In film school, writes Edward Zwick ’74 in his 2024 memoir, “We were all contemptuous of awards. As we got older, it turned out we were not so averse to winning them.”

Zwick — who directed the Academy Award-winning “Glory” and won an Oscar for Best Picture for his work as a producer on “Shakespeare in Love,” among other achievements — describes his career in “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood” as a roller-coaster ride: days upon days in dingy hotel rooms followed by starstruck nights on the red carpet. 

Ahead of the 98th Academy Awards, the Gazette asked Zwick what he makes of this year’s nominees, and what four decades in Hollywood have taught him about the value of winning a golden statue. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

How did your award wins and nominations shape you as a filmmaker, and how do you think about them now? 

Early on I had a kind of adolescent view of most things, a kind of contemptuous view of institutions. In my view, institutions had never been a very good judge of art. But Hollywood is a very seductive place. You’re surrounded by peers and the media. You begin to give these institutions greater importance. I fell prey to that, particularly as I was given a certain amount of attention for some of the things that I had done. 

But for me, because it happened when I was young, it anticipated all sorts of hills and valleys, things that worked and things that didn’t work. It became clear to me eventually that the awards had very little impact on my self-esteem or on my process. The day after you win an award, you still have to get up and face the blank page. In fact, I found that success has this weird counterintuitive effect. There’s something anxiety-provoking about it: Why did this thing work when the others didn’t? 

I found that only through failure do you learn to apply real critical analysis to the process, to why you made the choices that you made. Because there’s an alchemy to things that work that can’t necessarily be replicated. 

How have you seen the film industry change since you were coming up? 

Movies, when they were at the apex of the culture, had an ephemeral quality. A movie came to your local theater and you went to see it without any expectation that you would ever see it again. They had this momentous quality to them. 

But as television became an alternate viewing experience, and then as DVDs and streaming came around, the market just got more difficult. Obviously, COVID had a huge impact on the movie-going experience as well. 

Now we see movie production influenced by the algorithm, which presumes to tell us we should make a film because it has some relevance to another film and will therefore partake in its success. So we begin to see this imitative quality. And then films that are more unique or more challenging become a much more difficult bet and are therefore given smaller budgets and less marketing. 

Add that on top of competition from YouTube, TikTok, and everything else, and movies take on an increasingly secondary place in the culture. Ultimately, audiences have to be trained and educated, and it’s hard to want what you haven’t seen. I worry that as audiences get accustomed to movies that were designed for mass appeal, that cycle will only continue. 

Some would argue that unusual, challenging films are still being made to some degree. Looking at this year’s crop of nominees, for example, there’s “Sinners,” which racked up a record-breaking 16 nominations, and “Train Dreams.” 

Oh, there are certainly wonderful and important films being made. It’s absolutely still possible. 

With that in mind, what sticks out to you from this year’s nominees? 

You mentioned “Sinners” and “Train Dreams.” “Hamnet” is a wonderful movie. And there were some great foreign movies, too. Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” is quite wonderful as well. 

But it’s really like comparing chalk and cheese. How do you compare “Train Dreams” to “Sinners” and say which one is better, or “Sentimental Values” to “Hamnet”? Sometimes a movie wins because it strikes a fashionable chord, or just by virtue of its unique qualities, or because of a clever marketing campaign. 

As someone who’s been there, what advice would you give a nominee when it comes to the emotional roller coaster they’re sure to be on, whether they win or not? 

I’d say to have a sense of humor about it. It’s a chance for some recognition, and that’s not to be diminished, but it’s also not to be overvalued. I think most people in Hollywood came to do what they do out of love and artistic impulse, and that’s what sustains them. 

What made you set out to write a memoir when you did? 

Had COVID not happened, it might never have come to be. I was about to start a project, but we were shut down literally the day before shooting was going to start. We thought, as we all did, that the shutdown might be brief, and we could get back to it, but that turned out not to be the case. So as lockdown went on, I did something I’d never really done, and I looked at some of my old movies. What I saw in them wasn’t their flaws or their virtues, but rather, the situations, the anecdotes, and particularly the people, these relationships that had been so intense and amusing and loving and vexing. 

