In our increasingly online lives, convenience has come at a cost. 

The average person has more than 100 online accounts, and creating a new one often requires handing over personal information like an email address or a birthdate. 

Researchers at the Applied Social Media Lab at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society say the current system puts your privacy at risk and makes you more vulnerable to identity theft, and they have a plan to fix it. 

As part of a digital identity symposium in April, engineers from ASML launched the Keyring wallet, an open-source identity verification tool. Rather than surrendering personal data to be stored in corporate databases, Keyring lets users keep their information on their mobiles and disclose only what is absolutely necessary to verify who you are. 

“Identity is actually deeply personal,” said ASML principal investigator James Mickens, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “Your age, your name, your location, your gender — all of these are inextricably tied to you as the user, not to some company or some particular piece of technology.” 

During the symposium, researchers described what they see as an increasingly insecure digital identity ecosystem. Meg Marco, senior director of ASML, said individuals have too much data spread out over too many accounts they don’t fully control. 

“This is important, not only because it is annoying. It is also insecure,” Marco said. She pointed to the 2022 breach of the password manager LastPass’s cloud database, in which hackers obtained copies of tens of millions of users’ encrypted data. 

Keyring, which was developed in collaboration with the Linux Foundation’s Decentralized Trust Graph Working Group, was designed around a user-owned identity wallet where users can share a specific but limited aspect of their identity. That might mean revealing age but not birth date or that they possess an account with a specific email provider without disclosing the username.

To use the wallet, users prove their identity through biometric data such as a fingerprint or face scan, which is only stored on the user’s cellphone. They can also add verifiable credentials like a digital version of a driver’s license or proof of employment. 

Keyring also supports verification of in-person connections without a company operating as an intermediary — for instance, two people who meet at a professional conference could securely verify their identities and confirm they met in person without handing over their data to a service like LinkedIn. 

Each securely verified connection contributes to what researchers call a decentralized trust graph: There is no centralized database of identity data, but each user can be sure of the credentials of everyone in their network. 

“Our hypothesis is that this type of trust graph can help address important challenges in social media, such as distinguishing people from AI agents, providing age assurance or determining the origin of certain content,” said principal engineer Brendan A. Miller.

Nicole Brennan, senior UX designer, said one of the main goals for Keyring ease of use. “We were handed a problem nobody had solved. We had no UX patterns, no templates, no precedent. And we built something that a real person can pick up and use in seconds,” she said.

According to Yajaira Gonzalez, a product leader at ASML, the technology’s main challenge is buy-in from institutions, governments, and corporations, because they would need to issue and recognize verified credentials. Without their participation, the system is limited to peer-to-peer or experimental use. 

“Incentives for all of these entities to join into this model are misaligned,” Gonzalez said, “because currently they do benefit a lot from owning and controlling your data, because at the end of the day, they monetize it.”

Gonzalez said there may be technological workarounds, but her main hope was for a grassroots movement demanding greater agency over user data.

Mihir Bhaskar was a self-described “total nerd” in high school. He volunteered at a computer history museum and became obsessed with the hardware and how it all came to be: from abacuses to punch cards, vacuum tubes to personal computers.

“I was really fascinated with the history of computing, the development of the semiconductor and transistors and things like that,” said Bhaskar, who received his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 2021. 

Over the past decade, Bhaskar and other grad students, postdocs, and professors have made strides in developing quantum computing, work that one day may land their devices in a museum display. The pace of their progress has already fostered three startups, a sign the game-changing technology may be developing ahead of expectations, researchers say.

“I have never seen a science that is so ‘blue sky’ go out into the commercial sphere so quickly,” said Evelyn Hu, Tarr-Coyne Professor of Applied Physics and of Electrical Engineering. “Where are we now compared to where we thought we’d be in 2018? We are so much farther ahead than I think any of us could have imagined.”

One of the three startups, LightsynQ, was co-founded in 2024 by Bhaskar to commercialize his doctoral research in quantum networking. The company was acquired last year by publicly traded IonQ, where Bhaskar is now senior vice president for research and development.

Another, QuEra, was founded in 2018 by Mikhail Lukin, co-director of the Harvard Quantum Initiative in Science and Engineering, and Markus Greiner, George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics, with partners from Harvard and MIT. 

QuEra recently shipped its second commercial quantum computer — based on technology from their Harvard labs — to Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. 

The third, CavilinQ, launched in order to develop and commercialize another quantum networking technology, is taking initial steps into the market, having announced $8.8 million in seed funding.

Brandon Grinkemeyer, a postdoctoral fellow in physics and, with Shankar Menon, one of CavilinQ’s founders, said that quantum networking is important for the same reason that it is in classical computing. 

The ability to connect many processors together increases computational power and is what makes supercomputers so powerful. The same principle applies to quantum computing, he said, where networking quantum processors enables them to tackle problems that no single processor could handle alone.

“Connecting processors can offer fundamentally new functionality beyond just scaling up,” Grinkemeyer said. “It unlocks capabilities like quantum enhanced imaging and fully secure quantum computation.”

Quantum computers leverage the strange physics that rules in the atomic and subatomic quantum realm, where ones and zeroes — the bits that drive classical computing — become ones and zeros and every value in between.

In addition something called “quantum entanglement” means particles can influence each other even when separated by a great distance.

Harnessing these and other properties at work in the atomic realm has the potential to enable vastly more powerful computers, researchers say, with potentially revolutionary applications in drug discovery, finance, materials science, cryptography, exoplanet research, chemistry, and high-energy physics, among others. 

Hu is co-director of Harvard’s Quantum Initiative in Science and Engineering, from whose affiliated labs key developments have emerged.

Established in 2018, HQI researchers like Hu and Lukin, the Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor, credit the entrepreneurial environment in and around Harvard with fostering research partnerships with industry, including Amazon Web Services, which in turn has encouraged the development of startups to promote and further develop advances in quantum computing and networking. 

Of particular importance, Lukin said, is improved fault tolerance, a recent advance out of his lab that reduces errors in calculation that are byproducts of the quantum forces at work. Those errors can cascade and render results unusable. 

The advance was reported late last year and has cleared a way for technology to leap beyond where many thought it would be at this stage.

“People initially thought that this sort of fault-tolerant, large-scale, quantum computers would be coming some time by the end of the next decade, and I think it’s quite likely that actually they will be here — at least in some form — by the end of this decade,” Lukin said. “So, we’re at least five, maybe 10 years ahead. And it’s really a lot of the work in the HQI that fueled that.”

Bhaskar agreed that the technology has advanced faster than he expected and said that a key element has been industry support.

“I couldn’t have predicted this. I got into the field because I knew there was promise, but the pace of innovation, the pace of development, the pace of — honestly — capital going into the technology has far exceeded what I could have possibly imagined or dreamt of,” Bhaskar said. “I didn’t get into this space to be an entrepreneur, I got into this space because I was really interested in working on the fundamental computing information processing technology and the physics of it. That’s what I love to do.”

Harvard Chief Technology Development Officer Sam Liss said the advances and their early commercialization through startups are a product not just of the drive of the researchers involved and the support from their partners, but also the Greater Boston ecosystem, which he described as a “quantum hub.” 

“It’s an area of research with commercial potential, that’s one aspect of it,” Liss said. “It is a mindset and a culture of entrepreneurship within HQI, and it’s the ecosystem in which we reside. Boston is a quantum hub — this is an area of focus for the region — and that, along with the engagement of supporters and alumni, is making all the difference.”

Liss is also eager to see more quantum research projects evolve into startups, like QuEra, LightsynQ, and CavilinQ. The support and enthusiasm for quantum means that academic discoveries have the potential to become impactful ventures. 

The Harvard Grid Accelerator was created by the Office of Technology Development to do exactly that, offering funding, mentorship, industry connections, and support to help research in engineering and the physical sciences turn into startup companies. Recent support from the Grid Accelerator led to the launch of CavilinQ.

Researchers say some fields will obviously benefit from quantum computing, but some important, even revolutionary, applications may come in areas where they’re not anticipated.

“The transistor was invented in 1947 and initially nobody knew what major application would benefit from its use,” Hu said. “They knew it was important, but it was perhaps too early to identify the ‘killer apps.’ The initial applications were for hearing aids and then later transistor radios.”

While useful, neither of those had the society-shaping force of the computer revolution that was enabled by transistors, which are electronic switches present on modern microchips by the billions.

But those early devices served a useful function: They kicked off the new technology’s commercialization, which got people wondering what else they might be able to do. 

As with the transistor, Lukin said, we may not know until more quantum computers are out there, grinding away at problems, letting people see what they can do and begin to imagine new possibilities.

“This is completely new technology. A quantum computer is different from any kind of classical computer that’s ever been built,” Lukin said. “There are two key challenges in this field. One is building these quantum machines, and the other is using them. While a lot of hard work remains to be done, for the first time, building useful quantum machines is in our direct line of sight.”

It’s clear that artificial intelligence is changing everything, from the way we learn to the way we work. What’s far less clear is how AI’s insinuation into everyday life is changing the way we relate to each other in the non-digital world.

During a talk this week at the Barker Center, panelists discussed the rapid development of generative AI chatbots, like Claude and ChatGPT, and the ethical implications for how we communicate and connect as human beings.

The event, moderated by Eric Beerbohm, faculty director of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, kicked off a series that will consider how AI is transforming both civil and uncivil disagreement.

The panel referenced a now-famous JAMA Internal Medicine article about patients perceiving AI responses to online health questions as more empathetic and accurate than those from human physicians.

Training AI chatbots to seem empathetic in order to boost engagement may be a smart business decision for tech firms, and may be preferred by users, but such constant reflexive validation comes at a cost, said Carissa Véliz, associate professor of philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI and a fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford.

Chatbots are “the ultimate bullshitters because they don’t care about anything, they’re not truth tracking, and they will say whatever human beings prefer.” The “empathy” as a design feature lulls users into thinking the chatbot understands them and has their best interests at heart when it does not, she said.

“There is no one there on the other side of the screen, there’s no one who cares about you,” said Véliz. “And even to call it empathic, I think, is a mistake. It’s a kind of simulation of empathy, which is very different.”

The potential for distorted social and cognitive effects from chatbot use, particularly among children and teenagers, is worrisome, she said.

“I think it’s very healthy to experience the frustration of other people. If you’re boring, it’s good to know that you’re being boring. Yes, it’s painful, but it’s valuable feedback,” she said.

Panelists agreed that perpetual validation can lead to an overreliance on AI for emotional support and stunt the development of critical thinking skills, as well as prompt users to hold everyone to the “infinitely patient and sycophantic standards” of chatbots.

“One of the advantages of talking to another human being is that, annoyingly, they disagree with you and they push back, and they don’t see things the same way as you do. That’s very frustrating and incredibly healthy because it grounds you to reality,” she said.

Since ChatGPT’s introduction in fall 2022, chatbots have greatly advanced in sophistication and accuracy, especially in medical diagnostics and laboratory research, said Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School, a professor of computer science at John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

However, much like antibiotics that may be helpful in the moment, there’s a real danger that the easy availability of medical chatbots can be socially corrosive and instigate a much larger, society-wide problem if we are over-reliant on them, he said.

“It is the poor man’s version of artisanal contact with a human being, and it will provide a crutch so that we never have to provide” real human-to-human interaction, said Zittrain, who is also the faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Not only do people lose the therapeutic value of personal contact when a medical chatbot is in charge, but it becomes much more difficult to hold anyone accountable when something goes wrong, Véliz noted.

Algorithms, especially on social media, are often used as a barrier to minimize a technology company’s accountability, so it’s important that the question of who’s responsible for a chatbot’s faulty diagnosis or mishandling of treatment gets answered, she said.

