Larry Bacow’s mother, Ruth Wertheim, was 15 when she was sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp in the Czech Republic. Two years later, she was sent to Auschwitz, where she was separated from her parents, and subsequently moved to Merzdorf in Germany. Wertheim, the only member of her family to survive the war, was 18 when her camp and Auschwitz were liberated in 1945. A year later, she came to the U.S.

Former Harvard President Bacow joined world leaders, official delegates, and survivors on Jan. 27 as a representative of the University in a solemn ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in southern Poland. The site, where the Nazis murdered nearly 1 million Jews, has become an enduring symbol of the Holocaust and is now a museum and memorial.

In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Bacow spoke about the event, his first visit to the Auschwitz complex.

Can you tell us about your family’s connections to the Holocaust?

My mother was the only member of her family and the only Jew from her town, Londorf, Germany, who survived the war. I never really talked much about my mother in my professional life until I became president of Harvard in 2018. That was a time in which the government was showing increasing hostility toward immigrants as well as refugees, and I thought it was important for people to understand that those who come to this country from abroad typically do so for a variety of reasons.

One is simply to seek a better life for themselves and their children. They also come in search of religious freedom, and they may not have much in the way of resources. They may not speak the language, but they have a fierce determination to provide a better life for their children than they would have if they had remained behind.

Both of my parents were refugees. My father was born in Minsk in Belarus, and he came before the war, but my mother came after the war, so I started talking about it.

“How could she have lived through this experience and not been totally traumatized by it?”

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Larry Bacow: “I once asked her, ‘How could she have lived through this experience and not been totally traumatized by it?’ She was 15 when she went into the camps, 18 when she was liberated. She said, ‘At that point, Hitler had taken from me everything that I cared about: my parents, my friends, my entire family, our home, our possessions.’ She said, ‘I could have been angry or bitter for the rest of my life, and Hitler then would have deprived me of everything else, or I could live well, and that would be my revenge.’ And that was my mother. She was an amazingly resilient and strong person.”

Was this your first time in Auschwitz?

Yes. I had avoided going to any of the death camps previously. It was too close. My earliest memory as a child is my mother waking up in the middle of the night with a nightmare. I was 4 years old, and she was only nine years out of Auschwitz.

Having said that, my mother was a really remarkable woman, because first of all, she was very optimistic, determined, and forward-thinking; she was everyone’s favorite aunt. Everybody loved my mother. I once asked her, “How could she have lived through this experience and not been totally traumatized by it?” She was 15 when she went into the camps, 18 when she was liberated.

She said, “At that point, Hitler had taken from me everything that I cared about: my parents, my friends, my entire family, our home, our possessions.” She said, “I could have been angry or bitter for the rest of my life, and Hitler then would have deprived me of everything else, or I could live well, and that would be my revenge.” And that was my mother. She was an amazingly resilient and strong person.

How did the ceremony affect you personally?

When Alan Garber invited me to represent Harvard at the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I thought this was something that I needed to do. In some ways, it was an opportunity to physically bear witness to the atrocities that had been inflicted upon my mother and her family, and so many others.

What made the trip particularly poignant is that Auschwitz was liberated on Jan. 27 of 1945, and my mother passed away on Jan. 27, 1994, so this was the anniversary of my mother’s death. I just felt like I had to do this. This was important, especially at a time in which antisemitism is rising throughout the world. I was with two dozen heads of state who attended and other delegates who were there to make a statement that this should not and cannot happen again.

What were the most moving aspects of the ceremony for you?

There are commemorative events every five years. At this year’s commemoration the only speakers were Auschwitz survivors. This being the 80th anniversary, the organizers recognized that five or 10 years from now, there are likely to be no remaining survivors. The focus of the event was on the testimony of survivors. They were the only ones who spoke, other than the heads of the foundation and the museum, each of whom gave brief remarks.

Each of the survivors was quite elderly, in many cases quite frail, and some were using walkers and canes. They needed to be assisted to get to the podium, but that made their testimony that much more powerful — that they were determined for the world to know what happened and what happened to them. There’s a quotation that’s often attributed to Stalin, “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” Hearing the survivors’ stories made a number that’s otherwise incomprehensible very, very real. It was extremely, extremely moving.

There were also a few additional poignant moments. We all took shuttle buses from a parking lot to get to the event. It wasn’t a long trip, maybe eight or nine minutes. The buses were quite crowded, with most people standing, and as the buses drove in, we passed a cattle car in part of the preservation area in Auschwitz. I couldn’t help but think: Here we were in a bus that had heat, and although we were closely packed, it was nothing in comparison to those in which people who were deported to Auschwitz faced. There were hundreds of people crammed into these cattle cars, in many cases, without food or water, or even space to lie down.

I was also struck at the end of the ceremony, when we all rose to be led in prayer. There’s a prayer called Kaddish that Jews say for loved ones who have died on the anniversary of their death. This was the anniversary of my mother’s death, and saying it there, where the ashes of her family were literally scattered, was something I will never forget for the rest of my life.

“Hearing the survivors’ stories made a number that’s otherwise incomprehensible very, very real.”

My mother talked about how she was separated from her parents as they went directly to the crematorium. I was also impressed by the commitment of those who had worked so hard to preserve this memory and to preserve Auschwitz itself. They were not Jews. They were Poles. I think they are to be commended for their good efforts.

What role can universities play in preserving the memory of the Holocaust?

Our motto is truth, Veritas, and this is a time in which people continue to deny the existence of the Holocaust, where major leaders suggest that the time has come to turn the page and stop focusing on what the Nazis did.

It’s in these times that universities have a role to play by helping to preserve the record and to teach what actually happened. There were many Holocaust scholars who were represented at the event. Ronald Lauder, who is the chairman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation, pointed out that five years ago, at the last commemorative event, it was unthinkable that the world could be awash in antisemitism as it is now.

He said, “All the more reason to capture these stories, to document them, to preserve Auschwitz for posterity.” The entire Auschwitz death camp is preserved as a museum, and the Polish people deserve enormous respect for having done that.

There was one speaker who quoted a survivor who had spoken at the 70th anniversary of the commemoration of Auschwitz, someone by the name of Roman Kent, a Polish Holocaust survivor who is no longer alive. Kent’s quote really captured the purpose of the event. He said, “We cannot let our past become our children’s future.” For me, that sums things up quite well.

Every Thanksgiving, a handful of international College students trek to Diane Gallagher’s house in Brookline to eat home-cooked turkey, mashed potatoes, and gravy, and to share the history of their home countries’ flags.

Isa Salmanu ’28 from Nigeria was part of the group this past November, along with classmates from Argentina, Honduras, Portugal, and Spain. “The table was lively and full, as Diane had invited her neighbors and children. It felt like a big, warm gathering,” the Pennypacker Hall resident said. “We talked about a little bit of everything.”

The tradition is one of many that Gallagher and her two daughters have maintained since she became one of the inaugural members of the Harvard Host Family Program more than 40 years ago.

The program began in the late 1970s as a way to link new international students to local families with Harvard affiliations. Run out of the College’s First-Year Experience office, the initiative has few formal requirements. Host parents often meet up with students for meals, celebrate holidays, and, most importantly, help them adjust to life at Harvard.

Gallagher, who was then married to a Harvard Medical School alumnus, became one of the first volunteers to sign on after expressing the need to support incoming students from Africa to the secretary of then-President Derek Bok. She made hosting first-years a family tradition, with daughters Maura and Claire joining the effort when Diane moved to Cape Verde to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1990 to 1992.

Since then, the three women estimate they have helped dozens of students adjust to life on campus.

“It’s really been such a wonderful thread in the tapestry of the Gallaghers’ lives,” said Maura Gallagher. “It’s something that we all just enjoy immensely.”

Kevin Burke ’66 began hosting students in the 1980s. He took a break from participating in the program while raising his own family, but returned when he and his wife became empty nesters. “This time, I was able to put more time and effort into it,” he said.

Burke described his three-point process for meeting his new students. First, he picks them up at Logan Airport and drives them to campus. “It’s just really a lot of fun and a rare experience to share in the excitement, especially in cases where the students have never even been to Boston or the United States before,” he said.

Burke then takes students shopping for dorm essentials and helps them move in.

“It’s very uplifting and for me, it’s a mixture of nostalgia, optimism, and loyalty to my College,” said the Massachusetts native, who played defenseman for the men’s ice hockey team for two years. 

Polina Galouchko ’23 from Moscow recalls how grateful she felt for Burke in her early days in Cambridge.

“The first couple of days, he really just took care of everything,” said Galouchko, who is now a graduate student in political science and has stayed in contact with Burke. “I was completely unaware of where one gets things, and he took me shopping and showed me around campus. It was just incredible and so helpful.”

Nekesa Straker, senior assistant dean of residential life and first-year students, said this year 142 families volunteered to host 174 undergrads, including 98 international students. An additional 65 students were put on a waiting list, highlighting the need for more hosts.

“Our expectation, really, is that they form a connection with the students. It can range from going out to dinner, having coffee, answering questions, or just being another resource,” Straker said. The First-Year Experience office also offers opportunities for hosts and students to meet up during family weekend or at various sports events on campus.

Reisa Volkert, whose husband, L. John Volkert ’56, is an alum, and Sheila Thimba, College dean of administration and finance, have grown close to all of the students they have hosted, many of whom they see regularly.

Thimba, once an international student herself at St. Elizabeth University in Morristown, N.J., from Kenya, remembered what it felt like to be in a country far from family and friends.

During the past decade, she and her husband, George, have hosted dozens of students, many from Africa, and remain in contact with many of them long after graduation. With each new student, she immediately adds them to her host family WhatsApp group.

“I think they will say that’s actually more valuable to them than talking with us old folks,” Thimba joked. “We’re useful for picking up at the airport or taking them to Target. But mostly they get to know each other. That’s been incredibly useful.”

She noted that past students who have graduated and returned to Kenya have established a “farewell committee” for first-years leaving the country to come to Cambridge.

Similarly, Volkert, who also primarily hosts students from Africa, has made it her mission to connect each new cohort of students to others who came before them and make up her extended host family.

Once at Harvard, she takes them out to dinner and shopping when they need it. “For me, this really works well in terms of being that person who would be the parent or there for what they need,” she said.

“It’s like a second family here in the United States,” said Kwame Boateng ’28, one of Volkert’s students this year. “Reisa is like a mother to us, and the other members of the host family are like brothers and sisters to me. I love them very much. We meet every two weeks for dinner, and we get to catch up away from all the academic stuff.”

Boateng and Emmanuel Muriuki ’28, who is paired with Thimba, credited their host mothers for warning them about Boston’s tough winter weather. Muriuki, who comes from Kirinyaga County in Kenya, said he had “no idea where to start” when it came to finding warm clothing.

Thimba took him and other host students shopping for jackets and accessories that Muriuki started wearing as temperatures dipped this fall.

Two of Burke’s students, Galouchko and Sasha Khalo ’28 from Ukraine, described the enduring and endearing interactions he’s had with them — and their families.

When Khalo arrived in Boston with her mother and sister, they were all able to meet Burke. “He was just so thoughtful,” she said. “He’s a photographer, so he was taking professional pictures of us and making memories for us.”

Since then, Burke has kept Khalo’s family apprised of her time in Harvard through emails and photos.

Burke attended Galouchko’s wedding in New Hampshire the summer after she graduated, flying a camera-equipped drone over the nuptials to capture video of special moments, which he later gave to the newlyweds as a gift.

“It was super special, because we didn’t realize he was doing that. Six months later, he showed up and was like, ‘OK, here’s my gift to you guys!’” she shared. “There were so many precious moments captured from above, and it was such a unique and cool gift.”

Alumni, faculty, staff and other affiliates interested in becoming hosts can inquire with the First-Year Experience office.

When artist Joseph Lindon Smith arrived in Giza a century ago, it was on the heels of an exciting discovery: a tomb chapel for a high-ranking Egyptian official named Idu dating to 2390–2361 B.C.E.

Color photography had not yet advanced enough to be of use to archaeologists in 1925, so the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition had enlisted Smith, a former portrait artist trained in Boston, to document finds inside the Tomb of Idu. Such brightly colored renderings of archaeological sites remain valuable to scholars today.

In fact, the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East recently acquired “The Royal Scribe, Idu” — one of the roughly five paintings Smith made over two months at work in the tomb — now on view in a second-floor exhibition.

“The monuments are changing. There’s deterioration, there’s the elements; sometimes, unfortunately, there’s mistreatment,” said Peter Der Manuelian, museum director and Barbara Bell Professor of Egyptology. “Any documentation you get from the old days that shows things in a different or better-preserved state than you see them today — maybe with more colors preserved — is always welcome.”  

