Most envision the realistic style of the Greeks and Romans when thinking about the art of ancient Europe. But there were other peoples and ways to think about depicting the world, and that includes the Celts, the diverse group who inhabited Britain, Ireland, and a vast portion of continental Europe.

“Archaeology and art history are still very Greece- and Rome-focused in the United States,” said Susanne Ebbinghaus, the George M.A. Hanfmann Curator of Ancient Art and Head of the Division of Asian and Mediterranean Art. “So I thought, ‘Oh, it would be amazing to bring some of these objects here.’”

The Harvard Art Museums are sharing these artistic contributions in a new, first-of-its-kind exhibition called “Celtic Art Across the Ages,” which explores the objects created by those labeled “Celts” from the Iron Age to the early medieval period, as well as from the Celtic Revival of the late 19th and early 20th century and even more recent time periods. 

It also considers the evolution of imagery and ideas in the region amid the spread of Roman rule.

Laure Marest, the Damarete Associate Curator of Ancient Coins, said that this exhibit seeks to question assumptions about long-held artistic narratives.

“History is written by the winners,” Marest said. She pointed out that the themes of Greek and Roman art have been revered for a long time by Western audiences, but Celtic art — which co-existed alongside them — is different.

Marest said she was struck by how contemporary some of the pieces feel, with their reliance on abstraction, ornamentation, and deconstruction of forms. 

“The art they produce is actually surprisingly modern in some ways,” she said. 

One such example is a fragmented piece of sandstone in the shape of a head, discovered in Heidelberg in southwestern Germany in 1893. 

It was likely part of a warrior sculpture and often surprises viewers: It is not figurative, not clearly human, plant, or animal; it is almost cartoonish in its construction — features that are shared by other examples of Celtic art. 

Other imagery in the exhibit is fantastical in nature — featuring dragon-like or other mythical creatures — or incorporate different ideas of deities. 

There is also a bronze sculpture featuring the goddess Artio with a tree and a bear. Found in 1832 at Muri, near Bern, Switzerland, elements of the sculpture appear to have been changed and repurposed at different time periods.

Why? What significance did this deity hold to the people at the time it was created? What inspired the people who created — and changed — this divine image? It hints at the complexity of life for the various Celtic peoples under the spread of Roman rule.

“Most of the ancient inhabitants of central and western Europe are unlikely to have considered themselves Celts,” said Ebbinghaus, even though they may have related languages, practices, and traditions.

She explained that the people we refer to as Celts, Gauls, or Galatians weren’t as homogeneous as we tend to think. These ancient populations spanned a large geographic area and each had its own name and culture. 

“We’re deliberately trying to separate the clichés about Celts from art that has been called Celtic,” said Penny Coombe, the Kelekian Curatorial Fellow in Ancient Art. 

Coombe said the exhibit invites viewers to reflect on what this means.

“This term Celtic has endured for nearly 3,000 years, albeit with a huge gap in when it was used … What does relate all these very different artifacts to one another and is that a real relationship?” she said. “How is this term repurposed and reused in different ways at different times, and how does it become politically relevant in later periods of building nationalism, building nationhood?” 

The exhibition brings together nearly 300 objects from collections in France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Britain, Ireland, and the U.S. 

Curated by Ebbinghaus, Coombe, Marest, and Matthew M.L. Rogan, senior curatorial assistant for special exhibitions and publications, the exhibit has taken years to come together and relies heavily on significant loans from many European museums. 

It also features items from local collections, including items from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and Boston College.

Items range from jewelry to functional objects like arms and armor, horse trappings, chariot components, and feasting equipment to objects associated with the church.

One of the items on display is a pony cap, an ornamental hat with horns created for a small horse. This piece is loaned from Scotland and has an associated line drawing that shows how it would have looked on the animal’s head. 

“It’s so unusual,” Coombe said. “Why would you dress up a really tiny horse with this piece of armor … What do the horns mean? They’re decorated with scrolling and incised patterns, which seems to be similar to ornament that’s seen on shields that come from the River Thames in a distinctly British style.” 

The curators hope that Celtic Art Across the Ages will offer viewers an opportunity to deepen their understanding of art and appreciate what its nuances can reveal about the past. 

“Many populations lived in the ancient world, and, yes, interacted with Greeks and Romans. We should be skeptical of written histories and think about who is the author,” Ebbinghaus said. “We can learn to see in different ways and unexpected ways.” 

“Celtic Art Across the Ages” will be on display March 6-Aug. 2 at the Harvard Art Museums. A print catalog featuring more than 30 essays by international specialists accompanies the exhibition. The exhibition also features a variety of programming, including an Irish animated film marathon and Welsh poetry readings. The Museums are free and open to the public.

For more than a century, condensed matter physics has grappled with one of its greatest unsolved challenges: how to build superconductors that operate at room temperature and transmit electricity with no loss.

Now, in a paper recently published in Nature, a team of Harvard physicists has reported new insights into why one promising superconductor has yielded mysteriously uneven results.

The researchers used a novel method to study materials at high pressure by adding quantum sensors to a simple device pioneered by a Nobel-winning Harvard physicist in the last century, a tool that will likely prove useful to advance future work.

“We can ask questions at high pressure that we could never ask before,” said Norman Yao ’09, Ph.D. ’14, professor of physics and senior author of the new study. “And the question that we’ve been getting the most from our colleagues is: Can you measure our rock too?”

Most existing conductors cannot transmit electricity without some resistance and thus lose power (in the U.S., about 5 percent of electricity is lost in transmission but in some countries the losses amount to half of energy production). Superconductors have zero resistance — and thus no energy loss — making them potentially a revolutionary innovation.

In theory, better superconductors could make it economically feasible, for example, for wind farms in Siberia to power eastern Asia or solar panels in the Sahara Desert to supply Europe.

They also hold great potential in other applications such as magnet technologies, motors, maglev trains, high-energy particle accelerators, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems. Currently, MRI machines use liquid helium to bring the superconducting coils down to minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit.

Superconductors were first discovered in 1911, but practical applications long remained elusive because the materials require extremely cold temperatures.

One breakthrough came in 1986, when J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller discovered superconducting copper oxides, or cuprates, that worked at much higher temperatures than previously known materials (the pair won a Nobel Prize only 19 months later).

This revelation sparked a historic conference known as “The Woodstock of Physics” and the search for other “high temperature” (which here means not quite so cold) superconductors. Among the earliest proposed materials were the nickelates — layered nickel oxides that were chemical “cousins” of the cuprates.

In 2023, the first bulk nickelate superconductor was discovered. The discovery generated excitement, because the material had a critical temperature above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit, which, though deathly cold by human standards, is relatively warm for a superconductor), but also caution, because superconductivity emerged only under extremely high pressures.

This material proved to have puzzlingly uneven performance, and some scientists suggested only a small percentage of the material really was capable of superconductivity.

To better understand this mystery, a team led by Yao and Chris Laumann ’03, an associate professor of physics at Boston University, sought to study these materials at micron scale by adding some new tricks to an old technology.

In the first half of the 20th century, Harvard physicist Percy Bridgman conducted pioneering experiments of materials under high pressure by using a vice-like apparatus that squeezed samples between two cone-shaped anvils of steel or tungsten carbide (Bridgman won a Nobel Prize in 1946).

Later, other researchers switched the anvils to diamonds, one of the hardest naturally occurring materials on Earth. Besides hardness, diamonds offer another advantage: They can be turned into sensors.

By bombarding the diamonds with ions and baking them at high temperature, researchers create defects known as “nitrogen vacancy centers” that can detect magnetic and electric fields. In 2019, the Yao group became the first to add these nitrogen vacancy centers to the diamond anvil, allowing them to take new measurements of materials under pressures above 100 gigapascals — roughly those in the outer core of the Earth nearly 3,000 kilometers below the surface.

In the experiments, the diamond anvil cell — a device about the size of wine cork —  and the sample are mounted on a rod and lowered into a cryostat, a refrigerator whose temperature can go down to 4 degrees Kelvin, or about minus 452 Fahrenheit.

A beam of green light is directed into the interior of the diamonds, the nitrogen vacancy centers fluoresce red, and the light bounces back up a series of mirrors into a photon detector. A complex series of operations boils down to this: Changes in the red fluorescence reveal tiny shifts in the local magnetic field around the nickelate sample, a phenomenon known as the Meissner effect and a key indicator of superconductivity.

“This nitrogen vacancy measurement is able to see superconductivity on significantly smaller-length scales and long before conventional methods that are based upon resistance,” said Srinivas Mandyam, co-lead author of the new paper and a Ph.D. student in the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences studying physics. “When you’re trying to discover new compounds, this might pick it up much earlier than the usual way would.”

With this technique, researchers can map samples at millionths of a meter and correlate local superconducting behavior with temperature, pressure, stoichiometry (the ratio of elements in the material), and other forces including normal stress (compression) and shear stress.

“The tools that we’ve been developing as a group are quite special because you can really image functionality under pressure and determine where exactly the material acts as a superconductor,” said Yao.

The researchers adjust pressure like a “tuning knob.” Near the critical pressure, they saw the first evidence of superconductivity in localized regions. As they added pressure, these superconducting regions encompassed larger portions of the rock. They also discovered that superconductivity was curtailed by shear stresses.

Until now, the uneven results in nickelates had been attributed to a range of possibilities, such as inhomogeneities in chemistry and structure. The new study reveals that a single sample really should be seen as a collection of micron-scale localities that behave differently.

These insights could help engineer more efficient materials — a small step toward the ultimate goal of superconductors that work at ambient temperatures and pressures.

Laumann, a frequent collaborator with the Yao group, said the new tools would allow researchers to “sniff around this neighborhood better,” and more deeply investigate the properties of the varied types of superconductive materials discovered so far.

“It’s like if a tree falls in the woods and nobody’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?” said Laumann. “If nobody is there to tell you, it’s just not something you can see or discuss. The fact that we can now make these local measurements opens up a whole new range of questions.”

More than 200 years after the publication of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus,” the story continues to inspire writers, artists, and filmmakers, including Guillermo del Toro and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

In this edited interview, Deidre Lynch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, who has taught the novel in the course “Modern Monsters in Literature and Film,” discusses the historical context behind Shelley’s creation and why “Frankenstein” remains alive in the cultural imagination.

You have said that the novel “Frankenstein” is dear to your heart — why?

It has as much to do with the form of the novel as the content of the novel. I love that it’s a story inside a story inside a story. I love the fact that the first thing we encounter are these letters that this polar explorer is writing. He writes — as everyone knows now that Guillermo del Toro has preserved that part of the novel in his adaptation — that he comes across Victor Frankenstein as he is pursuing his monster, aiming to take revenge on him. Frankenstein tells his story, and then within Frankenstein’s story, we get the story of the monster, which he tells himself. What I love about that complicated structure is how Shelley has set things up in such a way that it becomes such a surprise when the monster begins to speak for himself for the first time. We go from thinking that the creature is repugnant in his monstrosity to realizing that he’s eloquent and persuasive, and maybe more human than his creator.

Mary Shelley wrote this novel at age 18. How did she do it?

She was the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, two literary celebrities in the 1790s, who were notorious for their support of the revolution in France and progressive politics. Shelley had a strong education and was exposed to literary people through her childhood.

So, if anybody was going to be able to do something like that at age 18, it would have been Mary Shelley. But what I find more astonishing is that by the time she writes “Frankenstein,” she has eloped with a married man, and by the time the novel is published in 1818, she has been pregnant more than once. She had to become an adult very quickly. The ways in which Victor Frankenstein responds with horror and disgust when his creature comes to life might resemble those of a new mother who’s horribly frightened by the responsibility of having to care for a newborn infant.

In the backdrop of the early 19th century, a time of turmoil in Europe, Mary Shelley crafts her novel. What historical contexts shape “Frankenstein”?

From the preface to the novel that is reissued in 1831, we know that “Frankenstein” was her contribution to a very famous ghost storytelling contest among her; her husband to-be, poet Percy Shelley; the poet Lord Byron; and John Polidori, the author of the first English vampire novel.

It’s the summer of 1816 when Shelley and her friends end up in Switzerland in a sort of self-imposed exile from England. By then, the long war between the British empire and the Revolutionary France and then Napoleonic France had been over only for a year. Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley come of age at a period of terrible political repression, and of immense unrest and immense injustice in England. That sense of injustice is important in the novel. It strikes me that the creature is asking Victor Frankenstein for justice: “Do right by me” is his plea. In a way, the novel is a response to a time when notions of equal rights are circulating, but there aren’t the legal structures to ensure that rights are observed or secured for those who need them.

Some scholars have said that the novel is a cautionary tale about science. What is your view?

It’s important to remember that the novel’s subtitle is “The Modern Prometheus.” In classical mythology, Prometheus is the titan who steals fire from the gods of Olympus in order to benefit humanity. So, there’s a notion of technological progress written into that subtitle. By the time she composes “Frankenstein,” Shelley is aware of experiments with galvanism, which used electricity on corpses to communicate the spark of life to the dead, and she also knows that some of those experiments often involved the corpses of convicts, and she seems to be reflecting on how these experiments disrespect the humanity of other human beings. Shelley explores the ethical consequences in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, when ambition overpowers people’s sense of what they owe to one another.

How have perceptions of Frankenstein changed over the years?

It got fairly harsh reviews when it was first published anonymously, maybe because of its dedication to William Godwin, which was catnip for conservative commentators who decided that anything that was dedicated to Godwin had to be politically dangerous. The novel’s political stand has been in some ways overshadowed by an 1823 play based on “Frankenstein” titled “Presumption! or, the Fate of Frankenstein” and the dramatic adaptations that followed. The consequence is that what disappeared from the cultural memory about “Frankenstein” is the fact that the creature speaks and tells his own story and tries to persuade Victor to do justice. In the 1823 play, the creature is barely a speaking part. And beginning with the 1931 film, where Boris Karloff plays the monster, the many spin-offs gave us a silent monster in ways that might make him less human than he seems when you read the book. That was one of the ways in which the novel got misremembered over the course of the 19th century. Part of that misremembering would include the many allegorical representations of class relations and race relations that used the image of Frankenstein as a vengeful monster.