I just started writing about it. In the beginning I didn’t even think of it as a book. Eventually I labeled the file on my computer “B–k” so as not to offend the gods. But as I wrote, I came to realize that from a 30,000-foot view, there was a trajectory that spoke to a time of remarkable transition in the business. I found there was a kind of autumnal quality to it, that it would reflect something that was not quite a bygone era, but something that’s no longer the center of our culture. 

The road to recovery is a lifelong endeavor for those struggling with alcohol use disorder.

People relapse an average of five times before achieving sustained sobriety — and stumbles can happen even after years of abstention, according to John Kelly. 

Kelly, the Elizabeth R. Spallin Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is the first author of a new study that explores some warning signs for relapse, especially in those who have had long stretches of success.

In an interview with the Gazette, which has been edited for clarity and length, Kelly discussed the lack of research surrounding long-term relapse, and what clinicians and patients in recovery should look out for.

Could you explain what some of the markers look like in day-to-day life?

There were four domains we looked at — biological, psychological, social, and changes in treatment/recovery support services.

Biological factors are things like sleep, appetite, or pain. The psychological are things like anxiety, depression, boredom, or stress. Social factors are loneliness, isolation, or engagement with high-risk others and environments where alcohol or other drugs may be present.

And then treatment and recovery support services would be things like people changing their medication use, if they’re on an anti-relapse, anti-craving medication, or changing their going to meetings, or stopping counseling.

From a biological standpoint, the things that were most notable were pain and recreational drug use. They occurred more rarely, but when they did occur, they were very strong predictors of recurrence of the disorder.

What sparked the decision to do this study?

We’ve got a ton of information — theoretical and empirical data — on short-term relapse. So we’re all quite familiar with the cues and triggers that can lead to relapse after a cessation attempt in these early days, weeks, and months. But there’s almost nothing that is known or was known about longer-term relapse once all of that so-called deconditioning has occurred — the unlearning of the conditioned cues that arouse the craving and the neurophysiological response when people become addicted to alcohol or other drugs.

We were able to uncover and discover some of the dynamics and content areas that were associated with longer-term relapse.

That’s what I think is very important from a disease-management perspective.

We talk about these illnesses as being chronically relapsing conditions, particularly in the first five years. It means that people, particularly in that first five years of their recovery, are still not out of the woods. They’re still susceptible to recurrence of the disorder, and yet we have no protocols in place for disease management in primary care or other clinical settings.

So what I wanted to do here was to try to see if we could uncover some of these warning signs that occur before people have a recurrence of the disorder, to monitor these kind of sobriety-based warning signs, or recovery vital signs that that can be monitored in primary care or other clinical settings.

Because we don’t have good biomarkers that will predict relapse or recurrence of an alcohol or other drug disorder, we have to rely on self-report and the kinds of psychosocial factors and environmental risk factors that can precipitate and increase risk.

In a clinical setting, how do we design the best screening questions to elicit the most useful responses?

I don’t think there’s any reason why people would be defensive about questions about pain, sleep, appetite, social-network changes, going to meetings, medication use. And so what we did is, we delineated a checklist, which is available in the paper as the appendix.

What that is, is a documentation and listing of all the things that people reported that precipitated relapse in the year. It provides a nice way for a clinician to broach the subject and then talk about some of these warning signs.

These signs are coming from people who have relapsed, who didn’t know that the relapse was coming. These people were, on average, in recovery for five or more years. What can happen is that imperceptibly, under the radar and insidiously, people don’t realize that they’re moving toward a relapse.

A good clinician can therefore talk about these things as risk factors, and make the patient more aware of them and even show them that these are potent risk factors for relapse, so pay attention to them.

Why is it so important to catch this behavior as early as possible? How much more difficult is it to get back to sobriety after a relapse?