The painting depicts a statue of Idu from the waist up, framed within a decorative “false door” on the tomb chapel’s west wall. Ancient Egyptians would leave food offerings there, believing the souls of the deceased could freely enter and exit from the netherworld. Hieroglyphs above include spells, Idu’s name, and his job titles.

“There are thousands of false doors all over Egypt. What makes this one interesting is this upper torso of Idu himself, the tomb owner, as if he’s coming up out of the netherworld,” Manuelian said. “He’s even got his hands out, saying, ‘I’m ready to take the offerings.’”

In his 1925 diary, Smith wrote about painting the Idu statue, saying “I finished my study of the ‘Bachsheesh’ man and began one of his little son at the left of the doorway.” In Arabic, “baksheesh” refers to money given as a tip, likely a reference to the statue’s outstretched hands, according to Manuelian.

Scientists today chronicle dig sites using technology such as photogrammetry to make 3D models. But before photography became advanced enough to properly capture color and detail in low-light environments, archaeologists often used line drawings, Manuelian said. It’s no wonder the work of artists like Smith was highly valued by Egyptologist and Harvard Professor George A. Reisner, who directed the Harvard-MFA Expedition from 1905 to 1947 on the Giza Plateau and other sites in Egypt and Sudan.

“Reisner saw them as academically valuable as well as aesthetically beautiful,” Manuelian said. “He loved that Smith could get this three-dimensionality in his two-dimensional paintings and make them visually pleasing, but also a good source of documentation.”

Today the MFA owns more than 100 of Smith’s paintings. The Harvard Art Museums has close to 100 of his works, but only a few of these show ancient Egyptian subjects.

“We are really happy to have this connection to Joseph Lindon Smith at Harvard,” Manuelian said. “It’s an aesthetic piece, it connects to the Harvard-MFA Expedition, and it’s one of Smith’s Egyptian paintings. I think it helps tell that story.”

Bradford Dickson usually dons a Speedo in preparation for matches. This time he wore a tuxedo. 

Head coach Ted Minnis and a few players recruited Dickson, an accomplished cellist, to perform the national anthem before the women’s team’s senior day game against Princeton. The sophomore attacker on the men’s water polo team is one of 53 students enrolled in the Harvard-Berklee College of Music joint studies program.

“Those are some of my favorite types of performances,” Dickson said of last spring’s event. “I’m playing for all my best friends, and it brings together everything I love: the people I love, the sport I love, and the music I love — all in one. That’s really special to me.”

“It was awesome to watch Bradford bring his two passions together in the same place,” Minnis said. “He did a great job, and it showed how well-rounded he is as a student, athlete, and as a young man.”

Dickson’s musical journey began in the second grade. He initially picked up the violin as part of an elementary school requirement, but his time with that instrument proved short-lived.

“I tried the cello in third grade, and I really liked it,” Dickson said. “The cello has the closest range to the human voice. Over time, I learned that the cello could do so many things; it can be the percussion, the bass — it’s so versatile. There’s no role the cello can’t take on.”

Along with his undergraduate coursework at the College, the economics concentrator  takes classes and does private sessions and public performances at Berklee, all of which will set him up to pursue a graduate degree there.

“All the classes are music-based and everything is centered around music, which I really enjoy,” Dickson said. “I get to take a wide variety of classes and receive a very open and broad music education.”

Finding a place where he could continue to study music at a high level played a significant role in Dickson’s college decision-making process. From music to academics to athletics, Harvard provided Dickson the best of all worlds, allowing him to practice cello, work toward his undergraduate degree, and play NCAA Division I water polo.

“Harvard was the only place where I could get an amazing education, play a Division I sport, and have the opportunity to pursue music at the best contemporary music school in the world,” Dickson said. “The fact that all three things aligned at Harvard was perfect.”

Whether in the pool with teammates or on stage playing the cello, Dickson credits his success to a strong work ethic and attention to detail, both of which allow him to continually improve.

“Bradford’s developed into his role as a defender on our team as he’s worked extremely hard on developing his skillset, and I’m very excited to see how he continues to progress,” Minnis said. “Out of the pool, just watching Bradford grow out of his shell and into a leader on this team has been remarkable to watch. He has been a major piece to our Boys and Girls Club program [of volunteers to Greater Boston chapters] and he’s such a great friend and role model to all his teammates.”

“Once you reach a certain level, the time you put in and the small details make a significant difference,” Dickson said. “It’s making that extra pass, practicing that shift on the cello a few more times. Those little things make us better than our competition. Cello is very similar. Everyone at Berklee can play, but when you have that extra bit of passion and the drive to be great, you stand out.”

Was it a slab of deli meat or the actor Jon Hamm that Elle magazine once described as “having a characteristic Midwestern farm yumminess”? That question was one of several tricky moments in the “Ham or Hamm?” portion of Hasty Pudding’s 2025 Man of the Year ceremony Friday at Farkas Hall. You’re forgiven if you’re stumped.

Hamm, an Emmy and Golden Globe winner known for his work in “Mad Men,” “Fargo,” and the Boston-set crime drama “The Town,” was honored — and roasted — ahead of a preview of Hasty’s 176th production, “101 Damnations.” The theatrical group’s president, Catherine Stanton ’25, and cast vice president, Bernardo de Moura Sequeira ’26, poked fun at the actor’s height, handsomeness, and his relationship with fellow actor Paul Rudd. Hamm was happy to play along, reprising his “Mad Men” role, among other stunts.

Before the fun, Andrew Farkas ’82, for whom Hasty Pudding’s theater was renamed in 2018, took to the stage to welcome Hamm and to talk up the mission.

“We are an artistic and philanthropic organization whose proceeds from everything go primarily to finance contributions to performing arts-oriented educational institutions around the world,” he said. “We’ve learned that if you give people a stage and you let them write about what it is they want to write about … it does wonders for self-esteem and development, and that is what the Hasty Pudding is all about, helping everybody else while having a wonderful time together and creating art in various forms.”

After the roast, Hamm was asked about the fate of his character in the TV drama “Landman,” whom fans are concerned may not return for a second season. “I’ve said to most of the people that have seen the show, not to give spoilers or anything, but usually, when you’re surrounded by your loved ones on a hospital bed and they’re crying and the machine has a flat line on it, it’s not great.”

He also reflected on “Mad Men,” calling it “a high-water mark in my life and career.” When it comes to his humorous side, the chance to host “Saturday Night Live” was a breakthrough, Hamm said. The show’s creator, Lorne Michaels, “gave me that opportunity, which led to ‘30 Rock,’ which led to ‘Bridesmaids.’ . . . So I’ll be forever grateful to him for that.”

Asked about “The Town,” Hamm insisted that his Boston accent in the Ben Affleck-directed movie was “supposed to be bad.”

“That’s my story and I’m sticking to it,” he said before kissing his Pudding Pot.

Hasty Pudding will honor the 2025 Woman of the Year, Cynthia Erivo, with a roast on Feb. 5.

In the 2022 novel “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin ’00, Sam Masur pitches a business proposal to his friend Sadie at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. “Everything I Never Told You” (2014) by Celeste Ng ’02 uses the River Houses near the John Weeks Footbridge to set a graduate-student love interest. And Selin Karadağ from “The Idiot” (2017) by Elif Batuman ’99 meets up with senior crush Ivan on the Widener Library steps.

Harvard’s campus has long served as the setting for narrative works by alumni as well as many others.

Beth Blum, Harris K. Weston Associate Professor of the Humanities, teaches an English Department course that explores books, films, television episodes, and even comics that engage with Harvard as object of cultural intrigue and critique. In her course, students discuss themes of belonging, tradition, privilege, and competition, research authors’ personal histories in the Archives, and even experiment with writing their own Harvard narratives.

In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Blum discusses the longstanding appeal of the genre, for both writers and readers.

What counts as a “Harvard Novel”? How do you define the genre?

I see the Harvard novel as a subset of campus fiction, which is simply any fiction set on a college campus — a classic example would perhaps be “Lucky Jim” by Kingsley Amis from 1954. These books are often either concerned with the tribulations of a professor who is up against a heartless administration, facing their own personal challenges and interpersonal dramas, or with the perspective of a student entering this new world and having to adjust to the realities of a very intense microcosm of the university.

Some stories are explicitly about Harvard and firmly set in the Yard, like Erich Segal’s 1970 hit “Love Story.” Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty,” which she wrote while at Radcliffe, is set at the fictional “Wellington College,” a place which shares some traits with Harvard but combines these aspects with those of an imaginary New England liberal arts college environment. Sometimes Harvard is simply part of a character’s formative backstory, as in “Everything I Never Told You” or “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.”

What are some common themes you see across these types of novels?

One point that quickly comes across is that attending Harvard is often a family affair. It is entwined with parental expectations and sacrifices, but also with sibling dynamics. This is something we see in “Everything I Never Told You.”

Another prominent theme is student-teacher relationships and the experience of pedagogical projection or transference. In [the 1973 film] “The Paper Chase,” the protagonist, Hart, becomes increasingly obsessed with pleasing his domineering law professor, only to realize at the end that the professor barely knows who he is.

The “street-smart outsider underdog” versus “privileged Harvard insider” is another common trope. This is connected to the contrast between creative idealism and institutional assimilation.

Harvard novels can often become a sort of morality tale, where the protagonist learns to embrace their internal values over those imposed by the structures of academic competition.

Belonging is another tremendously prominent motif. The value of community, of the interesting people one meets here, becomes a focal point of the literature.

To what do you attribute the longstanding appeal of Harvard’s campus?

As my students have pointed out, the University is itself an object of beauty and history. But that romantic history can feel incongruous with the gritty realities of daily living, and the best Harvard stories bring this to the fore.

For instance, the protagonist Selin in “The Idiot” describes the University handyman having to work around the decorative antlers hanging from the ceiling of the dining hall, trying to avoid being gouged by them. The clash between apprehending Harvard spaces as romantic historical objects, as anticipated by the incoming student, and the pragmatic need to maintain such spaces, with all the labor this maintenance entails, can create poignant opportunities for contemporary fiction.

Another common tactic is to use the University’s compression of time into this four-year space to create opportunities for drama. For students, there is a limited amount of time to make the most of their courses and relations here, so the stakes feel high and lend themselves to suspense and narrative action.

Do you think these books translate the same for Harvard students versus outside readers?

In my course, we’ve found that the experience of reading many of these texts is completely different for a Harvard affiliate than for a reader unfamiliar with Harvard settings. We’ve even found that the experience of reading these works as student versus faculty is very different.

For students, one of most important and consistently compelling aspects of Harvard that comes up a lot in class discussions is the housing system, the different quirks and identities of the various Houses, the drama of House and roommate selection — a sort of updating of the medieval “wheel of fortune,” the arbitrariness of fate.

Whereas for a faculty member such as myself, the Houses are much less central to my daily experience of the University. Reading these texts affords me insights into these everyday aspects of my students’ lives.

How can it benefit current students to read these texts?

One risk of the course is that campus customs can start to feel faintly ridiculous, as if you are living in your own campus satire. But I think this is actually a healthy side effect, as it encourages a little bit of irony and detachment from institutional pressures.

But more seriously, the course makes students experience campus life, and the educational journey, in a new way. Harvard landmarks we pass every day make appearances in the writings, from W.E.B. Du Bois’s undergraduate writings on the Johnston Gate for his English 12 class, to the use of the same Johnston Gate as “the wall” for punishing rebels in Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

One of their assignments asks them to uncover a “Harvard story” in the University’s archive, and then attempt to reconstruct how an author’s encounter with campus culture may have informed their philosophy or artistic output. One student looked at the courses listed on E.E. Cummings’ Harvard transcript and how it may have influenced the development of his modernist aesthetic. Another examined T.S. Eliot’s critiques of Harvard’s “elective system” of education, and how they relate to his literary criticism.

On a broader level, reading these texts can help students situate themselves within a cultural tradition that they are themselves helping to shape and define, and to reflect on this institutional affiliation that will forever be a part of their lives.

If someone wants to dive into reading a “Harvard novel,” where would you recommend starting?

As a scholar of modernism, my temptation is to recommend William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” a modernist novel published in 1936 and narrated as flashbacks by Quentin Compson to his Harvard roommate, Shreve.

But a book that I’m actually reading right now is “The Class” by Erich Segal. Like his earlier “Love Story,” it’s set at Harvard, but this novel follows five different students; it starts at their 25th class reunion and then flashes back to their freshman experiences. The double-temporality becomes both a reflection on the novelty of the student experience and a testament to how formative that experience became in the characters’ lives.