Of the many screen adaptations of Frankenstein, which one is your favorite?

I would say that the James Whale from 1931 is my favorite version because it’s a black and white film, and even though the monster, played by Boris Karloff, doesn’t speak, his hands are astoundingly eloquent. Guillermo del Toro promised more fidelity to the original text by including the polar explorer’s storyline in his movie, but he continues to leave out the story of Justine, a working-class woman who is executed because of Victor’s hubris and his failure to be accountable for the catastrophes that he’s unleashed. I also think that del Toro’s movie makes the morality really obvious and includes a scene of forgiveness between Victor and the monster at the end, which Shelley never wrote. By leaving things mysterious and ambiguous, Shelley gave us something that our imaginations will be able to feed on for as long as we’re still reading books. Movies for the longest time have overshadowed the book. But “Frankenstein” is now one of the most frequently taught texts in high schools and English departments.

Why does the story of “Frankenstein” still fascinate us to this day?

It’s always going to be relevant because it deals with issues of justice, equality, and how we exclude versus include other people within our community; a lot of stories of racism and racial exclusion have often been rooted in the “Frankenstein legend.

The novel is so rich that it is eternal, and the questions that it raises are existential questions: What does it mean to be human? What is it like to belong or not belong? When we don’t ask to be born, and yet here we are, how do we make the best of it? All of those are profound questions that go with being human. And I don’t know of many novels that raise them as effectively as Shelley does in “Frankenstein.”

Two new studies led by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute challenge a decades-old assumption that the thymus, an organ best known for its role in establishing immune function in childhood, becomes irrelevant in adulthood. Using AI to analyze routine CT scans, researchers uncovered that adults with a healthy thymus had increased longevity and reduced risk for cardiovascular disease and cancer. In a separate study of patients with cancer, the researchers found that thymic health may influence response to immunotherapy — a treatment that depends on the strength of a patient’s immune system.

These findings, published in two papers in the same issue of Nature, suggest the thymus plays a far more consequential role in adult health than previously understood, and might provide a new target for personalizing disease prevention and cancer treatments.

The thymus is a small organ in the chest that helps train T cells, priming the immune system to protect the body from infections and disease. For decades, doctors believed the organ was mostly inactive after puberty because it shrinks with age and produces fewer new T cells. As a result, its role in adult health has rarely been examined in large populations.

Previous research has linked T cell diversity to aging and immune decline, but most of those studies relied on small, blood-based analyses. In contrast, the new studies examined more than 25,000 adults in a national lung cancer screening trial and over 2,500 participants in the Framingham Heart Study — a large, long-running population cohort of generally healthy adults.

The team analyzed the size, shape, and composition of the thymus, generating a “thymic health” score. People with high thymic health scores had about a 50 percent lower risk of death, 63 percent lower risk of cardiovascular death, and 36 percent lower risk of developing lung cancer compared to those with low thymic health. These associations remained significant after adjusting for age and other health factors.

The researchers theorize that when thymic health and T cell diversity decline, the immune system may become less able to respond to new threats, like cancer or other diseases. Their analysis found that chronic inflammation, smoking, and high body weight were associated with poorer thymic health, suggesting that lifestyle and systemic inflammation may influence immune resilience across the lifespan.

“The thymus has been overlooked for decades and may be a missing piece in explaining why people age differently, and why cancer treatments fail in some patients,” said Hugo Aerts, corresponding author on both papers, Harvard Medical School professor of radiation oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and director of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Program at Mass General Brigham. “Our findings suggest thymic health deserves much more attention and may open new avenues for understanding how to protect the immune system as we age.”

In a second study, the researchers analyzed CT scans and outcomes from more than 1,200 immunotherapy-treated patients. Patients with stronger thymic health had about a 37 percent lower risk of cancer progression and a 44 percent lower risk of death, even after accounting for other patient, tumor, and treatment factors. These findings point to a previously underappreciated role the thymus may play in shaping how well patients respond to modern cancer immunotherapies.

The researchers caution that their findings will need to be confirmed in future studies, and the imaging method is not yet ready for routine clinical use. While lifestyle factors were linked to thymic health, the studies did not test whether modifying those factors can directly improve thymic function.

The team is currently leading additional research to investigate whether other care-associated factors may impact thymic health. In one study, they are examining whether unintended radiation exposure to the thymus in patients with lung cancer may affect outcomes. 

“Improving our understanding and monitoring of thymic health could eventually help physicians better assess disease risk and guide treatment decisions,” said Aerts. 

This research received funding support from the National Institutes of Health.

Southern states have historically underperformed in educational achievement. But a recent rise in test scores in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee has led some experts and journalists to describe the “Southern surge” as one of the few bright spots in U.S. education over the past several years.

According to the Education Recovery Scorecard, Alabama ranked first among states in math recovery and third in reading, Louisiana ranked second in math recovery and first in reading, Mississippi sixth in math recovery and fourth in reading, and Tennessee third in math recovery and ninth in reading.

The scorecard is a collaboration between the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard, the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, and faculty at Dartmouth College, to compare learning loss between 2019 and 2024.

In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Thomas Kane, Walter H. Gale Professor of Education and Economics, and the center’s faculty director, spoke about the lessons for other states.

Why have the recent educational gains in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee become such a big story?

It’s a big story that we all ought to be paying attention to because the federal government essentially handed power over K-12 decisions back to states in 2015. That was a decade ago, and nationally, achievement has been declining.

I think it’s largely because a lot of states, including Massachusetts, were not ready to take the reins. And this subset of Southern states has undertaken ambitious reforms to the way they teach literacy that seem to be paying off in terms of improved student achievement.

State leadership matters more than ever, and we ought to be encouraging states to step up with ambitious efforts to reverse the decline.

Your center examines educational policies and their impact on students’ achievement. Did the data surprise you and your team?

Part of what we’re trying to do at the center is highlight not just states, but individual districts that have been improving. For instance, Compton in Los Angeles is a low-income community that has made unusual progress since 2019. Union City is a low-income district in New Jersey, and they too have seen bigger increases than many of the higher income districts in the state.

The truth is that before 2015, many states, including Massachusetts, were making a lot of progress. But over the last decade, policymakers in many states have been leery about investing their political capital in education reform because they fear controversies.

We need to remind them that investing in state and local efforts to improve K-12 education leads to educational progress. In our center, we’re trying to provide evidence on the specific policies that are making a difference to inspire other communities and states to do the same.

What are the factors behind the success stories in the Southern states?

Unfortunately, we don’t know which policies these states have pursued were most important. For instance, Mississippi, which now ranks sixth in math recovery and fourth in reading, invested a lot in literacy coaches. Based on other research I’ve seen, the literacy coaches might have been a critical part of the Mississippi success.

Massachusetts is working on literacy reforms that don’t include much funding for coaches, but they include some of the other less controversial aspects of the Mississippi plan, like changing curricula and changing teacher training.

Our center is studying whether specific policies, like teacher coaching or student grade retention, are the key moving parts — so that states don’t just pick the most uncontroversial (and ineffective) aspects of the Southern state initiatives.

What changes did Louisiana and Alabama implement?

Louisiana provided state incentives for districts to change their curricula in math and literacy and also provided state support to retrain teachers in how to use those new materials. It also made it easier for districts to combine funding across different federal funding streams to pursue priorities and cleared away some of the red tape involved in federal funding.

Alabama passed a Numeracy Act in 2022, and provided math coaches to low-performing schools and funding for summer learning, especially for students in early grades.

But I hesitate to say that every state should do exactly the same thing because we don’t yet have good evidence on which aspects of their plans made the most difference. Going forward, we want to help states learn which specific policies make a difference.

Can you explain the cases of Tennessee and Mississippi?

The literacy reforms in Mississippi go back to 2012, when they shifted their early literacy curricula to emphasize more phonics-based literacy instruction, which is sometimes referred to as the science of reading.

The state provided funding for coaches to work with teachers in early grades, starting with the schools that were struggling the most. They also had a requirement they believe was a critical part of their success, which was requiring students to pass a literacy test at the end of third grade before proceeding to fourth grade.

It was a controversial move. Massachusetts has shied away from that requirement. But it could turn out to be critical.

Tennessee offered training for its K-5 teachers in phonics-based literacy instruction. They did not invest in literacy coaches statewide, although I’m guessing some individual districts did it.

Mississippi and Alabama also use what are called universal screeners to try to identify kids that have dyslexia and other issues early rather than wait for them to fail in third or fourth grade.

One thing that Tennessee did, especially during the pandemic, was invest statewide in tutoring programs to help students catch up.

What are the lessons for other states?

The most important thing that states need to realize is that it’s up to them whether their students’ achievement recovers — or continues to fall.

There is not going to be any federal leadership on K-12 education. It’s not just the current stalemate in Washington. The federal government gave the power back to states in 2015, and the decline in students’ achievement began that year.

It got worse during the pandemic, but it started back in 2015.

States need to realize that if we’re going to turn this around, it will depend on their own leadership. Four states have clearly taken that message to heart: Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee.

Let’s hope that Massachusetts and other states decide to step up and show some leadership, too.

This year, Harvard College is home to one current and two former National Youth Poet Laureates, a lineage that began with inaugural honoree Amanda Gorman ’20. National Youth Poet Laureate Evan Wang ’29 and former laureates Salome Agbaroji ’27 and Alyssa Gaines ’26 recently spoke with the Gazette about how the title changed them, balancing arts and academics, and how their poetry has evolved during their time at Harvard.

When Wang sits down to write (usually late at night in his dorm room), he is already thinking about the stage. The first-year tests each line for how it may sound when spoken aloud, and imagines what hand gestures he can use for emphasis.

“When I’m prepping for a performance, I think of ways that I can accentuate certain aspects of the poem,” he said. “I really want to have fluctuation; it should never be monotone. Which word you choose to stress within the poem redefines the meaning.”

As National Youth Poet Laureate, Wang is in high demand. His debut chapbook, “Slow Burn,” comes out next month. He has been working with a composer on a choral piece that the Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia is scheduled to premiere in June. This year he’s performed at the Google DeepMind headquarters in London, the AFS Youth Assembly in New York, and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in D.C.

Wang began to pursue poetry seriously in 2021, after a spoken word poem he wrote and performed about his own experience with racial microaggressions garnered positive attention in his school district.

“That just really motivated me to continue writing about my own experiences, because I realized how quickly a poem about myself can become a poem for others and can be about others,” Wang said.

Wang’s poems are reflective and confessional, and he writes mainly about queer romance, yearning, and the immigrant experience.

“I’m always taking risks,” Wang said. “I’m always diving deeper into myself to see what I’m really trying to say. A lot of my mentors describe my poetry as ‘sharp,’ because a lot of my lines are terse. They don’t waste a lot of breath, and they really are a gut punch.”

Wang said his approach to poetry changed after seeing a video of author Ocean Vuong, one of his greatest inspirations, performing the poem “Head First.”

“The poem was so vulnerable, but it used the word ‘stupid,’ which is quite colloquial,” Wang recalled. “For so long, I thought poetry had to be pristine. I thought it was Shakespeare and Whitman. From then on out, I wrote poetry as a way to explore my own vulnerability, as a way to become really intimate.”

Wang is chair of the IOP Coalition for the Arts, a creative director for FIG. Magazine, and involved in the Harvard College China Forum. He is passionate about poetry as a form of entertainment and wants to collaborate on projects that combine poetry with other art forms. It was when he heard dancer Misty Copeland speak about representation at the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal ceremony that he truly realized how much the arts have changed his life.

“I remember sitting in the audience thinking I cannot imagine a future where my life is separated from the arts,” Wang said. “That really served as a catalyst for me to really begin considering poetry as a viable career.”

Agbaroji believes that many Harvard students are poets, though few would describe themselves that way. Too often, she said, the label feels reserved for those with awards or titles. She hopes to change that perception.

“This is an art form that is so democratic and generalizable,” Agbaroji said. “You don’t need a recording studio, you don’t need a film crew, you literally just need your brain and the words. I’m hoping to influence people to try to write and create in a way that doesn’t necessitate excellence, but maybe just fun.”

The social studies concentrator is currently recording a spoken word poetry and music album in the SOCH studio . She said having a project with an end goal has given motivation to her writing practice.

“I make the time between classes, while I’m eating dinner, sometimes in my bed at 3 a.m., because I am so eager for people to experience the work,” Agbaroji said. “It’s a different motivation. Before I was writing because I was struck with inspiration. This one is a sense of urgency, because I’m just so excited to put out my first official project.”

She recalled her first year at Harvard as a “balancing act,” juggling academics and a social life while serving as National Youth Poet Laureate. Sometimes that meant having a little FOMO (she missed Yardfest because she was giving a TED Talk) but resulted in some incredible memories, like meeting President Joe Biden and former press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on a visit to the White House.

Agbaroji, who began writing poetry at age 14 during the pandemic, has always written about social and political issues, advocating against inequality and injustice. But recently she’s made room for more personal writing.

“I’m giving my work space to be about me: ‘Salome had a bad day today, let’s write about that,’” she said. “I think I’m appreciating that breadth I’m gaining as I mature as an artist.”

On campus, Agbaroji captains Omo Naija, Harvard’s African dance troupe, and is in the Signet Society. These days, the poets who inspire her most are rappers Kendrick Lamar, Noname, and Tierra Whack. Agbaroji, who is also a singer, regularly fuses poetry and music, which she said she was hesitant to do at first, due to the way she was first introduced to poetry: as an art form that is supposed to stand alone. Her album will feature both poetry and music.

“You’re supposed to be impactful with just your words and the stage. You shouldn’t need a song, you shouldn’t need a prop, all the power should live in the words,” Agbaroji explained. “But poets also know that rules are meant to be broken. I knew that coming to Harvard, that would be another element of myself I wanted to grow confidence in. I’m glad I did, and I keep challenging myself in that way.”

Last summer, Gaines realized she can’t live without writing.

It may not seem like a surprising revelation for someone who has been participating in poetry competitions since age 8. But after serving as National Youth Poet Laureate as a first-year, Gaines took a two-year break from poetry to explore other interests and career options through a joint concentration in Social Studies and History of Art and Architecture.