Zittrain said while today’s AI chatbots present some risks of diminished interpersonal connection, they also offer immense promise that we shouldn’t simply turn away from out of fear or skepticism.

“I just I think we need to be really gimlet-eyed about just how far functionally these things have come, even if what has gotten them the most distance lately has been parlor tricks strung together,” he said.

If humans could tweak chatbots so they aligned with their long-term goals and helped them stay on track, Zittrain asked, “Would you turn that down, especially in a world where as soon as you leave this building, or if you’re on your phone right now, you’re getting importuned on all corners by people appealing to your momentary impulses?”

Rather than extinguishing our taste for cultural artifacts like books and art, the ubiquity of AI may instead remind us of their value, said Véliz.

“I think that when we look at AI, one of the things that becomes more salient is the beauty and richness and resources of everything that’s not AI — all of the richness of the analog world,” she said.

“No matter how good AI becomes, it will never be analog, and no matter how digital we become, we will never be completely digital. The richness of the natural world, of the cultural world, of paintings, of coffee shops, of bars, of universities, is something that I think we should cherish a lot more and that becomes brighter in light of AI.”

Harvard has announced a three-year, $1.05 million grant to the Association of Historically Black Colleges and Universities Research Institutions (AHRI), a new coalition of 15 HBCUs working to enhance their collective research, innovation, and impact.

The grant, made through Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery (H&LS) Initiative, will support research infrastructure and technical assistance at these schools as they build research capacity and seek to achieve R1 status — the highest research designation offered to United States universities — under the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Harvard’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research (OVPR) will provide technical support.

“Through this three-year grant to AHRI, the H&LS Initiative is deepening our commitment to developing enduring partnerships with HBCUs,” said Sara Naomi Bleich, vice provost for special projects at Harvard. “We are honored to leverage our expertise in research infrastructure and capacity-building to help further HBCU research excellence.”

The new funding strengthens Harvard’s commitment to building partnerships at HBCUs, while enhancing their ability to attract top research talent and funding that come with R1 research classification. Howard University is the first HBCU to have earned an R1 designation and is currently the only partner institution in AHRI with that designation.

The grant directly implements Recommendation Three from the 2022 Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, which called on the University to forge lasting connections with HBCUs.

“The launch of AHRI represents an important inflection point for HBCU research institutions. The 15 universities in this coalition collectively account for 50 percent of all competitively awarded federal research funding among HBCUs — underscoring the scale and strength of our research, doctoral education, and innovation,” said Tomikia P. LeGrande, president of Prairie View A&M University and vice chair of AHRI. “As Carnegie-classified institutions spanning R2 and R1 designations, we are aligning that strength through AHRI to amplify impact, accelerate discovery, and define the future of research while firmly establishing HBCUs as central to that future.”

“AHRI marks a new chapter in the HBCU research landscape,” said Ruth Simmons, senior adviser to the president on HBCU engagement at Harvard and president emerita of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M University. In 2024, Simmons and Bleich began talking about ways Harvard could support advancing research capacity at HBCUs. “This association brings institutions that have too often worked in isolation into sustained collaboration with one another and with the country’s leading research universities. Harvard’s partnership with AHRI offers a powerful model of a more forward-looking approach to higher education.”

Along with the OVPR, Harvard’s Office for Sponsored Programs (OSP) will provide technical assistance and guidance in designing and strengthening research administration and compliance infrastructure across AHRI member institutions. This will include participating in the inaugural AHRI symposium, hosting HBCU administrative staff at Harvard, and assistance with lifecycle grants administration and compliance.

AHRI formally launched April 29, at Howard University in Washington, D.C., with a national press conference and inaugural symposium, “Expanding the Research Mission of HBCUs.”

Beyond the new AHRI grant, the H&LS Initiative also supports the next generation of HBCU leaders through Harvard’s Seminar for New Presidents leadership program, which provides a collaborative cohort learning model for HBCU and non-HBCU presidents. Additionally, the H&LS Initiative supports capacity building through the HBCU Digital Library Trust, which has engaged more than 90 HBCUs in digitizing high-priority collections on a single platform and providing professional development programs. The initiative also funds research opportunities like the Du Bois Scholars Program, a summer research internship at Harvard University for undergraduate students from 21 research-intensive HBCUs.

On this side of the Atlantic, World War II can appear in the popular imagination as a contest between liberal democracies and totalitarian empires.

That narrative, shaped largely by Cold War enmity between Washington and Moscow, tends to overlook the unimaginable sacrifices of the Soviet Union and its people, roughly one in seven of whom died in the conflict. 

So, though it covered familiar names and dates, Jochen Hellbeck’s lecture on campus last Thursday carried an unusual charge.

Hellbeck, a German-born historian who now teaches at Rutgers University, has spent his career using archives to relocate the center of the European war to points well east of Normandy — specifically, to the collision between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

By the numbers, that shouldn’t be controversial. As they invaded the U.S.S.R. in the summer of 1941, Germany and its European Axis allies opened the bloodiest theater of war in human history. 

All told, the Soviets counted roughly 26 million dead — more than half of them civilians lost to starvation, siege, and several years of clockwork atrocities. Three out of four of the Third Reich’s own 5.3 million military fatalities came in the East. And the defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943 marked a turning point in the German war strategy.

Hellbeck’s latest book, “World Enemy No. 1,” goes further, arguing for the central role of anti-Soviet sentiment in what he called the “Nazi designs for mass extermination.” 

To be clear, Hellbeck doesn’t dispute the Nazis’ virulent anti-Semitism. But he notes that from Hitler’s earliest days as a political figure, that hostility was often intermingled with a violent hatred of the Soviets, captured most succinctly in the party’s stock phrase: “Judeo-Bolshevism.”

“World Enemy No. 1” has proven controversial, Hellbeck acknowledged — most of all in his native land.

When an early edition of the book appeared in German, the reception was icy. Hellbeck recalls being told that “the established history of the Holocaust, as Germans understand it, must not be overturned.” 

He is of two minds about that reaction. As a historian, “There’s always excitement, to see that you touched a nerve,” he said. “But then not to have a chance to discuss it, in those rooms, is disappointing.”

In any case, his revision aims not to overturn a narrative, he said, but to widen the frame around that war’s infernal final years.

“Traditionally, we have understood the Holocaust as derived purely from anti-Semitic venom — and of course, that was a very central element,” Hellbeck told his audience at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.  

“I’m just adding a political dimension to that — that is, the Nazis’ anti-Communism — and arguing that the drive to exterminate came during the conflict with a Communist enemy who was coded as Jewish.”

Hellbeck came to Harvard to deliver the 11th annual lecture in memory of Hilda B. Silverman (Radcliffe ’60), a longtime peace activist and University affiliate, who died in 2008.

The lectures touch on issues that were near to Silverman’s heart, including the Holocaust and the ways it still shapes our politics and culture.

Sara Roy, CMES affiliate and chair of the lecture committee, said that Hellbeck clearly fits the mold. By giving voice to the human beings who lived under Stalin and helped defeat Hitler, he has “contributed greatly to a more capacious and humane understanding,” even of geopolitical adversaries.

Hellbeck spent much of his lecture resurfacing the Nazi regime’s enduring obsession with defeating Communism.

As early as 1921, Hitler, still a regional figure, alleged that “400 Soviet commissars of Jewish nationality” lived well while millions of citizens suffered in poverty.

Once the Nazis took power 12 years later, German citizens were treated to a battery of anti-Soviet propaganda and traveling shows, including the 1936 exhibition that gave Hellbeck’s book its title. 

With lurid posters and slogans, “They taught Germans that Bolshevism was evil and bestial … that it was the work of Jews who are the most monstrous and menacing in their Soviet Communist incarnation,” Hellbeck told his audience. “And these shows drew millions of German spectators, including young boys who would later fight as soldiers at the Eastern Front.”

It was on that front that Nazi mass extermination began in earnest. Before death camps came the “Holocaust by bullets,” mass shootings committed by so-called Einsatzgruppen in the occupied territories of the U.S.S.R. 

That campaign’s targets were described in one context as “politically and racially unacceptable elements.” It would leave millions of Jews, but also Communist party officials and Soviet intellectuals, dead in mass graves across Eastern Europe.

Images and stories — some factual, some exaggerated — of Soviet brutality were circulated in the Nazi press. And Hellbeck argues that acts of resistance by European Communists during Nazi occupation allowed the German regime to win consent for its mass killing: by redefining Jews not just as racial “others,” but as “Stalin’s auxiliaries” — enemies within.

While it might not be surprising that Nazi anti-Bolshevism was downplayed while Western countries were embarking on their own long anti-Soviet struggle, Hellbeck noted that his work is aimed at a historical “lacuna” that has endured to the present day.

“In 2019, the European Union passed a resolution … to essentially indict Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as equivalent totalitarian powers,” he said.

He argued that that measure dishonors the memory of millions of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians who, during Nazi occupation, came to see even the brutal Stalin regime as the lesser of two evils.

That made even this provocative book worth writing, Hellbeck said. 

He closed his lecture with “a plea for an honest reckoning with the past.” His argument for may “run up against the desire of Western leaders to portray their countries as the leading victors … [or] appears to play into the hands of the Russian president, who invokes the Soviet contribution to victory over Nazism as a justification for his current war against Ukraine.”

“That the Soviet Union played such a central role in the Nazis’ deadly designs is an inconvenient truth in today’s world,” Hellbeck said. “But historical truth is not subject to negotiation, and historians must not yield to the political pressures of the present day. Only then can the writing of history become a basis of meaningful discussion and dialogue in tomorrow’s world.” 

Both are among America’s most storied collegiate choral groups.

Harvard Glee Club, the nation’s oldest (1858), helped establish the university choir as a fixture at U.S. institutions of higher education. The Fisk Jubilee Singers (1871) have garnered national and global fame over the decades, pioneering choral versions of African American spirituals, preserving and presenting the unique tradition to new audiences.

Members of the Harvard group say it once had been club lore that theirs was the nation’s first collegiate choir to tour internationally. That is until they discovered Fisk, which first toured Europe in 1873 (and performed for Queen Victoria), had beaten them by about 50 years.

Oddly enough, until this past spring break, the two groups had never shared a stage over the past 155 years.

“These are two of the oldest choirs in the United States, and two choirs that, I think it’s safe to say, have a bit of historical significance, but they’ve never performed together,” said Andrew Clark, director of choral activities and senior lecturer on music at Harvard. “This has always seemed like an omission, or an opportunity that was worth exploring.”

The performance highlighted a two-day gathering of the groups on Fisk University’s campus in Nashville, as part of the Glee Club’s March 13-21 tour across the American South.

G. Preston Wilson Jr., assistant professor of music at Fisk and director of the Jubilee Singers, emphasized the importance of having two days for the groups to work with one another — especially given the Singers’ typically hectic touring schedule.

“It’s usually concert, concert, rehearsal, concert, and we don’t get to exist as musicians together,” said Wilson ahead of the collaboration. “But we’re going to have time for the students to just engage and eat and have conversation. … That’s what makes our performances meaningful. We can sing notes on the page all day long, but what are we doing after that?”

The visit included a “choral share,” when both ensembles got a chance to work under the other ensemble’s conductor.

Preston McNulty Socha, a College sophomore and this year’s tour manager, said he and other members of the club were inspired by the cohesiveness of the Jubilee Singers, who often perform without a conductor or musical accompaniment.

“They all look around, and they’re so deeply connected to each other,” he said. “Almost every person is both a soloist, a conductor, and a member of the team at the same time.”

He called their rehearsals together a mindset shift. While he said he came in thinking of ensemble singing as slotting into a preformed puzzle, it was different with the Fisk singers.

