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.

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.

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.”

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.

“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.”

Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences said the tradition brings a much-needed boost of happiness to the semester.

“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.”

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. 

1. Why did new research suggest that swapping butter with olive, canola, or soybean oils could lead to a 17 percent lower risk of premature death?

Plant-based oils have fewer calories per tablespoon

Plant-based oils are less likely to be used in baked goods, which tend to be high in sugar

Plant-based oils are high in unsaturated fatty acids

All of the above

2. As climate change impacts the makeup of Harvard Forest, what is replacing dying hemlocks?

Douglas fir trees

Black birch trees

Live oak trees

Invasive vines

3. Climate change is affecting homeowners insurance. How did California regulators change the rules after the recent wildfires?

They capped insurance rates to keep prices low

They allowed insurance companies to use catastrophic models to price their risks

They created a state-funded insurance program to replace private insurance

They mandated all homeowners purchase wildfire insurance

4. The secret to manufacturing less expensive pharmaceuticals could lie in a modified relative of what common liquid you might have around the house?

Bleach

Coffee

Vinegar

Nail polish remover

5. What famous Harvard scholar said he or she still uses three typewriters purchased from Cambridge Typewriter?

Jill Lepore

Annette Gordon-Reed

Robert Putnam

Vivek Murthy

Δ

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.”

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.”

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.”

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?”

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.

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.

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.”

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?

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

What emerged were Shetterly’s “Americans Who Tell the Truth” series and the Harvard Foundation Portraiture Project, both of which use portraiture as a form of storytelling to amplify overlooked voices.

“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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

The woke left has a conflict of interest; a blinding eye injury may be treatable; interest in republics is surging; TikTok underestimated power of music; the best way to watch David Lynch.

1. In his book “We Have Never Been Woke,” what does Musa al-Gharbi call many left-leaning people who likely identify as anti-racist, feminist, and LGBTQ+ allies?

Yuppies

Symbolic capitalists

Globalists

Social justice warriors

2. What new treatment showed promise in a clinical trial for previously untreatable corneal injuries?

CRISPR

Corneal transplant

Stem cell therapy

3. Professor Daniel Carpenter argues in his increasingly popular class “What is a Republic?” that America should be either exclusively a republic or exclusively a democracy.

True

False

4. How much money did a Business School study estimate Universal Music Group was losing annually due to listeners on TikTok prior to a 2024 agreement?

$3 million

$84 million

$411 million

$788 million

5. The Harvard Film Archive holds 35 mm prints of which of the following David Lynch works?

“Eraserhead”

“Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me”

“Wild at Heart”

All of the above

Δ

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.

“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.

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.”

“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.

“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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”  

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.

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.

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.

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.

1. How much lower is the AI adoption rate among women compared to men, on average, according to research out of the Business School?

10 percent

25 percent

40 percent

42 percent

2. Eating an orange a day may cut depression risk by 20 percent. Why might that be, according to the lead researcher of the study?

Oranges stimulate the growth of a gut bacteria that influences dopamine and serotonin production

Citrus fruits block the reuptake of serotonin in the brain, much like the antidepressant class SSRIs

People who eat oranges are more likely to have an overall balanced diet, which is important for mood regulation

Oranges smell nice, and nice smells elevate mood

3. Which dietary change could save almost three deaths a minute, according to Chan School heart specialist Goodarz Danaei?

Drinking a cup of green tea a day

Cutting salt consumption by 30 percent

Eating red meat once a week

4. In her new book, alum Sophia Rosenfeld explores how choice became synonymous with which of the following concepts:

Truth

Paralysis

Self-realization

Freedom

Δ

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.

The President’s Building Bridges Fund was established as a result of the preliminary recommendations from both the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias and the Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias, which emphasized the need to provide more opportunities for building community across campus. Grant funds were made available to support projects along one or several of the following lines:

• 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.”

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.”

Now an Art, Film & Visual Studies and Social Anthropology joint concentrator, Onyeiwu has spent hours honing her skills in the Ceramics Program through the Office for the Arts (OFA).

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.

“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 Bronwyn Vance ’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.”

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.”

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

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

“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

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

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

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.”

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.

“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.”

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?

Earlier this month, President Trump, who has falsely suggested Ukraine started the war, spoke privately by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin on a series of topics including Ukraine. And U.S. and Russian officials last week held preliminary discussions on peace talks without a representative from Ukraine present.

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.

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?

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.”

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.

Event participants included an international set of academics as well as proctors and tutors participating in Harvard College’s FiVE Fellowship in Values Engagement and undergraduates with the Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership Fellowship, a program led by a consortium that includes Harvard plus five other schools in California, Indiana, Florida, and Texas.

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.”