Then, an internship at Macmillan Publishers the summer before senior year brought her right back.

“I was around books all day long, and I was like, ‘OK, this is the thing I love,’” said Gaines, who declared a secondary in English. “I realized that I love writing, and I don’t see a life without it. I think poetry is always a part of the way I think about the world.”

Gaines recalls her first year as a pivotal time of growth and new experiences. On weekends she would often travel to perform her poetry at events like Bloomberg Philanthropy’s Earthshot Prize and the YPO EDGE summit and return to campus for classes and homework. Despite her status as National Youth Poet Laureate, she still felt impostor syndrome at Harvard, and felt pressure to pursue a practical career, even if it wasn’t her passion.

“I felt like the stakes were super high, and maybe I didn’t feel the authority to bet on myself as a writer, as a creative person,” Gaines recalled. “Through being at Harvard and being in classes with people who are throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the things that they love, I had to learn that that’s okay to do.”

This year, she has returned to creative writing in full force, working in whatever blocks of time she can find: between study sessions, in the dining hall, or even jotting down lines if they come to mind in class. Her work, which lately has explored themes of maritime navigation, the transatlantic slave trade, migration, and memory, carries a rhythm punctuated by alliteration that reflects her years performing spoken word.

Gaines serves on the art board of the Harvard Advocate, as well as the JFK Jr. Forum Committee at the IOP. She has been co-director of the Black Arts Collective and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc. Poets who inspire her include June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, Frank Bidart, and Reginald Dwayne Betts, as well as Tracy K. Smith, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and Professor of African and African American Studies.

 “I think it took some time for me to get back to writing poems and trying to see how my artistry, my craft, can develop,” Gaines said. “There’s so much for me to discover and to keep learning and to try again.”

Vladimir Nabokov never learned to type. Every word of every novel he published — including the classics “Lolita,” “Pale Fire,” and “Pnin” — was typed by his wife, Vera, before being sent to editors.

“He wrote on notecards,” said Christine Jacobson, associate curator of modern books and manuscripts at Harvard’s Houghton Library, and co-curator, with Dale Stinchcomb of New York’s Morgan Library, of “Thanks for Typing: Women’s Type Labor in Literature and the Arts.”

Nabokov, Jacobson said, would shuffle the notecards “until he liked the arc of the story. And depending on how fleshed out they were, he would then either dictate them to Vera, or if they were in complete prose, he would hand them to her to be typed.”

“Thanks for Typing” explores the stories of women like Vera — typists who helped bring the novels and stories of famous literary figures to the public — as well as the thousands of women who served as secretaries and typists for government officials, scientists, researchers, and Hollywood creatives.

The inspiration for the exhibit was a viral social media tag — #thanksfortyping — started by University of Virginia Professor Bruce Holsinger.

“He was looking through academic monographs on Google Books when he started to pay attention to the acknowledgement section and notice the same language over and over again: ‘Thanks to Judy for typing’; ‘Thanks to my wife, Mary, for typing the manuscript and transcribing the interviews,’” Jacobson said. “It was like, thanks for typing, thanks for typing, thanks for typing, over and over again.”

“And so we wondered, what might we find if we looked for these stories in our own archives here at Houghton, and what would it look like to bring greater attention to those stories in an exhibition?” Jacobson said.

Exploring Houghton’s archives, Jacobson and Stinchcomb discovered typists for Emily Dickinson, Henry James, T.S. Eliot, and Oscar Wilde. As part of the exhibit, the curators paired examples of Dickinson’s handwritten poems — including her unique capitalizations and paragraph indentations — with typewritten versions created Mabel Loomis Todd during the 1890s. Todd began publishing Dickinson’s manuscripts four years after her death, when Dickinson’s sister gave her hundreds of handwritten pages.

“We would not have Emily Dickinson’s poetry without her,” Jacobson said.

With responsibilities that ranged from research to copy editing, typists in some cases left an important mark on the finished product, Jacobson said, citing Todd’s decision to discard many of the oddities in Dickinson’s script and edits Vivian Eliot made to her husband’s poems.

Then there’s the influence typing had on the writer: “Henry James’ style changes very significantly once he starts dictating to a typist, and that is where you get the great late Henry James period, where his style is a lot more verbose and the sentences are very long and winding,” Jacobson said.

In addition to typists’ literary contributions, the curators wanted to contextualize how their work has been valued, or not, over time.

“From the moment the typewriter is invented, it is immediately associated with women and women’s labor,” Jacobson said.

When Christopher Latham Sholes invented the first commercially viable typewriter in 1872, he didn’t pose for press photographs but instead positioned his daughter at the machine, she noted. The very first photograph of somebody operating a typewriter, Jacobson said, captures Lillian Sholes — the original “typewriter girl.”

“The message that this would have been sending to 19th-century audiences would have been that this machine is so easy to use that a woman can do it,” Jacobson said. “Sholes is lauded as this person who paved the way for women to enter the white-collar working world, which is definitely true, but I think the issue here is that from its inception the contributions have been minimized, and not seen as a technical skill.”

From the turn of the century to the 1950s and ’60s, Jacobson said, women’s labor continued to be minimized while depictions of it grew more sexualized.

Mid-century typewriter manuals were “very much about catering to your boss’s every need and making sure that you look beautiful and hygienic for work,” she said. “They’re objects of sexual desire. They’re meant to adorn the office.”

The exhibit wouldn’t be complete without a chance for visitors to type for themselves, courtesy of a vintage Olympia in the Edison and Newman Room. Houghton is also partnering with the Harvard Film Archive to spotlight women who make their living at the typewriter, with screenings of “Meet Joe Doe,” “His Girl Friday,” and “The Hudsucker Proxy.” For showtimes, tickets, and Christine Jacobson’s show notes, visit the HFA website. 

“Thanks for Typing” will be on display through May 1.

There is a need for a Black bioethics, argued a recent panel sponsored by Harvard Medical School and Tuskegee University. One need look no farther than inequities in COVID-19 diagnoses and treatment during the pandemic for evidence, but another, devastating historical example is the 40-year-long Tuskegee experiment.

Moderator Rebecca Brendel, director of the HMS Center for Bioethics, gave a quick recap of the experiment, in which several hundred Black sharecroppers were enrolled in a U.S. Public Health Service study.

The 399 participants, all suffering from syphilis, were told they had “bad blood” so researchers could observe the progress of the untreated deadly disease in human subjects. The study ran from 1932 to 1972.

In 1978, a national committee of physicians, lawyers, and scientists issued The Belmont Report, which outlined ethical guidelines. (An official apology, from President Bill Clinton, finally came in 1997.)

But nearly 40 years after The Belmont Report, discrimination in healthcare remains a stark reality. Black mortality rates are still significantly higher than those of white people in the U.S., said panelist David Augustin Hodge, interim director, lead ethicist, and research professor at the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Healthcare at Tuskegee.

“Black people die at a faster rate. Life expectancy is lower,” said Hodge. Minority children “are 3.5 times more likely to die in childhood” than white. These discrepancies translate to “about 80 million years of life that have been lost between 1999 and 2020,” he said.

Such deaths are often attributed to causes unrelated to race. For example, the higher mortality rate of Black people with COVID is blamed on co-morbidities. But the co-morbidities that make Black people more vulnerable, such as diabetes, are themselves a result of a healthcare system that has failed the Black community.

“If we do not give attention to Black lives and brown lives and the lives of the vulnerable, we will see these things happen,” said panelist T.S. Harvey, associate professor of medical and linguistic anthropology and global health at Vanderbilt University.

The Belmont Report, as Harvey pointed out is “strictly limited,” in that it discusses only research with human subjects.

Considering these strictures, “it has been applied too broadly” as an answer to discrimination, he said. Instead, bioethicists need to look to liberation theology as a model of “inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness,” he said.

“As a Black bioethicist. I’m just as interested in our Native American population. I’m just as interested in Alaskan or Asian Pacific populations. I’m just as interested in my Hispanic brothers down on the border, the Mexican brothers and sisters, or the Cuban brothers and sisters. In those in the Appalachian Mountains, those who are poor,” Harvey said.

“Because quite frankly, when we’re talking about ethics and when we’re talking about principles, we are talking about the least of us,” as liberation theology teaches, he said.

Complicating the problem of healthcare discrepancies is the rising use of AI in both medical and sociological research, both noted. Because AI draws from published material, it is inherently backward-looking — and replicates the biased research of the past, such as studies that only included white people or only men.

“Technology for all of its capabilities, whether or not we’re talking about artificial intelligence, large language models, or really sophisticated prosthetics, is not neutral,” said Harvey. “It replicates existing structures, existing notions.”

“If we do not understand or start to work with the power of implicit bias in technology, we will continue to go down the road of excising those communities that need to be involved,” said Hodge.

Exclusion also occurs “not by racism, but by comfort zones,” Hodge continued, noting that researchers tend to think in terms of the communities to which they belong. “When we’re talking about clinical trials, we [should be] talking about making the invisible visible,” he said.

To counter this ingrained racism and classism, said Harvey, we must “think about health disparities and who are the populations that are impacted now, and then reimagine those technologies and reimagine those interventions by understanding those challenges. But to do that, we have to move beyond utilitarian ethics to what Dr. Hodge talks about as fundamentally relational.”

“We can use many, many different philosophical frames to think this through, but we need to recognize that technology is there as an aid and can be used in many, many ways, but also understand the kinds of disparities that some of these technologies reproduce,” he said.

One model may be found in the gaming community, where “the technology is in the hands of the gamers,” he said. In other words, it is driven by the users, which in healthcare would mean the patients or clients.

Beyond that, “I continue to push,” said Hodge, even as he identified a source of hope: “Young people are thinking about this kind of work: public health ethics, public health and bioethics, neuroethics, etc. It is important to engage.”

“What we hope to do is to build beyond,” concluded Harvey. “Reimagine the possibilities to think about the complexity of the problems as human problems that have human solutions.”

“Bioethics and Black History: The Legacy of the Tuskegee Report” was organized by the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics, the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care at Tuskegee University, and the HMS Office for Culture and Community Engagement as part of the series “Reflecting on the History of Healthcare,” available on the HMS Center for Bioethics YouTube community

Researchers seeking to understand the impact of smartphones on driving safety have a warning for music fans: Release day might be dangerous.

The study, described in a working paper published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, showed a 43 percent increase in streaming and a 15 percent increase in traffic fatalities on the days that major albums drop.

Vishal Patel, a surgical resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School, and the paper’s first author, said that the work was inspired by a moment behind the wheel. His wife, a singer and avid music fan, texted him to listen to a song that had just been released on streaming services. Patel began scrolling through his phone. When he looked up a few seconds later, he realized that he’d started drifting out of his lane.

“It hit me that a split second longer with my eyes off the road could have meant a serious accident,” he said. “Then I thought, if millions of people are doing the same thing at the same time — on the day a big album drops — the cumulative risk on the road must be enormous.”

Smartphones tempt drivers to send emails, search, call up directions, or even find a recipe for dinner. Despite that ceaseless potential for distraction, research into the impact of phones on driving is scarce, according to Patel and the new paper’s senior author, Anupam Bapu Jena, the Joseph P. Newhouse Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. The principal obstacle is ethics: Researchers can’t conduct live experiments that might illuminate what’s going on in the millions of cars on the road today. They can’t, for example, ethically instruct half of a study group to keep their eyes on the road while telling the other half to search for music as they navigate traffic.

Enter Patel’s insight about the distraction of downloading music, which he recognized as an opportunity for a natural experiment.

The researchers analyzed accident stats on the release days of the 10 most streamed albums between 2017 and 2022, plus, for comparison, on the 10 days both before and after the release dates. Using Spotify data, they found an average of 123.3 million streams on the major album release days, compared with just 86.1 million streams on the days before and after — a 43 percent increase on release days.

Turning to traffic fatalities, they found an average of 139.1 deaths on release days, an increase of 18.2 fatalities over the average of 120.9 traffic deaths on the 10 days before and after the releases. Added together, deaths rose 15.1 percent, totaling 182 additional fatalities on the 10 days when those major albums were released.

“It could be manipulation of the device, it could be general distraction because of the excitement,” Jena said. “It could also be that you’re playing the music louder than you normally would play it, and that you don’t pick up things around you that you otherwise would have picked up. Any of those things are possible.”

Patel and Jena also examined accident characteristics, seeking insights on the potential role of factors other than distraction. Drivers tended to be sober, arguing against the possibility that they had attended boozy parties celebrating the album releases. The increase in fatal accidents was also larger in single-occupant vehicles, missing a passenger who might help manage the music. Drivers also tended to be younger, fitting the profile of younger people as more avid music consumers.

Patel’s investigation into distracted driving continues. Technology has advanced significantly since 2022, when data collection for the current study ended. Vehicle technology has advanced, with cameras and sensors eliminating blind spots and making switching lanes safer. Many vehicles come with automatic braking and other safety features. Among the open questions, Patel said, is the impact of artificial intelligence, which could allow a new array of distracting tasks to be performed while driving. AI could also, however, enhance safety by taking on tasks from the driver, like finding music or drafting a work email.

“People convince themselves they can multitask behind the wheel — scheduling calls, eating, putting on makeup,” Patel said. “Smartphones have dramatically expanded what’s possible to do while driving and, as cars become increasingly connected, the temptation to divide your attention is only going to grow.”

Ahead of the 98th Academy Awards on March 15, we’ve created our own shortlist: movies with a tie to Harvard. Find out how much you know about Crimson cinema by taking our quiz. 

Step 1 of 10

10%

1. What novel set partially at Harvard was written to drum up interest in a movie?

“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin

“Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown

“The Idiot” by Elif Batuman

“Love Story” by Erich Segal

2. Erich Segal based aspects of the male protagonist of “Love Story” on an actual Harvard undergraduate he met while on sabbatical. Who was it?

Academy Award-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones

Nobel Prize-winning chemist Martin Chalfie

Film director and screenwriter Terrence Malick

NFL cornerback John Dockery

3. Michael Crichton ’64, M.D. ’69, whose novels “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park” have been adapted as movies, used his experience as a medical student in the making of what hit TV show?