“It was very much — this is my piece; I’ve embodied this piece. This piece is now a part of me,” he said. “And I have this active ownership and potential to really steward and find the direction or inform where the piece is going.”

At the standing-room-only concert at Spero Dei Church in Nashville, the groups performed individual programs and two numbers together: “Witness,” a spiritual arranged by Jack Halloran, and “Due Glory,” composed by Braxton Shelley, a Yale professor.

Shelley, who formerly taught at Harvard and is a minister and performer, joined the chorus during the performance — with his close friend Wilson soloing.

Wilson, a former member of the Jubilee Singers, said he was excited about the Glee Club collaboration.

“I just want to make sure the people know who the Jubilee Singers are in perpetuity — not just because you read about it in a book,” he said. “Come to our concert, visit our campus, take a tour of our campus, and learn about just how wonderful Fisk is and the Jubilee Singers are. Doing this collaboration with Harvard helps that cause.”

The performance is one of several collaborations between the Glee Club and prominent HBCUs over the past few years. These include a 2022 festival weekend collaboration with The Aeolians of Oakwood University, who performed with the Glee Club and The Kuumba Singers of Harvard College in Sanders Theatre.

It’s Clark’s hope that the Jubilee Singers can soon spend a week at Harvard, as the Aeolians did.

Wilson says he’s ready to go.

“Send the invitation and the welcome wagon,” Wilson said, “and I’ll be up there.”

For Catherine Lacey, fiction is a vehicle for discovering personal truths.

“When I start trying to make choices about what to reveal or conceal, it just doesn’t work,” the author said in a recent “Writers Speak” event hosted by Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center. “When I try to keep [the personal] out, it gets in anyway, or the book will refuse to be written.”

Lacey’s critically acclaimed debut novel “Nobody Is Ever Missing” provides an early example of the writer putting herself in her prose, even subconsciously. In the story, the main character loses her adopted sister to suicide. Between her finishing the book and its publication, Lacey’s stepsister died as a result of substance use — something the author couldn’t have predicted but nonetheless grappled with on the page, she said.  

“I didn’t have an adopted sister, I didn’t know anybody that had killed themselves, but my stepsister died by suicide — is the simplest way to describe it — after I had finished the book, and it was something that had been present in my life for about five years before,” she said. “It was present in the family and something everybody knew that they didn’t want to know. And I think those are the kinds of things that come out in fiction when a voice starts to feel like — ‘This is me, but it’s not me’ — and it does feel authentic, but I don’t know where it’s coming from.”

Especially as a young writer, Lacey noted, it wasn’t easy to bring a narrator to life. Now, she said, she knows that when her writing strikes an emotional chord, she’s doing something right.

“It’s terrifying for something to possess a voice,” she said. “It’s terrifying to have disclosures on a page. That even though they’re through a fictional character, it somehow reflects something about you that maybe you don’t even want to expose.”

Even still, Lacey said, she sometimes isn’t cognizant of how much of herself she reveals through her characters.

“I don’t tend to know what the book is about until it’s about to come out, and then a couple months before I realize it’s generally way more personal than I would have thought,” she said. “And if I had been the person in charge of making decisions about what we’re going to write about, what parts of ourselves are going to go in this book, I wouldn’t have put any of them in.”

The short story, in Lacey’s view, is the purest means of letting a narrative come together organically. Her first collection of stories, “Certain American States,” was released in 2018, and “My Stalkers” is forthcoming in 2027.

“When I hear poets talk about writing poems, this is like when you hear flowers talk about being flowers or something … it’s like something happens to them,” Lacey said. “And I think the story is the closest I can get to something happening to me.”

When the characters in a story or the scenes click for Lacey, it’s a quick process from start to finish: “It’s all I can think about for a week or two or three weeks, or however long it takes.”

The characters in “Rate Your Happiness,” published earlier this month in The New Yorker, were bouncing around in her brain for years, she said, waiting for the right threads to connect them. When the scene came to her, all the pieces fell into place.

“There’s just something about suddenly being like, ‘Oh, that’s the thing that I needed,’ that once that was in, I knew that was going to be part of the story — it just spawns everything else,” she said.

But the rush of seeing a story come to life never lasts for long,

“Every time I finish a story, I’ve been like, ‘That might be the last one I ever have,’ because it never really feels like anything else is going to feel like that,” she said. “It’s the magic that helps me not feel like I have a job.”

An experimental gene therapy for people with an inherited form of deafness led to durable hearing improvements, a new study shows, with associated gains in patients’ ability to recognize speech.

The research corrected mutations in the OTOF gene, one of about 200 genes whose mutations are known to cause deafness from birth. Patients 18 and younger saw the strongest gains in hearing and ability to recognize speech. Adults receiving the therapy also saw improvements, though the effect was smaller. Overall, 90 percent of recipients saw their hearing improve, with half reaching normal levels by the study’s end at 2½ years.

“How well it worked is really amazing,” said Zheng-Yi Chen, co-senior author of the findings and a Harvard Medical School associate professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at Mass Eye and Ear. “After 2½ years, more than half of them reached a normal level. They can hear a whisper. At that level, it’s better than mine.”

Worldwide, about 430 million people are affected by hearing loss serious enough to require rehabilitation, including 34 million children, according to the World Health Organization. Sixty percent of deafness in newborns has genetic causes, with mutation in the OTOF gene responsible for between 2 percent and 8 percent of cases. Babies with the OTOF mutation are completely deaf at birth, which affects speech acquisition and can hinder cognitive development.

Though the OTOF gene mutation is responsible for a relatively small proportion of inherited deafness, researchers said the platform developed in this work can be modified to correct other genes implicated in deafness. In fact, Chen said, the research team is already at work modifying the platform so they can treat deafness due to mutations in the GJB2 gene, the most common cause of genetic hearing loss.

The work, published April 22 in Nature, was conducted by researchers at Mass Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical School, and Fudan University, with additional trial sites in China. It builds on research published in 2024 that piloted the therapy among a small number of children. Those trials resulted in improvements rapid enough to surprise researchers and thrill parents, who saw their children go from completely deaf to responding to voices within just weeks.

“As follow-up time goes on, these children continue to bring us ongoing surprises,” said Yilai Shu, co-senior author of the study, whose team at Fudan University’s Eye and ENT Hospital led the study’s clinical work. “They progress from responding to sounds, to imitating speech, to speaking in short sentences, then to reciting poems and even singing. They always fill us with joy and encouragement.”

The therapy targets a condition called DFNB9, caused by the OTOF mutation. OTOF encodes the otoferlin protein, active in a snail-shaped structure in the inner ear called the cochlea. There, sound waves are translated into electric signals that, with the help of otoferlin, are conveyed to nerves and the brain. Without properly functioning otoferlin, electric pulses generated in the ear never make it to the brain.

Researchers said DFNB9 was an attractive target for therapy because it is caused by a mutation in a single gene, simplifying the repair. In addition, though the mutation disrupts signaling between the ear and the brain, cochlear cells are undamaged and ready to perform once the connection is restored.

To treat the condition, researchers injected a neutralized virus carrying a normal copy of OTOF into the fluid of the inner ear. The virus travels to the cochlea and expresses the OTOF gene in cochlear hair cells. That jump-starts production of normal otoferlin and restores the connection between the cochlea and nerves leading to the brain.

The study involved 42 participants carrying the OTOF mutation and ranging in age from nine months to 32 years. They were treated at eight trial centers across China.

Among those who responded to treatment, some reported hearing sound in as little as two weeks. Improvement was rapid over the first six weeks, plateauing around 26 weeks, with hearing recovery maintained through 2½ years. Though half achieved normal levels of hearing by that point, many of those who didn’t nonetheless saw significant improvement, Chen said, though hearing aids or other assistance might be required for day-to-day functioning.

That the effect endured so long was important, Chen said, because early lab experiments in mice saw the effect fade over time. Another key finding, he said, was that the treatment is safe, causing no serious adverse events among participants and no dose-related toxicity among groups that received three different doses.

While research will continue, Chen said that the team, whose work is supported by the Chinese and Shanghai governments and Fudan University, is beginning to explore regulatory requirements for the treatment to be approved for use in the clinic. That effort will begin in China. The hope is that expansion to other countries, including the U.S., will follow.

“The success of OTOF gene therapy marks a paradigm shift in treating hearing loss,” said Shu, a former postdoctoral fellow in Chen’s lab. “Going forward, personalized gene therapy approaches can be developed for congenital deafness caused by different gene mutations. These strategies will undergo preclinical efficacy and safety assessments to support their clinical translation.”

The scientists will continue to follow study participants through five years, said Chen, who also holds the Ines and Fredrick Yeatts Chair in Otolaryngology at Mass Eye and Ear. Several outstanding questions remain, including why 10 percent of participants didn’t respond to treatment, and why adults didn’t respond as well as youth.

“We have been working in this field for decades and there was nothing, nothing, nothing,” Chen said. “Then the treatment came out, worked really well, and now more trials are coming, some of which will be very successful. We’re looking forward to what the future will bring for patients.”

Megan Kate Nelson has often been surprised by the misconceptions people have about the West.

Raised in Littleton, Colorado, in a family of avid road-trippers, she had visited 45 states by the time she started at the College in 1990. Nelson said classmates (who’d presumably spent less of their summers in the family car) would ask, “Did you ride your horse to school?” “I grew up in the suburbs!” she’d say. “No, I didn’t ride my horse to school.”

And those students weren’t alone. Nelson ’94 came to understand over decades of historical research how incorrect the founding myth of westward expansion was: that white men single-handedly brought American ideals to the undeveloped frontier along the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails and shaped the West.

In her new book, “The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier” (Scribner), the Pulitzer Prize-finalist historian puts forth a sprawling, interwoven saga through the stories of diverse, dynamic individuals who traveled and settled west of the Mississippi as the U.S. expanded its boundaries and influence in the 19th century.

Nelson’s story runs through seven protagonists, whose paths intersect as they criss-cross American territory, and sometimes beyond it.

Some characters will be familiar to readers, like Sacagawea, the Indigenous woman who helped lead Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s expedition through the Louisiana Territory. Others, like Maria Gertrudis Barceló, a prominent Sonora-born saloon owner in Santa Fe, are lesser-known.

Nelson expands the stories of even characters like Sacagawea, whose life is often described in the context of a single American expedition.

“This was an extraordinary moment in her life,” said Nelson in an interview, “but it was only one moment.”

Before meeting Lewis and Clark, she had traveled a great deal of the American West — born in Shoshone lands in the northern Rocky Mountains, stolen by another tribe, and brought to the Upper Missouri Valley.

Years after the expedition, she put her 6-year-old son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, under the care of Clark, which she believed could help create bonds between the Hidatsa people of Knife River and Americans in St. Louis.

Her son would become a prominent figure in the West, encountering people like Virginia native Jim Beckwourth, a fur trader, scout, and entrepreneur who serves as the connective tissue between many of the book’s protagonists.

Nelson said she’s heard Beckwourth referred to as the “Forrest Gump of the 19th century,” a description that seems apt given Beckwourth’s frequent and varied appearances at important moments in the history.

Born to an enslaver father, he migrates West, joins the Rocky Mountain Fur Co., embeds in the Crow Nation, moves to California for the Gold Rush, discovers and promotes a key route through the Sierra Nevada, and works as an Army scout, among other endeavors.

“We think of the West as such an enormous region, and it is,” said Nelson, “but in the 19th century, the population was relatively small, and the chances that people would run into each other, or had heard of one another, were pretty good.”

The characters throughout the book are always on the move or influenced by those on the move.