I definitely plan to incorporate it into future iterations of the course. I can’t wait to hear what the students will make of it.

Many Republican political candidates and leaders accused their Democratic counterparts of being soft on crime during the run-up to the 2024 elections. Concerns over the safety of the nation’s cities has been a longstanding — and potent — political issue.

But how much influence do elected officials actually have over crime rates? Are localities with Democratic mayors less safe than those run by Republicans? Are they less generous with funding for police or more prescriptive on enforcement or diversity in hiring? New research examined data from 400 U.S. cities over nearly three decades and found the political affiliation of mayors made little difference when it comes to crime rates and policing.

The Gazette spoke with one of the researchers, Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, associate professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, about what they learned. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What compelled your team to look into whether there was any data to back up partisan claims of whether one side was better on crime?

I don’t think those are just made-up claims coming from one side of the partisan aisle. One of the really interesting things about crime, specifically in cities, is that people on both sides of the partisan aisle have made claims that Democratic cities are not well-run, especially on crime and public safety. That includes everyone from President Trump, making claims that Democrats have driven cities into the ground and made them more dangerous, to post-2024 election, people on the Democratic side of the aisle saying that Democratic city leaders are not approaching crime well, and they’re not satisfying voters.

So, we wanted to get at the claim: Relative to Republican city leaders, are Democratic politicians making cities more dangerous for people in any way? Are they changing the way police are funded or staffed over the last three decades? And if they are funding the police at lower levels, is that leading to higher levels of crime?

Your research looked at the effect mayors had on police spending and staffing, and how their political leaning influenced the racial and gender composition of police forces and police chiefs. What did you find?

A lot of the post-2020 rhetoric around policing is about how Democrats are rethinking the role and enormous budgets of police departments in cities across the country. A lot of Democrats claim they’re changing the way policing happens — diversifying the police force, reducing racial disparities in arrests, changing the way it’s funded. We wanted to address that claim as well. Are Democratic and Republican mayors decreasing funding of the police, the way they’re staffed, and the way they make arrests, especially with relation to race? And it turns out, that claim is not true either.

Democratic politicians aren’t cutting the budgets of police, and they aren’t making the police force vastly less white relative to Republicans. They’re not increasing the number of women police officers. These are characteristics that might make a huge difference in how the police are perceived by the community and how they go about their jobs. If we saw changes in the people hired to be police officers, other research suggests we’re going to change racial disparities in people’s interactions with the police and police officers’ use of force against civilians. But we just don’t see those demographic effects.

And we don’t see those downstream differences in terms of how racialized the contact between people in cities and the police is. Some of our results are suggestive that Democrats might reduce the Black share of arrests, but these results are definitely not conclusive.

If there was a true effect, say, on the racial composition of arrests, we would expect all of our analyses to come back with the same answer, or at least in the ballpark of the same answer. We instead find what looks like maybe a negative effect on the Black share of drug crime arrests, and maybe the Black share of total arrests, but they’re not a large enough effect and not consistent across the many research designs we use.

So, we can’t say with a large degree of confidence that these aren’t the same results we would see if there were just chance differences across cities. And so I wouldn’t interpret these results to say, “Democrats are reducing racial disparities in arrests.” If Democratic leaders are doing that, they’re not doing it to a degree that is statistically detectable from how Republicans are changing the racial composition of arrests.

Politicians often point to a city’s overall crime rate or a reduction in certain types of crimes as evidence of their success. What influence do a mayor’s politics have on crime rates or the types of crimes committed?

I think anyone in the field of criminology would know that it’s not just local policies, at least in the short term, that are going to lead to big crime or arrest differences. Arrests are a discretionary policy choice by a police force, but crime is the result of a lot of different things. It’s not just the result of how many police you have and how well they’re doing their job. It’s the result of everything from economic conditions to youth job training programs to diversionary post-prosecution programs that reduce recidivism — all of these play a role. The national economic outlook could play a large role in reducing crime relative to a specific policy made by a mayor.

Often, these policies are having some marginal impact, but they’re rarely going to make huge shifts in crime, and they’re definitely not going to do it immediately.

Crime is a really hard problem to solve. You can’t just make one policy and crime disappears. So, blaming one party or the other for increases in crime is counterproductive to the goal of increasing public safety in cities.

Over the last 30 years, nearly every city in the United States has seen a big decrease in crime, both violent crime and property crime. But within cities, it fluctuates quite a great deal. Individual cities are going to see some fluctuations in crime and arrest rates.

It’s easy to try to point the finger at a specific mayor or other local politicians like prosecutors, but often it has to do with a systematic trend. Maybe they can make changes at the margin, which many of them do, but it’s often going to be hard to attribute those changes to a specific policy made by a specific politician.

So, neither party deserves credit when crime is down and shouldn’t be blamed when crime is up?

Exactly. There are a lot of policies that might make a difference in crime, but neither party is doing a better job than the other party at implementing those.

What were some things you weren’t able to measure or detect in this study that merit further investigation?

I think a lot of future research, and something that I know a lot of other researchers are working on right now, is looking at a single city or a handful of cities in the last five years and gathering really in-depth data on policy changes, police behavior, and crime or interactions between citizens and the police.

A lot of those researchers are doing a great job at informing policy in terms of how we can change how the police are perceived by the community, how we can improve citizen interactions with the police, and how we can decrease crime in a way that’s going to help public safety for everyone and reduce racial biases.

Our study shows that these things have very little, it turns out, to do with partisanship and who the political leaders are in a partisan sense. They likely have much more to do with our police forces being trained differently or hiring different people. That’s where a lot of the really promising research is. I’d love to see claims from politicians about some of that evidence on what actually works, and pointing to their efforts to implement those policies in cities.

Immune cells called regulatory T cells have long been known for their role in countering inflammation. In the setting of infection, these so-called Tregs keep the immune system from going into overdrive and mistakenly attacking the body’s own organs.

Now scientists at Harvard Medical School have discovered a distinct population of Tregs dwelling in the protective layers of the brains of healthy mice, and their repertoire is much broader than inflammation control.

The research, published Tuesday in Science Immunology, shows that these specialized Tregs not only control access to the inner regions of the brain but also ensure the proper renewal of nerve cells in an area of the brain where short-term memories are formed and stored. 

The research, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, represents an important step toward untangling the complex interplay of immune cells in the brain. If replicated in further animal studies and confirmed in humans, the research could open up new avenues for averting or mitigating disease-fueling inflammation in the brain.

“We found a thus-far-uncharacterized, unique compartment of regulatory T cells residing in the meninges surrounding the brain and involved in an array of protective functions, acting as gatekeepers for other immune cells and involved in nerve cell regeneration,” said study senior author Diane Mathis, the Morton Grove-Rasmussen Professor of Immunohematology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.

The work adds to a growing body of research showing that Tregs go above and beyond their traditional immune-regulatory duties and act as tissue-specific guardians of health, the researchers said. Earlier work led by Mathis showed that Tregs in the muscles get activated during intense physical activity to fend off exercise-induced inflammation and maintain muscle health.

“The Tregs that we found in the meninges are endowed with skills customized to fit the needs of this particular tissue,” said study lead author Miguel Marin-Rodero, a doctoral student in the immunology program at Harvard Medical School in the Benoist-Mathis lab. “These findings are consistent with other studies showing that Tregs turn on and off specific genes to match the identity and needs of the organ they reside in — they are really the best immune cells ever.”

Tregs dwelling at the brain border act as gatekeepers

The meninges, three protective tissue layers under the skull, shield the brain and spinal cord from injury, toxins, and infection. This brain border hosts a diverse population of immune cells. Most of these cells are innate, and their roles and functions have been fairly well defined. But the brain border is also home to adaptive immune cells, many of which develop after birth, whose roles in brain immunity have remained somewhat elusive. The new study provides a detailed profile of Tregs — a type of adaptive immune cell — at the body-brain interface.

To understand the role of Tregs in this context, the researchers used a genetic technique to deplete them from the meninges of mice. The meninges of animals lacking Tregs produced higher than normal levels of an inflammatory chemical called interferon-gamma, causing widespread inflammation of the meninges. The removal of Tregs also opened the brain’s inner regions to interferon-producing, inflammation-fueling immune cells and activated immune cells that reside nearby but are normally kept at bay by Tregs. No longer restrained by Tregs, these immune cells infiltrated the brain and caused widespread inflammation and tissue damage. The resulting inflammation, the researchers said, was reminiscent of the damage and immune-cell activity seen in human and mouse brains with Alzheimer’s disease. 

“These experiments demonstrate that Tregs in the meninges act as gatekeepers to guard the innermost regions of the brain,” Marin-Rodero said.

Absence of Tregs scars a memory-making region of the brain

Next, researchers examined the effect of depleting Tregs on various brain regions. Not all brain regions were affected equally. In the absence of Tregs, inflammatory cells clustered mostly in the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in learning, memory formation and storage, and spatial navigation. The hippocampus is also one of few regions in rodent and human brains that continues to produce neurons into adulthood, so an assault on this area could have repercussions for memory formation.

Neural stem cells in the hippocampus underwent the most dramatic changes as a result of Treg depletion. These cells are critical because they are capable of becoming many other specialized brain cells. But in the absence of Tregs, their ability to differentiate into other cells was critically hampered. Their activity slowed down or altogether ceased, and they started to die off. 

Treg depletion appeared to leave a “scar” in the hippocampus, leading to a persistent functional defect in short-term memory formation, the researchers said. Treg-deficient animals developed problems with short-term memory that persisted even months after their Tregs were restored to normal.

But how exactly do Tregs keep other cells in check? 

In a final set of experiments, the researchers found that in the brains of healthy mice, Tregs keep inflammation-driving immune cells under control by competing for a shared resource — a growth factor called IL-2. When Tregs were removed, other immune cells were able to gobble up this cellular fuel, multiply quickly, and produce inflammatory proteins. 

A pathway to understand and treat neurodegenerative diseases

Inflammation has been long implicated in multiple neurodegenerative diseases, so the question that comes next, Mathis said, is: Do Tregs in human brains play a role in curbing the inflammation that drives these degenerative processes?

Mathis’ team is currently studying this very question using a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease. Simultaneously, they are also working with colleagues in the neuropathology and neurosurgery departments at Massachusetts General Hospital to investigate this process in human brains with Alzheimer’s. 

In recent years, Treg-based therapies have generated excitement about the possibility of using these cells in an organ-specific or tissue-specific manner to treat immune-mediated diseases. These efforts include lab-modified Tregs (CAR-Tregs and T-cell receptor Tregs) as well as the design of therapeutic molecules that could alter Treg function in a precise and site-specific manner.

“Understanding exactly how Tregs perform their protective duties could one day help us design treatments that boost their activity to modulate a wide range of disease processes,” Mathis said. 

Additional authors included Elisa Cintado, Alec J. Walker, Teshika Jayewickreme, Felipe A. Pinho-Ribeiro, Quentin Richardson, Ruaidhrí Jackson, Isaac M. Chiu, Christophe Benoist, Beth Stevens, and José Luís Trejo.

The research described in this story was supported by the JPB Foundation, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, National Institutes of Health, NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, and the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation. Additional support was provided through HHMI and the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund and by a predoctoral fellowship from the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness).

Fertility rates have fallen everywhere outside of sub-Saharan Africa. And they have fallen faster, and dropped even further, in some developed nations than others.

In a new paper, Claudia Goldin, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics, explains this divergence with a data-tested model that shows gendered and generational conflicts arising with swift economic change. The 2023 Nobel laureate notes countries whose economies grew gradually over the 20th century — including the U.S. and Sweden — now average around 1.7 children born to each woman. However, latecomers to development like Japan, Korea, and Italy average far fewer children.

The study illustrates how women in transitioning modern economies can be especially disadvantaged by traditional gender roles. “Children take time, and that time isn’t easily contracted out or mechanized,” said Goldin in a presentation of the research to the European Central Bank’s Annual Research Conference last fall. “Therefore much of the change in fertility will depend on if men assume more work in the home as women are drawn into the market, particularly if the home has children.

“If they don’t,” she continued, “women will be forced to cut back on something.”

Her analysis builds upon findings from a 2009 study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives titled “Will the Stork Return to Europe and Japan?” The paper — by economists James Feyrer, Bruce I. Sacerdote, Ph.D. ’97, and Ariel Dora Stern, Ph.D. ’14 — found birthrates are highest in countries with low-income levels and low female employment. But a surprising pattern was observed in wealthier countries.