General Hospital

ER

M*A*S*H

Grey’s Anatomy

4. Ashley Judd, M.P.A. ’10, got her first starring role in the film “Ruby in Paradise,” which plays homage to what classic novel?

“To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf

“The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton

“Northanger Abbey” by Jane Austen

“Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë

5. In the 1994 comedy “With Honors,” a Harvard student’s life is turned upside down when he meets whom?

A genie he releases from a lamp in the Harvard Art Museums

A homeless man living in the Widener Library boiler room

An eccentric law student who became the inspiration for Elle Woods in “Legally Blonde”

A gargoyle from a Memorial Hall tower come to life

6. The critically acclaimed 2019 film “Just Mercy” features Michael B. Jordan as which Harvard Law School alumnus?

Civil rights attorney Charles Hamilton Houston

Public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson

Legal scholar David B. Wilkins

Boston Municipal Court Judge George Lewis Ruffin

7. Alumna Ursula K. Le Guin is said to have influenced or inspired which of the following books and films?

“Cloud Atlas,” based on the book by David Mitchell

“Spirited Away,” an animated film by Hayao Miyazaki

“Eragon,” based on the book by Christopher Paolini

All of the above

8. The films “Mississippi Masala” and “Salaam Bombay!” share a behind-the-scenes connection to Harvard. What is it?

Harvard scholars advised on both movies

Their director and screenwriter met while studying at Harvard

Both films were funded by Harvard-affiliated production grants

Harvard provided archival footage used in both films

9. What Oscar-winning film got its start as an assignment in a Harvard playwriting class?

“Saving Private Ryan”

“Shakespeare in Love”

“Good Will Hunting”

“Forrest Gump”

10. Who was the first Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year to receive her award in person?

Jane Fonda

Ethel Merman

Katharine Hepburn

Liza Minelli

Δ

The war with Iran is not about regime change but rather an effort to protect Americans from a nuclear threat, according to Morgan Ortagus, who until recently served as deputy U.S. special envoy to the Middle East and special envoy to Lebanon under ambassador Steve Witkoff.

But if the elimination of the Supreme Leader of Iran and leaders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps helps Iranians choose what their future looks like, then, “I don’t think it was a mistake,” Ortagus said during a talk at the Kennedy School on Tuesday.

“I don’t feel bad for any of these people,” she said. “These are people that tortured and mass executed their own people and plotted to kill my president.”

The strikes by the U.S. and Israel on Feb. 28 were not triggered by one specific event, but a “culmination of threats” from Iran and years of failed diplomatic efforts by both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations, according to Ortagus, who served as a State Department spokesperson during the first Trump administration.

Among the threats she cited were the Iranian regime’s decades of malign influence in the Middle East, its continuing nuclear ambitions, the escalation of threats to U.S. bases and those of U.S. allies in the region, and plots to assassinate President Trump, former national security adviser John Bolton, and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.

Despite all of that, “President Trump very much wanted a deal with the regime and was willing to give them one” prior to the 12-day war with Israel last June, but he felt Iran was merely “string[ing] along” the U.S., said Ortagus, who was involved in the negotiation.

Ortagus pushed back on criticism of the administration’s actions in the current war. She defended the wide range of rationales the president and top defense and foreign policy officials have offered for the attack, insisting that they give Trump “maximum flexibility” in negotiations with Iran and allow for quick decision-making. She also downplayed the relative inexperience of the lead U.S. negotiators, Witkoff, a New York real estate developer, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.

“What matters is results,” said Ortagus, a former U.S. Navy Reserve intelligence officer.

Asked by co-moderator Ned Price, interim co-director of the HKS Institute of Politics, about the president’s claim that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated” in bombings last year, Ortagus said that Trump was referring only to the specific sites the U.S. had targeted, not Iran’s willingness to develop nuclear weapons.

Trump views the current military action as a means to remove the threat posed by Iran’s navy and to degrade its ballistic missile stockpile, as well as a follow-up on his pledge earlier this year to Iranian protestors that “help is on the way,” she said.

“When you say that, you have to put your money where your mouth is, and I think in this case the president’s done that.”

The administration tried, she said, to coerce Iran’s regime into capitulation before opting for military action.

“The Iranian regime were extended the hand of diplomacy by the president multiple times,” she said. “It’s unfortunate that they’ve chosen, time and time again, to destroy their own country and their own people for some theocratic revolutionary idea of how they are going to reshape the Middle East.”

The event was moderated by Price, who served as deputy to the U.S. representative to the United Nations and as U.S. Department of State spokesperson during the Biden administration, and Bahar Moradi, president of the Harvard Undergraduate Iranian Association.

With a variety of seating nooks and a warm, casually elegant aesthetic, the first floor of the new Atlas Hotel in Allston encourages visitors to stay a while. The hope is that this intentional design choice will be availed by hotel guests and local neighbors alike.

“We call this space ‘Allston’s living room,’ and we really want the community to feel comfortable here,” said the hotel’s managing director, Arnaldo Almonte.

And on a recent visit just a few weeks after the Hotel opened at the end of January, people were scattered throughout the space chatting and working on laptops, exactly as intended. 

The Atlas Hotel, designed by Marlon Blackwell Architects, is the latest building to open on Harvard’s Enterprise Research Campus (ERC), with 246 rooms, including 12 suites. Along with the ERC’s David Rubenstein Treehouse at Harvard University, the hotel will support the ERC’s mission to bring diverse groups from teaching, research, business, and learning together in this burgeoning innovation district. The hotel was developed by Tishman Speyer, and is managed by Highgate group.

Directly adjacent to the “living room” is the lounge area for Ama, the hotel’s ground floor restaurant, led by local restaurateurs Biplaw Rai and Nyacko Pearl Perry of Pearl & Law Hospitality, creators and owners of Dorchester’s Comfort Kitchen.

“Because it’s attached to the hotel, we knew the lounge area was important as a place where people could continue their conversations from meetings or conferences, or just hang out and relax,” explained Rai. The rest of the dining spaces for Ama are tucked behind a large bar with views of the interior courtyard where there is a seasonal outdoor dining area.

Ama, which means “mother” in Nepali, embraces a theme of caregiving, from menu offerings such as soups and pork belly, to the ergonomic design of the bar to support the health of bar staff, to the art create.

“We can only do this kind of project with the community — we understand being in a hotel might be a barrier for neighbors to want to come in, but we really want everyone to come, linger, and enjoy their time here,” said Rai.

The hotel incorporates art and photos from Boston artists throughout the spaces. Among them: Edward Boches’ photos from his “Postcards from Allston” series, which was featured at the Harvard Ed Portal’s Crossings Gallery in 2022. Ama further connects the local Allston-Brighton art community and the Ed Portal with two collaborative pieces from payal kumar and Nina Bhattacharya, both of whom recently exhibited their work at the Crossings Gallery.

“In collaborating with the Ama at the Atlas team, it became so clear that every person carried a story of a caregiver with them shaping their own journeys as caregivers,” kumar and Bhattacharya wrote in a statement. “It was important to us to uplift these beautiful intergenerational stories through our artwork and to ground the space in what is often unseen. We drew on sense memories elicited during a workshop with staff to design pieces that make visible the care, dignity, and labor at the heart of nourishment.”

Later this spring, the Pearl & Law team will expand their offerings at the Atlas when they open a separate rooftop space called Foxglove Terrace, designed to create the atmosphere of an Asian night market. The indoor and outdoor spaces will offer dramatic views of the Charles River, Cambridge, and Boston, highlighting the Atlas’ unique location.

“We really see the Atlas as not only the hospitality hub for the Enterprise Research Campus, but also as a launching pad for visitors to explore this side of Boston and Cambridge. Allston is easy to access from east, west, north, and south, and we pull together many international influences in this neighborhood, from Lebanese, to Cantonese, and now Nepalese with Ama. I think this combination of diversity and accessibility is an amazing draw for the community and our guests,” said Almonte.

The hotel was created with the proximity to Harvard Business School and the Science and Engineering Complex in mind as those audiences are equally important to the Atlas. Onsite meeting rooms have been designed to complement the larger conference spaces at the Rubenstein Treehouse next door.

“We know there is a wide web of Harvard Schools and programs and we want all Harvard affiliates, from various Schools to alumni, to join us here,” said Almonte. “We want this to be a gathering place for the existing neighbors, for people who are coming to visit, for people who are at the Rubenstein Treehouse for a conference. It really is supposed to be a place to foster organic interactions, and further the vibrancy of the ERC, and the broader neighborhood.”

Benjamin Franklin is known as a leading figure of the American Revolution, a diplomat, a printer and publisher, and an inventor. But in a lecture Thursday, Joyce Chaplin made the case that Franklin’s role as a man of science was central not only to his life but also to American independence.

Science gained cultural significance in the 18th century, as Europe embraced Enlightenment ideals, and Franklin made himself into one of the best-known scientific minds of his era, said Chaplin, James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History. That reputation, shaped in part by the publication of the pamphlet “Experiments and Observations on Electricity” in 1751, would pay dividends during the Revolution and beyond. 

“Franklin did experiments that provided the first convincing explanations of electricity, including its manifestation as lightning,” said Chaplin. “Within the context of enthusiasm for science in the 18th century, this was important. His work in science gave Franklin unparalleled authority to defy a monarch who seemed to have become a tyrant … setting off the first political revolution in an age of revolutions that would continue into the early 19th century.”

The event, at the Geological Lecture Hall, was sponsored by the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. It marked the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Franklin was born in Boston in 1706. After a yearslong apprenticeship, he moved to Philadelphia at age 17 to establish himself as an independent printer. A year later he traveled to London, where he not only mastered the printing trade, but also developed a fascination for science to the point where he became “desperate to meet Isaac Newton,” said Chaplin, whose books include “The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius.” Newton had published “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica” in 1687, in which he formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, and London was a hub of discovery and innovation.

It was a time when “participation in science was widespread and unspecialized,” Chaplin said. It was in London that Franklin learned “what a reputation in science might do for him,” she added.

“Franklin was interested in science,” Chaplin said, “because he was ambitious and knew he needed some extraordinary accomplishment to achieve any kind of prominence.”

When Franklin returned to Philadelphia, he quickly became a successful printer. In 1729, he purchased “The Pennsylvania Gazette,” and in 1732, he published “Poor Richard’s Almanack” to share his interest in science, including weather forecasts, and discoveries of the era.

Inspired by the Royal Society of London, which was founded in 1662 to promote scientific research, in 1731 Franklin created the Library Company of Philadelphia, which collected scientific instruments and sponsored lectures in science. He helped establish the American Philosophical Society and the Academy of Philadelphia, which later evolved into the University of Philadelphia.

Franklin’s work with electricity, including the kite experiment, secured him prominence first in Philadelphia and later in Europe, where he was respected and admired. In time, his fame would spread “into Russia and through the Americas, including the Spanish and Portuguese colonies,” said Chaplin.

When Immanuel Kant called Franklin a modern Prometheus for “having drawn fire or electricity from the heavens,” the German philosopher “was implying a similar defiance of the natural and supernatural order of things,” according to Chaplin. The same theme occupied Mary Shelley, who might have had Franklin in mind when she published “Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus,” in 1818. Shelley’s novel presented “a darker vision of the man of science,” Chaplin noted, and delivered a “rather dire warning about scientific prowess.”

“Shelley had many possible targets in mind for this accusation,” she said. “Franklin is definitely one, maybe the major one, in this book. … If anyone ever asked me how Franklin is different from the other American founders, I’d say, in perfect truth, ‘Well, he’s the subtitle to Frankenstein.”’

And yet, as Franklin’s scientific fame grew, so did his political power. In 1753, he was appointed deputy postmaster general of North America. The year after, he was elected to represent the Pennsylvania assembly at the Albany Congress, “something that had never happened when he was just a printer,” Chaplin said. Franklin served as agent of the Pennsylvania assembly in London between 1757 and 1762.

During the Revolution, Franklin’s scientific reputation was an asset in his diplomatic efforts to secure France’s support for the insurgent colonies. He was a key figure in the founding and early years of the republic, helping draft the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, but all his political power stemmed from his scientific prowess, Chaplin said.

“I do think the United States of America would have come into existence even if Benjamin Franklin never existed,” she said. “But I think most Americans are today unaware of the heavy lifting, starting in 1776, that Franklin’s reputation, as a famous man of science, performed for the United States. Science helped to make a powerful case for the nation at the dawn of its birth.”

The vibe was festive, with jazz playing in the background. Students worked quickly but didn’t rush to form relief sculptures of fruit — apples, lemon, pomegranate, strawberries, cherries, leaves, all set against an arch.

The group of 11 had gathered at the Harvard Art Museums’ Materials Lab on a recent Friday afternoon to try their hands at sculpting in stucco, a thick, gritty compound made of lime, sand, and marble dust that had been widely used for decorative purposes during the Renaissance and Baroque periods across Europe.

Held as part of the graduate seminar “Sculpture, Theory, Practice: Donatello, Michelangelo, Bernini, Serpotta,” taught by Shawon Kinew, assistant professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, the workshop aimed to bridge the theory and practice of sculpture.

“As an art historian, sometimes our discipline can become a little removed or abstracted from the actual materiality or the physical object itself,” said Kinew. “It’s always a valuable experience when you have that tactile understanding of what the artist was doing. Our aim in this workshop is to challenge our knowledge with the practical experience of art-making — what changes for the art historian when she knows how to make.”

Wearing white coats and blue gloves, students followed recipes of stucco mixes, materials, and techniques used centuries ago by artists Alejandro Casella, Pietro da Cortona, and Giacomo Serpotta as they molded relief sculptures from the armature, the framework supporting a sculpture, to the final layer of marmorino, a mix of lime and marble dust.

By the end of the workshop, students left with lessons beyond art history or stucco decoration.

Nathaniel Shields ’26, a master’s student in engineering and business, said the workshop helped him gain a better appreciation of art and what it takes to produce it, as well as a chance to practice what he was learning in class.