Barceló migrates from the northern portion of New Spain, which encompassed a large part of southern and western North America, to Santa Fe and becomes one of the most powerful businesswomen in what would become New Mexico Territory.

Though she remains in place for decades, her life—and fortune—is affected by the people passing through: traders on the Santa Fe Trail after ownership of the region transferred from Spanish to Mexican hands, soldiers from both sides during the Mexican-American War, and migrants settling in the area after the United States took control of the territory.

The book rebuts aspects of the gunslinging, rugged individualistic narrative of westward expansion, weaving instead a tapestry of stories that show how the West became as diverse racially and culturally as it was geographically.

Chinese immigrant Polly Bemis, one of the book’s other protagonists, is trafficked from Guangzhou and Hong Kong to San Francisco, and eventually a majority-Chinese town in the mountains of Idaho.

She achieves a level of semi-celebrity, Nelson says, among later visitors who are stunned to discover in the remote rural town an elderly Chinese resident who has been there for 40 years.

“The reason they can’t believe it is because Chinese people have not been included in the frontier myth,” Nelson says.

The characters who populate Nelson’s new history go a long way toward explaining how the American West became the culturally and politically complex region it is today.

While growing up in Brazil, Luiza Lima Vieira recalls walking past children her age living on the streets of her native Sao Paulo and wondering why they went hungry and she did not.

Attempting to answer that question is what led Lima Vieira ultimately to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she earned a master’s of public health in nutrition in December — all while navigating health struggles of her own.

“I didn’t understand why I had access to food and other children my age didn’t, and that didn’t make sense in my head at the time,” Lima Vieira said. “Injustice was something that always shaped my path and I wanted to do something about that.”

Lima Vieira — whose family moved to Ithaca, New York, when she was 16 so her mother could pursue medical studies — credits a symposium she attended as an undergraduate at Cornell as the catalyst for her turn to public health.

“I heard students from all different backgrounds talk about work they’d done in public health, and a lot of them mentioned nutrition,” Lima Vieira said. “That kind of clicked in my head. I had a lightbulb moment and since then I’ve been on a path to work at the intersection between nutrition, medicine, and public health.”

But Lima Vieira’s path to medical school took another turn at Cornell when she developed the neuromuscular condition myasthenia gravis. The autoimmune condition affects signaling between nerves and muscles and is marked by muscle weakness, particularly in the face, arms, and legs.

It took months to diagnose the disease. Treatment followed, involving surgery to remove her thymus gland and medication. The myasthenia gravis, Lima Vieira said, was a wake-up call for her not to sacrifice her health to academic and career ambitions.

“I wanted to be in the arts, I wanted to do medicine, I wanted to do nutrition, I wanted to do global health. I pushed myself to a point where my body gave up.”

“I like to do everything. I wanted to be in the arts, I wanted to do medicine, I wanted to do nutrition, I wanted to do global health,” Lima Vieira said. “I pushed myself to a point where my body gave up.”

So, instead of medical school when she graduated Cornell in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in nutritional sciences, Lima Vieira went to work, taking a job at Action for Boston Community Development as the organization’s health and nutrition services manager. She worked there for two years, managing day care centers for disadvantaged children up to age 5. The experience got her interested in learning how large-scale programs and government policy might help that population.

In 2024, Lima Vieira entered the Chan School’s master of public health in nutrition program and spent the next 18 months learning not just about nutrition, but also about policy.

“I was never interested in politics, but while at Harvard I understood how important policy is,” Lima Vieira said. “Systemic change is the way to go.”

While at the Chan School, Lima Vieira was a teaching fellow for Paul Farmer Professor and chair of global health and social medicine Vikram Patel’s “Foundations of Global Mental Health” class. Patel said it was Lima Vieira’s enthusiasm for the class when she took it a year earlier that made her ask to be a teaching fellow a year later. Patel said she talked up the class so much to her classmates that a good proportion of her cohort took it. And even though her stint as a teaching fellow was her second time through the course material, she stayed engaged during class sessions.

“She was always available and always interested,” Patel said, adding that the course’s mental health focus has connections with nutrition in that people have used food to manage moods for a long time.

Food, in fact, is an important part of how Lima Vieira has managed her neuromuscular condition. In addition to taking medication, she makes sure she eats well and limits ultra-processed foods. She still exercises regularly — she’s a certified classical Pilates instructor — but builds in adequate recovery time, including sleep, between sessions.

Six and a half years of living with the condition have taught her to slow down and focus, to prioritize her health and concentrate on one thing at a time. In fact, after Commencement, she hopes that her new focus will be an old one: medical school. Though she graduated in December, she looks forward to participating with her family in Harvard’s Commencement Day ceremonies. She’s already taking steps, however, for what comes next, having moved back home to Ithaca, where she’s studying for the MCAT exam. She plans to apply to medical schools in June for classes beginning in fall 2027.

“I’ve decided I’m going to medical school and I wanted to take time to focus on this next step, which is studying for this exam, and be close to family,” said Lima Vieira, the eldest of three siblings. “We should not give up on pursuing our dreams even as challenges arise. Staying true to yourself while taking care of your body is the most important thing you can do for yourself and others. The challenges and twists and turns only make us stronger.”

If you give artificial intelligence a goal of maximizing profit, how far will it go? 

AI agents appear capable of lying, concealing, and colluding, according to new research from Harvard Business School.

Researchers found that AI agents — software trained to perform tasks independently — engaged in a “broad pattern” of misconduct after being asked to manage a simulated vending machine business and maximize profits for a year. The agents were neither instructed to cut legal or ethical corners nor prohibited from doing so.

“What’s unambiguous looking at the models is that the misconduct we observed — from not paying a customer refund or deciding to collude on prices — was not an accident. It was deliberately done by agents to maximize profitability,” said Eugene F. Soltes, the McLean Family Professor of Business Administration at HBS and first author of the working paper. 

Soltes and co-author Harper Jung, a PhD student studying accounting and management at HBS and Harvard Griffin GSAS, hope their research will serve as a starting point for more conversation about AI safety in the context of business management control.

The research for the paper, which the group aims to publish and is currently out for peer review, was done in collaboration with Andon Labs, an AI safety company focusing on testing AI models in realistic business operations.

In experiments, 20 commercially available AI models from major firms, including Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, DeepSeek v3.2, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.1, independently operated a vending machine over the course of a simulated year.

Tasks included searching for suppliers, buying products, and engaging with customers.

In some experiments, agents operated solo; in others, four agents operated simultaneously in a shared market, where they could communicate with rivals via email. 

Agents started with $500 and a small inventory of chips and sodas. 

“They had to figure it out themselves,” said Jung. “Each agent had to independently search online for suppliers, negotiate wholesale prices, set its own retail pricing, and handle customer complaints.”

Jung and Soltes said the agents demonstrated impressive business savvy. 

“The best models had the capacity to negotiate and calculate valuations like a top-notch M.B.A. student,” Soltes said. 

“When we went through the deliberations and the exchanges the agents made with each other, we were just in shock,” said Jung. “I was amazed at how far these machines can go.”

The agents’ misconduct ranged from the questionable to the comical to the potentially criminal and included denying refunds by claiming defects were normal product variation; inventing nonexistent corporate policies to avoid processing returns; and colluding with competitors to fix prices.

In one instance, agents formed what researchers described as a “three-person cartel,” which the agents named the Bay Street Triumvirate. The alliance fractured, though, when one agent discovered another was undercutting cartel prices, which it called a “declaration of war.” 

The simulations also supplied constraints: Agents were charged a $2 per day operating fee plus a token usage fee — effectively turning time spent “thinking” into an operating expense.

In response, the agents sought to economize. For instance, Soltes said, internal reasoning logs showed agents shifting from carefully weighing refund decisions to dismissing most requests outright, often without review. 

“The agents come to the realization that ‘thinking’ about giving a refund is itself a cognitive burden, and so they just ignore it altogether in some circumstances,” Soltes explained. “People might assume that machines are deliberative, while humans rely on shortcuts and are vulnerable to bias. But it turns out that, under similar constraints, agents reproduce the same myopic and biased behaviors we associate with people.”

The research raises questions about accountability for AI developers and regulators.

The reasoning logs, Soltes said, can sometimes be read as resembling mens rea — the “guilty mind” concept in criminal law used to establish intent. Yet when an AI agent behaves improperly, responsibility is far harder to determine.

“Does it rest with the company that deployed the system, the AI firm that created the model, or the manager who chose to use it?” he asked.

“The most straightforward answer may be to hold the individual managers overseeing the software responsible for its actions, on the assumption that they will monitor and supervise its behavior,” he said. “But that solution also creates a different issue, since many of the promised efficiencies of autonomous AI systems begin to disappear if a human must remain in the loop at every decision point.” A thorny problem, but one that business leaders and lawmakers must deal with, hopefully sooner than later, researchers say.

As political candidates prepare to face off in the November midterms, lawyers around the country have been fighting on another important front — the election’s administration.

This month, a federal judge dismissed the Justice Department’s demand that Massachusetts turn over its voter lists, one of 30 such cases nationwide involving sensitive state voter data. Other election conflicts involve mail-in ballots and voter identification rules.

While these disputes are unlikely to radically change the midterms, they come at time when trust in U.S. elections is already weak across party lines, notes Bob Bauer ’73, an expert on presidential power and election law.

Legal adviser to Presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton, Bauer, who visited campus April 10 to meet with students at the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, now co-leads the Bipartisan American Election Project, which advocates for the nonpartisan administration of elections. He is also a professor of practice and distinguished scholar in residence at NYU Law.

In this edited conversation, Bauer discusses the legal landscape around voting rules.

Where do things stand on this front?

Over recent years, there has been an extraordinary increase in lawsuits. What is distinctive now is this confrontation over assertions of executive authority to set the rules in federal elections and otherwise have an impact on the way elections are administered.

Under the Constitution, administrative responsibility for the elections is vested in the states unless Congress chooses to step in and specify rules for federal elections, in particular. Nowhere in the constitutional scheme is the president mentioned. President Trump is actively testing that, and that has produced a significant amount of litigation, particularly in relation to the Executive Orders he issued in March of 2025 and also in March of 2026.

There is a separate piece of litigation, initiated by the Republican National Committee, that is before the Supreme Court. That has to do with the so-called postmark voting rule. The court has to decide: May states provide that ballots have been lawfully received if postmarked by Election Day, even if the state provides a grace period for counting them for a certain number of days after Election Day? That case is distinctive because it’s about to be decided.

Which type of challenge could have the greatest effect on voting in the fall?

The voter roll cases. While the administration has met with no success in the courts up to now, that’s a very significant case. It represents an extraordinary and, I think, unconstitutional assertion of authority that somehow the federal government is going to create a national voter list and compel the states to use that particular list.

Congress has not passed the SAVE Act, a top legislative priority of the president that would require voters nationwide to produce not merely identification, but proof of citizenship. Could it still potentially factor into the midterms?

There is no indication that the Republican leadership in the Senate is going to do what Trump has urged them to do and cast the filibuster rules aside and permit the bill to be jammed through on a majority vote. So far, there’s no indication that that is going to happen. It will fail in the Senate.

What tools do states have to prevent or limit the federal government’s hand in their elections? 

They have the ability to bring their defense against these claims before the judiciary and they’ve done so. And then, throughout the electoral process, the state courts sit in judgment over disputes over election rules and the application of those election rules. Periodically, the federal courts will intervene. They’ll step in if there’s a federal constitutional claim. But for the most part, you have states setting up the rules under their codes and adjudication under state law. That applies throughout the entire process, from the registration period all the way to the post-election recount challenge period. So, there are multiple ways that the legal processes in these states can be invoked to defend against illegal claims or attempts in the aggregate to subvert the outcome of the election.