It can be, yes, because there’s a lot more shame and self-stigma that occurs in later relapses when people have been in recovery. So it’s very important to intervene before the recurrence of the disorder, to be proactive about it, rather than wait for some kind of disaster to happen — to end up in the emergency department, or overnight stays in the hospital, or some other thing that’s happened because of the recurrence of the disorder.

It can minimize the mortality rate and morbidity rate, as well as all the other aspects — the social ramifications and the negative ripple effects that occur in the families of people who relapse as well.

Was there anything that you found that was particularly surprising?

I think those biological factors, particularly physical pain. Even though that was a rare one, it was a potent one.

Also recreational drug use, especially with this kind of California sober idea — when if you have a certain type of drug use disorder, like alcohol use disorder, then you use something like cannabis as a kind of a harm-reduction or coping tool. But a lot of these people using something like cannabis relapsed on their primary drug, which was alcohol.

For me, a lot of it was really underscoring potent factors, which we’ve known about for a long time, like cognitive vigilance — the idea of making sure you don’t forget that you’re in recovery from this potentially deadly disorder, and making sure that regardless of how many days, months, years you have behind you, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’re cured and that you still have to maintain vigilance.

So a very frequent, potent marker of relapse risk was when people reprioritized other things above their recovery.

If there’s one thing public intellectuals can agree on, it’s the necessity of disagreement. But thoughtful debate in a public forum is becoming increasingly rare, threatening the the future of intellectual life in America, according to George Scialabba ’69, Professor Jesse McCarthy, and Anastasia Berg ’09.

The three spoke about the evolving role of the public intellectual at an event hosted by the Public Culture Project, an initiative of the Division of Arts & Humanities, on Feb. 25.

“Partly, public intellectuals exist to give voice and articulation to as-yet unformed ideas in public, the populace. And hopefully to compare and contrast,” said Scialabba, an essayist and literary critic. “It never works ideally. Usually public intellectuals, like everyone else, are partisan — sometimes rancidly partisan. But in democratic cultures they do help people understand their encoded impulses and desires and see them or hear them represented in public life.”

Scialabba, whose most recent book is the just-published “The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia,” said that that despite the longtime stereotype of the U.S. as an anti-intellectual nation, the country has historically produced many public intellectuals across ideological traditions. 

That would include, for instance, representatives of the so-called New York Intellectuals (such as Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg), Harlem Renaissance (W.E.B. Dubois, Alain Locke), Cold War liberals (Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Richard Hofstadter), conservatives (William F. Buckley, James Burnham), and individual writers like Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag

But today, Scialabba said, the conditions that once supported great thinking are eroding. Urban gathering spaces and flexible part-time jobs that offered time and space to pursue intellectual pursuits are disappearing, and small magazines and newspapers can’t financially support writers the way they used to.

Additionally, many intellectuals have been absorbed into academia, where there is less room for public engagement, he said.

“For everyone, it means a narrowing horizon,” Scialabba said. “Students, especially, are affected. The panic currently raging among the young about their career prospects could not be a more effective deradicalizing agent and could not be more unfavorable to producing public intellectuals if it had been designed for that purpose.”

McCarthy, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and of the Social Sciences, defines intellectuals as people who believe deeply that ideas matter. He said that at many critical moments in American history, including the Civil War and the end of slavery, there was never a question for Black American intellectuals about whether arguments were important. 

“There was no way to ever imagine that ideas didn’t matter, the stakes of political struggle have always been so stark and so immediate that the question of getting involved in this emerges spontaneously and of necessity,” McCarthy said.

Berg, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Irvine, worries that with the advancement of technology, including AI, young people are increasingly deprived of opportunities to hone linguistic and cognitive skills.

She said it was especially concerning at times like the present when ideas and arguments are more important than ever.

“I really worry that people will not be able to conduct an argument, as their entire cognitive, linguistic lives are being mediated for them,” Berg said.