“It’s a huge privilege to be able to enter a class like this, where you have the ability to consider things from the historical perspective, but also the practical perspective,” said Shields. “After reading and learning about this material and the artwork in class, obviously the ability to put your hands into some stucco and try to make something yourself is pretty exciting.”

Kinew’s class focuses on artists such as Donatello, Michelangelo, Bernini, and Serpotta, and their use of materials such as bronze, wood, marble, wax, clay, and stucco.

The workshop’s focus on stucco was significant, said Kinew, because art historians have overlooked the material despite its widespread use across Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries.

“Stucco sculpture is one of the most important and ubiquitous media of Renaissance and Baroque Italy, and still it is rare for it to get the same scholarly treatment as fresco or marble sculpture,” said Kinew.

Similar to marble but much cheaper and lighter, stucco was mostly used in sculpture and decoration in churches and palaces throughout Italy and Europe.

Due to its lightness, sculptors favored stucco as a “material of flight,” said Kinew. “It could render the most fantastic visions of flight — flying figures that seem suspended in air, rays of light, sunburst figures, all of which could only be achieved in stucco,” she added.

Tony Sigel, a former senior conservator at Harvard Art Museums, aided students during the workshop. He highlighted the role of the Materials Lab, which hosts hands-on classes for the public, campus groups, and students.

“Having a room like this in a museum like this is a very unique thing,” said Sigel, “and having the course taught by conservators is a gift.”

Conservators Alberto Felici and Elisabeth Manship, who led the workshop, said they hoped the students learn lessons that will help them in careers as art historians — or even as art enthusiasts. Felici and Manship are lecturers and researchers in the renowned conservation program of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland.

“The main takeaway for me is that they realize how complicated it is,” said Felici. “It’s important that the students are able to understand the behavior of different materials, the thinking and the work that went into creating the art so that they would be able to better understand the aim of the artist.”

In addition, students learned how much of this kind of art was a collective effort, Manship said. By working in groups, students replicated the workshop system used by Italian artists, who often collaborated with dozens of assistants and craftsmen on large projects.

“We forget that there were huge groups of people working together even if we only know the name of one artist,” Manship said.

For students, the best part was being able to work with a material they have been studying. They didn’t mind the challenges of dealing with stucco, a self-hardening material that requires fast work and nimble fingers.

“I’m not very good at what I’m doing,” said History of Art & Architecture concentrator Charlie Benjamin ’26 as he worked on sculpting a lemon. “I have a lot more appreciation for the artists themselves … In a way, the workshop demystified the art-making process, which you think of as a spontaneous act of creation, and you realize just how much sweat and forethought has to go into something [like] creating art.”

For Kinew, the workshop was a return to the legacy of art history classes that included making, which began at Harvard with Edward Waldo Forbes’ signature course, “Methods and Processes of Italian Painting,” known to students as the “Egg and Plaster” course, in 1932.

An art historian and pioneer in art conservation, Forbes taught students how to recreate early Italian paintings by using egg tempera, made from pigments mixed with egg yolk.

“Forbes’ students came to understand Giotto and Michelangelo by painting in tempera and in fresco,” Kinew said. “This was a moment when the study of art history was wholly integrated with art-making, a time when art history found its home in the museum.”

Kinew hopes that the workshop will help students and art lovers gain a deeper artistic appreciation of stucco as a decorative and sculptural art form.

“My hope is that now when we visit Roman or Palermitan chapels, we will see these spaces in all their complexity and parts, as stucco confections,” Kinew said. “It will be like seeing these spaces in technicolor for the first time.”

Alzheimer’s disease is widely believed to be caused by accumulating amyloid plaques in the brain, which trigger cascading effects that cause damage. But efforts to reduce amyloid plaques haven’t reversed cognitive decline, causing some to wonder whether something else is going on.

Leyla Akay, director of biology at the Boston area startup TAC Therapeutics, is among them — and thinks that “something else” might be fat metabolism, or, more precisely, disruptions to normal fat metabolism in the brain.

Akay, who spoke at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study on Thursday, pointed out that the recently approved Alzheimer’s drug donanemab reduces amyloid beta plaques in the brain, but that it only slows cognitive decline and doesn’t reverse it.

“Ultimately, these patients are declining,” said Akay. “It’s fair to ask if we can do better and ask, ‘Are there other potential causes of biological mechanisms contributing to Alzheimer’s disease?’”

During Akay’s doctoral work at MIT, she zeroed in on the APOE4 gene, a mutation of APOE3 and major risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s disease. APOE4 plays a role in lipid transport in the brain but is worse at the task than APOE3. The result is lipids accumulating inside of brain cells and disruption of nerve cells’ fatty myelin coating, which could affect how nerve signals move through the brain.

When Akay’s lab discovered that inhibiting a molecule called GSK3 beta reduced lipid accumulation inside of brain cells and improved myelination, they started TAC Therapeutics to develop the idea further.

Akay told the audience for the panel, which was part of Radcliffe’s Next in Science series, that early results are promising but there’s a lot of work still to be done.

“A lot of work ahead” was also a theme for other speakers at the event, who spoke about modifiable risk factors for Alzheimer’s, the possibility of social drivers influencing the condition, and how work continuing on the amyloid beta front includes a focus on the second step in the destructive cascade: the development of tangles of a protein called tau in the brain.

The event was moderated by Immaculata De Vivo, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, professor of epidemiology at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Melanie Mason Niemiec ’71 Faculty Codirector of the Sciences at Radcliffe. De Vivo said dementia — with Alzheimer’s as the leading cause — already affects 55 million people in the world, and that number is set to almost triple by 2050. Despite that gloomy forecast, De Vivo hailed the research moving ahead on several fronts that continues to push the frontiers of knowledge about the feared condition.

She hailed advances in molecular and cellular neuroscience, genetics, and genomics, in our understanding of how environmental conditions increase risk, and how clinical trials and advances in prevention are working to delay onset and slow progression.

“This is a moment of real possibility,” De Vivo said. “Our speakers today are advancing our understanding of dementia from very different vantage points: epidemiology and social drivers of health, clinical research and prevention, neurobiology and model systems, and the role of lipids — fats — and genetics in neurodegeneration.”

Cara Croft, senior lecturer in neuroscience at Queen Mary University of London described work in her lab using mice and naked mole-rats to explore the role of the protein tau in Alzheimer’s disease. Tau accumulates in fibrous tangles in the brain and is believed to be triggered by the initial accumulation of amyloid beta plaques. A key part of her work is examining how neurons can sometimes unravel tau tangles, allowing them to be cleared rather than accumulate.

“We know that proteins can unravel and unclump and that’s something that we want to boost,” Croft said. “Some neurons already have this fast tau unraveling and we want to normalize them all to have this really fast tau unraveling with the idea that this could be a future treatment for Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.”

Reducing risk of developing Alzheimer’s in the first place is possible and may depend in part on our legs and our appetites. Jennifer Gatchel, assistant professor of psychiatry at HMS and Massachusetts General Hospital, said recent work has shown that there is such a thing as a brain-healthy diet. The Mediterranean diet with legumes, fish, and olive oil; the DASH diet focused on lowering blood pressure; and the MIND diet, which combines elements of the two, have all shown benefits in lowering Alzheimer’s risk. Gatchel also pointed to recent work out of MGH that found that physical activity can affect risk. Those who walked more had reduced risk of the condition. And, though walking more was associated with even lower risk, even the lowest level, 3,000 steps per day, brought positive benefits.

“Even small incremental changes can actually have biological effects on our brain, so it doesn’t have to be all or nothing,” Gatchel said. “That was a very, very exciting finding.”

Our position in society may also play a role in our Alzheimer’s risk, according to Ganga Bey, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Bey’s research focuses on how the stressors that come with social hierarchy, made up of socioeconomic factors such as race, gender, and ethnicity, can increase Alzheimer’s risk through stress, diet, blood pressure, and other physiological factors. The result, Bey said, is that Black Americans have twice the risk of Alzheimer’s, and Hispanics 1.5 times the risk, as non-Hispanic white Americans.

“Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias are patterned along clear racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines. Some sex or gender disparities exist as well but they are less consistently observed,” Bey said. “What in the environment that is doing all these things and causing so much disease, but is so poorly understood? What is it exactly that we’re referring to and how does it influence the behavior of our genes?”

Moviegoing isn’t what it used to be. Rising ticket prices, worsening theater etiquette, and lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have all contributed to sagging box office numbers. A survey from October shows the percentage of moviegoers who frequently see films in theaters decreased from 39 percent in 2019 to 17 percent in 2025. In another poll conducted last year, 75 percent of Americans said they had recently opted to stream a movie at home instead of watching it in the theater.

Yet certain groups of dedicated moviegoers are defying those trends, particularly Gen Z audiences. In-theater events, anniversary screenings, and blockbusters with strong social media marketing have shown the most promise in filling seats, but recent releases shouldn’t be discounted: Ryan Coogler’s record-breaking Oscar nominee “Sinners” (2025) was shown at AMC Theaters in January for the fourth time, not even a year since its opening.

What is bringing some audiences back to theaters when it’s more convenient and cost-effective to watch at home? In a conversation edited for clarity and length, we asked Nathan Roberts, filmmaker, professor, and head instructor at Harvard Extension School, what he’s learned in six years of teaching his course “Why Do Movies Move Us?: The Psychology and Philosophy of Filmgoing.”

The last six years have highlighted the attendance problem facing theaters, but among groups that buck those trends you’d almost think it’s a non-issue.

There’s always been a kind of ritual aspect of going to the cinema that I feel has grown. When something becomes more of a niche activity, it can gain popularity for those who take it seriously. There is a certain identity associated with that activity, a kind of doubling down. There’s a similar kind of ownership that I’ve seen people taking with film that, in some ways, has to be taken if you’re going to justify going out of your way to go to the theater when it’s easier to watch something at home.

When there’s an event or specialness to a certain film, it tends to do well, but when people think of event cinema, they tend to think of things that are really big — films that are expensive, films that are lavish — but I also feel like something to pay attention to is how the event-ness isn’t just a question of size, but a question of delight in collective experience. People who like concerts can go to big festivals, but true lovers of live music often will enjoy going to a smaller venue with an artist they really love, where it feels like there’s a kind of intimacy. I’m curious to see to what degree we can discern whether collective intimacy is as important, if not more important, than the bigness or splashiness of the event. A recent example is the film “Send Help” (2026), which is unique as it held consistently at the box office despite losing screens. It’s a very fun film to watch with the crowd because not only are transgressive things happening — there are some sequences that are kind of violent and crazy — but there’s this psychological element to how these two characters relate, which makes it so fun to see with a full house and people reacting. I think it is a sign that an original studio film — not a piece of intellectual property — can actually do quite well and maintain longevity because of how fun it is to watch with an audience.

Is there really a measurable difference between seeing movies at home versus in the theater?

In one study from 2021, they found that it’s not only hardcore cinephiles who like going to the movies. There’s actually an emotional component to how people respond to films that differs depending on whether they watch them in the theaters or at home. That said, empirical studies are difficult because there are so many independent variables that go into every single experience of film viewing. I think that’s why a lot of the scholarship on this issue has been phenomenological, largely drawing on and thinking through aspects of personal experience that can be shared, but come from a subjective place rather than an objective one.

How do reissues fit into the conversation?

Reissues are in part, a response to the broader problems at the box office: a lack of theatrically distributed films across the board. A lot of these theaters — AMC Theatres and so on — are built with a number of auditoriums that are not necessarily being fully utilized. There’s empty space and the theater isn’t making money. So regardless of the number of people who go to these reissues, offering the possibility for people to buy tickets and come to see these films is only a net gain for the theater.

There’s also the question of differentiating the theater experience from the home experience. Home theaters are great — now you can get huge televisions, but you can’t match the quality of IMAX at home. A lot of these reissues are in IMAX, including films not shot on IMAX. One of the more interesting and strange reissues, in my opinion, was “Black Swan” (2010) in IMAX last year. That film was shot on 16 mm, and IMAX is 65 mm. There must have been some post-production processes that they did in order to make it look good when it was blown up to IMAX, but that, to me, suggests that the reason for the reissue is not necessarily even a means of showing the film in the best possible way, but providing a sensory experience for a viewer that they simply can’t have at home. There’s a long history of Hollywood cultivating technologies for theaters to differentiate themselves from home television distribution. It feels to me like this is a continuation of that process. I do wonder if people are thinking, “Wow, this film was amazing to watch at home, how cool would it be to actually see it on the big screen, or to see it in IMAX?” Re-releases offer an opportunity for people who, the first time around, weren’t motivated to see it on the big screen, to catch a full sensory experience of a film.

Given how many don’t make it to theaters, are filmmakers still making movies with the theatrical experience in mind?

This is one of the places where it’s important to differentiate between what studios desire and what filmmakers desire. Filmmakers desire to create immersive collective experiences, because those are often the experiences that made them love and want to make films in the first place. It’s only, in my experience, industry incentives that push against that. On the extreme end of the spectrum, something that has grown as a way to make money while the film industry is floundering are these so-called “vertical dramas,” literally designed to be watched on the phone. Often, they’re low production value, nonunion projects that don’t pay very well. From my point of view, living in Los Angeles, being a filmmaker, having talked to filmmakers, I don’t know a single one who’s like, “I can’t wait to make this vertical drama,” or “I can’t wait to make something that people watch at home on streaming.” This is continually backed up by things that you can read in the press and hear at award ceremonies where filmmakers say, “Keep theaters alive!” “Go to theaters!” Part of the desire is to create an image that is so detailed and full that it can be appreciated on a big screen, to craft a kind of overwhelming or sensory experience. There’s a delight in creating a 5.1 surround-sound experience that can only be had on the quality sound system of a theater.

So why do movies move us?

Every time you go to sit down and see a film with a group of people or by yourself, there’s always something that is going to be moving in a new and different way. That is what gives me hope in filmgoing: There isn’t a preset way of how movies move us. There are always possibilities for new forms and new ways of being moved, and new ways of forming collectivities, whether it’s seeing films in the theater, gallery, or seeing films at home. The lack of predictability, or the lack of predictable response, is a beautiful thing.