“They note that women’s participation in the economy is actually greater in countries with higher fertility,” said Goldin, who is also the Lee and Ezpeleta Professor of Arts and Sciences.

Her paper compares fertility rates in two groups of six countries. The first set — comprised of Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S. — saw relatively continuous economic development over the 20th century even with the disruptions of the Great Depression and two world wars. All had reached a total fertility rate of around two children per woman by the 1970s. Not until the 2010s did rates fall below that figure.

The second group — Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, Portugal, and Spain — developed quickly from the mid-1950s and ’60s after long periods of economic stagnation or decline. Each averaged three children or more per woman in 1970. But all six had dropped below two by the mid-1980s. Most had converged to around 1.3 by the mid-1990s, with Korea being the extreme case. Its total fertility rate for 2022 (the last year included in Goldin’s analysis) was 0.78 children per woman.

Demographers have dubbed the fertility rates of those nations the “lowest-low.”

Total fertility rates for two groups of nations, 1920 to 2022

Goldin theorized that families in the second set of countries had been “catapulted” into the modern economy, with less time for adjusting gender norms. Korea, for example, saw incomes quadruple between the 1960s and ’80s, with 30 percent of the population moving from rural areas to urban areas (usually Seoul) over the same period.

“Rapid economic change often challenges strongly held beliefs,” she summarized. “And beliefs change more slowly than economies do.”

Her paper introduces a framework for understanding how such conflicts lead to lower fertility. It assumes that family traditions and beliefs inform a person’s fertility plans. But so do economic conditions observed in young adulthood. This all comes together as couples plan family size, with men putting more weight on factors inherited from previous generations and women acting as “agents of change” by emphasizing economic self-interest.

“It’s not that boys are more traditional than girls; it’s that boys have more to gain from the traditional home,” Goldin explained. “But girls suddenly see that their options have changed. They can get an education. They can go out and work.”

Goldin’s model demonstrates that greater macroeconomic growth from childhood to adulthood means greater generational conflict and wider gulfs between men’s and women’s preferred family size. It assumes that men who contribute more at home have more of an influence on family size. But women’s desires win out when caregiving and other household tasks fall primarily on them.

To test her ideas, Goldin started with 100 years of economic and geographic data from all 12 countries. Sure enough, the “lowest-low” nations saw meteoric growth in per-capita gross domestic product, combined with huge rural-to-urban migrations, beginning in the mid-20th century. Meanwhile, GDP charted a slow, steady incline in the first set of countries, with far fewer migrations to big cities.

Time-use surveys, assembled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, provided Goldin with evidence of gendered divisions of unpaid caregiving and household labor between 2009 and 2019. She uncovered a bigger gap between men and women in the “lowest-low” countries. Women, on average, devoted 3.1 more hours per day to household duties in Japan and three more hours per day in Italy. Compare that with the U.S., where women logged about 1.79 more daily hours on household duties, or Sweden, where the difference was just 0.8 hours.

“The bottom line is,” Goldin said, “countries that saw this very, very rapid increase in standards of living are probably at sub-optimal birthrates.”

The labor economist and economic historian ends by floating a novel solution. The U.S. baby boom, which peaked above 3.5 children per woman in the late 1950s, is the rare example of a wealthy country temporarily increasing its fertility rate. It was accomplished by “glorifying marriage, motherhood, the ‘good wife,’ and the home,” Goldin writes.

Societies that want to encourage more babies today, she suggests, should try venerating fatherhood.

The anesthetic ketamine has become increasingly popular as a treatment for people with severe depression that resists conventional therapies. A number of studies have documented the drug’s game-changing effects, but scientists have been unsure exactly how it works. Now, a tiny, translucent fish appears to provide important new insights.

Zebrafish, a member of the minnow family popular as a model for neuroscience research and in home aquariums, do not get depressed, exactly. However, when placed in a virtual environment that simulates the lack of forward movement, they do seem to “give up” — that is, they stop swimming.

Researchers have leveraged this behavior, which is reminiscent of persistent traits in human depression, as well as the tiny fish’s see-through body to observe how their tendency to give up changes when ketamine is introduced. In research published last month in the journal Neuron, scientists at Harvard and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Research Campus were able to trace the drug’s interaction with an unexpected neural partner.

As in humans, ketamine makes zebrafish “more resilient to this kind of futility,” said Alex Chen, a Ph.D. student in the Engert Lab in Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Ahrens Lab at Janelia, who co-authored the paper.

Most research attention has focused on neurons, said Chen and co-lead author Marc Duque Ramírez, but their team found that supporting cells called astroglia were the ones in play with this fish “depression” and its treatment.

When the fish first perceive they aren’t moving, activity in the astroglia cells ramps up, and the zebrafish begin to swim harder. The astroglia eventually reach a threshold that signals the fish’s neurons to stop swimming. Ketamine, however, appears to overstimulate the astroglia, making them less sensitive. This overstimulation, which occurs through its stimulation of noradrenergic neurons that activate astrocytes (like astroglia), paradoxically calms the “giving up” response, so the fish continues to swim.

“That was definitely a surprise for us,” said Chen. “We knew these cells were involved in the behavior, and so we are wondering whether giving the fish ketamine would affect these cells after the drug is washed out. But we had no idea that the cells would react so strongly to the drug.”

“We expected it to have the opposite effect,” added Duque Ramírez, a Ph.D. student in the Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences who is also in the Engert Lab.

Duque Ramírez explained that the drug alters calcium levels in the cells, blocking increases that usually lead to the “giving up” trigger. “The hypothesis we have is that by causing this hyperactivation of astroglia, it somehow readjusts the system to a new homeostatic set point where it takes a lot more calcium to induce giving up.”

While the study increases understanding of how ketamine works, the light it has shed on the role of astroglia is key.

“Astroglia cells have historically been thought to play more of a passive role in the brain,” said Chen. “More recently we have seen that these cells can act as active signaling partners to neurons. What seems to happen is that the astroglia cells respond to norepinephrine, which is a transmitter that is released in times of stress or high arousal. The effect in fish is that when these astrocytes are activated by norepinephrine, they suppress swimming, and the fish give up.”

But while the reaction sheds light on how ketamine works, the insight does not appear to apply to other drugs.

“We also tested a bunch of other antidepressants,” said Duque Ramírez. “With some of the psychedelic compounds, even though we saw the same effect behaviorally, they didn’t cause this increase in astroglia in calcium. We think that this could suggest that these other drugs are working on parallel pathways, that they might eventually converge into the same targets, but that this effect was very specific to ketamine.”

“Most of the work being done right now on ketamine and other fast-acting antidepressants has focused primarily on their effects on neurons,” said Chen. “It seems possible that by ignoring these other cell types in the brain, it’s been an obstacle in how the field understands how these drugs work.”

This research was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Celebrating the funding of more than $60 million to create and preserve affordable housing throughout Boston, Harvard Executive Vice President Meredith Weenick welcomed city leadership — including Mayor Michelle Wu’s chief of staff, Tiffany Chu, and chief of housing, Sheila Dillon — to the Harvard Ed Portal in Allston to announce awards for 12 projects.

“We know that the housing crisis is one of the biggest sources of stress for families in our city, and that’s why every action we need to take creates more housing production and ensures affordability,” Chu said. “The 12 projects receiving funding here today include affordable units for rent and purchase, affordable housing, senior housing, supportive housing, and will be built on both public and private land.”

“At a time when affordable housing need has never been greater, these awards are an important step forward,” said Weenick. “We’re proud to partner in this effort, and I want to recognize that it takes a village to support these types of projects. All of you have so many partners, including the city, and we’re lucky to have such terrific partners all across our neighborhood.”

Once complete, the funded projects will provide 637 units of income-restricted housing in the neighborhoods of Allston, Brighton, Chinatown, Dorchester, Fenway, Jamaica Plain, Mattapan, Mission Hill, and Roxbury.

The Harvard-enabled Allston projects included in this funding announcement are the creation of 43 affordable homeownership units on land donated by Harvard at 65 Seattle St. in Allston, and the transformation of the historic Hill Memorial Baptist Church on North Harvard St. into 49 affordable rental units for Boston seniors. Harvard contributed $4.8 million to fully fund site acquisition for the latter. 

“As a longtime member of the Allston-Brighton community, Harvard has developed a complex housing strategy that adapts to the dynamic needs of city requirements and city residents,” Weenick said. “And we are excited to be involved in enabling two of the projects that will be announced today. These two projects represent nearly 100 units of affordable housing in Allston and they exemplify what we can activate through creativity, responsiveness, and partnership.”

Harvard’s efforts beyond the campus in Allston already have enabled more than 1,300 new housing units, approximately 25 percent of which are affordable. Harvard donated land at the former site of Brookline Machine at 90 Antwerp St., enabling the creation of 20 homeownership units, 12 of which are affordable. Through regulatory agreements associated with construction of the Enterprise Research Campus, Havard has committed $25 million over 12 years to support affordable housing creation in the neighborhood and will ensure that 20 percent of the residential units in the ERC are affordable.

Additionally, the Harvard-funded All Bright Homeownership Program supports homeownership stabilization in Allston-Brighton by enabling the Allston Brighton Community Development Corp. to purchase and resell homes with deed restrictions to ensure housing remains owner-occupied. On a regional scale, the long-standing Harvard Local Housing Collaborative has funded more than $20 million in low-interest revolving loans since its creation in 2000, helping create and preserve more than 7,000 units of affordable housing in Greater Boston.

According to Boston officials, all of the new construction projects funded in this round will be required to follow the Zero Emissions Building requirements outlined in the MOH Design Standards, and new developments will use electricity and on-site solar panels as the sole (or primary) fuel sources. 

Expressing appreciation for the award recipients, Dillon remarked, “You responded to our request for proposals and our funding awards, because you seized an opportunity out there. You saw a great development idea. You put together quality applications. You agreed to make your developments carbon-neutral, and have made commitments to ensure that local businesses, local Boston businesses, are benefiting from this economic activity. Your housing developments will not only house our residents, but they’ll contribute to Boston’s climate goals and economic equity goals, so thank you for all that you have done through this funding round.”

“We’re delighted to celebrate this milestone with all of you. The announcement of these awards is not just financially significant, but is a testament to the hard work and dedication of everyone involved in the effort to create and preserve housing throughout the city of Boston,” stated Weenick.

Harvard University Housing (HUH) manages approximately 3,000 apartments, offering a broad choice of locations, unit types, amenities, and sizes to meet the individual budgets and housing needs of eligible Harvard affiliates (full-time graduate students, faculty members, and employees). Harvard affiliates may apply for Harvard University Housing online at www.huhousing.harvard.edu. The website also provides information about additional housing options and useful Harvard and community resources for incoming and current affiliates.

In accordance with the University’s rent policy, Harvard University Housing charges market rents*. To establish the proposed rents for 2025–2026, Jayendu Patel of Economic, Financial & Statistical Consulting Services performed and endorsed the results of a regression analysis on three years of market rents for more than 14,700 apartments. The data on apartments included in the analysis were obtained from a variety of sources, including rentals posted on the HUH Off-Campus Housing website by private-market property owners, information supplied by a real estate appraisal firm, and various non-Harvard rental websites, in order to provide comparable private rental market listings for competing apartment complexes in Cambridge, Boston, and Somerville. As always, all revenues generated by Harvard University Housing in excess of operating expenses and debt service are used to fund capital improvements and renewal of the facilities in HUH’s existing residential portfolio.

The rents noted in this article have been reviewed and endorsed by the Faculty Advisory Committee on Harvard University Housing and will take effect for the 2025-2026 leasing season. Written comments on the proposed rents may be sent to the Faculty Advisory Committee on Harvard University Housing, c/o Harvard University Housing, Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Campus Center, 1350 Massachusetts Ave., Room 827, Cambridge, MA 02138. Comments to the committee may also be sent via email to leasing@harvard.edu. Any written comments should be submitted by Feb. 7.

2025–2026 rents for continuing HUH tenants

Current HUH tenants who choose to extend their lease will receive, on average, a 5 percent rent increase, with actual increases ranging from 0 percent to 6.5 percent. Heat, hot water, electricity, and gas, where applicable, are included in all Harvard University Housing apartment rents; internet service and air conditioning may also be included where available.

Harvard University Housing tenants will receive an email in March 2025 with instructions on how to submit a request to either extend or terminate their current lease. Tenants who would like additional information or help in determining their continuing rental rates for 2025–2026 may call the HUH Leasing Office at (617) 495-1459.