She warned of the dangers of falling into patterns of habitual, unexamined thinking, citing philosopher Hannah Arendt’s idea that most evil arises from thoughtlessness or a shallow inability to think beyond clichés and stock phrases — such as the kind a large language model may produce.

In fact, the whole reason Socrates insisted on accosting Athenian citizens with existential questions was to promote “perplexity” in others, she said.

In some corners of the country, intellectuals are taking on the cause, passing their passion for inquiry to the next generation through initiatives like the Program for Public Thinking, run by the University of Chicago, and “The Point” magazine, where Berg is an editor.

“Our task has been to inculcate the habit of perplexed thinking,” said Berg. “It’s only such thinking, Arendt insisted, that can condition human beings against that most banal, the most common and most treacherous evildoing. There’s an ethical significance to being able to approach things in a perplexed manner.”

She acknowledged that engaging in intellectual discourse and disagreement with others can be uncomfortable and destabilizing. For hosts and organizers, it can be hard to provoke thought in an audience without alienating or scaring people off.

“How do we stage disagreements? This is a huge focus of what we try to convey to our students,” Berg said. “How do we disagree in public and stage a disagreement that’s antagonistic and exciting and incisive, that draws in rather than alienates our readers or the people who identify with one of those positions? How do we encounter beliefs radically different than our own without condescension or contempt?”

That can help us, she said, at a critical moment in history.

“Today I see this extra task for public intellectuals of safeguarding a public, safeguarding the capacity of people to meaningfully disagree with one another.”

As the Russia-Ukraine war enters its fifth year, and with the U.S. seeming to withdraw from its role as a reliable security and trading partner, there is now a clear understanding in Europe that it’s time to turn the page and prepare to go it alone, says author and journalist Anne Applebaum.

“Everyone you speak to now, not just in Europe but especially in Europe, talks about hedging: ‘How do we hedge against the United States? How do we find other markets? How do we protect ourselves? We’re now in a world where we have America on one side and Russia on the other, and we need to think about what our voice will be,’” Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, said during a March 4 talk with Serhii Plokhii, the Mykhailo S. Hrushevs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard.

The event was part of a series of talks on Europe in wartime hosted by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Center for European Studies at Harvard.

Applebaum, who has written several books on the political histories of Russia, Ukraine, and Europe, said that the current global moment harkens back to the dark politics of a century ago, when ethnonationalism was on the rise. Most striking, she said, is the weakening of the rules-based world order that emerged after World War II and prevailed into the 21st century. At the recent Munich Security Conference, she said, the terms “liberal world order” and “rules-based world order” were being “used as a kind of insult” by some.

“It was a thing you say to dismiss somebody — ‘That’s someone who doesn’t know what’s going on because they’re still stuck in the ideas of the 1990s and 2000s and we moved to something else.’” She added: “It’s a really very radical change, and obviously, it affects Europe, obviously it affects Ukraine, and obviously it affects us.”

Beginning in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the EU thought that trade with Russia, especially for its cheap oil and gas, was the best path toward peace and good relations, Applebaum noted. By providing Russia with some financial stability and integrating it into European markets, the thinking went, the Kremlin would be disincentivized to engage in conflicts with countries along Europe’s Eastern flank, she said.

“The breaking of that belief, especially in Germany, has been profound,” Applebaum said, “and I don’t think it comes back anytime soon.”

One possible outcome of the war could be a Europe that includes Ukraine. With its vast mineral and agricultural wealth, along with its military strength, Ukraine could be a “transformational” member of the EU and NATO, Applebaum said.

While there is a real desire among many in the EU and Ukraine to make the accession happen, she said, the process cannot move forward without approval from all 27 EU nations on numerous governance, trade, and security issues.

“The Ukrainians are frustrated by the EU conversation because they think, ‘You’re blocking us for no reason,’ and Zelensky very much wants to be able to offer Ukrainians something at the end of the war,” Applebaum said. “It’s just that the logistical and institutional complications aren’t small. They’re important.”

