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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Measuring green compute power, from flops to gigaflops

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The power of parallel processing

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

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

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

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

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

A powerful supercomputer, built to be green

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

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

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

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

Fast, green — and human

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The study was limited to patients in Massachusetts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Putnam is that rarest of academics: a crossover star.

Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy, Emeritus, grew up in postwar Port Clinton, Ohio, a working-class town on Lake Erie. The kids played Little League together, parents were on the PTA, and everyone in the community gathered in groups to worship, play bridge, and help solve local challenges.

Memories of his youth would become Putnam’s intellectual lodestar for a life of pioneering scholarship and lead to a landmark book, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” in 2000, which made him one of the world’s most famous political scientists.

Putnam argued in “Bowling Alone” that the glue that holds communities together comes not from formal institutions, but from social ties forged at places like churches, Elks Club meetings, and bowling leagues. That book, along with his earlier work identifying a now-widely used conflict resolution theory known as “the two-level game,” won him his field’s most prestigious honors. His desire to turn theory into problem-solving policy earned him the ears of Presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama.

Putnam, now 83, came to Harvard’s Government Department in 1979. In addition to research and teaching, he held several administrative posts, including dean of Harvard Kennedy School (1989-1991), associate dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, and director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Putnam retired from teaching in 2018 but remains a member of the Kennedy School faculty.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

You’re best known for your work on the important effect that community and social connection have on American society. Tell me about your family life growing up in Port Clinton.

Port Clinton was a small town. I was born in 1941, so I’m a pre-Baby Boomer. I was born in 1941, so I’m a pre-Baby Boomer. My parents were both fairly well-educated. My dad had a master’s degree in business and was the first in his family to go to college. He graduated from the University of Michigan right in the middle of the Depression, so the first 10 years of his career he was looking for jobs.

Then he went into the Navy when the war started, and he lost a leg in the war. Back in the day, military veterans had very little support. He spent a year in the hospital in the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

After the war, he had a wife and a young child — me — and no way to make a living. But my dad was a talented, hard-working guy, and within a couple of years he had started a small construction company from scratch. As a start-up contractor he built houses on spec. He was outgoing and soon became one of the town leaders, very much involved in civic life. But in 1962, while I was in college, there was a big national housing recession, and he went bankrupt.

In short, I grew up in a fairly comfortable life, but that happened to have been the only 10 years of my family’s life when we were comfortable. Shortly after he went bankrupt, he died of a heart attack, so he died very young, leaving me the sole support of my chronically ill mom.

Was your community a “Leave It to Beaver” kind of place—homogenous racially and economically?

No. It was actually very mixed. On the one hand, it was a farming area. I could walk out my back door into farmland. But it was also part of Greater Detroit. There was one big factory in town, Standard Products, which was a supplier to Detroit. They made the little rubber molding around car windows.

Many of the dads of my classmates were UAW workers, so it was solid working class. And then, some kids in my class were kids of farmers, and some were poor. Nobody was very rich and nobody was very poor.

The town was small, and it was very cohesive. We all played on the same basketball teams and Little League. So, growing up in a close family and a close community, I was conscious of the importance of community, even though I wouldn’t have had the words for it.

The school was integrated; my bowling team was integrated — three white members and two Black members. The president of the student body was Black, and the second-ranked student in my class was Black. We were all friends.

Were you socially active?

By personality, I’m shy. I was precocious, if I can put it that way. I was focused on books. My mom didn’t want me to be spoiled, so she kept telling me, “You’ve got to get out and join things!”

When I was in grade school, I didn’t play sports. So early every morning, she would get up and play catch with me in front of our house. Ruth Putnam was bound and determined that Bobby Putnam was not going to be an aloof intellectual.

In high school, I belonged to everything. I was in sports; I was in debate; I was in band; I was in the science club; and I was in chorus. I was doing that despite the fact that, inside, I was shy.

Also, I was trying to be one of the guys, so even though I was not a natural athlete at all, in my junior year I went out for football. I had very poor eyesight, so the only position I could play was a position in which you didn’t have to see anything. That meant I was on the offensive line, where all you had to do was try to block the guy in front of you. And I was awful. I was like fifth string or something.

What I didn’t know was that all my classmates were watching the fact that though I was good in school, I had put myself in a position in which I was not good. And, for that reason, they elected me president of the student class. Now, I’m not bragging about that. I’m trying to say, Here’s this little kid. He’s basically shy. His mom is pushing him to get involved in community. He takes on that lesson. And moreover, it turned out the community was a welcoming community not just to me, it was welcoming to everybody.

You enrolled at Swarthmore College in 1959. What was campus life, especially the political mood, like back then?

Let’s look at Bob Putnam at this moment: He’s a hick from Ohio; he’s a science nerd; he’s a Methodist; and he’s a moderate Republican. In the summer of 1960 — this now sounds crazy — I would write to the Nixon campaign, volunteering.

Swarthmore was small. It was homogeneous socially and intellectually and even politically, and it was intense. And very intellectual. Sophomore year, the fall of 1960, I had to take a distribution course, so I took a course in political science. There were two guys running for president — Kennedy and Nixon.

Swarthmore was very left-wing. It was very socially conscious. Kennedy was a little conservative for many people at Swarthmore.

In this poli-sci class, there was this cute coed named Rosemary sitting in front of me. After class, we started hanging out together. She’s Jewish [Putnam would convert after they married], she comes from a big city — Chicago. Her parents are very clearly New Deal Democrats. We got talking. Of course, we were talking a little bit about politics because that was the class we had just come from.

For our first date, she took me to a Kennedy rally. Sort of, “In your face, Putnam!” And, of course, the next week, I invited her to a Nixon rally. Those were our first two dates. We got along pretty well, and by the election, I was a Democrat.

On Jan. 20, 1961, we said, “What the hell? It’s not that far down to Washington. We’ll go to the inauguration.” We heard Kennedy say with our own ears, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” I thought he was speaking just to me. And I thought, “I’ve got to do something about America. I have obligations to this country.”

“We heard Kennedy say with our own ears, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.’ I thought he was speaking just to me. And I thought, ‘I’ve got to do something about America. I have obligations to this country.’”

Not long after, you switched your focus in college to psychology, history, and political science. Who were some of your mentors back then?

In social psychology, I was lucky enough to have two excellent professors. Dean Peabody was one. He was not well known then, but he became a very well-known social psychologist. And Solomon Asch, who at the time was the leading social psychologist in the world. He was a great teacher; he taught small seminars. He was most famous for something called the Asch Social Pressure experiment, which was about the effects of conformity.