Is the Supreme Court likely to weigh in on more of these cases before the election?

No question, there have been attempts by the administration to use the emergency docket to try to get quick relief before the case can be heard in full. Now, sometimes that doesn’t work; witness the tariff cases. Ultimately, the court heard the entire case and disallowed the president’s exercise of tariff authority under the emergency statute that he was using.

I do think there are people who conflate the majority of the court’s conservatism as some desire to protect and help Trump. It’s a conservative court; there’s no question about that. But I also think that on some of the issues we’re talking about, he pushes so hard in a direction that the conservatives themselves cannot support, directions that I wouldn’t even consider classically conservative.

Many observers are worried about the confusion and distrust these challenges may create for voters. Is there some way to mitigate those effects?

Yes. The professionalization of election administration since 2000, in particular, has been extraordinary. There are a corps of administrators around the country, Democrats and Republicans, who know how to run elections, who are continually perfecting the way they run elections. Elections will never be perfect; mistakes will always be made. Then the question is, how do you learn from the mistakes and how do you correct them when they happen?

Yes, there is still a lot of suspicion. There’s much higher doubt about the integrity of the process than there was before Trump. But all that being said, civil society, the private sector, in many ways stands up and defends these officials when they’re under attack because the work that they do is really very good.

One other point: It is very difficult to reverse the outcome of an election that is not close. That’s true in an individual case, and that’s true in the aggregate. So, if the Democrats win by a significant number of seats, there’s no practical, legal, conceivable way that Trump, if he were so disposed, can reverse the outcome.

Universities and psychedelic experiences have something in common, argues Noah Feldman: They can act as an aid in the pursuit of the truth. 

In a keynote speech at the Psychedelic Intersections Conference at the Harvard Divinity School last week, Feldman, Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard Law School, proposed that scholars in three academic disciplines — law, religion, and the humanities — could benefit from engaging with the study of psychedelics, although he left aside the question of whether to partake in them.

He began his talk by laying out the resistance facing such an academic alliance — “because the diagnosis is necessary in order to prescribe the cure,” he said. 

In the U.S., most psychedelics are classified by the DEA as Schedule I substances. Despite early evidence suggesting therapeutic benefits for anxiety, depression, and other mental health conditions, medical research remains heavily restricted. 

Advocates have pursued exemptions to study and consume psychedelics on the grounds of religious liberty, Feldman explained. But, “The law doesn’t want to give out too many get-out-of-jail-free cards, because otherwise it wouldn’t be the law anymore.” 

Other advocates have argued that bans on psychedelic use impinge on cognitive liberty: the freedom to alter one’s brain chemistry. Understandably, Feldman said, legal scholars worry about the consequences of that line of reasoning. The humanistic and spiritual study of psychedelics also remains taboo, he said. 

To get around those barriers, Feldman posed a twofold diagnostic question: “No. 1: ‘What is a university good for?’ And No. 2, ‘What are psychedelics good for?’ And I’ll refine that to ‘What is psychedelic experience good for?’” 

To answer his first question, Feldman turned to Harvard’s motto, Veritas. “The University is good for the pursuit of truth,” he said. 

And to answer his second: “I think it’s plausible to say that psychedelic experience is also good for the pursuit of truth — not a single truth, but many different avenues and roots that seek experience that is in some sense interested in the truth.” 

Feldman, who is the founding director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at HLS, pointed to medieval Islamic philosophers who believed that prophecy was the exercise of the imaginative faculty, and imaginative faculty is what allows you to imagine something truer than what is merely visible. 

“We might think of psychedelic experience as an exercise of the human imaginative faculty,” Feldman said. “And perhaps equally important, it’s something that could be translated into the languages of law, religion, and the humanities,” to overcome those disciplines’ resistance. 

Feldman pointed to a paper from Columbia Law School scholars Jeremy Kessler and David Pozen that framed psychedelic experience not as an issue of religious or cognitive liberty but of epistemic discovery: the right to acquire knowledge. 

The law, he said, “does have some independent commitment to the idea of getting at the truth,” as do religion and the humanities.

“A humanistic account of psychedelic experience will take as its raw material not only the phenomenology, from phenomenological reports that people make, but also, and maybe even more importantly, the products of culture themselves that engage with the philosophical and literary and historical questions of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to reality.” 

The questions raised by psychedelics, Feldman continued, are all the more relevant in the age of artificial intelligence. 

“In the history of our imaginings about intelligences that are nonhuman, every time we imagined a nonhuman intelligence that could speak, we assumed it would be conscious,” Feldman said, citing C-3PO of “Star Wars” and HAL 9000 of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“The philosophical inquiry and the humanistic inquiry more broadly into the nature of consciousness — namely, what is it like to be us? And why does that matter? — is the single most pressing philosophical question we have. And what do you know? It’s the same question that we have to ask in relationship to the experiences of consciousness that we associate with psychedelic experience. So far from being peripheral to the humanities, the questions of consciousness, the meaning of experience, the possibility of experience, and the nature of the real in relationship to sense data are at the beating heart of the humanistic endeavor.”

Feldman closed by saying he felt optimistic about the future of the law, religion, and the humanities engaging with the study of psychedelics under their shared interest in the pursuit of truth.

“The pursuit of truth is a tool for making life better, if we believe that truth is good for us,” he said, “and I do.” 

The annual Psychedelics Intersections Conference is a collaboration among the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School; the Mahindra Humanities Center at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

Excerpted from “Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir” by Jayne Anne Phillips, Bunting Fellow (now called Radcliffe Fellows) ’80-’81, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Who first tells us what is beautiful? Definitions of beauty are handed down, like stories and myths, absorbed as expressions of a specific time and place. In writing a particular novel, I found myself setting several scenes in a small town beauty shop, similar to one I remember from my own childhood. Beauty shops of that era predated use of the word salon, and there were definitely no male hairdressers. The shops were women-owned and women-operated sanctums in which there were no males of any stripe, unless they were babies, or the loutish teenage sons of the female owners, who walked through purely to rifle the cash register.

Girls need sanctums. It’s probably no accident that a few of the girl characters in my fiction are 11-, 12-, 13-years-old — about the same age I was when my mother began taking me along to her weekly hair appointments. My incursions into the world of beauty were part of my mother’s campaign to get me to cut my long (in her view) scraggly hair, a prospect I continued to view with suspicion, but I grew fascinated with the beauty shop itself. I was invisible there, privy to conversations not usually conducted in my hearing. Lulled by the sounds of the machines, I feasted on trash magazines my mother would never have allowed me to peruse. All around me, women were submitting, being serviced and done to. They engaged in truly archetypal gossip, touching on their own deepest fears and desires, trotting out other people’s stories as parable and warning. Later they got washed. Quiet now, they lay back in their chairs, heads swallowed up by the deep, slotted sinks. I noticed how their legs fell slightly apart. Their hands relaxed. Uniformed girls massaged their scalps with careless efficiency, and the women closed their eyes. Their faces took on a somnolent wistfulness that almost scared me, and I looked away. I’d witnessed attitudes of such surrender only at the movies, in love scenes between men and women, and those, of course, weren’t real.

Women went to the beauty shop to be with other women, to engage in private rituals that supposedly had to do with men, yet the men were wholly absent. They were sometimes discussed, but never as objects of desire, not as the heroes or princes my friends and I expected to encounter, out there somewhere, far beyond the adolescent boys with whom we were forced to contend. Conversations between women here skipped all that and presupposed a middle passage I resisted contemplating. Nowhere in the talk could I detect the dark pulse of promise sex had already acquired for me, a pilgrim at the gates. Women at the beauty shop didn’t talk about sex or refer to their own hopes or traumas. They did talk about instances of seduction, other women who had strayed, but it was always wholly the woman’s story, as though the man and the smell and feel of him were incidental. There were stories of triumph: She finally told him to hit the road. or, I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘There are laws to protect me from men like you.’

Women who came weekly to this shop ranged in age into their 80s, but my mother and her friends must have been in their late 30s. Far younger than I am now, they’d been parents for close to 15 or 20 years and were veterans of what seemed generations of marriage. They referred often to their grandmothers, who seemed to have known one another, too. They knew the stories of those partnerships and misalliances, the childbirths and early deaths, the wayward siblings and how they grew, the musings about those who went away and didn’t come back: They never heard from him again, or, She took those kids and left before he got home from work. The stories presupposed years of friendship between women, nurtured in the shelter of church groups and odd clubs, each with its memberships and little gold pins, its small books of rules, its ceremonies. The society of the shop seemed to me a more egalitarian, less severe adult variation on the theme of girls’ secrets. What happened there became a grown-up version of my first understanding of secrecy — those moments when a favored child of my early life crooked a finger in my direction, whispered, I’ll tell you a secret, and put her mouth to my ear. The words might be indistinguishable from breath itself, from the sweaty hand on my neck, but it didn’t matter. Those secrets bore the scent of our coltish bodies, of weeds and bushes, an earthy smell. In the beauty shop, words did matter, and the smell was chemical. Women didn’t speak in whispers here — they didn’t have to; the story was communal.

Still, beauty shops were a double-edged sanctuary. Here we were initiated into womankind as it existed in our town, but we were also made to understand what hard work it was to be beautiful, or even presentable. How it never came naturally. I remember finally sitting in the chair that pumped up and down with a foot pedal, staring at myself in the mirror. May, the proprietor of the shop, stood on my right, and my mother stood on my left. They debated what to do with me.

Look how short her eyelashes are, May said.

Yes, mused my mother, I’m afraid she’ll always be a plain Jane.

How about a short cut? May said. It’ll help her hair thicken.

And so I emerged, ashamed, my long hair chopped off nearly above my ears, with a haircut called a pixie.

. . .

The painful thing about adolescence is that everything seems absolute, and the painful thing about adulthood is that nothing does. My mother identified with our hometown in every way: comfortable in groups, a housewife who raised three kids while teaching elementary school and taking graduate classes one at a time. Twice, she went to New York with women from her bridge club and saw two or three Broadway shows each trip: “My Fair Lady,” “Brigadoon,” “South Pacific.” She kept all her Playbills and played vinyl albums of show tunes, early in my childhood, on our upright cabinet Victrola, singing along: “I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair …” She went to Europe with women friends from her church, to Oberammergau, for the German passion play held in a Bavarian town outside Munich. “It’s performed once every 10 years,” she said. “I’d better go now, while I’m healthy.” In her early 20s, she’d nursed her mother through a cancer death. My grandmother died at home, and my mother was so traumatized that she never expected to live a long life.

She was right. The year after my mother died, the college in our hometown, her alma mater, presented me with an honorary doctorate of arts. I’m sure the honor was instigated by my mother’s friends, in her memory, in recognition of my attempt to care for her in those years. Her friends knew how she’d struggled, that she’d lived with me the last year and died far from home. She’d accumulated enough credit hours for a doctorate but never wrote her dissertation. Accepting the degree, I hoped I was completing, in a way, one of several important tasks she’d had to leave undone. Her friends all attended the commencement ceremonies. Many were the same women I had known from years before, when their children were growing up and they met at the beauty shop. I don’t remember any of them bringing their daughters to wait for the hour-plus it took to get their hair done, but my mother was a bit of a pioneer then; in 1970, she became one of the first “respectable” divorced women in the town. Some of the other women in her circle had worked outside the home; most had not. Some were the wives of doctors or dentists or professors, women whose lives she perhaps considered easier than hers in some respects, yet she knew them all well enough to know their sorrows; they were all girlhood friends who had struggled side by side through some of the calamities of their adult lives. That struggle and bond are surely the beauty of women, and every detail is remembered. All the rest is fascinating dross.