It’s too soon to know how the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran will affect Ukraine or Russia, according to Applebaum. Should the conflict continue, the global instability it has caused, including a spike in oil prices, may boost the Russian economy at a critical juncture, she said. Rapid depletion of U.S. weapons could also benefit Russia, she added.

On the other hand, a besieged Iran, which has been an important strategic Russian ally and reportedly used Russian intelligence to hit U.S. military targets, could seriously weaken Russia’s influence in the region, she said.

Applebaum believes that both wars have revealed a fundamental flaw in the informal alliance of autocratic regimes like China, Russia, and Iran. Though their antipathy toward liberal democracy remains constant, she said, they have shown little willingness to provide military support to their fellow autocrats.

“A lot of those regimes turned out to be more fragile than had been previously imagined,” she said. “One of the premises was that they would help each other when in trouble — and that seems to be not true.”

How quickly our bodies age on a cellular level — our “biological age” — can differ from how old we actually are in years. Using data from a large randomized clinical trial of older adults, researchers from Harvard and Mass General Brigham evaluated the effects of taking a daily multivitamin over the course of two years on five measures of biological aging and found a slowing equivalent to about four months of aging. The benefits were increased in those who were biologically older than their actual age at the start of the trial. The results are published in Nature Medicine.

“There is a lot of interest today in identifying ways to not just live longer, but to live better,” said senior author Howard Sesso, a preventive medicine specialist at Mass General and a Harvard Chan School epidemiologist. “It was exciting to see the benefits of a multivitamin linked with markers of biological aging. This study opens the door to learning more about accessible, safe interventions that contribute to healthier, higher-quality aging.”

Epigenetic clocks estimate biological aging based on tiny changes in DNA. These clocks look at specific sites in our DNA that regulate gene expression (known as DNA methylation) and change naturally as we get older, helping track mortality and the pace of aging.

The new study, which uses data from the well-established COcoa Supplement Multivitamins Outcomes Study (COSMOS), analyzed DNA methylation data from blood samples of 958 randomly selected healthy participants with an average chronological age of 70.

Participants were randomized to take a daily cocoa extract and multivitamin; daily cocoa extract and placebo; placebo and multivitamin; or placebos only. Samples were analyzed for changes in five epigenetic clocks from the start of the trial and at the end of the first and second years. Compared to the placebo-only group, people in the multivitamin group had slowing in all five epigenetic clocks, including statistically significant slowing in the two clocks that are predictive of mortality. The changes equated to about four months less biological aging over the course of two years. Additionally, people who were biologically older than their actual age at the start of the trial benefited the most.

“We plan to do follow-up research to determine if the slowing of biological aging — observed through these five epigenetic clocks, and additional or new ones — persists after the trial ends,” said co-author and collaborator Yanbin Dong of the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University.

Said Sesso: “A lot of people take a multivitamin without necessarily knowing any benefits from taking it, so the more we can learn about its potential health benefits, the better.”

The study received funding from the National Institutes of Health.

For years, a protein inside our cells has quietly powered billions of dollars’ worth of cancer drugs. Now a team of researchers have discovered that this workhorse protein, called cereblon, in addition to its known functions, can also fine‑tune which proteins live and which are sent to the cellular trash.

The new study, published in Nature, is the first to identify and map an allosteric site — a hidden binding pocket — on cereblon. This research was led by Christina Woo, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, and her research group, in collaboration with a team of scientists at pharmaceutical company GSK and Scripps Research Institute.

Cereblon is part of a protein complex that tags other proteins for destruction. It became infamous because it was targeted by thalidomide, a drug prescribed for morning sickness in the 1950s and 1960s that caused birth defects. Decades later, thalidomide and related compounds were rehabilitated as treatments for blood cancers, precisely because they can redirect cereblon to tag disease‑causing proteins.

That principle is underpinned by a strategy called targeted protein degradation. Chemists design small molecules that bring bad proteins to cereblon, which then marks them for disposal by the cell’s disposal machinery.