Another was Roland Pennock, who was a very distinguished political philosopher. He was known globally, even though he taught at a tiny liberal arts college. I also became quite close to Chuck Gilbert, another Swarthmore professor. The relationships you had with your mentors there were very intense.

After Swarthmore, you studied at Balliol College, Oxford, on a Fulbright scholarship and then headed to Yale for your master’s degree and doctorate. What drew you there?

Yale happened at that point to have the best political science department in the world. They had extremely good political scientists — Bob Lane, Karl Deutsch, and most of all, Bob Dahl, who were the giants of the ’60s and ’70s in political science. We studied in small seminars, so I benefited enormously from working with them.

What was your first big break as a young political scientist, the thing that put you on the professional map?

Professionally the first paper that I wrote as a graduate student was called “Political Attitudes and the Local Community.” It was on this issue of how the community affects the individual. That paper was published in the APSR [American Political Science Review]. That now sometimes happens, but then it was unheard of for a graduate student to publish a paper in the American Political Science Review or World Politics or whatever. It proved to me that I could play in the big leagues in professional terms.

At the time, the Yale paper was just one more term paper. I did not think my whole career was going to be about community. But looking back on it now, I can see, going all the way back to Port Clinton, I was always drawn to these issues. There was something in me that was interested intellectually in the connection between individuals and the community.

Another lucky thing: When I was going on the job market in 1966, ’67, there were very few Ph.D.s coming out then. My birth year was at the end of the baby dearth, during the ’30s and early ’40s, so I had almost no competitors.

But right behind me, universities could see this enormous wave of Boomers entering college. It meant that before I had written a word of my dissertation, I had many tenure-track offers — from Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, UW-Madison, the University of Michigan. This was not because of me; it was because of the times. So, we had all these choices. We could have gone almost anyplace. But Rosemary and I were Midwesterners, and we had parents whom we were close to, so we went to Ann Arbor. That felt like going home.

I’ve always been aware that I am influenced by my environment. So, I choose environments where I’d be led in a certain direction. When I went to Ann Arbor, I knew it was the most quantitative place studying social and political science in the world. I was not that good, but I knew that if I’m there, I would become so — by osmosis. And I did.

After Yale, you joined the Michigan faculty where you taught for several years before taking a detour to work at the White House. You served on the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter’s legendary national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. How did that come about? 

In about the middle ’70s, I still thought maybe I should be in public service, not just an academic. I got an opportunity to work for a year in the government, and, as it turned out, in the White House. I did that thinking, “Let me put myself there and see whether I like that. Maybe I’ll like it even more than academics or maybe I’ll learn something while I’m there.”

I worked on the staff of the National Security Council for the calendar year 1978. It turned out to be a really important year, and it had a powerful effect on my work in many ways.

It was amazing for me recently to read my own notes from that year, because I could see how much of the whole rest of my career had been affected by that service. I’d never been in government before. I could have taken the Kennedy admonition in that direction. I could have said, “Go into government.” I didn’t. I went into academics.

I took handwritten notes of conversations between the President of the United States Jimmy Carter, and the chancellor of Germany, which, at the time, would have been very highly classified. We were dealing with Iran; we were dealing with nuclear arms control negotiations and U.S.-European relations and U.S.-Soviet relations.

I was just a novice, so I was always working with somebody who knew a lot more than I did. The field I was supposed to be working in was called “global strategy,” but global strategy then actually meant sticking it to the Soviets. So we spent all of our time figuring out — if the Soviets did X, what should be the U.S. response? It was exciting and remarkably interesting.

Did that experience shape any of your subsequent work?

I did some quite significant work based directly on what I learned in Washington. I later invented something called the two-level game model. It turned out to be, in academic terms, a really big deal. The two-level game is what got me into the National Academy of Sciences, not my work on social capital. It came directly out of my service on the NSC.

The other thing that happened was that I was working with Sam Huntington, a famous Harvard professor. He was my boss at the NSC. Somewhat to my surprise, he came away thinking that I was really good. After I finished my time in the NSC, he persuaded Harvard to make me an offer. It seems silly now, but my first thought was, “Why would I want to go to Cambridge? I’m happy. We’re loving it here in Ann Arbor.” But I’ve been at Harvard ever since — nearly half a century.

This idea you’re best known for — that social capital plays a very important role in society — came out of an academic study in Italy that you had worked on for many years. How did that happen?

Most people who know of my work now know only of my work after 1990, when I was already 50 years old. In between the two-level games and “Bowling Alone,” there was this long-term study about Italian regional government. Among academics, it’s at least as well-known as “Bowling Alone.” The book was called “Making Democracy Work.”

If you’re a political scientist and you wanted to study the development of political institutions, logically, you’d like to take the same organization, with the same powers, and the same money and so on, and put it down in different social and economic and political contexts, so you could see which governments flourished and which faltered. That would give you a clue as to how the environment affected the development of these institutions.

Normally, political science is not an experimental study. But while Rosemary and I and our kids were in Italy in 1970, the Italians, without knowing it, created exactly the basis for this kind of study. They created, for the first time, a set of regional governments that had never existed before.

On paper, they were all identical, but in economic and political and cultural and social terms, were vastly different. That unexpectedly turned into a 25-year-long study to measure the success or failure of those new governments.

We had many different hypotheses. We didn’t guess for a long time what turned out to be the critical ingredient — choral societies and football clubs. To what extent did people in a given region join together in things, not just politics, but these informal kinds of connections. We gradually realized, “Whoa! It’s not the education; it’s not the wealth. It’s the choral societies and these informal connections.”

And at the very end of that study, I was a visitor at Oxford and was living in Nuffield College. Late one night, I couldn’t get to sleep. I looked for some book that would put me to sleep. In the library I found this big, thick book of sociological theory called “Foundations of Social Theory” by James Coleman. I thought, “I’ll read this, and I’ll be asleep in 10 minutes.”

I came to this chapter in the book called “Social Capital.” That was the first time I’d ever heard the term, which Coleman used to refer to social connections. Almost immediately, I realized that what I’m talking about in Italy is social capital. It’s these connections, which turn out to be valuable. I ended up not sleeping at all that night. I was so excited.

Up until then, the only people who cared about my work were the half-dozen political scientists in the world who cared about Italian regional government. But now, because I’d introduced the idea of social capital, it got a lot of attention. An Economist review said I was one of the leading social scientists of the last 100 years! That review was another big turning point.

As you were finishing that project, you began to see that this idea about social capital might also explain the political, racial, and social divisions that seemed to be underway in the U.S. beginning in the early 1990s?