Before becoming Harvard’s 31st president, Alan Garber served as provost and chief academic officer for more than 12 years, a role that gave him an expansive view and an intimate understanding of the teaching and research that define the University’s mission. The lessons of that experience have stayed with him.

Garber’s Harvard roots run deep, starting with his arrival in the early 1970s as a freshman from Rock Island, Illinois. After graduating in three years, he went on to earn two advanced degrees: A Harvard Ph.D. in economics and an M.D. at Stanford University. That was immediately followed by internal medicine training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he met his future wife. He returned to Stanford, where he spent the next 25 years as a teacher, researcher, and VA physician.

In this edited interview, Garber notes that he’d never aspired to a top post in higher education before President Drew Faust called to gauge his interest in the provost’s job. Years later, when he stepped into the presidency, he was once again pushing the boundaries he’d imagined for himself. But in both cases, he says, Harvard had given him too much for the answer to be anything but a wholehearted “Yes.”

Tell me about your childhood in Rock Island.

Rock Island, across the Mississippi River from Davenport, Iowa, was a city of about 50,000 then. My father was born there, and my mother grew up in Wisconsin.

I have a twin sister and an older brother. As you might expect, my twin and I have always been especially close. My mother was a social worker. When children arrived, she became a stay-at-home mom who did extensive volunteer work. My father was the oldest male in his family, so when his parents grew very sick and died young, he effectively became the head of the family. He worked and did not attend college. He ended up owning a liquor store and playing the violin in the Tri-City Symphony Orchestra. Both of my parents believed deeply in the importance and value of education.

During high school, I had a few jobs. They included summer work stacking paving bricks from a torn-up street and delivering plumbing supplies. During the school year, I worked as an usher in the multiplex cinema in the adjacent town, Milan. Milan was mostly rural — the cornfields started just a few blocks away. I looked forward to sitting in one of the theaters during my break, eating my bucket of popcorn and drinking a quart of Coke. When the first “Godfather” movie played, I’d usually drop in during the baptism scene. Another favorite was the chase scene in “The French Connection.” I felt listless, and my head ached, on my days off. That’s how I discovered caffeine withdrawal.

We weren’t near a big city. It was about a 3½-hour drive from Chicago. Growing up, I had the feeling that there was a lot going on in the wider world that wasn’t happening where we lived.

Was music a big part of your upbringing?

We went to classical concerts every month, and my father played string quartets with his colleagues at our home. I didn’t really appreciate chamber music until I was much older, but from an early age I loved Beethoven and the great violin and piano concertos. Sometimes my father would invite guest soloists to our house for a cocktail party after the Saturday evening concert. At one of those parties, our dog bit Itzhak Perlman on his bow hand.

That probably killed the conversation.

Not for long. Perlman was charming and incredibly gracious. He just laughed it off.

When did you set your sights on Harvard?

Harvard seemed a grand, remote, historic, and unattainable institution that stood for excellence. At the end of my junior year of high school, I traveled to Boston and saw the school for the first time. Whatever interest I had was multiplied manyfold by visiting the campus and meeting people there.

What brought you to Boston?

I stopped there on the way to a summer science program for high school students at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. I had a glimpse of both Harvard and MIT, where my cousin worked. I applied to several other colleges but didn’t visit them.

My summer experience made me think about completing high school in a new environment. A plan came together quickly. Somehow my brother, a yeshiva student in Chicago, and I convinced my parents that I should join him, studying at the yeshiva at night while attending public high school in the daytime. I had no desire to become a rabbi but wanted to explore Judaism at a deeper level than had been possible going to Hebrew school twice a week. And that’s what I did. It was an incredible experience.

In what sense?

I’d studied Hebrew, the Bible, and the Jewish religion for many years, but not in a serious way. Now I was thrown in with people who were real scholars. It made me appreciate how little I knew. We studied the Talmud and rabbinical commentaries as partners. Each one of them had far more experience and knowledge than I did. I am grateful to this day for their patience and encouragement. As I had hoped, my appreciation and understanding of Judaism deepened greatly.

You arrived on campus in 1973. How would you describe Harvard’s student body at the time?

It struck me then as diverse and international, though it wasn’t by today’s standards. My House, Dunster, was very friendly. You could sit down in the dining hall with anybody and feel comfortable speaking about almost any issue. I like to think the conversation was usually profound, and sometimes it was. But we probably talked about weekend parties, the food, and music more than anything else. My classmates were impressive. Everyone seemed to know something interesting.

Although surveys indicate that students are more reluctant to speak about sensitive topics today, in other respects the experience was similar. There was a real sense that you were around people who were going to make a difference and that, when you did have discussions, you couldn’t get by with sloppy thinking.

You finished in three years. Tell me about that experience.

The barrier to graduating in three years was low. You needed enough Advanced Placement credits when you matriculated, and you had to do enough work in three years. Only a fraction of eligible students chose to graduate early.

Like many of my classmates who took less than four years, I was motivated in part by financial considerations. Losing a year of the Harvard College experience was a real sacrifice, but those of us who entered graduate or professional school at Harvard were able to continue to spend time with many of our College friends. Under the circumstances, it didn’t seem like a bad idea.

At that point you were interested in premed?

I was interested in science, especially the life sciences. I didn’t have firm plans but assumed that I’d become a physician. I later learned my parents shared that assumption. If you plan to graduate in three years, you need to declare your concentration within a couple of months of starting college. I declared in biochemistry, one of the most popular concentrations for premeds. So I was on a path that would at least give me the option to apply to med school.

But two courses I took in the first year opened my eyes to other possibilities. They were Physics 12, taught by Edward Purcell, a Nobel laureate, and Ec 10. I loved both of them. When I moved into Dunster House the next year, I became friends with Jerome Culp, the resident tutor in economics. We talked about economics and how much I’d enjoyed it. He soon convinced me that I should change direction and concentrate in economics.

I liked physics, too, but my interest wasn’t deep, and my roommates (they later became prominent professors, two in physics and one in chemistry) set the bar impossibly high. Physics 12 contributed to my decision to pursue economics in an unexpected way: by teaching me how to structure and solve applied mathematics problems, a vital skill for an economist.

Jerome gave me other good advice. He said that I should start taking graduate courses and told me which were most important. He also urged me to become a research assistant, arranging for me to work for a prolific young labor economist who is still a member of our faculty, Richard Freeman. It was an invaluable experience. So that is how conversations in the Dunster dining hall set me on a path that led to where I am now.

What did you like about economics?

It was a compelling frame through which to view human behavior. It provided a set of questions and a quantitative mode of thinking about important, real-world phenomena. You learn how to formulate and rigorously test hypotheses, a skill that is important in many fields and in life.

After you graduated, you pursued a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard and an M.D. at Stanford at the same time. This is long before online learning, so how did that work, logistically?

First came the decision to do both. To get advice about whether to get an M.D. or a Ph.D. in economics, I met with distinguished faculty across the University. Economists encouraged me to go into economics. Marty Feldstein, who later became one of my dissertation advisers, was one of them. As a Harvard undergrad, he’d planned to attend medical school himself but deferred admission to Harvard Medical School while he pursued a fellowship leading to his doctorate at Oxford. After a few years, he decided against the M.D.

The dean of the School of Public Health, a physician, thought I should get a Ph.D. in public health. The other physicians urged me to pursue an M.D.

As I digested the conflicting advice, I realized that by the time I graduated college, I would have done half of the required Ph.D. coursework. If I took an additional year, I could complete the coursework, earning a master’s degree in the process. So I decided to apply both to medical schools and economics departments, figuring that I should at least get the master’s in economics. One evening, the chair of the economics graduate admissions committee saw me poring over piles of computer output and asked whether I planned to pursue the entire Ph.D. I’d been thinking of it anyway and committed on the spot. He later became the chair of my dissertation committee.

I took a deferral from medical school at Stanford, where two of the nation’s most prominent health economists taught, spending the next year at Harvard with my classmates and finishing my Ph.D. coursework as planned. Then I took a leave from graduate school and went to medical school. I did two years, took a leave from med school, worked on my dissertation, and then came back to med school. I finished the two degrees, on two coasts, nearly simultaneously.

Where was your clinical work during medical school?

At Stanford Hospital and the Palo Alto VA hospital. I was also a research assistant during my first years of medical school. One of my mentors was Hal Sox, the chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine for Stanford and also the head of general medicine at the VA hospital. When I took a leave of absence to work on my dissertation, he arranged for me to have a student general medicine clinic at the Palo Alto VA.

Thanks to that experience, when I started clinical clerkships upon my formal return to medical school, I was as well-prepared as medical students who had gone straight through. My attraction to the VA was reinforced by my first inpatient medicine clerkship, which was also at the VA. That also led to my decision to go into general internal medicine and later, when I became a faculty member, to do my clinical work at the same hospital.

Were there particular patients who made a deep impression?

There were several, but one, a Mr. Campbell, really stood out. He was a World War II veteran, dying of advanced lung cancer. The main hospital building was old enough to still have wards with as many as 12 patients in a room. That sounds unpleasant, but the wards had important advantages over private and semi-private rooms. The patients in the wards came to know each other and looked out for one another. That vigilance was better in some ways than fancy monitoring equipment. He had a prolonged hospitalization and knew the ropes by the time I met him. He always looked out for his wardmates.

He was a wonderful person and very kind to me. He knew that I was learning by taking care of him and was so accommodating, generous, and uncomplaining. In many ways, he was one of my greatest teachers. It really hit me hard when he died.

It sounds like a tight-knit group of patients.

If somebody was having trouble breathing, another patient would find a nurse to help. Most were stoical and would not complain if they were feeling worse. They might hide it, even if they had a worrying symptom, like shortness of breath. Their wardmates would make sure the doctors and nurses knew. Mr. Campbell did that and set an example for other patients. I saw firsthand what people meant when they referred to World War II veterans as the “Greatest Generation.”

Your Ph.D.-M.D. experience was clearly a marathon. Did you ever get discouraged?

When I was looking at residency programs, the interviewers at Mass General asked: Do you think you’ll regret spending all of this time in training when you could have just been an economist? I replied that one of my grad school roommates — the economist Jeff Sachs — had just been promoted to full professor with tenure at Harvard, and here I was about to start an internship in six months. It was completely possible, I said, that when I would be called in the middle of the night to do a fever workup, I might think, “If I had just done economics, what would I be doing right now? Certainly something better than this.”

But I was sure that in the long run I’d find my work as both an economist and physician more meaningful than pursuing only one of those vocations. And all these years later, I can say that I’ve never regretted that choice.

When you were hired as an assistant professor at Stanford, you went back to the VA to do your clinical work?

Yes. Just as when I was a student, taking care of veterans was a source of great satisfaction and pride. I continued to see patients at the Palo Alto VA until I returned here to be provost in 2011.

Were there certain health issues that were particular to that population?

Compared to many academic medical centers, we saw more lung disease, liver disease, and heart disease. The Palo Alto VA was also a major referral center for the care of dual (medical and psychiatric) diagnosis patients and for spinal cord injury. I taught and supervised care of patients both on the inpatient service and in clinic. For several years, I was the only tenured Stanford faculty member in general medicine at the VA hospital. During that time I took care of many former prisoners of war, some of whom had ongoing illness related to their imprisonment, like the neurological impairments resulting from beriberi acquired in World War II prison camps.

During your time at Stanford, you authored more than 100 articles on healthcare economics. Tell me about your research.

I became very interested in applying the tools of economics to evaluate medical and public health practices. In my dissertation, I examined antibiotic resistance, where one person’s overuse of antibiotics puts others at risk of becoming infected by a resistant organism. It sounded like a negative externality, where one person’s economic activity harms others. I thought that the tools of economics could be helpful in measuring and ultimately controlling the harms that antibiotic users impose on others.

Over the years, I studied areas like cardiovascular disease prevention, including cholesterol control. I used and taught the tools of decision analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and the application of econometric techniques to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease.

You started two centers related to health policy and economics at Stanford. Was that when you first began to think about higher education administration?

I wasn’t interested in academic leadership positions and would have been even less inclined to pursue them if they were described as administration. However, not long after I started on the Stanford faculty, my division chief went on sabbatical, and I ended up becoming the director and principal investigator of a postdoctoral fellowship program that he led. That role basically continued throughout my time on the Stanford faculty. Later, I became the acting division chief. I had no interest in doing this on a longer-term basis, so creating the centers was kind of an aberration.

The chair of the Department of Medicine came up with the idea for a center for me to run — why it became two centers is a long story. She and my mentors at Stanford somehow convinced me that the centers’ mission would be sufficiently close to my research interests that running them would not be burdensome. I was overly optimistic about that, but leading the centers turned out to be gratifying in unexpected ways. Most importantly, I discovered that I loved mentoring students at all levels, postdocs, and eventually faculty. But I wasn’t attracted to positions with greater leadership responsibilities, like department chairmanships. I never would have expected to be a candidate for provost.

You started as Harvard provost in 2011. Did the idea of someday becoming president ever cross your mind?

People ask about it, but it was not something I was thinking about. When I started as provost, I didn’t have as much leadership experience as was typical for the position. I accepted the offer because I hoped to repay my debt to Harvard for all that it gave me. I didn’t think I needed to be president to do that.

As is typical for U.S. universities, the provost is the chief academic officer and is uniquely focused on the academic life of the University as a whole. Anyone with broad intellectual curiosity can’t help but feel a sense of wonder when they learn about the work faculty do at the frontiers of the fields represented at Harvard. That promise of intellectual stimulation combined with the opportunity to do my part to help the University succeed was irresistible.

At some point during your tenure as provost, you started to notice that the community was having trouble talking across differences and remaining open to a range of views on political and cultural issues. How did that realization develop?

Over the years, there was a growing reluctance — notably among students, but also among faculty and staff — to speak openly about sensitive issues, especially with people who might have different views. A fear of being misunderstood, of giving offense, and of ostracism chilled speech. Fear is not conducive to learning. It’s not conducive to doing great research. Sometimes we need to take risks to make progress. We shouldn’t offend people gratuitously, but if the consequences of inadvertently or even intentionally giving offense become too great, dialogue about difficult issues will be a casualty.