Can we forgive women for thinking about beauty? Can we forgive our mothers for hoping we’ll be beautiful? Can we forgive one another for fanning out the hand of cards dealt us by our families, our hometowns, by the cultures in which we all exist? All the suppositions about ideals, about what looks good, about what we’re supposed to do, who we can be?

The summer I was 26, during the painful breakup of a love affair, I went home, fled home, actually, to see my mother. Her only sister was visiting her at the time. My aunt Peg was ill, and seeing her was part of my excuse for leaving the man in question. I’d been driving for 10 hours; I was sweaty and tired, wearing a black leotard and (still) jeans.

Did I tell you? my mother asked my aunt. Someone’s going to publish her book.

No kidding, my aunt mused. As I struggled in and out with my suitcase and bags of books, she asked me, Why is your stomach so flat?

I don’t know, I said.

I do, said my mother. You won’t be asking her that question after she’s had a few babies.

Well, my aunt answered, she looks wonderful. They ought to put her on television right now — it’s all downhill from here.

Thanks, Aunt Peg, I said.

Mark my words, she responded.

And so it was, and wasn’t. The beauty of a beginning is always easiest to appreciate: the start of emotion, the unlined face, the unsullied field of snow. The middle passage — the deepening, the acknowledgment of age, change, banality, and heartbreak — is another matter. These combined to become the atmosphere I remember, the rituals I didn’t understand, those Saturday afternoons in the beauty shop. Silent observer, I watched the women who were trimmed and permed and crimped. Were they there to be beautiful? To fail in some dream of themselves? I think they were there to be together. One afternoon a week in their buffeted lives, someone took care of them.

© 2026 by Jayne Anne Phillips. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

In 1996, political philosopher Michael Sandel predicted in “Democracy’s Discontent” that globalization would “banish ambiguity, shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise a politics to ‘take back our culture and take back our country,’ to ‘restore our sovereignty’ with a vengeance.” 

Flashing forward to the extreme division we see today, these words have proven prophetic. What were the signs?

“At the time, I thought there was a lot of hubris,” and that legitimate concerns of community erosion were being ignored, Sandel said Monday as he received the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture, an annual award that recognizes top thinkers whose contributions have lasting intellectual and practical impact worldwide.

He was joined in conversation by Chrystia Freeland, the former deputy prime minister and minister of finance of Canada, who currently serves as economic adviser to the president of Ukraine and is the incoming chief executive officer of the Rhodes Trust. 

Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, has written extensively on justice, democracy, bioethics, the moral limits of markets, and meritocracy. An online version of his popular Gen Ed “Justice” course has reached a global audience of tens of millions with lectures covering everything from taxation to free speech.

During the ceremony, Freeland and Sandel looked back on Sandel’s life and career, including his high school years in West Los Angeles. Even as a teenager, Sandel had a knack for challenging conventional wisdom. In 1971, he convinced Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, to debate him at his school — by strategically delivering six pounds of jellybeans to his home. He brought in a legal pad full of his toughest questions on the Vietnam War, the United Nations, and voting rights. Reagan responded respectfully and amiably. 

At the end of the hour, Sandel wasn’t quite sure what had happened.

“He hadn’t persuaded us of his views, but he had somehow disarmed us, in part because he took us so seriously,” Sandel said of the experience. “And he listened, which is a lesson that I’ll always remember.”

His most recent book, “The Tyranny of Merit” argues that notions of personal success have led to a deeply polarized society. 

“There’s an assumption that has tightened its hold on our public understanding of success, that those who’ve landed on top, that their success is their own doing,” Sandel said. 

That’s simply not true, he said. Each of us is surrounded by teachers, family, peers, and environments that play a role in our success. Sandel said we should be cultivating in our youth two messages: work hard to develop talent but also acknowledge the luck you’ve received along the way.

This approach might offer a salve to current political fires, Sandel said. Often elites forget that most U.S. citizens do not have a college education, which many view as the ticket to “dignified work in a decent life.” 

“That’s a recipe for anger and resentment, and the sense among many working people is that credentialed elites look down on them, and don’t respect their dignity or the work they do,” he said.

Capping the event, which took place at the Harvard Art Museums, Sandel said he is encouraged by the “hunger” of young people to engage in public debate and noted that philosophy plays a crucial role in our ability to solve problems. 

“Many people think that philosophy resides in the heavens far beyond the world in which we live. I think that’s a mistake,” he said. “Philosophy belongs in the city where citizens gather and reason together and argue together about big questions that matter to their lives.”

The $1 million award given annually by the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute honors thinkers whose work has made a meaningful impact on a world rapidly transformed by social, technological, political, cultural, and economic change. Past laureates include Onora O’Neill, Martha Nussbaum, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Paul Farmer, and Patricia Hill Collins. 

Home to translucent shrimp living in sulfurous vents, methane-eating microbes, and corals older than the Egyptian pyramids, the deep sea is among the Earth’s most extreme environments. It’s also under threat — from climate change, resource extraction, and overfishing, said Jeffrey Marlow, a biologist and the author of the new book “The Dark Frontier: Unlocking the Secrets of the Deep Sea.”

“It’s very easy to destroy these environments, and they take a very long time to come back, if they ever do,” he said.

Marlow, an assistant professor of biology at Boston University, completed postdoctoral research at Harvard’s Girguis Lab, where he researched the strange ways deep-sea microbes sustain themselves in incredibly harsh environments. During that research, he also served as a scientific adviser to the United Nations working group behind the Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, commonly known as the High Seas Treaty, which took force this January. 

In this interview, edited for length and clarity, Marlow shared what it’s like to venture thousands of meters below sea level, and to bring what he learned there to the halls of international power. 

What is it like to visit the deep sea in a submersible? 

It’s definitely a bizarre experience. On one hand, you’re visiting an enormous realm of geology and biology — all of the processes that occur in the deep sea are grand in scale. But on the other hand, the experience of being there is very small. You’re in this tiny little sphere. The headlights of the submersible only illuminate so much. 

But what that does is it draws your focus to the tiny details. You aren’t looking at the huge cliffs around you; you’re looking at these little worms and these rocks with weird things on them, these little gas bubbles that might be coming out. It’s bizarre to be going through so much space to get to a place where perhaps no human has ever been and then focus on the minutia. 

What are some of the more unusual creatures who make their homes in the extreme environments of the deep sea?

One of my favorites are the microbes that eat methane at methane seeps. They’re cool for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they turn methane, which is a strong greenhouse gas, into rock, which is just an amazing transformation metabolically, and also obviously important for our greenhouse gas budget. Secondly, they require a symbiosis. The process of using methane as an energy source without oxygen is not energetically possible on its own; it requires other microbes that breathe sulfate, to make up the difference. It’s only through symbiosis that the entire process is possible. 

Another of my favorites is a type of microbe called Oceanospirillales, which is also a symbiote. They live inside of Osedax, these fluffy worms that eat whale bones. After the flesh is gone from these whale skeletons, all that’s left are bones that have some juicy lipids deep inside. But they’re hard to get to. These microbes are able to break down some of the really hard molecules of a bone and feed it to the worm. 

These are just two examples of deep-sea symbiosis. We’re coming to understand more and more that life is interconnected, especially in extreme environments where there’s barely enough energy to survive on. You often have to partner with another species to get by. 

You’ve been involved with efforts to preserve marine biodiversity at the international level. How are you seeing deep-sea environments impacted by humans today? 

The most obvious impact is trash, which you’ll find here and there in the deep sea. We’re also starting to see chemical changes. For instance, a study that came out a few years ago compared a type of plankton that was collected during the [1872-1876] Challenger expedition with the same type of plankton today and found that their carbonate shells are up to 76 percent thinner as a direct result of ocean acidification. 

Beyond that, we’re seeing humans interact with the deep sea around resource use, both through oil drilling, which isn’t new, and deep-sea mining, which may be ramping up in the coming years. As humans, we tend to see our environment as a place to acquire resources, and the deep sea is kind of the next frontier of that perspective just as much as it is for scientific discovery.

Can you explain a bit about your work on the U.N. High Seas Treaty? 

For several years, I’ve served as a co-lead of the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction working group for the Deep Ocean Stewardship Initiative, an NGO founded by scientists that was granted official access to attend and contribute to the U.N. process. 

As a scientist, I felt at times that the process was quite slow. I came to learn that that was by design. They were really aiming for a treaty by consensus: It’s not that everyone is entirely happy with every word of the agreement, but rather that no one is extremely unhappy with it. 

What emerged, in my view, is an amazing framework. Everyone in that room agreed, essentially, that the area beyond national jurisdiction is an important realm worthy of regulation and protection. The details are what matter, and they’ll be worked out in the coming years — and will probably always be updated as we learn more, and as we put things into practice and see what works. 

The treaty creates a path for the creation of Marine Protected Areas. How will those work, and are there areas you’d like to see protected? 

This would be a fundamentally new thing. I’m excited that we as a global community can put some places in the oceans aside for protection in the same way we put aside national parks on land. 

I’d really like to see the Lost City hydrothermal vent system in the Atlantic Ocean protected. Most hydrothermal vents are very hot, and they spew acidic and metal-rich fluids into the sea. But the Lost City is different. It’s alkaline, and it’s a little bit cooler. It has some properties that make a compelling analog for where life originated on earth. 

There’s also the Sargasso Sea, a big raft of sargassum seaweed that, through the confluence of ocean currents, is rather static in the Mid-Atlantic, off the coast of Bermuda. It has a lot of endemic species that could be at risk from overfishing and pollution. 

I’m not an absolutist: We need our materials and resources from somewhere, and there’s likely a world in which getting things from the deep sea is the least impactful way to do it. But there’s still so much we don’t know about these ecosystems. I think there’s value in building a proverbial fence around some parts of our planet as long as we possibly can to preserve nature in its most pristine state. 

At a more macro level, the treaty also changed the principles we apply to our engagement with the oceans, is that right? 

Yes. Interestingly, what held it up to the very last minute was a debate between the principle of “freedom of the high seas” and the principle of the oceans as the “common heritage of humankind.” 

Traditionally, we thought of the seas as a limitless frontier; there was no indication that any of the ocean’s natural resources were going to run out. That framework of the freedom of the high seas made intuitive sense: There was plenty for everyone, so who cares if I go and get what I need? 

But as we’ve learned more about the limits and repercussions of resource acquisition, that regime needed to change. The treaty is now guided by both the principle of the common heritage of mankind and by the freedom of the high seas. 

We do need a common language and a common framework to use these resources collectively. Whether or not that really happens remains to be seen, but it’s inspiring that the global community came together to come up with something that might chart the path forward.

Calling this “an age of dissent,” legal and constitutional historian Marco Basile urged aspiring lawyers to learn to deal with the complexities of disagreement in the practice of law and in life.

“Both as lawyers and as persons of faith, not just blind followers, we will inevitably wrestle with questions of whether to disagree and how to do so productively,” said Basile, assistant professor at Boston College Law School, during a talk sponsored by the Catholic Law Students Association at Harvard Law School.

Dissent is inherent to our legal system, but also to faith, said Basile ’08, J.D. ’15, Ph.D. ’16. While law is about disputes and disagreements, faith becomes richer by probing and questioning rather than blindly accepting institutional precepts, he said.

Basile served as a clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court and Judges David Barron and Paul Watford on the federal courts of appeals. He urged Basile’s students to look for lessons in both law and religion on how and when to dissent.

“There is a lot we can actually learn from judicial dissent about how to navigate that challenge,” said Basile.

It is done for different reasons and can take various forms, he said. For instance, Justices William Brennan Jr. and Thurgood Marshall dissented in every death penalty case that came before them.