Yes. We lived in Lexington at that point. I came down to breakfast, and Rosemary showed me a story in The Boston Globe about how the Lexington PTA didn’t have as many members as it used to. And I thought, “Doesn’t everybody always join the PTA?”

I had a research assistant, so we gathered a little data, and it turned out it wasn’t just Lexington, it was everyplace. PTA membership was falling off. I’d grown up in the ’50s, when all parents belonged to the PTA. And I thought, “What’s going on here?” My dad had been in Kiwanis; I wonder if it’s true in Kiwanis? And sure enough, we got the data on Kiwanis membership. It was also declining. That led me pretty soon to say, “I think I’ve stumbled onto something here.”

I had had lunch with a Harvard donor friend of mine, who happened to own a chain of bowling alleys. I said, “It looks to me like people are not bowling in leagues anymore, but they’re still bowling.” He said, “You’ve stumbled onto the major economic problem facing the bowling industry.”

It turns out if you bowl in a league, you drink four times as much beer, and you eat four times as many pretzels. The money in bowling is not in the balls and shoes, it’s in the beer and pretzels.

So his industry was in the strange situation of having more people coming through the door, but revenue was falling because they weren’t drinking as much beer and eating as many pretzels. When I recounted that story to a colleague at the Kennedy School, Jack Donahue, he said “My goodness, you mean they’re bowling alone?”

Soon I delivered a paper at a research conference in Sweden sponsored by the Nobel Foundation. As a joke I titled the draft “Bowling Alone.” It got published in a tiny little journal that had a circulation of about a dozen called the Journal of Democracy. It was published on Jan. 1, 1995, and the same day, the two leading political commentators in America said in their New Year’s columns, “This crazy professor at Harvard has just discovered this amazing effect.”

Within a week, my mailbox, email, and real letters went through the roof. Within about two weeks, I was invited to Camp David to talk with the Clintons. And within about three weeks, Rosemary and I were profiled in People magazine.

Why do you think “Bowling Alone” caught fire so quickly?

I had stumbled onto something that most Americans actually knew privately. I was pretty confident that I was right because thousands of people wrote me saying, “My father was in Rotary, or he was in the Elks. I was proud of him for being in the Elks. I’m not in the Elks. I know I have good reasons, but I kind of feel sorry, and you’ve now helped me understand my personal problem.” For a long time, the academics were skeptical. But underneath, all those thousands of letters suggested to me that I was onto something.

It’s quite unusual for an academic to produce work that’s taken seriously by peers, but also crosses over into the popular culture. What was that like?

I know it’s unusual. There are some advantages and disadvantages to it. I told you about going to the John F. Kennedy inaugural. I wanted to make a difference in America. So, at some level, I welcomed it.

Once the book was published around 2000, I became a kind of celebrity. That gave me a standing to reach to a larger audience and to at least fool myself into thinking that I was actually making a difference. Not change history. The way my team and I talked about it is, we were going to try to bend history. Maybe, at the margins, we could help things a little bit.

You did get some pushback. Some questioned the 1995 paper’s accuracy, and for a while it looked like that might flatten enthusiasm for your findings. What happened?

Early on, I discovered that there had been a methodological mistake in the original article in the Journal of Democracy ­— not that I had made personally, but I’d used some data from a data archive, and the archive data was wrong. Fortunately, I caught that before anybody else did. But still, if you corrected that mistake, then it was not at all clear that I was right.

At one point, there was a newspaper story saying, “‘Bowling Alone’ is bunk.” That was deeply depressing — clinically. I went through this long depression in which I thought, “Maybe I’m completely wrong.” And then I discovered two data archives, and it turned out I was righter than I’d even suspected I was.

After the publication of this journal article, I got a very generous book deal. I thought I was going to publish it in six months, but I spent the next five years trying to figure out whether it really was true that social capital was declining in America. And if so, why it was true? Did it matter? And what could we do about it? Once the book came out, I did not want to have another “‘Bowling Alone’ is bunk” headline.

I had a big research team by this point. Most social scientists then were doing it like artisans — one person doing all the work. By the time I got to “Bowling Alone,” I was doing industrial social science, if I can put it that way. So, it took me five years, but then it came out, and it was a big hit again. Probably right now, I’m better known than I have been in my whole life even though I’m in my mid-80s. That’s fundamentally because the ensuing years have shown that I was right. I was saved by the data.

In “Join or Die,” a new documentary about your work, there’s an old clip where you lament, “We’re watching ‘Friends’ instead of having friends.” Are you disheartened that the downward trends around community and social connection you identified and warned about in the 1990s have perhaps gotten worse?

Things have gotten worse and when I’ve said that I often leave people with the impression that I think I’ve been a failure. I don’t think I’ve been a failure. Even forgetting about my academic successes, I think I’ve been reasonably successful in raising the alarm about this. But I’ve not found the solution.

Over the last 20, 25 years, most of my time has not been spent on research or writing. It’s been spent on outreach. I have worked with hundreds of grassroots groups all across the country, in every state in America, trying to explain what I’ve found and trying to encourage them to think about what they could do to turn this around. You’d have to ask them to be sure, but I think you would find that they would say, “Putnam has not fixed the problem, and we have not fixed the problem, but he’s put us on the right track.”

The second thing I’ve done is to speak to thousands of journalists and public officials. I’ve tried to make use of the fact that I’ve become something of a celebrity. I could tell you how I spent today, which is in four or five Zoom meetings with somebody from New Hampshire who wants to talk about what they can do here to fix things, and Gov. Josh Shapiro’s team to find out what they could do in Pennsylvania to fix these things, and so on. If I could speak to 500 people a year for 25 years, that’s a lot of people.

Political scientists aren’t expected to fix the things they study. But you have worked with U.S. presidents and world leaders, policymakers, local officials, and communities to help them address these challenges. Did that come from your desire to live up to President Kennedy’s call to service?

Actually, I do want to fix America! (Laughter.) The irony of all this is: I haven’t quite fixed it, but underneath, that’s been my real motive.

There’s an approach to social science now, which is to say, “We just do the facts. It’s not our business to say what people should do, much less get out and work with them to do it.”

I strongly disagree with that. Of course, there’s a role for people who just do the math. That’s fine. I admire that. Once upon a time, I did it myself. So, I’m not saying political scientists or social scientists shouldn’t do high-tech, quantitative stuff. I’m just saying that, as a group, social scientists should not be focused just on description. They should also be focused on, in some sense, taking a more active role, trying to change. One way or another, ordinary Americans help to fund what is a pretty cushy life for academics like me, and I think we have some obligation to work on problems that concern them.

