title put philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in conversation with Rhode Island’s 18th-century founder Roger Williams.
“He established radically tolerant policies when it comes to religious and lifestyle differences in the community,” Newhouse explained. “He thought that keeping everybody talking to each other was the most important thing, and in order to achieve that he was prepared to deal with more rancor.”
Ideas from Bejan’s book were used to map a triangle of features inherent to any society wrestling with open inquiry: stability, discourse, and diversity. “It’s like that internet meme that gives you three things — fast, cheap, and good. Pick two!” Newhouse quipped.
She hypothesized that higher education had started to prioritize the Lockean ideal of social cohesion while suggesting it aim for something closer to Williams’ model.
“People enjoy living in cohesive communities,” Newhouse said. “But I wonder if it’s starting to interfere with the mission of the university, which requires robust discourse across deep disagreement.”
Equally relevant to current challenges besetting college campuses was a talk by St. Lawrence University education professor Jeff Frank about a recent project where faculty partnered with students to pilot a novel approach to advancing civil discourse.
An internal campaign they call “Be a Saint” trumpets the community’s shared values of listening, respect, and engagement with a bonus reference to the school’s athletics teams. The effort is currently being expanded to include initiatives tied to fortifying students’ mental health, Frank shared.
“It’s in everybody’s best interest to learn how to live in a pluralistic society,” he said. “So our messaging now is that this is in your personal best interest. You’re not just doing this for the institution.”