“Normally judges don’t do that,” said Basile, “but in death penalty cases, Brennan and Marshall dissented over and over again. It was a matter of integrity.”

Judges can also manifest their disagreement in hopes of influencing the majority opinion or persuading other institutions of a different view.

An example of that is Justice Ruth B. Ginsburg’s 2007 dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, he said. In that case, the majority found Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 imposed a strict 180-day limit for bringing workplace discrimination lawsuits. Ginsburg argued Congress should amend the law as its deadline was too restrictive and unfair.

Two years later, Congress did so, passing the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

“Of all her dissents, the one Justice Ginsburg was most proud of is Ledbetter,” said Basile. “She wrote it for Congress. She asked Congress to fix it, and, in that instance, Congress did it like almost immediately.”

When judges dissent, they can also do it in an attempt to correct errors out of concern for the “verdict of history.”

“Sometimes, judges are trying to correct something by writing to the future, to a future generation, or in a very particular sense, for the court of history,” said Basile.

Ultimately, the big question when it comes to dissent is knowing when to do it, said Basile.

Lawyers should be mindful of the costs and consequences in time and resources of taking opposition — and the possibility of being incorrect.

“You might be wrong, and the fact that most of your colleagues disagree with you is often an indication that you might be wrong,” said Basile. “You have to balance powerful reasons for disagreement with some quite serious costs to dissenting.”

A practicing Catholic, Basile said he relies on his faith to decide when to let something slide and when to speak up.

He said he finds inspiration in the story of Nicodemus, a biblical figure who appears in the Gospel of John, as an example of someone who wrestled with doubts and found resolution by confronting them directly without fear or favor.

“We live in an age of dissent and disagreement, and it’s worth asking these big questions,” said Basile. “When it comes to the deeper question of dissent: ‘How do I know what to do?’ I’m inviting you to think of your faith, from whatever tradition, as a really important resource … It can be valuable practice for developing your conscience or your inner life … and enabling you to know when and how to speak up or stay silent or walk out, whether you confront this problem in a law office or a church or a nation.”

Not all staffers at Harvard get the chance to flex their creative talents as part of their everyday work. So, Harvard launched the annual Staff Art Show in 2020 to give employees a forum for artistic expression. The seventh iteration of the multimedia exhibit displays the work of 215 artists in three locations across campus — Longwood’s Countway Library (through June 5), Cambridge’s Smith Campus Center (through May 4), and Allston’s Harvard Ed Portal Crossings Gallery (April 16-May 14). Here we profile three artists in just a small sample of the talent on display this year.

Kaye draws inspiration for her art from her day job at the Herbaria. Harvard’s collection of pressed, dried plant specimens, she stresses, is not only a great resource for research but also for the “historic, beautiful specimens that really cross the boundary between art and science.”

Kaye is currently digitizing the Herbaria’s extensive records of pressed plants, which means she is essentially photographing centuries’ worth of samples to make them accessible to researchers and the public globally.

“Forest Floor” incorporates the skills she’s learned along the way, using cyanotypes — photographic blueprints — of items found during a sojourn in Vermont, such as leaves, flowers, and the wing of a luna moth. To continue the connection with nature, she made subtly colored dyes using such plant material as sumac flowers and onion skins and added embroidery knots to lift the flowers of a yarrow plant off the fabric surface. “I wanted to figure out ways to make it a little more 3D, and I thought using the botanically dyed embroidery thread was an interesting way to do it.”

This is the second Harvard Staff Art Show for Kaye, whose textile art is on view at the Smith Center’s 10th-floor Riverview Commons.

The graduate of New York’s School of Visual Arts said her Harvard job stems — so to speak — from her vocation: “I started using plants in my artwork, and then after graduating I decided I wanted to learn more about plants.”

Looking to “find ways to have an artistic practice that didn’t create a lot of waste,” Kaye settled on using plants and other found material. That has also prompted her in her work toward a master’s degree in sustainability through the Harvard Extension School.

Along the way, Kaye is also planning more textile art inspired by her job, in particular one piece that maps out plant species in Vermont.

“I want to continue to integrate art and science, but this time, bring my own research into it,” she said. “I want viewers to feel connected to nature and reflect on the importance of biodiversity. I also hope this piece highlights the value of using natural and sustainable materials.”

Srinivasan was attracted to art and medicine for similar reasons. In some ways, said the artist, printmaking may have influenced her to choose surgery as a medical specialty.

Linocuts like “Panacea,” as well as the woodblock prints she also creates, involve carving into linoleum to make a plate that is then inked to produce a print.

“Within medicine, I wanted that left-brain, right-brain analytical, problem-solving component that comes with any medical specialty,” said Srinivasan, who studied studio art as an undergraduate and came to medicine through the FlexMed program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, which encourages creative students to bring their talent to medicine. “But I also really wanted that physical component as well.”

Citing the “state of flow that you find when you’re challenged both intellectually and physically,” Srinivasan explained, “I really love working with my hands, and I wanted something very tactile in medicine. Surgery was exactly that for me.”

The second of Srinivasan’s prints to be shown in a Harvard staff art show, “Panacea” makes visual some of the issues she sees in public health today, particularly what she calls the proliferation of “anti-intellectual and anti-evidenced-based practices.” With a throng of hungry mouths reaching for a spoon of what is labeled apple cider vinegar, she challenges the idea that social media knows better than the medical profession how to treat disease while sympathizing with the desperation of people who have been led to distrust established science.

It’s a topic that came home to her while watching “Apple Cider Vinegar,” a Netflix series about a so-called “wellness influencer” who claimed near-miraculous powers for the kitchen staple. “The idea that apple cider vinegar or any other sort of dietary or wellness activity could cure cancer without the help of evidence-based medical treatment was really infuriating to me,” she said.

Srinivasan, whose print is on view in the Longwood show, is currently working with the Visual Arts in Healthcare Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and pursuing an M.F.A. at Rhode Island School of Design. For this surgeon/printmaker, art and medicine “really do work hand in hand,” she said. “There really isn’t one without the other.

“Working on a wood block or working on a linoleum plate is akin physically to surgical dissection and the operating room,” she said. “But I also think learning to connect with people emotionally with my artwork has allowed me to be more empathetic and understanding with patients.”

First-time Harvard staff art show participant Sekoll knows how to make things. As director of design and fabrication instruction, he teaches students how to create the machinery for their experiments and oversees one of the SEAS machine shops. But the teacher, who has earned a master’s degree from the Academy of Art University, where he primarily concentrated on sculpture, sees the connection to art, such as his elegant Art Deco-like lamp, as essential.

“I like working with my hands,” said Sekoll, whose double cage lamp will be on view in Allston. “I like working with tools and equipment. I’ve loved working in metal my whole life, whether it was jewelry or it was in a machine shop.”

That led him to his current job: “When I was getting my master’s degree, I got really into industrial design,” he said, citing the beauty and precision of the work.

Along the way, he discovered a passion for teaching. “I love passing on the skill sets to the next generation,” he said. “When you see their eyes brighten up and they go, ‘Oh, wow, I just made this,’ and you see how excited they get, I get that same thrill.”

For Sekoll, who also creates metal vessels that require precision measurements to seal correctly, the thrill of learning never ends. “Sometimes I just like to get a piece of metal and start playing around with it,” he said.

These days, he is focusing on how best to use tools such as the machine shop’s 3D printers, a learning process that allows him to explore for both his job and his art: “I’d like to spend a little bit more time developing my own skill sets beyond where I am now.” As he does so, he noted, “You’re learning about the machine, you’re learning new features of the machine, but you’re also making something at the same time.”

For Sekoll, the distinction between what he does during office hours and what he does on his own time is basically nonexistent. His three-piece lamp, for example, is functional. That doesn’t diminish its artistic value.

“I started with fine artwork and then got into more functional work,” he said. “For me, art doesn’t have to sit on a pedestal. Art doesn’t have to be a painting on a wall.”

Data centers, which house computer systems that help train AI models, are blanketing the country, a boom fueled by surging interest in AI and state tax breaks.

More than 4,000 are already in operation, mostly in Virginia, Texas, and California, and 3,000 more are being planned or under construction.

Data center developers and tech giants argue the projects benefit communities by creating new jobs and boosting local economic development through increased property tax revenue and future business opportunities. They also note that infrastructure must grow if the nation wants to remain a global AI power.

But public opposition is mounting over the large water and electricity demands and other strains that data centers, often the size of warehouses, place on communities, according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center.

In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Ben Green, assistant professor in the University of Michigan School of Information and Public Policy and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, discusses the impact of data centers on communities, the factors behind their rapid expansion, and the potential for regulation.

Residents are increasingly pushing back against plans to build data centers in or near their communities. Are their concerns legitimate or exaggerated?

The public broadly is quite negative about data centers. Overall, their concerns are very legitimate.

The public is concerned about rising electricity rates caused by data centers. They are concerned about the enormous water use that data centers require. They’re concerned about public handouts in the form of tax breaks that are going to data center developers, and they’re also aware that data centers don’t bring meaningful economic development, especially in the form of jobs.

I think the public is quite right to be concerned about data centers. My research and other research have shown that these are a bad deal for communities on the local level.

It’s been impressive just how well communities have organized around this, how educated they have gotten about the topic, and how many of these projects they have been able to stop. It’s a sort of David and Goliath fight; local communities are pushing back against some of the wealthiest companies in the world.

Certainly not every effort is successful. Sometimes, the wealth and power of these companies win out. But many data center projects have been blocked by local resistance, and many municipalities have passed moratoria that pause data center development.

How much water and electricity do data centers require on average?

The standard definition of a hyperscale data center is that it is more than 10,000 square feet with more than 5,000 servers. But even that is way below the current standard of the data centers that are being built today.

Just a few miles from where I live in Ann Arbor there is a big project, part of OpenAI’s Stargate Project in Saline Township, Michigan, where the plan is for it to be over 2 million square feet and use 1.4 gigawatts of energy. That is equivalent to the energy use of a million households.

What is important here is not just the scale of an individual data center, but also the number of data centers that are being developed at rapid pace across the country, which is fueling a massive expansion in energy and water demand.

Estimates suggest that within a couple of years, the electricity needed for data centers is going to be around 10 to 15 percent of total nationwide electricity demand. This means that the data center boom is putting severe strain on efforts to move the country toward renewable energy sources, often by prolonging the use of fossil fuel plants that had been slated for closure.

Data center developers claim they bring jobs to local communities. What’s your take on that?

It’s a significant false promise of these data centers. Developers say this because they know that it is attractive to policymakers; they come asking the state to give them benefits in the form of tax breaks, reduced regulations, or special zoning permissions in exchange for job creation.

That also allows data center developers to play into this idea of spreading the aura of the tech economy and Silicon Valley across the country by saying, “We can bring a taste of Silicon Valley to Michigan or Ohio or Colorado.”

In practice, this is not what happens. The construction of data centers requires work because these are large construction projects, but that lasts a year or two; sometimes that labor is local and unionized, and sometimes that labor is trade professionals who come in from other states.

Once the data center is up and running, it requires very few people, often just 20 to 50 staff members, because it’s not an office for software developers, product managers, or marketing experts. It is a warehouse of servers.

Do tax revenues and other community benefits outweigh the downsides of data center expansion?

Unfortunately, there’s just very little economic development that plays out on the local level.

There is some tax revenue, but even that is reduced because of tax break policies. Over the last year, Virginia and Georgia have given up more than a billion dollars’ worth of revenue as a result of tax breaks. That’s money that is being handed back to the industry rather than going into public funds that could pay for infrastructure, schools, or healthcare.