In the early 2000s, you launched an initiative to convert ideas about social capital into practical solutions, called the Saguaro Seminar. In a recent interview with The New York Times, you called it your biggest failure. Why?

It turned out the problem was too vague. We had this idea — it came from some experts at the Kennedy School — of so-called executive sessions in which you bring together some academics and some practitioners and try to figure out what to do about a problem. And it works for quite specific problems, like crime. We had a report, but the report did not have the impact that we hoped it would have. In retrospect, I think our hopes were exaggerated.

Lots of people have invested a ton of money in having some kind of national commission on one of these big problems — the national commission on polarization or national commission on inequality. None of them have solved the problem. That’s because, I think, fundamentally it’s not an absence of good ideas, it’s an absence of grassroots efforts. Everybody in that group worked hard, and we had some good ideas, but ideas are not enough.

We did make one really good decision. It was made by a guy named Tom Sander, my No. 2 for about 20 years. We were trying to get together a bunch of practitioners from across the nation. We wanted to have a very diverse group. He heard of this young lawyer who was then working as a community organizer in Chicago. And he came back and said, “I think this guy might be our guy.”

Let me guess: His name was Barack Obama?

He was younger than almost anybody else in the group, and he was super smart and very ambitious. Just lovable. We all liked him because he’s very likable and smart. His nickname was “the governor” because we thought, “You’re so good. Maybe someday you might end up being elected governor of Illinois.” Imagine that! (Laughter.) Within five years, he was president of the United States.

While he was president, quite often, he invited me to the White House to speak. In his second term, he awarded me the National Humanities Medal for my work on community. I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say some of his main initiatives came from my talks with him at the White House. And all of that was because Tom Sander, this colleague of mine, had gone looking for a bright young organizer in Chicago.

So, at every stage of my career, I benefited from somebody else. I was lucky in the mentors and colleagues and friends and students that I had. I was lucky that I met my wife. It was not moments in which I was brilliant, it was moments in which I recognized that somebody else had come up with a good idea.

Election night 2000 represents a difficult chapter in the history of broadcast news.

Exit polls showed a tight presidential election between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush. Just before 8 p.m., NBC News projected a Gore victory in the pivotal state of Florida, with all the other major television networks closely following. Two hours later, all retracted their forecasts as Gore’s margins narrowed with the reporting of additional votes.

Just after 2 a.m., the networks felt confident calling the state — and therefore the presidency — for Bush. But two hours later, they had to backtrack again when it became clear Florida was headed for a recount.

“The media had a vulnerability in understanding the changing nature of how elections are actually run,” said Stephen Ansolabehere, Frank G. Thompson Professor of Government, reflecting on Florida’s razor’s edge results, which exposed the networks’ reliance on outdated statistical modeling.

Five years later, Ansolabehere, an elections and public opinion expert, joined a team of social science Ph.D.s charged with improvingdata journalism and election forecasting for CBS News. “I’ve been there ever since for every midterm and presidential election as well as the primaries,” he said.

We caught up with Ansolabehere, mastermind of the long-running Cooperative Election Study, for a lesson on the evolving nature of real-time vote projections and a preview of election night 2024. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

How did TV journalists get it so wrong in 2000?

That election exposed a lot of administrative failures in the U.S. electoral system — from voting machines to registration to management of polling places. But the networks relied on the same old statistical models to ingest data — and then they just put that out. They stationed journalists in various areas to report on local results, but they weren’t necessarily placed where the problems were.

There was also a rush to report. The television networks were basically racing each other. Don’t get me wrong. There was certainly an ethos of getting it right because calling the election can have a big impact — it can shift how legal strategies are pursued by the campaigns afterwards. That was very much the case in 2000 and 2020. It was almost the case in 2004.

Journalists know it’s a big responsibility. But for me, it’s also this very cool problem.

Say more about that.

The very cool problem is, you’re shown in real time little portions of something that has occurred — the election. At 7 p.m., you get to see, say, 10 percent of what has happened. At what point can you make a decision? Do you need to see 50 percent of the data? Do you need 90 percent? It’s a missing data problem. It’s a forecasting problem. And it’s forecasting things that we political scientists care about, like turnout, vote shares, and how different groups voted.

How has the rise of absentee voting complicated this work?

In 2000, one in eight ballots nationwide was cast absentee or early. In 2016, 40 percent of ballets were cast absentee or early. During COVID, more than 60 percent were. That makes it really challenging to understand what’s going on during election night. In particular, there have been a bunch of studies that say making absentee voting easier doesn’t increase turnout. But since the states made absentee voting easier, turnout has gone up a bunch.

Many will recall from 2020 that there are idiosyncrasies with how absentee ballots are reported. How has that affected your work on election night?

Our old data models were based on [electoral] precincts. There are about 180,000 precincts in the U.S. — each a tiny place, with about 1,000 people — and we could see in each one how things had shifted from one election to the next.

But absentee ballots are not reported at the precinct level. They’re usually reported at the county level. There are 3,000 counties in the U.S., and they are very heterogeneous. That makes it very difficult to understand which little pieces of the missing or obscured puzzle have been revealed as the votes are reported.

Absentee voting was also politicized in 2020. How did that affect your team?

Up until 2020, we were lucky because absentee voting was pretty much like in-precinct voting. That is, it was unrelated to how people voted. But when we started getting the data streams in 2020, Biden would be up by something like 20 points in the absentee ballots, because that’s usually what gets dumped first on election night. You’ll see zero precincts reporting, but 20 percent of the votes are in — that’s the absentees from the county.

The problem was particularly vexing out west, because there you have these big urban counties that count for something like 75 percent of the state’s population. Think Maricopa County where Phoenix is in Arizona or Clark County with Las Vegas County in Nevada. We were, on the fly, trying to partition the data based not on the presidential vote. We could see that, say, the round of absentee votes that came in at 10:05 EST p.m. also had a reported vote from a certain state legislative district. That gave us some information about what part of Maricopa County the votes were from.

When did you know the results of the 2020 presidential election?

By about 1:30 a.m., I knew Biden had won.

But it took days for the media, including CBS, to declare a winner.

Everyone on the Decision Desk team was just racking their brains through midnight — can we figure out anything about where these absentee ballots are coming from? CBS staffer Kabir Khanna and I finally hit on a model where we could understand not so much what data we already had, but what data we didn’t yet have — how Democratic or Republican were the areas that hadn’t reported their absentee counts. And given how things were trending, what that must mean for the outstanding ballots.

At 1:30 it became obvious to me, at least, that Biden would win Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada.