2025–2026 rents for new HUH tenants for the 2025-2026 leasing season

The results of this market analysis and of other market research indicate that Harvard University Housing 2025–2026 market rents will be as listed below. Heat, hot water, electricity, and gas, where applicable, are included in all Harvard University Housing apartment rents; internet service and air conditioning may also be included, where available.

• 10 Akron Street: studios $2,340–$2,700; one-bedroom convertibles $2,964–$3,312.
• 18 Banks Street: one bedrooms $2,820–$3,204; two bedrooms $3,420–$3,588.
• Beckwith Circle: three bedrooms $3,204–$4,164; four bedrooms $3,624–$4,500.
• Botanic Gardens: one bedrooms $2,868–$3,012; two bedrooms $3,384–$3,540; three bedrooms $3,924–$4,164.
• 472–474 Broadway: one bedrooms $2,760–$2,832.
• 5 Cowperthwaite Street: studios $2,496–$2,904; one bedrooms $3,012–$3,024; one-bedroom convertibles $2,964–$3,228; two bedrooms $3,468–$4,236.
• 27 Everett Street: one bedrooms $3,156–$3,228; three bedrooms $4,248–$4,956.
• 29 Garden Street: studios $2,172–$2,520; one-bedroom convertibles $2,748–$2,784; two-bedroom efficiencies $3,084–$3,624; two bedrooms $3,468–$3,552; three bedrooms $4,776–$5,016.
• Harvard @ Trilogy: suite $1,956- $2,196; studios $2,376–$2,604; one-bedroom convertibles$3,060–$3,276; two-bedroom efficiencies $3,696–$3,948.
• Haskins Hall: studios $2,364–$2,460; one bedrooms $2,628–$2,904.
• Holden Green: one bedrooms $2,508–$2,880; two bedrooms $2,880–$4,056; three bedrooms $3,768–$3,852.
• 2 Holyoke Street: one bedrooms $2,856–$3,024.
• Kirkland Court: one bedrooms $2,532–$3,000; two bedrooms $3,336–$3,588; three bedrooms $4,296–$4,596.
• 8A Mt. Auburn Street: one bedrooms $2,856–$3,024.
• Peabody Terrace: studios $2,316–$2,976; one bedrooms $2,796–$3,312; two bedrooms $3,228–$3,852; three bedrooms $4,740–$5,160.
• 16 Prescott Street: studios $2,316–$2,472; one bedrooms $2,676–$2,880.
• 18 Prescott Street: studios $2,256–$2,328; one bedrooms $2,664–$2,928.
• 85–95 Prescott Street: studios $2,376–$2,628; one bedrooms $2,688–$3,132; two bedrooms $3,144.
• Shaler Lane: one bedrooms $2,544–$2,736; two bedrooms $2,904–$3,444.
• Soldiers Field Park: studios $2,772–$3,264; one bedrooms $3,192–$3,648; two bedrooms $3,912–$4,932; three bedrooms $4,332–$5,668; four bedrooms $5,688-$5,856.
• Terry Terrace: studios $2,448–$2,532; one bedrooms $2,700–$3,000; two bedrooms $3,336–$3,372.
• 9–13A Ware Street: studios $2,352–$2,496; one bedrooms $2,664–$2,988; two bedrooms $3,324–$3,348.
• 15 Ware Street: studios $2,580; one bedrooms $3,504; two bedrooms $4,080.
• 19 Ware Street: two bedrooms $3,876–$3,924; three bedrooms $4,164.
• One Western Avenue: studios $2,532–$2,820; one bedrooms $2,724–$3,180; two bedrooms $3,192–$3,984; three bedrooms $4,608–$4,980.
• Wood Frame Buildings: studios $1,728–$2,448; one bedrooms $2,496–$3,468; two bedrooms $3,132–$4,800; three bedrooms $3,504–$6,384; four bedrooms $5,400–$6,000.

The comments received will be reviewed by the Faculty Advisory Committee, which includes: Suzanne Cooper, Edith M. Stokey Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School; Nancy Hill, Charles Bigelow Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Howell Jackson, James S. Reid Jr. Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Jerold S. Kayden, Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design, Graduate School of Design; John Macomber, Gloria A. Dauten Real Estate Fellow, senior lecturer, Harvard Business School; Daniel P. Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering, Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and Sean Caron, vice president for Campus Services (chair), Office of Executive Vice President for Administration.

*The rents for tenants of Harvard University Housing are set at prevailing market rates, in keeping with the University’s affiliated housing rent policy. This policy was established in 1983 by President Derek Bok based on recommendations from a study led by Professor Archibald Cox and the Committee on Affiliated Housing. The original faculty committee determined that market rate pricing was the fairest method of allocating apartments and that setting rents for Harvard University Housing below market rate would be a form of financial aid, which should be determined by each individual School, not via the rent setting process. Additionally, the cost of housing should be considered when financial aid is determined.

Today many people would be lost without the interactive, highly mathematical GPS maps that we carry in our pockets. But entire traditions of mapmaking exist outside the norms of latitude and longitude, from routes drawn in sand to itineraries for early traders to topographical guides for the earliest hobby cyclists.

“Rivers & Roads: The Art of Getting There,” an exhibit on display through Jan. 31 in the corridor gallery of Pusey Library, explores methods of mapmaking “that don’t adhere to this latitude and longitude system but are still very effective,” said curator Molly Taylor-Poleskey, Harvard Map Librarian. Taylor-Poleskey spoke to the Gazette about what these unusual maps can tell us about how we think about getting from here to there. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

What inspired you to focus on maps that don’t rely on a grid system?

There is a Western tradition of mathematical mapping that undergirds digital wayfinding like what you have on your Google Maps. Other ways of saying this are Cartesian, universal, or Ptolemaic maps, from the ancient Greek mathematician who came up with the idea of placing an imaginary grid over the globe from which you could measure one point to another.

But that’s only one kind of distance, and it’s not the way that I think about distance when I move around in my everyday life. I think, “OK, I’m going to bike to work today. Where are the hills, where’s the dangerous intersections?” Mapping throughout time and in different cultures has approached the question of getting around in so many ways, but we’ve become so used to thinking about mapping in this one way.

We’ve had this idea about accuracy that goes along with math as universally and completely objective. I wanted to say, it’s not objective. A lot of the maps in this exhibit are hyperlocal, and they need to be seen in their contexts to understand what they’re trying to accomplish. I wasn’t interested in the global worldview; it’s really about communication between the mapmaker and the map user. What I found in the process of curating the exhibit was a beautiful variety of ways of doing that.

You have on display a map of the Niger River, published in 1826, that was originally drawn in the sand by Muhammad Bello, Sultan of the Sokoto Caliphate, for a British explorer named Hugh Clapperton. You say it’s believed that Bello purposefully misrepresented the river to discourage Europeans from further exploration of the area. What does that tell us about the balance between objective and objectivity in these hyperlocal maps?

Mapmakers are always selective. In that particular map, we know Sultan Bello is giving some misinformation about something he knew quite intimately. We can conjecture about the things he wanted to hold back. Maps are about control of information, so there’s a specificity about what’s useful and what’s not.

I’ll also say that the question of objectivity comes up in another way in the history of mapmaking. Western maps in a certain era would say “There be monsters here,” and that was code for “We don’t know, and what we don’t know is dangerous.”

There’s a switch in about the 19th century in Western maps where you stop seeing what today we think of as ornamental elements. That’s because there’s this idea that people have conquered nature, and it’s not so scary.

What other themes emerged as you put together this exhibit?

Roads started appearing in European maps much later than I would have thought, not until the 17th century. I was curious about what Europeans used for wayfinding before that, and I discovered it was itineraries. It came out of the medieval pilgrimage tradition. You’d convey the route from one place to another by listing the places along the way. In the early modern period, merchants created itineraries showing the routes connecting sites of production to market cities. Those maps didn’t have political boundaries because you didn’t need them. That’s a different perspective than we get 100 years later in the 17th century when rulers were making state-sponsored maps. 

Also, maps don’t just document roads: In a way, they led to the development of roads themselves. In the late 19th century, we have a huge transition. For the first time, there was a middle class in Europe and America that had money and time for leisure activities. At the same time, bicycles become safer and massively popular. You have a lot of newly urban people who are venturing out to enjoy the countryside recreationally. So how do they know how to get around? There are no road signs. This vogue for excursions into the countryside led to the development of route maps that you could fold up and put in your pocket. We have a map of bicycle routes in Paris that shows elevation change because you want to know when you’re going to have to push. It’s so interesting to me because it has some features like a GPS navigation system would have today that say, “turn left,” or “straight ahead.” It’s just one little instruction because you are simultaneously navigating and riding and do not want to be distracted by extraneous information.

Hobby cyclists would find themselves lost or broken down with no information about where they were or where they could get help, and the roads were almost all unpaved. So they became huge road advocates. We have an 1888 cyclists’ road book from Connecticut, the first modern tourist guidebook. It was made by the League of American Wheelmen, and they had a campaign for marking roads and systematizing them. That kind of advocacy work in government and through their publications is copied by automobile associations right afterward, which become democratized shortly after. Organizations like the American Automobile Association, AAA, took on the same methods of advocacy starting in the 1920s. It was largely thanks to the Good Roads bicycle movement that early motorists had any passable roads to travel through the American countryside.

Molecules haven’t been used in quantum computing, even though they have the potential to make the ultra-high-speed experimental technology even faster. Their rich internal structures were seen as too complicated, too delicate, too unpredictable to manage, so smaller particles have been used.

But a team of Harvard scientists has succeeded for the first time in trapping molecules to perform quantum operations. This feat was accomplished by using ultra-cold polar molecules as qubits, or the fundamental units of information that power the technology. The findings, recently published in the journal Nature, open new realms of possibility for harnessing the complexity of molecular structures for future applications.

“As a field we have been trying to do this for 20 years,” said senior co-author Kang-Kuen Ni, Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry and professor of physics. “And we’ve finally been able to do it!”

Physicists and engineers have been working to develop quantum computing for several decades. The technology, which exploits aspects of quantum mechanics for computation, promises speeds exponentially faster than classical computers, which could enable game-changing advances in fields including medicine, science, and finance.

Dominating the world of quantum computing are experiments with trapped ions, neutral atoms, and superconducting circuits. In these systems, tiny individual particles can be reliably trapped to serve as qubits and form quantum logic gates. The Harvard team’s paper details the far more complicated process involved with using molecules to form an iSWAP gate, a key quantum circuit that creates entanglement — the very property that makes quantum computing so powerful.

The researchers started by trapping sodium-cesium (NaCs) molecules with optical tweezers in a stable and extremely cold environment. The electric dipole-dipole (or positive-negative) interactions between the molecules were then used to perform a quantum operation. By carefully controlling how the molecules rotated with respect to one another, the team managed to entangle two molecules, creating a quantum state known as a two-qubit Bell state with 94 percent accuracy.

Logic gates enable information processing in quantum computers just as they do in traditional computers. But while classical gates manipulate binary bits (0s and 1s), quantum gates operate on qubits — which can achieve what are called superpositions, existing in multiple states simultaneously. That means quantum computers can do things that would be impossible for traditional machines, such as creating entangled states in the first place — or even performing operations in multiple computational states at once.

Quantum gates are also reversible and capable of manipulating qubits with precision while preserving their quantum nature. The iSWAP gate used in this experiment swapped the states of two qubits and applied what is called a phase shift, an essential step in generating entanglement where the states of two qubits become correlated regardless of the distance in between.

“Our work marks a milestone in trapped molecule technology and is the last building block necessary to build a molecular quantum computer,” said co-author and postdoctoral fellow Annie Park. “The unique properties of molecules, such as their rich internal structure, offer many opportunities to advance these technologies.”

Scientists have dreamed since the 1990s of harnessing molecular systems, with their nuclear spins and nuclear magnetic resonance techniques, for quantum computing. A series of early experiments showed encouraging results, but molecules proved generally unstable for use in quantum operations due to their unpredictable movements. That can interfere with coherence, the delicate quantum state necessary for reliable operations.

But trapping molecules in ultra-cold environments, where the molecule’s intricate internal structures can be controlled, helps overcome this hurdle. Once holding these molecules with optical tweezers — with precisely focused lasers for controlling tiny objects — researchers were able to minimize the molecules’ motion and manipulate their quantum states.

Making this breakthrough possible were several members of Ni’s lab including Lewis R.B. Picard, Annie J. Park, Gabriel E. Patenotte, and Samuel Gebretsadkan, as well as physicists with the University of Colorado’s Center for Theory of Quantum Matter.