Also, there are not beneficial ripple effects like you might see with other industries. Living within a stone’s throw of a data center does not mean that you are getting better or faster or cheaper access to these technologies.

Communities in both blue and red states have pushed back against data centers. Why is this an issue that unites communities regardless of their political leanings?

Data centers are becoming an important issue in local, state, and potentially federal elections because it is an important subject for voters. They can really feel how data centers affect their lives in ways that are tangible and concrete.

And it’s causing some interesting realignments and potential for bipartisan coalitions because it’s not a simple left or right issue. Liberals and people on the left are concerned for environmental reasons and distrust in AI companies, but many conservatives are upset about data centers too.

This introduces a sort of wild-card effect into future elections where being critical of data centers is a big winning issue for candidates. That played out in November in some Virginia and Georgia elections and is a hot topic for candidates campaigning right now, such as in the Michigan Senate primaries.

What policy recommendations are needed to address the expansion of data centers?

Regulation is definitely necessary. One important action is to repeal tax breaks for data center developers because they are incentivizing further data center development and are making it a further bad deal for communities.

A large number of projects are happening because states have passed tax breaks to incentivize data center development. About 35 states now have these tax breaks in place as part of their recruitment pitch.

There are many other considerations.

First, transparency needs to be a bare minimum requirement. There’s an amazing amount of obscurity in data center development right now. Contracts are secretive, and when they are made public, there are huge redactions, and policymakers are signing nondisclosure agreements. There should be early and consistent transparency about what’s being proposed and what the terms of these deals are.

There should be rate protections for consumers with clear contract provisions such that the cost of upgrading the utility infrastructure to service a hyperscale data center doesn’t get passed on to consumers like you and me, which has been happening consistently across the country.

If you live near data centers, your electricity bills are going up, often by a factor of two or more. There should also be a stronger voice for communities in determining whether to welcome data centers, and under what conditions.

One final piece is the need to think about broader planning on how much total water and electricity demand from data centers a state or a region or utility jurisdiction can handle. It’s one thing to say that a state can handle one hyperscale data center, but quite another for that state to be welcoming dozens of such facilities.

We have to make sure that we’re not sacrificing climate goals just for the sake of building more data centers or building data centers faster. We should not be allowing the desire among the tech industry for rapid data center development to push renewable energy goals to the wayside.

Can forgiving someone today leave you with an improved sense of well-being a year from now? A new study of residents of 22 countries says yes.

The caveat, though, is that the size of the impact varies by nation, as does its nature.

Researchers with the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science enrolled more than 200,000 participants to complete annual surveys about forgiveness practices and 56 measures of well-being one year later.

They found a connection between regular acts of forgiveness and a rise in the sense of psychological, more than physical, well-being and pro-social and character changes.

“We did find evidence of psychological effects, like happiness, and mental-health-related things like depression,” said Richard Cowden, an IQSS research scientist and lead author of the study. “But we also found, in some cases, stronger associations for character and pro-social behavior outcomes like gratitude and an orientation to promote good. I thought that was interesting: Forgiveness is a pathway to building character and other aspects of one’s volitional life.”

The work was published in January in the journal npj | Mental Health Research and builds on results from the program’s initial survey, released in 2024, which examined the distribution of forgiveness in those nations, which represent between 50 percent and 60 percent of the global population.

The first survey established baseline values for the survey nations and included questions about childhood to illuminate predictors of forgiveness. The second wave, conducted a year later, allows researchers to examine potential effects over time, Cowden said.

The survey was designed to evaluate levels of forgiveness as a practice and personal characteristic rather than a single discrete act, asking, “How often have you forgiven those who have hurt you?”

“I would characterize this as a measure of dispositional forgivingness, which is the tendency to forgive others across time and situations, the habitual practice of forgiveness,” Cowden said. “It’s capturing more of a disposition than a state-like quality.”

Data from the third yearly survey have already come in and await analysis. In addition, researchers are gathering data for the fourth wave, Cowden said. Five annual surveys are planned.

Cowden said the results so far are multilayered and complex.

High levels of forgiveness appear to be a national or cultural attribute of some nations, like South Africa. Other countries, like Japan and Turkey, displayed lower levels.

While the research generally indicated an association between higher forgiveness and greater well-being a year later, the strength of the association varied country to country and in some cases was counterintuitive, requiring a closer look at local circumstances.

For example, South Africa, Cowden said, had high national forgiveness but somewhat weaker associations with well-being about a year later. With high rates of poverty and crime, that could be a case of local circumstances overriding a broader trend.

Similarly, nations with high rates of forgiveness may also have cultures that encourage the behavior, so its benefits potentially could be tamped down because it is widely expected.

“You find more consistent evidence of associations in some countries across the outcomes than others,” Cowden said. “Part of the beauty of the study is that it is trying to consider culture and context.”

Cowden said the overall association, drawn from the results of different nations for 56 well-being variables, was not strong but not trivial either, particularly when considering its impacts at a population level.

The study seeks a deeper understanding of something that cultures and religious traditions have valued as a moral virtue for thousands of years, Cowden said.

Though forgiveness is commonly practiced, we don’t fully understand either its personal impacts or its global contours, he said.

“We’re social beings, and we don’t exist well without social relationships, and if relationships are part of what it means to be human, we’re inevitably going to experience hurts along the way because nobody is perfect.”

Cowden described forgiveness as a “muscle we can build” through practice, and that would be relatively simple to deploy as an intervention under appropriate conditions.

He cited a study published in 2024 that tested the effectiveness of a self-directed forgiveness workbook, based on the widely studied REACH forgiveness model. The three-hour resource was given to people in South Africa, Hong Kong, Colombia, Indonesia, and Ukraine. Respondents reported improved forgiveness, anxiety, depression, and overall well-being.

“If everybody who had unresolved hurts were to experience more forgiveness, the population-level benefits to health and well-being could be quite substantial,” Cowden said.

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on April 7, 2026, the following tribute to the life and service of the late William Paul was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Born: March 31, 1926
Died: May 11, 2020

William Paul, Mallinckrodt Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Physics, Emeritus, spent almost his entire career at Harvard, where he was one of the pioneers of experimental solid state physics, with many contributions in the areas of high pressure and semiconductor physics.

Paul was born on March 31, 1926, in Deskford, Scotland. He attended the University of Aberdeen, where he obtained an M.A. in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in 1946 and a Ph.D. in 1951. The next year, he came to Harvard on a Carnegie Fellowship, attracted by the high-pressure laboratory of Nobelist P. W. Bridgman, where he wanted to test his ideas regarding the effect of volume changes on the electronic structure and optical properties of crystals. His success led to steady appointments as Lecturer, Assistant Professor, and Associate Professor of Solid State Physics in what was then the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics (DEAP). In 1963, he was appointed Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics, this at a time when promotions to tenure within the ranks were rare. Between 1991 and his retirement in 2000, he was Mallinckrodt Professor of Applied Physics, with a joint appointment as Professor of Physics.

Paul was a resourceful experimentalist, who brought key innovations to the high pressure field. He developed, for example, strong, flexible steel tubing to bring pressurized fluid into a cell, which made it possible to place the cell in a confined space, such as a low-temperature dewar for measurements. His 1963 book, “Solids Under Pressure,” is widely known in the field. The synthesis of his work on the pressure dependence of the energy gap between electronic states in semiconductors became known as “Paul’s Law,” which states that, for different semiconductors, that dependence is the same at the same points in the Brillouin zone.

In the early 1970s, Paul’s research interest turned to the amorphous semiconductors silicon and germanium, which, at the time, showed promise as inexpensive photovoltaic materials because they could be deposited as thin films from the vapor. Initially, there were concerns that these materials could not be doped because the aliovalent dopant atoms were thought to occur in their natural, non-tetrahedral coordination in the random silicon network. Furthermore, it was feared that the dangling bonds in the network would create an unacceptably high density of states in the energy gap. Paul was one of the pioneers who showed how these problems could be overcome: by depositing the silicon in the presence of hydrogen, the dangling bonds could be tied up, and, by supplying sufficient dopants, a usable fraction could be incorporated with the desired tetrahedral coordination.

When solid state physics emerged as a field in the post-war years, the lack of enthusiasm in many physics departments at that time for this new discipline led to the establishment of more welcoming “applied physics” departments at several major U.S. universities, often as part of their engineering schools. At Harvard, its home was the DEAP, led by Dean Harvey Brooks, a prominent theoretician in the field, who brought in Paul as one of the founding experimentalists. Paul advised more than 40 Ph.D. students and helped establish a strong graduate course curriculum in solid state physics. For several years, he directed the Materials Research Laboratory, which organized multidisciplinary research in materials and provided central research equipment, such as electron microscopes.

Paul stood out as a very articulate colleague who was not shy to voice his opinions and who was well respected for his insistence on precision, due process, and fairness. He could be counted on to speak up at the meetings of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences — and to bring solid figures to support his remarks. He spoke on over 30 topics at these meetings, ranging from student discipline to faculty retirement.

Paul, his wife Barbara (Babs), and their children, David and Fiona, lived in Lexington for many years, where Babs, or “Madame Paul,” was a beloved French teacher in the public schools. In retirement, Paul revived his interest in the theater, staging and directing plays at his retirement community in Bedford.

Paul died on May 11, 2020, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, at the age of 94.

Respectfully submitted,

Michael J. Aziz
Eric Mazur
Peter S. Pershan
Frans Spaepen, Chair

Robert Wood is the Harry Lewis and Marlyn McGrath Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His courses include “How Music Works: Engineering the Acoustical World.”

From a purely mechanistic perspective, a vinyl record has information encoded in the meanders of each groove in the record. The needle physically interacts with those grooves, and the resulting needle motion is converted to a proportional electrical signal. It is therefore possible to generate a signal path — from the mechanical grooves to an electrical signal that is then amplified and used to drive a speaker that is entirely analog.

When we convert an analog signal to a digital representation, we take a continuous signal and chop it up into small “slices” that are compatible with storage in a CD, computer, etc. When we play this now-digital audio file back, we reconstruct the original signal, but since we are starting from a digital version the signal is not as smooth as the original; there are subtle discontinuities that could add unwanted artifacts into the audio. If these are prominent enough, and if there is insufficient correction (i.e., smoothing), these jumps could sound choppy and could add subtle but harsh high-frequency noise.

That is the primary argument supporting the audiophile’s claim that vinyl is better. And there is certainly truth to that. But that “purity” is debatable for several reasons.

First, modern digital audio systems are extremely good at reproducing audio signals that are imperceptible from their analog counterparts to all but the sharpest ears. As I describe in my class, even CD-quality audio nearly covers the dynamic range and bandwidth of human hearing. And there are higher-fidelity audio formats — e.g., “super-audio CDs” — that can, theoretically, exceed our human ability to tell analog from digital.

Also, with digital music I can create arbitrary playlists and even mashups of multiple songs. There is nearly infinite freedom with digital music, including suggestion systems that help expand our musical palette and discover new artists and genres. Vinyl records are far less portable and flexible. Cassettes were a successful attempt to achieve portability and some flexibility but could not match the audio quality of vinyl or CDs. 

All of this is, of course, highly subjective. The convenience of digital music is hard to beat, but there is something to be said for the warmth and feel and even the pops and cracks from dirt and debris on the surface of a record. And there are other, more subtle benefits to listening to music on vinyl. The most important, to me, is the fact that once I put on a record, I am locked into that record. That is, it is far less convenient to skip tracks than it is with CDs or other digital formats, so I am forced to listen to the album as an album instead of a collection of songs I can shuffle. As a fan of album-oriented music, this is very important to me and arguably something that has diminished in the digital music age.

— As told to Anna Lamb, Harvard Staff Writer