What will you keep your eye on when you’re back at the Decision Desk?

One of the things we’re starting to look at right now is what’s the absentee ballot yield — that is, how many people have returned their absentee ballots — by party registration. A lot of states, not all, report party registration. But almost all of the states where the race will be close do.

And on Election Night itself, the first reporting we get is the 5 p.m. exit poll. If the Democrats aren’t up by five [points] in the raw exit-poll data, I’m going to guess it’ll be bad night for them. That’s what happened in 2016. The exit-poll data came back with Hillary Clinton up by five.

Why would the exit polls favor Democrats?

Raw exit-poll data always overstate the Democrats by five. We’ve studied it. We found things to explain little parts of it, but nobody really knows why. It’s been that way since the 1970s.

With another presidential election at America’s doorstep, Lawrence D. Bobo, the dean of Social Science, last week gathered four of his division’s faculty members — Mina Cikara, Jill Lepore, Eric Nelson, and Theda Skocpol — to discuss the state of the U.S. political system.  

“We don’t have enough occasions in the social sciences to share ideas across our disciplines, across our methods, and across our different perspectives to understand key issues,” offered Bobo, who is also the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences, at the top of the conversation. He hoped that the interdisciplinary panel’s expertise ­— in history, sociology, government, political theory, and psychology — would yield “a sense of illumination, if not calm, about the fate of American democracy.” 

Drawing on field research with American voters and the history of U.S. political thought, the symposium quickly surfaced disagreement over the source of recent dysfunction.

Borrowing from a lecture she delivered last month upon winning the American Political Science Association’s James Madison Award, Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, shared with the panel a timeline of recent actions by the Republican Party that in her view are aimed at undercutting U.S. elections and accountable governance. 

“We’re in a period of radicalization to the point of authoritarian, anti-democratic commitment by one of the two major political parties,” she said. “Ironically, it’s the party that started out in the Civil War-era celebrating freedom and opposing slavery.” 

Skocpol, co-author of “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism” (2012) and “Rust Belt Union Blues” (2023), distributed a handout listing 18 examples since 2000 of what she termed “legal hardball,” a concept she credited to her Government Department colleagues Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, whose book “Tyranny of the Minority” (2023) details how Southern Democrats used “constitutional hardball” during Reconstruction to disenfranchise Black voters and secure their own power.

Nelson, Robert M. Beren Professor of Government, offered “a modest dissent, or at least a friendly amendment” to Skocpol’s account. “There’s no question that the Republican Party has become deeply radicalized,” said Nelson, author “The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God.” (2019). “But I think the phenomenon that we’ve seen is a spiral, and in order to diagnose it correctly you have to realize that the dynamics require a kind of tit-for-tat on both sides.”

Democrats were the first to break with norms around judicial appointments, he argued, with Democratic senators lining up in 1987 against President Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. “Republicans then responded and began abusing the confirmation process, particularly for lower court federal judges,” he said. 

Democrats, he said, then eliminated the filibuster for lower court appointments in 2013. Republicans, in turn, refused to give President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland a SCOTUS hearing in 2016 and eliminated the filibuster for nominations the following year. 

As a result, presidents no longer nominate justices who are “at least minimally acceptable to those in the minority,” Nelson said. Democrats have become increasingly outraged by the succession of Supreme Court decisions that followed. “And the Democrats now propose to violate the Constitution by having Congress pass a bill that pretends to have the authority to impose term limits on justices,” he concluded. 

Also documented by Skocpol is an uptick in what she called “extralegal” threats and violence following false claims about the 2020 election results. Her examples included harassment of public officials as well as the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

Republicans controlled the presidency and Congress for much of the period she analyzed, Skocpol said. “I think the timeline here raises the possibility that an outright offensive authoritarian movement has emerged that wants to take it all and to turn elections into, at most, decorations — and to deploy harassment and threats of violence regularly along with quasi-legal tactics,” she said.

Insights from the event’s other two speakers looked beyond partisan politics. Lepore, David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, drew from her 2020 book “If Then” to review six decades of technological change and what she sees as its corrosive effect on all levels of government. Cikara, a professor of psychology who specializes in intergroup conflict and polarization, spoke to a hopeful body of research on altering people’s “meta-perceptions,” or an individual’s ideas about how others regard them and their identity group. 

With both Harvard students and faculty in attendance, the Oct. 21 symposium featured a lively Q&A section, dominated by fears of constitutional crises and democratic collapse.

Nelson shared his concerns that this year’s election results could set off “terrifying sorts of constitutional impasse” and “dangerous levels of instability and dysfunction.” Nevertheless, he lamented all the talk of existential danger this election season. “It reminds people of things that were said in 2016 and 2020,” he said.

It has become the “standard get-out-the-vote rhetoric” on left and the right alike, Lepore added. “I think there’s a lot of really important work about the stakes, and the stakes are extremely high, but I think that rhetoric is fundamentally incendiary.”

“But why would it be rhetoric to identify those threats and try to communicate them?” Skocpol wondered. 

“The argument is that it has a perverse effect,” Nelson replied. “At this point, there’s been so much of it that people tune it out and don’t take the actual threat sufficiently seriously.”

Inspectors general are placed in most federal agencies to promote efficiency and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse, and the U.S. Supreme Court would benefit from having one, said former inspector general of the Department of Justice Glenn Fine.

There are 74 offices of inspectors general across the federal government, but the federal judiciary, which includes the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals, and the U.S. District Courts, has none. With roughly 2,000 judges, 30,000 employees, and an $8 billion budget, the federal judiciary is a huge operation that lends itself to fraud and waste, which only an independent internal overseer can evaluate and investigate, said Fine ’78, J.D. ’85.

“Justices are human, and some may commit misconduct, and some may be accused of misconduct unfairly,” said Fine during a conversation with Jack Goldsmith, Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. “I believe an inspector general would be good for the U.S. Supreme Court and it would help improve trust in the court.”

Fine’s proposal for the Supreme Court was one of several he offered during the talk about his new book, “Watchdogs: Inspectors General and the Battle for Honest and Accountable Government,” which highlights the critical role of inspectors general in promoting efficiency and government accountability. 

Established by Congress in 1978, the office of inspector general and its role is still not well understood by the public or even by government officials, said Fine, who hopes his book underscores the critical work they do. As independent, nonpartisan overseers within their agencies, inspectors general can conduct audits, evaluations, and investigations to detect and deter waste, fraud, and abuse, providing an essential check and balance in government. IGs report to their agency heads and to Congress and must make public reports with recommendations.