To evaluate the whole operation, the research team measured the resulting two-qubit Bell state and studied errors caused by any motion that did occur. This left them with ideas for improving the stability and accuracy of their setup in future experiments. Switching between interacting and non-interacting states also enabled researchers to digitize their experiment, providing additional insights.

“There’s a lot of room for innovations and new ideas about how to leverage the advantages of the molecular platform,” Ni said. “I’m excited to see what comes out of this.”

This research was supported by multiple sources including the Air Force of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation, the Physics Frontier Center, and Multidisciplinary Research Program of the University Research Initiative.

New diet drugs are making it easier to lose weight. So does that mean we can stop exercising? Health experts say no. There is a long list of upsides to going for a walk or hitting the gym, and weight loss isn’t necessarily at the top.

“Exercise is good for everything from cognition and mental health benefits such as preventing neurocognitive disorders like Alzheimer’s disease to cardiovascular benefits like preventing mortality from cardiovascular disease, maintaining vascular function, and improving lung strength and lung function,” said Christina Dieli-Conwright, an associate professor in the Department of Nutrition at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“Exercising regularly can even benefit the gastrointestinal system, like gut motility, digestion and the gut microbiome. … Depression, anxiety, sleep, fatigue, pain — I can’t think of a body system that is not benefited by exercise,” she added.

But, while exercise can help in losing weight, it isn’t a magic bullet, she said.

“Historically speaking, the thought behind exercise and weight loss is a little bit erroneous. Exercise alone does not typically put an individual into enough of a caloric deficit to cause weight loss,” she said.

Why? For starters consider that exercise, on average, can burn from 200 to 700 calories an hour, while consuming that many calories can be done in minutes.

And most of us appear to be poor at keeping track of what we’re taking in vs. what we’re burning.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 73 percent of Americans are overweight or obese. At the same time, almost half of all adults met activity guidelines for aerobic physical activity during the period of a year, and nearly a quarter met guidelines for both aerobic and muscle-strengthening activity.

7 to 15 Hours of exercise a week significantly lowers cancer risk, according to 2019 study

Medical experts say both exercise and maintaining a healthy weight are important components of promoting overall health and longevity.

“Because the effects of weight loss on diabetes control and risk of diabetes is stronger than for exercise, but for other things like heart disease and living longer — they look like they’re about equivalent,” said I-Min Lee, a professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Chan School and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

In 2019, Lee helped author a study on physical activity and cancer risk that showed that seven to 15 hours of exercise a week can significantly lower one’s risk of seven types of cancer. That benefit decreases with an overweight BMI, but still shows an improved risk for six cancers: colon, breast, kidney, myeloma, liver, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

“Depression, anxiety, sleep, fatigue, pain — I can’t think of a body system that is not benefited by exercise.”

Christina Dieli-Conwright, T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Lee advises those who are looking to begin an exercise regimen to start small.

“That way you get a little bit of benefit,” she said, “and it’s also very encouraging, because if it’s an amount that’s doable, and you succeed, it might make you want to do more.”

And doing more is good for everyone, she said. A good strategy, according to Lee, is to try to add 10 minutes to your routine — whatever it may be. If you walk for 20 minutes a day, go for 30 until you meet or exceed the recommended 150 minutes of weekly exercise.

Edward Phillips, an assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at HMS, and founder and director of the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, agrees.

“If I ask someone how easily they think they could add a bottle of water in the morning or in the afternoon to combat dehydration, they’re going to say, ‘That’s not so hard.’ If they start doing that, and they also add in a five-minute walk after lunch, which is really healthy, and also easy to achieve, then when I check in with them three weeks later, they go, ‘I’m drinking more water. I feel better. And by the way, the five-minute walk turned into a 10-minute walk.’”

Phillips is also host of the WBUR podcast “Food, We Need to Talk,” covering health and fitness. He said when patients don’t see changes on the scale, they need tangible reasons to keep working out — and there are apparent reasons.

“People need a good story in order to make changes that would result in meaningful health changes,” he said. “Exercise allows you to be more functional. You can get out of a chair more easily. You can sit in the chair more easily. … Or when a friend says, ‘Let’s go downhill skiing this weekend,’ and you’re like, ‘I haven’t done that in years,’ you say. ‘I could try it, because I’ve been exercising.’”

Dieli-Conwright said it helps to do anything a couple of times a week that gets you out of breath.

“You’re going to get more bang for your buck if you do both aerobic and resistance exercise, though,” she said. “The reason is that aerobic exercise is going to tax the cardiorespiratory system more than resistance or weightlifting. That type of exercise is fantastic for muscle strength. But with both you are going to target glucose metabolism, which is going to be important for managing hyper- and hypoglycemia, diabetes management, things like that.”

She adds that it’s also important to interrupt sitting time or sedentary behaviors.

“Once an hour, get up for two to three minutes even, and just stand up and down and squat or take a two-minute little walk, and go up and down the stairs a couple of times. That can actually help to also manage glucose, which leads, again, back into diabetes risk,” she said.

But Dieli-Conwright emphasizes that creating an exercise habit is key.

“We all know that obesity is incredibly bad. It leads to so many different other co-morbid conditions, specifically heart disease and diabetes. However, there’s so much data that’s overlooked that supports the paradigm that I generally call, and others call, being fit and fat,” she said, essentially being overweight, yet metabolically healthy.

U.S. productivity soared in the second half of the 20th century, creating benefits for consumers in the form of lower prices across a wide range of goods. But one critical sector proved a glaring exception: housing.

Today the country faces a housing affordability crisis, with ownership out of reach for a growing set of Americans. The price of a new single-family home has more than doubled since 1960, due to a variety of commonly cited factors including labor and material costs. But a recent economics working paper highlights another reason for the rising cost of putting a roof over one’s head: the stifling impact of “not in my backyard,” or NIMBY, land-use policies on builders.

“If there’s one thing we’ve known since the time of Adam Smith, but even more so since the time of Henry Ford, it’s that mass production — repetition — makes things cheap,” said Edward Glaeser, a co-author of the research and the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics. “But land-use regulation stops us from building a mass-produced home and requires instead a very idiosyncratic home. It means every project will be micromanaged. Every project will be small. Every project will be a bespoke build to satisfy five different requirements from the community.” 

The new research was inspired by a 2023 paper by University of Chicago economists Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson, who documented what they termed “the strange and awful path” of declining productivity in U.S. construction. The building sector, they found, had outpaced the rest of the U.S. economy throughout the 1950s and well into the ’60s. Then came a dramatic shift. Between 1970 and 2000, even as the overall economy continued to grow, productivity in the construction sector, measured in housing starts per worker, fell by 40 percent.

The findings resonated with Leonardo D’Amico, a Ph.D. economics candidate in the Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences who arrived at Harvard from Italy in 2019. “America is extremely productive in so many industries, especially compared to Europe,” he said. “But housing construction was this glaring example of missing productivity.”

Glaeser and D’Amico partnered with three co-authors, including William R. Kerr, the Dimitri V. D’Arbeloff – MBA Class of 1955 Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, to investigate whether the rise of NIMBYism had driven the sector’s divergence. They started in the early 1900s, seeking a broad view of innovation and productivity among U.S. builders.

The century of Census data the team collected showed a steep increase in housing productivity from 1935 to 1970. In fact, the researchers saw that the number of homes produced per construction worker during this period often grew faster than total manufacturing output per industrial worker — including the number of cars produced by auto workers. “This goes against the idea that there is something about the housing sector that makes it impossible to grow,” D’Amico emphasized.

Like Goolsbee and Syverson, D’Amico and colleagues found that construction productivity hit reverse circa 1970 — just as the volume of local and regional land-use regulations picked up. In contrast, the authors saw that productivity in auto manufacturing continued to climb, with cars today costing 60 percent less (when adjusted for inflation) than in 1960.

As land-use regulations climbed, housing construction productivity sank compared with auto manufacturing

To explain the role of regulation in high housing costs and falling construction productivity, the new paper presents a model in which the proliferation of land-use regulations served to limit the size of construction projects. Smaller projects, in turn, led to smaller firms with fewer incentives to invest in cost-saving innovations associated with mass production. Testing the model meant quantifying the size of housing developments over time. Drawing on historical real estate data from CoreLogic and other sources, the researchers found that the share of single-family housing yielded by large-scale building projects has indeed been in decline.

“Documenting the size of projects over time is something we’re particularly proud of in terms of empirical contributions,” said Glaeser, an urban economist who has studied housing for more than 25 years. “It enabled us to show the decline or even elimination of really big projects over time.”

The paper includes a section comparing the scale of current projects against that of Long Island’s famous Levittown development, home to more than 17,000 cookie-cutter houses built in the late ’40s and early ’50s.

“Entrepreneurs like William Levitt figured out ways to mass-produce housing on America’s suburban frontier,” Glaeser said. “They sent carpenters up and down the street; they sent plumbers up and down the street. It was all moving toward economies of scale, with Levitt moving into modular, prefabricated housing by the 1960s.”

Post-war builders developed thousands of single-family homes on land parcels that averaged more than 5,000 acres. Today, the researchers write, the share of housing built in large projects has fallen by more than one-third, while developments on more than 500 acres are “essentially nonexistent.” 

The researchers also detail the productivity advantages enjoyed by large builders like Levitt. Using economic and business Census data, they show that construction firms with 500 or more employees produce four times as many housing units per employee than firms with fewer than 20 employees. Yet employment by large homebuilders started falling in 1973, with no comparable decline in manufacturing or the economy at large.  

Firms proved smallest — and least productive — in areas most inclined toward NIMBYism, the researchers found. Homebuilders in these regions navigate rules covering everything from lot size and density to design as well as planning commissions, review boards, and sometimes even voter referendums. But a closer look at the construction sector’s patenting and R&D activity uncovered nationwide impacts.

Since the 1970s, construction patents have lagged other industries

“We see in the data that the construction industry was patenting and innovating as much as other industries before the 1970s,” said D’Amico, who is working with fellow Ph.D. candidate Victoria Angelova on a separate paper that investigates the connection between housing costs and fertility rates — underscoring how housing affordability can influence the most fundamental decision-making.

More than 150 years of patenting activity showed the construction industry lagging in the last three decades of the 20th century. “At first we thought maybe it’s because building suppliers were innovating; it’s just not the builders themselves,” D’Amico said. “But we looked at manufacturing firms that serve the construction industry and, remarkably, even their share of innovation has gone down compared to manufacturing firms overall.”

One upshot is what Glaeser characterized as “a massive intergenerational transfer” of housing wealth. He cited his 2017 paper with University of Pennsylvania finance and business economist Joseph Gyourko, who is also a co-author on the new paper. The pair showed that 35- to 44-year-olds in the 50th percentile of U.S. earners averaged nearly $56,000 of housing wealth in 1983, while the same demographic held just $6,000 by 2013. Compare that with median earners ages 65 to 74, who averaged more than $82,000 in 1983 and $100,000 in 2013.

“For me, it harkens back to a model of economic growth and decline that was put forward by Mancur Olson in the 1980s,” said Glaeser, citing the economist/political scientist who described a historical pattern of stable societies generating powerful insiders who guard their own interests by effectively shutting out up-and-comers.

Glaeser was pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in the early 1990s when he first encountered Olson’s “The Rise and Decline of Nations” (1982). At the time, the book’s ideas struck him as apt descriptions of the country’s coastal housing markets. But today, Glaeser said, the problem is more widespread.

“Olson captured the unfortunate reality that insiders — or people who have already bought homes — have figured out how to basically stop any new homes from being created anywhere near them,” Glaeser said. 

Have you ever struggled to remember somebody’s name at a party or crammed for an exam only to blank during the test? In their 2023 book “Why We Forget and How to Remember Better,” brain scientists Andrew Budson and Elizabeth Kensinger, both Harvard alums, explain how memory works and offer research-based tips on optimizing your ability to recall. They helped us develop the following quiz so readers can test how much they really know about memory.

1. You’re more likely to master a new skill, such as playing tennis, if you practice:

Seven hours once a week

One hour a day for seven days

2. Six weeks of exercise can do which of the following?

Release growth factors in the brain

Improve memory

Enlarge the volume of the hippocampus

All of the above

3. Which of the following images is a real penny?

A

B

4. Each time we retrieve a memory we may subtly or even radically change the memory permanently. True or false?

True

False

5. We can thank research by Harvard psychologist George Miller for the length of:

Driver’s license ID numbers

ATM PINs

Phone numbers

Library card numbers

6. Memory and performance degrade while multitasking. Which kind of multitasking is more difficult to pull off? Concentrating on…

Two verbal tasks at once, such as remembering a grocery list while reading a poem

A verbal and a visual task at once, such as remembering a grocery list while reading a map

7. When trying to remember an acquaintance’s name, avoid:

Taking a deep breath and trying to relax

Thinking of a time that you were with them

Thinking of another fact you know about them

Thinking about names that might be theirs

8. You’ve been studying for hours and now facts are starting to “melt together.” Sleeping will help you free up brain capacity. True or false?