As these problems grew, I realized that traditional debates about what speech is permissible in different settings, and other traditional speech concerns, only addressed part of the challenge we faced. There still needed to be an understanding about speech rights, but it became apparent that we also needed to ensure that our entire community had the skills to participate in difficult conversations.

Among our faculty are renowned experts on these issues. And many more can demonstrate how to facilitate dialogue with extraordinary finesse and grace. I realized that we should look at this set of speech challenges as an opportunity to empower students, faculty, staff, and all the members of our community to be able to handle difficult situations better. In other words, we have an obligation to give people the tools they need to fully participate in the life of the community. That includes exposing, discussing, and working through differences.

Are there lessons you can learn by engaging with differences that you can’t learn any other way?

By doing so, you better understand perspectives that differ from your own. More importantly, you develop general skills in listening, speaking, and identifying areas of agreement and disagreement. You might even change your mind and be better for it. Engaging with differences is important right now because there is an overwhelming sentiment in our community that we need to be brought closer together, that we should not retreat into our own corners and avoid people whom we believe to be different from us.

Do you see intolerance of opposing views and intolerance of other people as two sides of the same coin?

Yes. People associate views with identities. If you’re a wealthy white student who went to a small private school in California, people assume that you will have a particular set of political views. If you’re a Black student from the urban Northeast, they assume that you will have another set of political views. And both might happen to be wrong. There’s a diversity of views from people with different economic, social, or religious backgrounds. We all want to be treated as individuals, not as types. We don’t want anyone to prejudge us based on our demographic characteristics or any other group identity.

The University has been locked in a dispute with the Trump administration for the past year. Did you see this coming before the election? Also, how do you strike a balance between today’s challenges and longer-term planning?

In the wake of October 7, 2023, the decline in trust in institutions, especially universities, accelerated. Academic institutions were blamed, often unfairly, for many of the problems the nation faced. But there were real problems at Harvard and other campuses. Attacking universities seemed to be a successful political strategy. As a candidate, Trump warned that his administration would investigate and seek to transform universities.

So harsh scrutiny was to be expected. However, we did not anticipate the form and the severity of the attack on Harvard and other universities, nor the readiness with which precedent would be abandoned, for example in Title VI investigations and enforcement. In navigating all that has followed we have, as always, been guided by principle. In developing our responses in the past 13 months, we have always confirmed that we will follow the law. We have always strived to protect the mission of Harvard and of higher education more broadly. We will go to great lengths to protect that mission, because in the end, when we carry out our mission, we serve the public.

You mentioned that the community wants to be brought together. Is it happening? Do you see a more unified institution?

Many people have told me how pleased they are at the way we have come together as a community. We still have our differences, but we also are committed to our mission, our common goals, and each other with a dedication that would be elusive when threats to the institution seem neither imminent nor serious. Now, more than at any other time in memory, we appreciate that this is a great and precious community — and it’s extensive. It includes not only the faculty, staff, students, and alumni, but also the many friends who may have no formal affiliation with Harvard but share our aspirations for higher education and its role in the world. That’s something that validates our mission and should give us all hope for the future.

Some 1 million patients in the U.S. live with a type of heart disease called heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, or HFpEF, caused by a stiffening of a chamber of the heart that makes it much more challenging to distribute blood throughout the body. The condition has few approved therapies and high mortality rates.

For years, researchers have suspected that the hormone relaxin could be an effective treatment for certain cardiovascular diseases — including possibly HFpEF. It helps counteract fibrosis, prevents veins and arteries from hardening, and promotes essential vascular and cardiac remodeling to support the mother’s heart during pregnancy. However, a major challenge has been keeping relaxin in the body long enough to be effective. The pharmaceutical industry tested a similar compound in clinical trials but encountered the same challenge as many hormone-based treatments: These molecules are generally small, and the body filters them out too quickly for them to be effective. 

“The pharmacokinetics are not really suitable to use it as a drug,” said Grant Zimmermann, director of business development at Harvard Office of Technology Development (OTD).

That started to change in 2017, soon after a discovery in the lab of Andrew Kruse, professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School. “Andrew came to us,” Zimmermann recalls, “and said, ‘I think I know how to fix this.’”

Kruse had been interested in the structural biology of relaxin, which he calls a “very unusual member” of the family of proteins his lab has researched for years. Researchers in the Kruse Lab were studying the structure of the relaxin receptor to understand how it binds to its ligand and induces changes in the body. In the process, the research team made an important discovery: They were able to convert relaxin from a naturally occurring two-chain molecule to a one-chain molecule using protein engineering, and they were able to attach the Fc-domain of an antibody to extend relaxin’s half-life in the body. Native relaxin is complicated to produce in the lab because of its two-chain structure, according to Sarah Erlandson, the graduate student leading the project. Creating a single-chain design made it possible to fuse the antibody Fc to relaxin, allowing it to stay in the body longer.

There wasn’t one moment that illuminated how consequential the discovery would be, says Erlandson. Instead, the process involved the types of continuous progress that often define scientific research and development. Their work “relied on iterative design improvements,” she said. “I remember our growing excitement as we made progress on the engineered protein. That’s when it started to feel like we could have a tangible impact on relaxin therapeutics.”

What they designed as a tool to study structural biology, Kruse realized, could have significant therapeutic potential.

OTD protected the innovations related to the research and got to work on strategies to further advance the research toward commercialization opportunities. Zimmermann brought the project to his colleagues at the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator (BBA). That team immediately saw promise in the research and provided funding through pilot and development grants, along with business development support.

Relaxin represents a “prototypical example” of the type of innovations that the BBA funds, says Zimmermann. The accelerator specifically looks for technologies with a clear path to clinical development that need a boost to attract potential industry partners that can further the development of beneficial innovations through sponsored research or license it for commercial use.

The BBA helped fund pharmacokinetic evaluations of the molecule’s use in mice and validate the research to the point that Kruse was able to form a startup and license the technology, launching Tectonic Therapeutic to further advance the research to the clinic.

“All of these things were really critical for us to be able to out-license this molecule, to show that it actually had some real promise,” Kruse said. “The Blavatnik Accelerator is really what allowed us to go from a pure research compound to something that was ultimately a clinical candidate.”

Kruse also received guidance and ultimately partnered with Timothy A. Springer, the Latham Family Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School, whose lab studies protein-based therapeutics and who has helped found numerous biotech companies. What began as a lunchtime conversation about progressing academic discovery into a company grew into a collaboration. Springer helped co-found Tectonic, worked with Kruse on fundraising pitches, and provided pivotal early funding, along with his technical expertise.

Since licensing the relaxin technology, Tectonic has conducted additional engineering on the molecule devised in Kruse’s lab — with Kruse as an adviser and Springer on the board of directors — and created a larger platform to develop treatments targeting other G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), the class of receptors that Kruse’s lab studies. About 30 percent of all approved drugs target GPCRs, but currently-approved treatments target “just a small fraction” of all known GPCRs, says Alise Reicin, Tectonic’s CEO.

“There is a lot of biology there that could be important in drug discovery and development, but many of those GPCRs, for a variety of reasons, were considered hard to drug or undruggable,” said Reicin. Targeting them with unique biological engineering, the team thought, could unlock new treatments.

For cardiovascular disease, the company’s focus is the RXFP1 receptor, a GPCR that is involved in numerous processes throughout the body, including in the cardiovascular system. Relaxin binds to the RXFP1 receptor and can make tissues, including veins, stretchier and softer. Tectonic’s relaxin treatment, known as TX45, is now in a Phase 2 clinical trial.

“I think there’s lots of reason for optimism that this story is going to play out in the way we envisioned all those years ago,” said Zimmermann.

In January 2025, Tectonic received data suggesting its relaxin therapeutic could work in a subset of patients, those with pulmonary hypertension associated with HFpEF. In the fall, they received a similar dataset in patients with pulmonary hypertension associated with reduced ejection fraction heart failure. These patients typically have reduced exercise tolerance and increased mortality compared with heart failure patients without pulmonary hypertension. In the coming year, the company will also begin working on treating a new form of pulmonary hypertension, associated with interstitial lung disease, with relaxin. For patients, this would mean a potential new treatment for challenging and, at times, fatal conditions. 

“I’m a big believer that it’s the academic-pharma-biotech partnership that has driven innovation in all of the great drug-development programs over the last few decades that have improved the lives of patients,” said Reicin.

A Los Angeles jury will decide whether Meta’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube are addictive and causing harm to teenagers and children — and whether they can be held responsible for it.

The lawsuit involves a 20-year-old California woman who says her compulsive use of Instagram and YouTube since childhood resulted in mental health struggles. She argues the platforms are intentionally designed to be addictive in order to boost user engagement.

A 1996 law protects online platforms from liability from content posted by users.

Meta and Google have denied that their popular services pose mental health dangers to young people. But a growing body of research, along with real-life observations of parents and teachers, suggests otherwise.

Glenn Cohen is deputy dean and the James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and faculty director at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics.

In this edited conversation, Cohen explains why the Los Angeles trial, which began Feb. 9, is testing tech’s insulation from liability and may reshape the public’s relationship with social media.

Many are calling this a landmark trial. Do you share that view?

This is a case that initially was against Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snapchat. It’s currently against Meta and Google; Snapchat and TikTok settled out of court. It’s a so-called bellwether trial.

There are about 1,600 cases that are in multidistrict litigation, which is a procedure for consolidating cases for some parts of the adjudication process. This is the first, but there’s going to be about two dozen bellwether trials. And these cases are selected as representative litigation for the larger pool of litigants.

I think it’s going to be quite an important case in part because it’s a theory that has a serious consequence for Meta and Google should they lose. They tried to get the case resolved in an earlier stage of the proceedings. When the court refused to grant them that resolution in November, that’s when Snapchat and TikTok decided to settle and not to take their chances at trial.

Meta and Google are risking a lot. This is one of the very first cases where we saw Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg take the stand, and so this is a pretty unprecedented sort of thing.

Meta and Google are alleged to have deliberately designed their products to be addictive to teenagers and younger children. What does the plaintiff have to prove?

Her claim is that she became addicted to these sites as a child, and now experiences anxiety, depression, and body image issues as a result.

The opening statement by her lawyer, Mark Lanier, said things like it’s addictive to the brains of children and that Meta engineered addiction in children’s brains. He draws explicit comparisons to tobacco. Tobacco and gambling are the two public health analogues that you’re going to see come up multiple times.

The allegation is that, just as slot machines and cigarettes use particular techniques from behavioral science and neurobiology, the design decisions here were done in a way to maximize the engagement of youth to increase advertising revenue. That’s a main claim the plaintiffs use to frame their case.

One of the most interesting legal questions has to do with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This was a 1996 law that shielded online platforms from liability for third-party content posted on websites.

The issue of whether the Act protects Meta in this case came up at prior stages of this litigation where the court disagreed with Meta. Should Meta lose this case, it is likely to come up on appeal.

Tech firms are involved in lots of litigation. What makes this particular lawsuit so compelling?

What’s novel about this case is that the plaintiffs frame their claim as having nothing to do with content. They claim this is about design and functionality and design aspects like infinite scroll. So, they argue, a court can adjudicate liability for the design without running afoul of either Section 230 or facing First Amendment questions about content regulation and the like.

The trial court has accepted those arguments at this stage of the proceeding. But on appeal, should Meta lose this case, I suspect that ruling will be front and center.

The other thing to look for in the litigation is about causation — that is, for the plaintiffs to show that the harms would have been avoided if Meta had not designed the product in this way, that the health issues arose because of Meta product design.

We’re going to see back-and-forth and jousting about whether it’s the content versus the design that’s causing the damage to this young woman that she alleges.

And I think we’re going to see a bunch of back and forth on what’s called “failure to warn” questions.

The mother of the plaintiff has alleged that she had never seen any of the warnings on the subject. She learned about it after watching “60 Minutes” after her daughter had been using the Meta products. There’s going to be questions about what kinds of warnings were provided, whether they were sufficient, and whether that negates the liability of Meta.

One more thing will be the quality of social science research linking the platform features to the alleged harms to this young woman and to children in general. That’s going to be another pressure point.

Those are probably three or four things that I would keep my eye on that are going to be significant.

There’s a real chance that Meta will lose this case at trial. Some of their best arguments were ones that have been rejected in an earlier decision by the court. Still, those are mostly legal questions that I think will be taken up on appeal.

So, it’s possible that Meta will lose the trial and yet ultimately be vindicated at the end of the day.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of their arguments, in your view?

The plaintiff seems to have a very compelling story to tell, and that often is helpful, especially in front of a jury.

And I think they’ve already gotten some good stuff out of Mr. Zuckerberg on the stand. I don’t think he cratered, but the sound bites they’ve generated have been helpful to the plaintiff and the general mood around this litigation.

So those are two of the things that are strongest for the plaintiff side.

On the other side, there is this issue about content versus design. It’s quite hard to disentangle, and that will be something that Meta will be hitting repeatedly.

And then, this question of causation will come up repeatedly, as well, and whether the plaintiff’s attorneys can demonstrate the relationship between the design features and the injuries the young woman sustained.

I imagine that we’ll see the lawyers argue these issues both in the trial court proceeding and certainly on appeal if they should lose.

Many countries in Europe, Australia, and others now regulate social media, as well as AI. Could this case accelerate regulations either here or abroad?

I think so. The things that are most likely on the table would be much more age verification and age gating.

Zuckerberg, in his testimony, says that phone makers bear more responsibility and having a reliable way to verify a young user’s age without a driver’s license would be, he said, a “very wise and simple way” to do it.

So that will be part of Meta and the other social media companies’ story too: that regulators should be focused on the main place where adolescents and children access social media — their phones — and that phone makers should be regulated. That’s going to be an argument they make to stave off regulation on them.

One of the biggest challenges we’ve seen with a bunch of the cases that have made it to the U.S. Supreme Court is Section 230. And then, on the flip side, the First Amendment and a reluctance to be regulating anything that approaches content.