“They have been called some of the most important public servants you’ve never heard of, and that’s true,” said Fine. “When I was the IG of the Justice Department, I worked with five attorney generals, and when I was the acting IG of the Department of Defense, I worked with four secretaries of defense, and even they did not understand the independence of the IG.”

As inspector general of the Department of Justice from 2000 to 2011 and acting inspector general of the Department of Defense from 2006 to 2020, Fine served during the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. In April 2020, Trump ousted Fine as the Pentagon’s acting watchdog, and subsequently removed him as the head of a panel tasked to oversee the $2 trillion coronavirus relief package. At the time, Trump also removed four other inspectors general, including the Intelligence Community IG and the State Department IG.

During his tenure at the Justice Department from 2000 to 2011, Fine’s office oversaw investigations of the ways in which the FBI missed and failed to connect the dots before the Sept. 11 attacks, the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and the failure of FBI internal security procedures to detect agent Robert Hanssen as a spy working for Russia for over two decades, among many others.

From 2006 to 2020, Fine’s IG office at the Department of Defense investigated the use of reconstruction funds in Afghanistan, as well as the wars in Iraq and Syria, and the “Fat Leonard” case, the worst corruption scandal in Navy history.

During his talk, Fine also proposed reforms to improve the IG’s office, including setting a term limit for inspectors general, preventing them from holding multiple positions at the same time, and establishing a better system to oversee inspectors general.

“We do need a better answer to the question of who is watching the watchdogs, both in terms of when there’s actual misconduct committed and also when an IG is just not that effective,” said Fine.

Goldsmith, who interacted with Fine at the Justice Department when Goldsmith was the assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, from 2003 to 2004, had words of praise for inspectors general.

“Inspectors general are feared in agencies because of their independence and because they could go anywhere and do anything within the department,” said Goldsmith. “It’s hard to exaggerate how important these institutions are to the functioning of the executive branch and how successful they are.”

The work of inspectors general makes government accountable and promotes democracy, said Fine, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution and an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School. They should strive to be timely, transparent, and make actionable recommendations, and most importantly, they should be independent and stand up to potential challenges by government officials.

“Don’t expect to be popular,” said Fine. “You can’t try to please one side or the other because that’s a recipe for disaster, and your credibility is shot. That’s the only thing that matters: your credibility or independence … the belief that you’re doing this in a nonpartisan, credible way, relying only on the facts.”

Self-described “former spooky kid” Katie Kohn teaches the class “Advanced Fiction: Writing Horror” at Harvard Extension School. The Gazette interviewed Kohn, a doctoral candidate in the Art, Film and Visual Studies program, about people’s fascination with scary stories, the difference between bad and good horror, and what the genre can teach us about ourselves.

What makes horror stories different from other stories?

All stories are rooted in conflict; they promise us that things will go wrong. But horror stories do two things that I truly think are unique. For one, horror tends to destabilize the very binaries out of which other stories source their tension. It’s not just about playing good against evil, the familiar against the strange. Horror complicates. For instance, we use the term “uncanny” to describe a breakdown between something we recognize and something we don’t. It’s neither simply familiar nor strange; it’s somehow both. Horror loves to take us to these places where nothing is certain, where it feels like the rug is always about to come out from under us.  

That’s the other effect horror stories promise: uncertainty to the very end. Horror asks us to accept the prospect that things might not turn out well. If other stories overcome challenges or resolve tensions, this one might be as raw and as confrontational as life can be, without curation or niceties. For instance, there are points at which we no longer feel safe reading a horror story or watching a horror film, that moment when we want to look over our shoulder or check under the bed. All stories ask that we suspend our disbelief. Horror exploits that basic instinct to give ourselves over to stories. Horror is a genre that bites back. 

What draws people to horror stories?

The first theory that often comes up is catharsis. Horror fiction offers a safe way to experience things that we fear in life. I’d add that horror doesn’t just confront what we already fear. It’s a genre that goes digging; it looks for what’s buried, and in doing so, it tends to find that which is repressed, to speak to the otherwise unspeakable, or bring what has been overlooked or marginalized back into focus. Horror gets at truths that we might not be able to access in other ways. It gives us a language to speak to what troubles us. In that way, dark things can be quite illuminating.  

And yet, horror is considered a lowly genre, both in literature and film. Why?

There are theories. American film scholar Linda Williams once proposed certain genres are considered “lowly” because they’re associated with bodily effects. Horror tries to get us to scream, melodrama to cry, and pornography, well … you know. All these genres are trying to assault your body, to provoke a physical reaction. This places them in a hierarchy opposite qualities associated with higher art: stimulating the mind or the intellect rather than the body. That’s a theory that I’m willing to buy. I’d also say it’s possible horror — genre fiction, in general — exists within existing power hierarchies. Popular fiction can be accessible fiction, becoming a home for marginalized voices with little access to institutional power. This is precisely one of the things that makes horror so exciting to me, personally, but it’s also what sets it apart. 

What’s the difference between good and bad horror?

In any form of storytelling or craft there are “bad” versions, but these things are subjective. There is of course horror that just wants to shock or push you to the limits. I tend to find horror more satisfying when it’s tackling difficult or illuminating questions.

Folks use the term “elevated” horror to describe this, perhaps to distinguish certain texts and authors from horror’s reputation as a “lowly” genre, which is itself telling. But if we’re talking personal favorites, I don’t know how much such distinctions really matter. In film, I love “The Descent,” which is something of a cult hit, as well as “The Others,” more of a gothic. “Alien,” of course. As for prose, I always recommend Scott Smith’s “The Ruins.” I thought it was going to be a simple thriller, but it turned out to be a novel I return to year after year. 

In general, I think the fun of horror is that it’s always surprising. Something doesn’t have to have a big budget or big names to strike a chord; sometimes what resonates can be quite personal — even idiosyncratic. For instance, I personally tend to avoid cannibalism plots, but I’ll run to haunted houses and feminine gothics or anything involving deep-sea horror. If there’s an underwater laboratory and things start to go wrong, I’m there. Not surprising, as one of my biggest fears is being stuck underwater.

In terms of works we read in this course, I do have a soft spot for Bram Stoker’s “The Judge’s House.” It’s a relatively simple ghost story, but it made me look over my shoulder when I first read it. And if horror isn’t making us question the world that we live in and our position in it, what’s the point?

How do classic and contemporary horror stories reflect the anxieties of their times?