True

False

9. Which of the following substances impair memory?

Coffee

Cannabis

CBD

10. The strategy for remembering information called “method of loci” or “memory palace,” developed by the ancient Greeks, involves:

Being present and in the moment when trying to recall information

Associating information you have difficulty remembering with major landmarks

Visualizing a building you are familiar with and walking through it in your imagination

Using architectural principles to build memories from the foundation up

11. When stressed out, your fight-or-flight response kicks in, heightening your ability to recall critical information you need in that moment. True or false.

True

False

Δ

Lives have been lost and disrupted, and thousands of homes and businesses have been destroyed as wind-whipped wildfires continue to burn around Los Angeles a week after they began. Mental health professionals expect emotional and psychological wounds will endure long after the blazes have been extinguished.

The Gazette spoke with Karestan Koenen, an expert in psychological trauma at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who investigated the mental health impacts of the 2018 Paradise fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise, California, killed 85, and became the deadliest and costliest fire in state history. Koenen, a professor of psychiatric epidemiology, talked about what to expect in the days and weeks ahead.

In the Los Angeles fires, we have at least two dozen dead, more than 100,000 have been evacuated, more than 12,000 structures burned. That’s a lot of loss and upheaval. Are you expecting mental health impacts right away or more likely later?

We would expect mental health concerns to manifest right away, but the first thing is that everyone needs to be safe. Their basic needs have to be addressed. People lost homes but also places of employment, schools, churches, community structures, support systems, and different aspects of life. There’s a lot of research that shows that one of the things that predicts poor mental health outcomes after disasters is the disruptions in things like employment, housing, etc. So, one of the best things to prevent long-term mental health consequences is to address people’s basic needs for a safe place to live, for food, for work.

How much variability do you see in such a situation? I imagine there’s a different impact if you just had to evacuate versus your home burning down or you know a neighbor who died.

There’s a lot of variation in experience. One of the reasons the Paradise fire was so traumatic was because people had little warning. It is particularly traumatic when your life is threatened, and they were evacuating while fire was burning around them.

I’ve done a lot of interviews on trauma over the years and the person I did the Paradise interviews with, Dr. Roger Pitman, an expert on PTSD, said the only interviews where he saw as much trauma were in war, in combat veterans and civilian war survivors. It’s because of all the losses. When people lose their homes, it’s the loss of the home itself, but they also lose their clothing, stuffed animals, family photos, heirlooms, boxes of their kids’ newborn stuff. And pets. Losing a pet can have a really big impact. Pets often run away when there’s a fire, and their owners experience guilt that they were not able to save them.

Is it different for firefighters versus people who are victims and being evacuated?

Yes. Firefighters and first responders are trained in how to deal with the situation. Being prepared, having rehearsed what to do will reduce the chance of having negative outcomes.

Firefighters and first responders can still experience trauma, especially if their lives are threatened, but they have a purpose. They’re doing something to help. One of the hardest things to handle in a disaster is the feeling of helplessness, that loss of control. If you’re evacuated, you don’t know where you’re going — maybe to temporary housing — and you don’t control when you can go back to your house. So, when we talk about trauma, we talk about losses and things that are out of your control, that are threatening and unpredictable. Fires are all of those things.

Are there some people who, under the same circumstances, are unaffected, and can we predict who that will be?

We can’t predict that very well, but there are things that make people more or less vulnerable. People with a history of mental disorders, depression, or physical health problems might be more vulnerable. People who don’t have good supports, don’t have stable employment, don’t have insurance, they would be more vulnerable, under more stress after the fires.

Then there’s the exposure itself, whether you saw your home burn or someone die versus being safely evacuated. Maybe bad things happened, but you didn’t witness them. There’s a lot of evidence that how kids feel will be influenced a lot by how their parents respond to what’s going on. Kids are vulnerable but can be buffered by their parents and other supports, like the school still being open, so they can still go even though they’ve been evacuated. That’s a better situation, because then they at least still have a normal school day.

So, if you’re a parent, you should try to kind of act as if things are under control, even if that’s not what you feel?

No, I’m not saying that. Rather, it’s an argument for parents to make sure they’re attending to the things they need, like when you’re on an airplane: Put on your own oxygen mask first, before you put on your kid’s oxygen mask. If parents can do things that help them feel better, it will trickle down. Supporting parents and caretakers is one of the best ways to support kids.

Is there an ideal time frame after we take care of basic needs that mental health assessments and care interventions should start?

After fires like this, a lot of people will show distress. That might look like being hypervigilant, on guard, being tense, feeling anxious, worrying, being reactive to things in the news about a fire, for example. They could be depressed, sad, have trouble sleeping, or trouble concentrating. It’d be normal to experience those things after what happened.

But many people heal on their own, even with pretty extreme trauma. A lot of people go through a natural recovery process, talking to friends, speaking with people in the community. In a few weeks to a month — after the fires are out and things are stable — people should be feeling better, their anxiety should be going down.

If it’s persisting or getting worse, that might be a time to get some help. Another thing to watch for is avoidance, isolating, or using substances to cope. Keep in mind too that the things you used to like to do, like exercising and going outside to enjoy nature — activities interrupted by the fires — there’s evidence that they help people’s mental health. So as soon as possible, take some time to do things you enjoyed.

How do you know when it’s time to seek professional help?

When the things I mentioned — anxiety, feeling sad most of the time, problems sleeping, problems concentrating — start interfering with things like work: You are back, but you can’t get your work done; you can’t concentrate. Also, if they’re interfering with relationships: You find yourself avoiding people you normally like spending time with or you’re losing your temper a lot more, in an extreme way. If you’re feeling bad, it’s not getting better, and it’s interfering with your life, that’s definitely time to get help.

Is there anything you learned from the Paradise experience that might be helpful in the aftermath of the fires in L.A.?

 We already talked about the importance of attending to people’s basic needs — a safe place to live, food, etc. But there’s also the importance of rebuilding the community. In Paradise, the loss of a community as well as individual homes was what made it even worse for people because they lost their way of connecting with people. So, if there are ways to connect people, provide places to gather and connect, that’s important. We often focus on the basic needs, like food, shelter, clothing — which totally makes sense — but we also need to focus on the community connection.

So, if you belong to a church that burned down, maybe get people together somehow?

It should probably be others, leaders or relief organizations, who facilitate that. If people are overwhelmed, dealing with their own basic needs, they’re not going to have a lot of extra energy to organize things.

One thing with the L.A. fire is it seemed to affect people with different socioeconomic statuses, including superstars. My hope is that those with more resources will be able to help those with fewer. Negative mental health consequences of disasters, like the L.A. fires, are common but they can be mitigated and even prevented if the right supports are in place and the community comes together.

When Susan Kuo was growing up, a relative came to live with her and her immediate family in Vancouver, Canada. Previously warm and affectionate, the family member had become suspicious and withdrawn and struggled to communicate needs.

What Kuo didn’t know at the time, but realized later while taking psychology classes as an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia, was that some of the behaviors exhibited by her family member were signs of schizophrenia. Being able to label what she witnessed brought clarity to a confusing time in her life. Kuo resolved to bring that same clarity to others about neuropsychiatric disabilities — and how they can vary across people’s lifetimes.

“If we had been able to figure out more specific services earlier, that would’ve been really helpful in terms of getting my family member back on track,” said Kuo, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Genomic Medicine and Department of Psychiatry at Mass General studying autism and schizophrenia. She is also affiliated with the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute.

Kuo had always been drawn to medicine, and once exposed to psychology it cemented her professional path. While earning her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, she zeroed in on schizophrenia.

Uncovering developmental patterns

Kuo wanted to better understand genetic effects contributing to schizophrenia that may be associated with changes in brain and behavior throughout people’s lifetimes. Her relative, for example, showed signs of schizophrenia upon reaching young adulthood, which is in line with the typical onset age of 18 to 25 years.

She wondered whether there were notable patterns among relatives, compared to people without a family history of schizophrenia, that suggest genetic effects.

“First-degree relatives, siblings and such, share on average 50 percent of their genes in common” with a person with schizophrenia, explained Kuo’s Ph.D. adviser Michael Pogue-Geile, whose lab studies family genetics to pinpoint potential factors that might contribute to the onset of schizophrenia.

Working closely with Pogue-Geile, Kuo conducted a study that divided biological relatives of people with schizophrenia into three age groups: pre-20s, 20s, and post-20s. Kuo and Pogue-Geile discovered subtle differences in cognitive function and brain structure among relatives in their 20s who did not have schizophrenia diagnoses but carried more schizophrenia-associated genetic variants than the general population.

The findings suggest some genetic effects that may contribute to the onset of schizophrenia are more salient around this time of life. Pogue-Geile offered some possible explanations for why that may be: Some genes turn on and off during different times in a person’s lifespan (think puberty); also, people often experience significant change and stress as they enter adulthood.

“That was very innovative research that not really any other people had done in the field,” Pogue-Geile said.

Predicting intervention responses

Kuo continued working with people with schizophrenia during her clinical internship at UCLA Medical Center. Keith Nuechterlein, whose lab at UCLA is also a clinic for people experiencing their first episode of schizophrenia, said that Kuo’s “superb research skills” and talent for psychotherapy contributed significantly to the lab. The team published a paper that suggested childhood and teenage experiences before a first episode of schizophrenia predict how well certain interventions would work.

“If we can intervene successfully at the beginning of this illness, the hope is that we can change the trajectory.”

Keith Nuechterlein, director, UCLA Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior

While on average many young people adapt well to various roles and responsibilities before their first episode of schizophrenia, Kuo noticed that the average was hiding a wide range of experiences. People with schizophrenia generally follow one of three developmental trajectories from childhood through adolescence: Some maintain social ties and keep up schoolwork; others progressively show challenges leading up to the onset of their first episode of schizophrenia; and others struggle with social ties and schoolwork starting in childhood. Kuo’s work suggests those who fall in the last group showed the highest levels of improvement with cognitive training interventions.

“That’s actually encouraging; it helps us know how to target that kind of cognitive training,” Nuechterlein said. “If we can intervene successfully at the beginning of this illness, the hope is that we can change the trajectory.”

Planning clinical and educational resources

For Kuo, she’s noticed that genetics research to date has rarely captured how phenotypes, particularly those that impact quality of life, may shift over time for people with neuropsychiatric disabilities. She hopes to change that.

Now at the Mass General, where her research focuses on autism as well as schizophrenia, Kuo has another opportunity to study relationships between genetic variation and phenotypic variation throughout development.

Elise Robinson, an epidemiologist and geneticist who supervises Kuo’s research, discussed Kuo’s contribution to the lab.

“Heterogeneity in autism is massively underdiscussed, which has implications for clinical practice and family experience,” said Robinson, whose lab is based at Mass General Hospital’s Center for Genomic Medicine and Department of Psychiatry and at Broad Institute’s Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research.

“By understanding the genetic and phenotypic diversity, the hope is that we can better match different services to folks who could use them,” Kuo said. “What are the supports they could use down the line as you’re anticipating some of the challenges — or some of the strengths — they might develop?”

Since joining the Robinson lab, Kuo has been studying this variability among people with neuropsychiatric disabilities at scale, with an eye toward building clinical and educational resources. The team analyzed patterns of attaining early developmental milestones, such as walking and talking, in over 17,000 autistic children compared to over 4,000 siblings without an autism diagnosis. They found that while some autistic children reached these milestones on time, autistic children on average reached milestones up to 20 months later. Later milestones like speaking phrases had longer delays than earlier milestones like smiling.

Building on these findings, Kuo’s team is currently working on a suite of online, public resources designed for clinicians and families of autistic children to learn about the latest genetics research and navigate considerations surrounding clinical genetic testing.

As for Robinson, she continues to be impressed by Kuo’s drive.

“She’s incredibly diligent; she’s also invariably thoughtful and nonjudgmental and wonderful about mentoring people in our team,” Robinson said. “It’s a large part of why she’s such a natural leader, an obvious budding leader in our community.”

Alumni from classes spanning 40 years have stepped forward to support Harvard’s vision for a new era of economics education and research. Gifts from Joseph T. Tsai ’98; Jeffrey T. Tsai ’01, S.M. ’04; Jason T. Tsai ’05; Alexander Slusky ’89, M.B.A. ’92, and Danna Slusky; and Don Smith ’66 will bolster the department’s future home, Pritzker Hall, and establish two new professorships.