Now, I do think there are probably congressional bills that could be passed that could protect minors without touching content and potentially running afoul of the First Amendment. But the social media companies have been fairly adept, thus far, in avoiding a lot of regulation.

There’s also an argument that if these trials are successful, some might point to them and say, “We don’t need governmental one-size-fits-all regulations. Tort liability is doing the work here for us.” So, there’s a way in which a win for the plaintiffs might also be an argument against too much top-down regulation.

Apart from the ultimate decision at trial, the trial itself is generating all sorts of sound bites and things that might make regulators more interested. We’ve seen increased interest in regulation outside the U.S.; we’ve seen a little bit within the U.S. with some of the states regulating in this space.

Notwithstanding the fact that social media companies are good at lobbying, there’s a real chance that some of the stuff that will be revealed in the course of these trials may change the average American’s relationship with social media companies.

Muriel Siebert arrived in New York City in 1954 with $500 and a dream. But from her first job as a “glorified gofer” at a small financial analysis firm, she would go on to become the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, the first woman to own and operate a brokerage firm on the NYSE, and the first woman to serve as Superintendent of Banks for the State of New York. 

A new exhibit, “Muriel Siebert: Redefining Power and Possibility on Wall Street,” on display now at the Harvard Business School’s Baker Library, highlights Siebert’s remarkable career, which opened doors for women in finance. This exhibit introduces the extensive holdings of the Muriel Siebert Collection at Baker Library, which the Muriel Siebert Foundation donated to the library in 2019. The Siebert archive comprises a wide range of materials, including correspondence, research reports, speeches, articles, press releases, photographs, and audiovisual materials.

“Now, this is exciting.”

Muriel Siebert was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1928, the daughter of a homemaker and a dentist. She attended Flora Stone Mather College intending to become an accountant, but before she could graduate, her father was diagnosed with cancer. She dropped out to care for him in her junior year.  

In 1953, Siebert visited New York City with some friends and toured the New York Stock Exchange.  

“What I saw as I looked down from the visitors’ gallery was a sea of men in dark suits,” she wrote in her autobiography. “But after absorbing all that fierce energy, I turned to my friends and said, ‘Now, this is exciting.'”  

The following year, Siebert returned to New York to look for work. 

After being turned down for several jobs, Siebert found work as a research trainee at Bache & Co. for $65 per week. She considered herself a “glorified gofer,” but she learned about the art and science of market analysis.

“I can look at a page of numbers and they light up and tell me a story,” she said. 

A seat at the table

Siebert rose through the ranks of the research analysts at smaller brokerage firms.  

She encountered gender discrimination on many fronts.  

“Mentors for women didn’t exist when I started on Wall Street,” she wrote. “It makes you a feminist when you’re making $150 a week and the man sitting next to you is making $300.”  

In 1967, a client suggested she buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and start her own firm. Siebert read the NYSE constitution and found no rules against women buying a seat. She bought her membership for $445,000, the equivalent of more than $4 million today. She called her membership badge “the most expensive piece of jewelry going.” 

Going into business

 Siebert quickly earned a reputation as a trailblazer. She was invited to speak at Harvard Business School in 1968, shortly after she bought her seat on the exchange (HBS had first admitted women into its full MBA program five years earlier). 

In 1972, she was invited back to be the keynote speaker at a program called “The Impact of Women on Today’s Business Environment.” She began her address, “When I received the invitation to speak here — I thought of the Virginia Slim Cigarette Ad — You’ve come a long way baby. As a woman who has succeeded in a man’s world — I’d like to say ‘Baby — you’ve got a long way to go.'” 

Aiming for bigger reforms 

In 1977, Siebert was appointed New York State’s Superintendent of Banks, making her the first woman to hold the position. She oversaw about 500 banking institutions, $400 billion in assets, and $100 billion in trust accounts. 

The role made her acutely aware of the need for financial reform. In 1982, she ran for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, losing in the Republican primary to Assemblywoman Florence M. Sullivan.  

“Pride, principal, and profit” 

While she was Superintendent of Banks and running for Senate, Siebert relinquished control of her firm into a blind trust. But after her primary loss, she returned to her company. 

She grew the firm significantly, opening new offices, expanding into new services, and adopting new technologies, including an early computerized trading site.  

“When I left my position with New York State, I had some offers from major firms. Had I taken any of them, I probably would have made a lot more money, but … I felt an obligation to other women. Had there been ten other woman-owned firms, I might have chosen differently,” 

Throughout her career, Siebert championed women in business. She was a founder of the Women’s Forum in the Committee of 200, organizations supporting women in business. In 1990, she established the Siebert Entrepreneurial Philanthropic Plan (SEPP), which directed to charity 50 percent of profits, after clearing costs, from the fees associated with the underwriting or purchasing of new securities.  

“Giving back is more than an obligation, it’s a privilege,” she said. 

Siebert was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and the International Forum Women’s Hall of Fame. In 2016, three years after her death, the NYSE opened Siebert Hall, the first and only room in the Exchange dedicated to an individual.  

“Muriel Siebert: Redefining Power and Possibility on Wall Street” is open at Harvard Business School’s Baker Library through December 2026. This article includes text drawn from the digital exhibition and exhibition catalog. 

The first symptoms appeared during a concert.

In 2009, Satoshi Yamaguchi, a drummer with the Japanese rock quartet RADWIMPS, found himself lost during a familiar bridge.

“The sound stopped suddenly,” Yamaguchi recalled in a 2023 TV news interview with NHK World-Japan. “I wanted to use my right foot to hit the drum twice, but I ended with the first try. At that instant, my brain really drew a blank. I thought, ‘What’s going on?’”

It took five years to receive the diagnosis of musician’s dystonia, which causes involuntary muscle spasms. The neurological disorder, impacting roughly 1 percent of professional musicians globally, eventually forced Yamaguchi’s exit from the band he had co-founded in 2003. But it also opened a remarkable new chapter in the percussionist’s story.

In a recent event hosted by the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Yamaguchi recalled his journey from rock stardom to scientific researcher intent on solving the mysteries of his condition. He also showed off the voice-activated drum kit that enabled his return to live performance in 2024, nearly a decade after he left RADWIMPS.

“My children had only ever seen me play the drums on the screen,” Yamaguchi recalled, sharing a photo of his family of five. “This was the first time they heard me perform live.”

Key to Yamaguchi’s trajectory was drummer-turned-scientist Shinya Fujii of Keio University’s NeuroMusicLab. The pair, who met when Yamaguchi arrived as a visiting researcher in 2021, went on to pursue a series of academic inquiries into musician’s dystonia.

Their first paper, published in 2024, charted the disorder’s impact on Yamaguchi’s musicianship. The effects may seem subtle to the untrained ear. But when symptoms appeared, the researchers confirmed, the drummer fell out of rhythm with a metronome.

For Yamaguchi, the findings came as a relief. “When I was still active in the band, I had no way to share the difference or the struggle with the people around me,” he told a packed house at Smith Campus Center. “But through science, I was finally able to reveal the true nature of that ghost.”

Inspired, Yamaguchi went on to conduct a large-scale survey of professional and amateur Japanese musicians. Results show musician’s dystonia is more prevalent among pros, with the right lower limbs most frequently afflicted.

Also uncovered was a potential link with the stress caused by in-ear metronomes, increasingly used in the music world by drummers, conductors, and other designated timekeepers. The devices dictate the rhythm of each piece, with a click track delivered directly to the eardrum.

“In recent years,” Yamaguchi explained, “large-scale live performance has evolved into a total entertainment experience that includes not only listening to performance, but also synchronizing the music with visuals, lighting, special effects, and programmed sound sources.”

In 2023, Yamaguchi moved to the Bay Area for a residency at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. It was an unlikely place to discover the joys of taiko drumming, a traditional Japanese art form. He ended up performing in a 50th anniversary concert with the group San Jose Taiko.

The art form’s whole-body rhythms are taught orally — not via sheet music, Yamaguchi noted. While learning this way, he was struck by an idea. “What if I could use my voice to create the sound of the bass drum?” he recalled wondering. “My voice could become my instrument.”

Developed in collaboration with Yamaha, VXD is a bass-drum interface operated via vocal cues and throat sensor. Yamaguchi met privately last week with scientists from the Harvard Biodesign Lab, who wanted to understand how the system works. At the public event, Yamaguchi showed off VXD by playing a few RADWIMPS favorites.

An audience member gasped with delight when he started drumming “Sparkle,” featured in the 2016 hit anime film “Your Name.” Also performed were early releases “25-kome no senshokutai” (“The 25th Chromosome”) and “Iindesuka?” (“Is It Alright?”).

“Music has given me life,” Yamaguchi said near the end of his talk. “Music has also caused me pain. I lost it once, and then I found my way back to it — and it saved me.”

The event closed with the high-energy “Zenzenzense” (“Past Past Past Life”), which was also featured in “Your Name.” Yamaguchi pursed his lips into the microphone as he repeated the “don” syllable that triggers the VXD system’s bass drum. His right foot, pressed firmly to the floor, appeared as an anchor. The rest of his body was lifted by the beat.

Every Thursday, viewers of the Emmy Award-winning HBO Max show “The Pitt” clock into their shift at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s emergency department to watch their favorite fictional doctors tackle any number of crises. But does “The Pitt” capture the reality of life as an emergency physician? The Gazette talked to four doctors at Harvard-affiliated hospitals about what the show gets right, what it doesn’t, and why they watch (or don’t). Their answers have been edited for clarity and length.

The pacing is exceptionally accurate. But it’s not just the pacing. It’s also the fact that the characters are constantly getting interrupted. They’ll be talking about one case and be in the middle of a conversation, but they’re pulled into another case, or they’re answering pages and they’re juggling multiple patients at once.

It’s also the whiplash of going from one patient to another, and the emotional whiplash of going from a heartbreaking case in one room to a minor complaint in the next room, and trying to juggle the back and forth there.

There are a lot of cases that they get right. We have a huge mental health crisis in this country, and the show does a good job of portraying things like suicidal ideation or acute psychosis without sensationalizing it. These are often sad and complicated cases, and the show does a good job of showing that there’s not an easy solution, and sometimes there’s not a solution at all for the mental health crises that some patients experience. One other example they are not shying away from is the fact that a lot of our patients have crises of homelessness, of lacking insurance, of having unsafe home situations, of having immigration concerns.

But there is a little bit of time compression. There are conditions that take days to unfold, but they unfold on the show in a couple of hours. Patients are being discharged after a big illness or injury a lot faster than they would be in the emergency department because they’ve magically recovered. There are lab results that come back within the same episode and these episodes are all one hour. If we’re getting a CAT scan on a patient in the emergency department, it normally takes an hour or two to wait, then you get the CAT scan that takes an hour or two to read. But on TV, that would be three episodes later and that story arc is already gone.

No medical show is going to be perfect.

I can’t make it through a whole episode without turning it off, because it nails a lot of it really. I practiced emergency medicine solely for about six years, and then I continued to practice it part-time with sports medicine for another eight years or so. But I haven’t been in the ED for four years. I tried to go back when I joined Mass General and do a couple shifts, and I can’t do it. I can’t handle it, and I’m not good at it anymore. You have to be your best at every moment there.

“The Pitt” really, really nails the psychosocial stuff. I thought it was a little much when that guy was on the roof thinking about jumping. But there’s not one of us, I bet you, that hasn’t had the thought crossing your mind, especially when you’re going in to do an overnight shift and you know it’s going to be hell, or when it’s Christmas Eve and you’re not with your kids and you’re going through hell.

If you’re thinking about going into emergency medicine, watch the show and try to remember, as you get older, you get tired. You couldn’t get into a good emergency medicine residency when “ER” was on. And now “The Pitt” is here, and over the past 10 years or so, programs aren’t filling anymore. The word’s out that this is a tough job. Go look at 50-year-old ED physicians that stuck with it. They don’t look good.

I find the medical parts of the show realistic. Those of us who grew up in the era of “ER” years ago with Noah Wyle — that was an early kind of semi-realistic, not super realistic, view of the emergency department.

The way that they describe presentation of patients, the pathology that we see, procedures we do is realistic, surprisingly, more than any other show that I’ve seen. It’s the variety of patients that we get as they come through the door, the movement, all of it. It’s realistic in a way that it makes you feel like you’re at work.

The stuff that is not so realistic are the kinds of behavioral issues. While there’s cheeky commentary between people all the time, the sort of tense drama or interplay that we see that makes good drama is not necessarily standard in the emergency department.

It’s actually a quite collegial place to work. That’s why people like to work there, because it’s very much a team approach. We all like to work with the team.

Also there are times when the emergency room waits can be really long, because everybody’s coming at once. But that’s not the norm. It’s a busy place, but we are equipped to move people through. In the series, every time they go out to the waiting room, it’s absolute pandemonium, and it’s terrible out there. And that’s not exactly accurate.

“ER” veered into a lot of the drama. And I really love that “The Pitt” is just the emergency department and the relationships that happen there. And I love that they’re highlighting the nurses and the security and how it really is a village. I think they added respiratory tech this year because we can’t function without our respiratory tech.

There are probably a handful of cases that no, we would never do it like that or you would have that once in your career, maybe, and they happen to have it in the first five hours of a shift. But I would say 97 percent of those cases are totally what we see.

We see a lot of abdominal pain that’s not featured. Or a cold. You’re not going to feature that every time, which is a little bit more of our cadence of like, ankle sprain, ankle sprain, ankle sprain, or back pain, back pain. Not every case is this amazing case report, but certainly all of that stuff is very plausible and real.

And then also, they illustrated COVID and the difficulty of it, and those decisions that many people had to make about resources and who was going to get what. We fortunately never ran out of ventilators, but there was a whole mask issue, and they were very tough times.

In the end, I’m very grateful for it, for the entertainment, but also the messaging. If people understand when they come to the emergency department that it is crazy, and have a little bit of better understanding that it’s not for lack of not wanting you to go upstairs, or not wanting you to be in the hallway, it makes my job easier when people are not so upset.

Oftentimes, MGH is crowded, and we’re always apologizing to our patients. Suddenly it’s a little more palatable, because they’re like, ‘It’s like “The Pitt.”’