In many ways we’re still very much living in the shadow of gothic literature. The gothic is a response to the Enlightenment era view of man’s supposed intellectual and moral prowess: that we can be in control or at least understand the world, that the known world is itself a stable — even conquerable — thing. Today, horror continues to do what the gothic has always done, reminding us that the world is far stranger than we presume to know and, ultimately, not ours to control. Horror will often take us to that more radical source of conflict where we realize that there is a limit to what we can control or even comprehend. Certainly, some stories exploit anxieties both past and present rooted in presumed oppositions: us vs. them, pure vs. impure, holy vs. profane, good vs. evil. But again, horror also confronts these binaries.

Our course tries to look to the past to see how much of its legacy remains present in today’s horror. We cover excerpts from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” as well as Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” But the focus is more on contemporary works. Of course, we must consider Stephen King as well as other prolific writers who are not necessarily household names: folks like Paul Tremblay or Tananarive Due or well-known experimentalists like Carmen Maria Machado. We also look beyond the format of prose in works from Emily Carroll and even a children’s picture book. I genuinely think Stan and Jan Berenstain’s “The Spooky Old Tree” is a masterpiece of horror storytelling, it’s just one that happens to be for early readers. 

How do horror writers succeed in raising the hairs on our neck?

There are many ways horror gets under our skin. One strategy is docufiction. In different ways, both “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” are presented as first-hand accounts, making us wonder whether we understand our own world as well as its sometimes-naive protagonists do. 

Related is the motif of infection. I don’t just mean as a plot point, say, the mass infection of a zombie apocalypse. If the characters in a film have just watched a video that will kill them in seven days, what does that mean for those of us in the audience who just watched the same video? What really gets under our skin — and what really makes a film like George Romero’s 1968 “Night of the Living Dead” so affecting — isn’t the idea that the scary thing in the story could happen to any of the characters, but that it could also happen to us. By the end of “Night of the Living Dead,” you know that there is something worse than being bitten by a mindless zombie, and it’s something possibly even more insidious. Zombies, after all, are just reminders that to live with a human body offers no guarantee that one will be seen as human.  

It’s important to not forget that horror isn’t just about being scary. I tell my students that horror, like any fiction, should try to tap into something that resonates. Something that affects people on a deeper level. Not just the element of surprise or a jump scare, but something that lasts. 

While researching voter suppression and the Civil Rights Movement, artist Lisa Jones Gentry came across a story published by the Southern Poverty Law Institute. The news post highlighted 40 people who were murdered between 1954 and 1968, among them activists, victims of vigilantes, and ordinary citizens. The names inspired Gentry to create a piece of mixed media artwork to honor those lives.

“They Died for You: Vote 2024” features the faces of these men, women, and children concealed among brightly colored geometric shapes. The piece, and another Gentry created in 2020, sit in a new exhibition titled “Vote!” highlighting African American voting history at the Neil L. and Angelica Zander Rudenstine Gallery in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

“They were really just ordinary people whose lives had been cut short because they were trying to make sure that this country was free for everyone,” said Gentry, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

“Vote!” showcases key figures who historically defined civic participation as their community struggled for equal voting rights. Works by Gentry, Haili Francis, A.L.M. ’18, Titus Kaphar, and others are on display along with selections from the Hutchins Center’s permanent collection, including Jules R. Arthur, Ray A. Frieden ’65, Charles W. White, and Rico Gatson. 

Curator Dell Marie Hamilton, acting director of the Cooper Gallery for African & African American Art at the Hutchins Center, said she is intrigued by undecided voters and said she hopes the exhibition can show them the long road Black Americans have traveled to gain and protect their right to vote.

“This is a very long trajectory that doesn’t just happen. We, as civic participants, are part of this history as well,” she said. “For those folks who are perhaps still struggling with whether or not this is even a system worth saving, I would hope that an exhibition like this gives them some of the fuel they need to understand that this is the history that we’re wrestling with. This is the aftermath of why we are where we are. I feel like you can’t know the present or the future without really understanding the history.”

From the beginning, visitors are confronted with the U.S.’ violent and shameful past with enslavement. Kaphar’s “Drawing the Blinds, Thaddeus Stevens” is an oil on canvas featuring the abolitionist and American lawyer and a seated Black woman — a hint at Stevens’ relationship with Lydia Hamilton Smith, a mixed-race, born-free housekeeper, businesswoman, and abolitionist. The piece is displayed next to “Raffle,” a piece developed by Charles W. White in 1970 that was inspired by advertisements promoting slave auctions. “Raffle” is an oil wash on illustration board in shades of brown, featuring an enslaved Black woman who appears to be pregnant.

Two works by Francis, an alumna of the Harvard Extension School who helped plan a Harvard Black Alumni Society’s Global Change Makers Conference, which inspired the exhibition, are also displayed.

“As an artist, my role is to simply bring attention to something that can spark a larger conversation,” said Francis, an artist and scholar working at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. “I believe that when we use art [we can] catalyze these conversations that can be difficult to have in other areas.”

One of Francis’ pieces, “Sidney Revels Redmond,” showcases the legacy of Redmond, a fellow alum (1923, HLS 1925), the grandson of the first Black senator, and a civil rights attorney in his own right. Francis’ second piece, “Shirley Chisholm: Unbought,” pays homage to the first Black woman elected to the House of Representatives and the first Black woman to run for president.

“My hope is that people understand that voting is powerful,” she said. “They do have a voice, even though sometimes they can get discouraged when the outcome doesn’t necessarily look like it’s going in a direction that feels fair or right.”

“Vote!” runs until Dec. 7, and is co-sponsored by the Harvard Black Alumni Society, the Harvard Alumni Association, and Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

Mara Bolis arrived at the airport in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire last June — delayed, tired, and disheveled following a 20-plus hour journey from Boston. A security guard signaled for her to follow him through passport control and led her to a waiting SUV, assuring her that her luggage would follow. She sank into the back seat, eyes closed, looking forward to her hotel bed.

But when the car rolled to a stop, it was outside the gate of an elegant home. Glancing down at her jeans, sneakers, and cargo shirt, Bolis felt a wave of panic. It occurred to her that she was at the home of Patrick Achi, the former prime minister of the west African nation — and a former observer of her course.

Bolis’ road to Côte d’Ivoire began last spring semester. A fellow at the Harvard Center for International Development (CID), she led a seminar titled “Bringing a Gender Lens to Development Policy and Practice.”

While there are many drivers of inequality in the developing world, marginalization based on gender is a persistent cause. Part of the reason is because women continue to have less formal political authority — they make up only about 27 percent of parliamentarians around the world, so their unique needs and perspectives often go overlooked. Bolis’ course aimed to help leaders build the practical skills necessary to bridge that gap.