“The collective generosity of these alumni is powering a transformative vision for the future of economics research at Harvard, shaping the next generation of scholars and policymakers,” said Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “We are deeply grateful for their support, which is advancing the creation of an innovative new building and endowed professorships, firmly establishing the critical intellectual role Harvard’s economics program will play in developing the future of the field.”

For more than 100 years, the Economics Department in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has produced scholarship and policy ideas aimed at the world’s most pressing problems, including recessions, gender and racial inequality, climate change, and global poverty. Revered for its top undergraduate and graduate programs, the department educates more than 500 undergraduate concentrators and nearly 200 graduate students every year. Economics faculty have earned countless accolades including multiple MacArthur Awards, Clark Medals, and Nobel Prizes, including the Nobel awarded in 2023 to Claudia Goldin, Lee and Ezpeleta Professor of Arts and Sciences and Henry Lee Professor of Economics.

New spaces for new kinds of work

The new support will help to build the future home for the Economics Department, which began with an impactful gift from Penny Pritzker ’81 and Bryan Traubert. Pritzker Hall will bring research and teaching together under one roof, in a space designed for interaction and collaboration.

“Our hope is that the new building will be a machine for interactions that will connect students and faculty and generate ideas that change the world,” says Ed Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics. “Pritzker Hall has been designed to pull in hopeful undergraduates — to make economics as exciting and inclusive as possible — to educate them to lead and do cutting-edge research that will inform policymaking everywhere. The spaces are both beautiful and functional, designed so that knowledge will flow freely and that the ‘aha’ moments that have happened in the Harvard Economics Department will continue for decades.”

The three Tsai brothers made their gift to name the event and teaching space in honor of their father, Hong-Tu Tsai, chairman of Cathay Financial Holdings. The Tsai Family Event Area and Terrace will be a high-profile venue for convening faculty, visiting scholars, community members, and civic and world leaders for scholarly and public audiences.

“We wanted to be part of Harvard’s new vision for economics,” said Joe Tsai. Members of the Tsai family have been avid supporters of Harvard College for decades, including through a notable gift to the Center for Government and International Studies in 1996 and the named Tsai Auditorium. “We were inspired by the approach being taken to the development of Pritzker Hall, which will draw scholars together in a highly interactive space and nourish the intellectual immersion at the foundation of the Harvard undergraduate experience. Our father helped make Harvard possible for us, and we’d like to help others have the same transformational opportunities that we did.”

Investing in talent and fresh perspectives

Two separate gifts, one from the Slusky family and another from Smith, will support new professorships in important fields of study, ensuring the department can meet the needs of a rapidly evolving research landscape. The Slusky Family Professorship of Economics and Markets Fund will be awarded to an eminent scholar of economics who studies real-world applications.

“Economics faculty gave me a great foundation of knowledge that I’ve benefited from ever since,” says Alexander Slusky, reflecting on his opportunity to attend Harvard six years after emigrating from the former Soviet Union. He established the professorship in part due to the mentoring he received as an undergraduate by department luminaries including N. Gregory Mankiw, Martin Feldstein, and Richard Caves.

“The Harvard Economics Department is a critical part of educating future leaders of America,” said Slusky, who is founding partner of Vector Capital. “I want to help it grow this community.”

Smith also feels deep gratitude for his ties to the department and the mentoring he received from faculty member John Kenneth Galbraith. Smith has been passionate about environmental economics ever since his days as a Harvard student and as a longtime entrepreneur focused on developing clean energy. His gift will establish the Donald M. Smith Professorship Fund, to be awarded to a pioneering scholar who works in climate change, natural resources, or energy economics.

“I wanted to help Harvard find the best scholar in environmental economics,” said Smith, CEO and chief technology officer for EnviroBeef, a company dedicated to providing environmentally friendly beef. “It’s so wonderful for me very late in my professional life to be doing something that’s meaningful to Harvard.”

The Harvard Alumni Association nominating committee has announced its candidates for the spring 2025 elections of the Harvard Board of Overseers and elected directors of the Harvard Alumni Association.

The nominating committee brings together 13 alumni with varied backgrounds and includes three current or recent Overseers who have direct experience with the workings and needs of the board. The committee invites and receives suggestions about possible candidates from across the alumni community and reviews information on hundreds of prospective candidates as part of extensive deliberations throughout the fall term.

“The process of considering this year’s candidates for Overseer and HAA elected director has again revealed the extraordinary depth and diversity of talents and accomplishments across our alumni community,” said Robert N. Shapiro ’72, J.D. ’78, chair of the nominating committee, former Overseer, and past president of both the Harvard Alumni Association and the Harvard Law School Association. “These candidates exemplify a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives that will benefit the university. They share a devotion to Harvard as a beacon of academic excellence and a belief in its boundless potential to serve the wider world.”

The committee seeks to develop a set of Overseer candidates that takes account of the board’s present composition and the University’s future needs. The committee considers experience and accomplishment in an academic or professional domain important to the University; interest in and concern for higher education and for Harvard University as a whole; commitment to the overall quality and continual improvement of Harvard’s programs of education and research; willingness to invest the time and energy necessary for effective service; understanding of complex organizations, and leadership and consensus-building skills.

“I’m grateful to my committee colleagues for their thoughtfulness and insights in identifying this outstanding group of candidates,” Shapiro said. “And all of us are grateful to the candidates themselves for their willingness to invest their time and care in the Harvard community and its reach far beyond campus.”

Overseer candidates

HAA elected director candidates

Candidates for Overseer may also be nominated by petition, by obtaining a required number of signatures from eligible voters. The deadline to submit petitions for the 2025 Overseers election is Jan. 30. Find more information on the nomination and election process here.

The election begins April 1. Completed ballots will be accepted until 5 p.m. on May 14. Harvard degree holders can vote online or by paper ballot for five anticipated vacancies on the Board of Overseers and for six openings among the HAA elected directors.

All Harvard degree holders as of Jan. 1, except for officers of instruction and government at Harvard and members of the Harvard Corporation, are eligible to vote for Overseer candidates. All Harvard degree holders as of Jan. 1 may vote for HAA elected directors.

The Board of Overseers is one of Harvard’s two governing boards, along with the President and Fellows, also known as the Corporation. Formally established in 1642, the board plays an integral role in the governance of the University, complementing the Corporation’s work as Harvard’s principal fiduciary board. As a central part of its work, the Board of Overseers directs the visitation process, the primary means for periodic external assessment of Harvard’s Schools and departments. Through its array of standing committees, and the roughly 50 visiting committees that report to them, the board probes the quality of Harvard’s programs and assures that the University remains true to its charter as a place of learning. More generally, drawing on its members’ diverse experience and expertise, the board provides counsel to the University’s leadership on priorities, plans, and strategic initiatives. The board also has the power of consent to certain actions, such as the election of Corporation members. The current membership of the board is listed here.

The HAA board, including its elected directors, is an advisory board that aims to foster a sense of community, engagement, and University citizenship among Harvard alumni around the world. The work focuses on developing volunteer leadership and increasing and deepening alumni engagement through an array of programs that support alumni communities worldwide. In recent years, the board’s priorities have included strengthening outreach to recent graduates and graduate school alumni and continuing to build and promote inclusive communities.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Daniel Poneman served as CEO of Centrus Energy, a supplier of nuclear fuel, from 2015 through 2023.

Fueled by artificial intelligence, cloud service providers, and ambitious new climate regulations, U.S. demand for carbon-free electricity is on the rise. In response, analysts and lawmakers are taking a fresh look at a controversial energy source: nuclear power.

Two new reactors in Georgia are the first in consecutive years in the U.S. since 1990. In June, Congress overwhelmingly passed the ADVANCE Act, a bipartisan bill that boosts the number of reactors coming on line. Late last year, tech giants Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all pledged to invest in small reactors to help meet their future energy needs.

In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Daniel Poneman, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center, discusses the growing momentum behind nuclear power plants. Poneman served as deputy secretary of energy and chief operating officer at the U.S. Department of Energy from 2009 to 2014. From 2015 through 2023 he was CEO of Centrus Energy, a supplier of nuclear fuel to power plants around the world.

Is nuclear power making a comeback?

I believe the answer is yes, because we have new factors present and they’re all converging to add momentum to nuclear. For a long time, a lot of people have been worried about climate change and reducing carbon emissions. The only source of clean power that’s been proven to work — day or night, season in, season out, in any geographic location, and successfully operating at large scale — that’s nuclear. It’s just shy of 20 percent of our total electricity production and nearly half of our carbon-free electricity.

On top of that is this vertiginous increase in electricity demand that’s driven by 1) the AI revolution and 2) the effort to decarbonize not only power generation, which is about one-quarter of total emissions, but also transportation and industrial processes. If you have electric vehicles and you get the power for the vehicles from coal plants, you haven’t solved the emissions problem.

The last factor is the hyper scalers, which have the wherewithal and frankly the balance sheets to support these very substantial investments in nuclear. So, you have all of those market-driven factors and strong recognition by the government of the importance of nuclear. I don’t think there’s any issue that has broader or deeper bipartisan support than this one. All of these things are converging to add new momentum to American nuclear energy.

Historically, opposition to nuclear power has been linked to safety and environmental concerns — including waste — and on the business side, to high costs and low profits. What’s different — is today’s nuclear power safer, cleaner, more cost-effective?

In terms of security, when people were concerned after 9/11, changes were undertaken. And obviously, a lot of lessons were drawn after Fukushima. There has been a continuous set of improvements over the years.

When you ask what’s different: There is a whole new generation called advanced reactors. One of the problems over the years is that large reactors got larger and larger, and each one became a bespoke project. There were too many change orders within a single reactor project, and that just kills you on budget.

One thing is to go to factory-built, small reactors that can be standardized, punched out like a cookie cutter, the same design over and over. The more of these things you punch out, the cheaper it gets, and the more practice you have installing them, the cheaper it gets. If you do things like that, you can improve on safety and budget.

The waste issue depends on the specific reactor technology. Some advanced reactors are based on existing Gen III designs, so their waste would be the same but with smaller quantities because the reactors are smaller. Gen IV reactors use fast neutrons, which allow a more efficient use of fuel and therefore a reduction of total volumes. Some Gen IV reactors can burn used fuel that has already been irradiated, which would have the effect of both burning out some of the minor actinides and turning what is now considered “waste” into a source of more energy. At the end of the day, all nuclear waste, whether from current generation or advanced reactors, will need to be disposed in deep geologic formations; this is a safe process with well-known technology.

“I don’t think there’s any issue that has broader or deeper bipartisan support than this one.”

The Biden administration late last year announced several new U.S. nuclear benchmarks at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Are those goals realistic?

They’re ambitious, but I think they’re necessary if we’re going to reach our targets. At the Belfer Center, I’m working on a project on how to get 200 gigawatts of new nuclear built in the United States by 2050. A bunch of things have to happen right for that to be achievable. But I have great confidence that when there’s something that’s truly important, and people in the United States put their minds to it, we can do great things. But it’s going to take smart government policies. We’re going to have to have lean and effective regulations. We’ve got to figure out a way to spread the cost and risk sufficiently, so you induce people to act sooner rather than later.

Government loan guarantees that reduce the cost of capital can both defray first-mover risks and also give confidence to the private sector to co-invest. If we concentrate our efforts, we have a chance to restore U.S. global leadership.

What factors will determine whether those goals are reached or derailed?

Government is going to have to be there in terms of smart tax policy, in terms of providing things like cost-overrun insurance. The government also can be an important source of demand, especially for small and micro reactors that have potential applications such as supporting micro grids for things that can’t afford to go dark — military bases, things of that character. If there’s a cyber threat from an enemy or from some natural event, I would recommend the government buy a bunch of these small reactors to help them get over that first-of-a-kind challenge that is so hard to overcome for private entrepreneurs who can’t wait decades for an adequate return on investment. Private capital can then take the confidence that comes from having strong co-investment and commitments from the federal side.

You’re going to have to have the engineering, procurement, and construction contractors who got rusty over the last few decades get back into the game and execute well. And we’re going to have to have the talent pool grow and training programs at the university level, but also in the trades and organized labor. Many thousands and, ultimately, hundreds of thousands of jobs are needed.

You’re going to need well-trained people in the supply chain manufacturing these very precise components and parts. It’s going to take a group effort. And to maintain the social license to do this, we have to bring all of civil society along with us. So far, in recent years, you see a lot of very positive movement in that direction.

The night sky is now a little clearer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like, do the work.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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