Achi arrived for a research fellowship at CID that semester. After stepping down from government in October 2023 to focus on his longtime role as president of the Regional Council of the La Mé region, he had come to Cambridge to research the factors slowing Africa’s development progress.

The former prime minister was planning for his own spring seminar, “Unlocking Africa’s Potential through Development,” which would provide insights into these challenges and explore strategies for overcoming them, and he decided to sit in on Bolis’ class as an observer.

After the first class, Achi approached Bolis and told her he’d enjoyed the class but felt uncomfortable as the only man in the room. (He would later reflect that this was the first time this had ever happened to him in a professional setting.) Achi didn’t want the other participants to feel they could not speak freely with a man in the room. He asked whether he should continue to attend.

“You should absolutely come back,” Bolis replied with a smile. “And now you know how most women in the professional world feel.”

Achi would not only return, he would soon become an integral voice in class and an advocate of gender equality.

“It was revelatory for him,” said Bolis. “In learning about examples of inequality in public life around the world, and how inequality on the basis of gender had personally affected many of the other students in the class, he grew increasingly energized by the prospect of what he could do to support women back home in La Mé.”

In May, Achi took the stage at CID’s Global Empowerment Meeting where, alongside former Jordanian Prime Minister Omar Al Razzaz, he spoke with PBS NewsHour’s Amna Nawaz on how he had advocated for women and girls during his time in office (including doubling the rate of high school attendance for girls by building schools walking distance from their homes) and what he would do differently now (a major lesson for Achi: Listen to women).

Achi reflected on his experience in Bolis’ course in an article for CID, noting that it was “instrumental in deepening my understanding of gender issues and made me realize that while many of us believe we are implementing effective gender policies, the actual awareness and prioritization of these is often significantly lacking.”

Achi and Bolis began collaborating on the development of a comprehensive gender strategy for the La Mé region. The work had three components: research to identify women’s needs as distinct from those of men (the first time the region had gathered sex-disaggregated statistics to inform their strategy development); a roundtable discussion, hosted by the La Mé Regional Council, of the key issues facing women in the region; and a training, run by Bolis, for elected and administrative officials to bring a gender lens to their policy and programs.

In June, Achi and Bolis initiated a research project alongside two HKS students, Femi Olonilua and Kotomi Odate, with the support of gender leaders and members of Achi’s La Mé team. The team went on to talk to hundreds of residents about what activities they felt would help women reach their goals. The HKS students facilitated focus groups and administered questionnaires, then worked to identify the key challenges facing women and develop policy recommendations to address them.

In July, Bolis arrived in Côte d’Ivoire, expecting to participate in a small, closed-door session with the Ministry of Women in the Economy to discuss opportunities and living standards for women and provide training on bringing a gender lens to policy and program development for La Mé regional officials.

This is how Bolis found herself at Achi’s home, surrounded by elegantly dressed people who, she was realizing, had waited until she’d arrived at 10 p.m. to begin their dinner. What Bolis assumed would be a private session turned out to be a much longer major event.

“When we arrived in La Mé the next day, I found a public ceremony with over 100 participants, including members of the press, elected and administrative officials from all levels of government, international donors, representatives from the World Bank and French Development Bank, and members of civil society and women’s rights organizations from across Côte d’Ivoire,” said Bolis.

She was brought onstage to give remarks. She noted, laughing, that working with Achi means always being on your toes.

Later, in a smaller, closed-door session, Olonilua and Odate presented their survey findings to the multi-stakeholder group. The two students talked about women’s aspirations in agriculture and commerce, their interest in learning about women’s rights, and the barriers they face.

Following the presentations, the group talked about their “vision for women’s empowerment in La Mé and took a hard look at exactly what was standing in our way,” Bolis said. “Like elsewhere in the developing world, the unpaid care work done by women in the region keeps them from engaging in economic activity and gaining financial independence. They lack safe and reliable transportation options. Many women were unable to secure permission to leave their homes alone. In parts of La Mé, women have an 80 percent illiteracy rate. We talked through these problems and their root causes. The conversation had an incredible energy.”

One problem the group identified is that many women in La Mé lack formal identification, which can lead to their being overlooked in economic or social programs. “Right then and there, we decided to have an ID drive. It’s rare that you can have a conversation with so many different players where everyone is ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work,” said Bolis.

Over the course of the rest of the week, Bolis led a gender-sensitization workshop for 50 elected and administrative regional government officials in La Mé, which was met with requests for more such opportunities by male and female participants alike.

Then Achi’s wife, Florence Achi, one of the few female mayors in Côte d’Ivoire, invited the HKS team to an event celebrating the region’s mothers where the mayor was the guest of honor.

Before they went, Mayor Achi’s team helped the HKS team obtain dresses in Ivorian fashion to befit the occasion. The event featured a parade of women’s associations, music, and dancing with hundreds of celebrants resplendent in a rainbow of colors and designs.

In closing, Mayor Achi gave a rousing speech, assuring the crowd that women could do anything they set their minds to — even become mayor — to an eruption of roaring cheers.

“Nothing could have prepared us for the moment the mayor pulled us in to join her in a traditional dance in front of all of the spectators,” Bolis said. “The audience was generous with their applause, considering our clear lack of experience with Ivorian dance.”

Since the July event, Achi’s gender-equity work in La Mé has picked up speed. This fall, La Mé’s Regional Council approved the country’s first-ever gender-responsive budget, which allots funding for gender initiatives across the region in 2025. Areas of focus include women’s rights awareness-raising, training on active citizenship, adult literacy classes, and enhanced support for agricultural production.

Women in the area have also expressed a strong interest in financial-inclusion initiatives. In response, the government has budgeted for increased investment in support of women’s savings groups, which are called AVEC (French for “with”), in Côte d’Ivoire, as well as training to help women use their phones for saving, lending, and transactional purposes.

The new budget “brought tears to my eyes,” said Bolis, who has wrapped up her time in CID but continues her work in gender-justice initiatives as a fellow with Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership.

“These initiatives will contribute to the financial resilience, well-being, and happiness of women — and men — across La Mé. They are the outcome of countless hours of work by our students to carefully untangle these complex issues, and by former Prime Minister Achi’s efforts to champion gender issues in a new and important way. They demonstrate the types of cross-border collaboration and joint learning that is made possible through an environment like Harvard. The joy of developing partnerships to create more equitable futures is why I do what I do.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographic motion studies were first pioneered in the 19th century by Eadweard Muybridge, who used multiple cameras and trip wires to photograph horses galloping. The process later evolved to use individual cameras and strobes in the work of the more contemporary Harold E. Edgerton and Gjon Mili.

How we did it

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

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