Until now, nearly all of that work focused on cereblon’s orthosteric binding site — the same site thalidomide uses. The new study reveals that cereblon also has a second pocket, an allosteric site, that doesn’t replace the main binding site but changes what happens once it is engaged.

“This work is so novel that when I share it with audiences, you can see a ripple effect across the room of just how excited they are to learn about this new binding site on cereblon,” Woo said.

Scientists at GSK first identified a small molecule, SB‑405483, that appeared to boost certain signals, suggesting it might be binding somewhere else on cereblon.

“We immediately recognized that the discovery of an allosteric cereblon binder could represent a fundamentally new area of cereblon biology for exploration,” said Andrew Benowitz, executive director at GSK and former American Cancer Society postdoc at Harvard. “We knew of Professor Woo’s breakthrough contributions to the understanding of cereblon biology, and it seemed like a very natural idea to initiate a collaboration with her to better understand exactly what we had found.”

The Woo Lab led an extensive set of cell‑based studies, using reporter cell lines that produced different cereblon neosubstrates — proteins that can be targeted for degradation — fused to fluorescent tags. When a tagged protein was destroyed, its glow faded. By treating these cells with standard cereblon‑targeting drugs at the main site — with and without the new allosteric ligand — they could watch how the second site changed what was degraded.

In some combinations, the allosteric ligand made certain targets easier to destroy. In others, it protected them, reducing their degradation. In many cases, results depended on the existing cereblon‑binding drug with which it was paired.

“We saw that this small molecule can enhance the degradation of certain neosubstrates in the presence of certain orthosteric ligands, but also that modulating this allosteric site can inhibit neosubstrate degradation,” said first author Vanessa Dippon, a graduate student at the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “It just completely changed the repertoire and landscape of cereblon neosubstrate degradation.”

For Woo, that selectivity is the heart of the discovery.

“The most immediate application is the potential to enhance efficacy of orthosteric ligands for the desired target, and reduce off‑target toxicity, by reducing the ability to recruit undesirable targets,” she said.

To understand why a hidden site could have such wide‑ranging effects, the team turned to structural biology. Working with cryo‑electron microscopy expert Gabriel Lander at Scripps, they obtained high‑resolution snapshots of cereblon in different shapes.

Those structures revealed that when both the main and the allosteric sites are occupied, cereblon moves through a previously unseen intermediate form and settles into a more closed shape that is especially good at grabbing proteins marked for destruction. They also showed that the allosteric ligand nudges the main‑site drugs into slightly different positions, offering a structural explanation for the shifting degradation patterns seen in cells.

The discovery opens several new possibilities. One is to use allosteric ligands as add‑on modulators for existing cereblon‑based cancer drugs — boosting their action on desired targets while limiting the degradation of proteins linked to side effects. Another is to design new molecular glues or two‑headed degrader molecules that use the allosteric pocket itself.

More broadly, Woo sees the work as a window into how cells may naturally regulate cereblon and related enzymes.

“It implies that there’s so much more to understand about the way that these E3 ligases are regulated in us,” she said. “That likely implies that there are small molecules — endogenous molecules — that are doing those functions already. And we’re just kind of catching up to understanding it.”

The project was partially supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Every book is a doorway into another world, and some worlds are weirder than others. We asked members of the campus community to recommend a few that expand our notions of what literature can be. 

A half-century before the advent of LLMs, Italo Calvino was experimenting with the use of combinatory and computational systems for crafting new literary works.

The automation of writing, he speculated, could open up powerful new horizons of literary expression as machines became increasingly capable of bringing to the page “all those things that we are accustomed to consider as the most jealously guarded attributes of our psychological life, of our daily experience, our unpredictable changes of mood and inner elations, despairs and moments of illumination.”

Frustrated by the limitations of period computer technology, he found his ideal “machine” in the tarot card decks used by card players and cartomancers. 

Such is the storytelling engine deployed in “The Castle of Crossed Destinies” (1973), a novel built out of images instead of words, in which the narrator “plays” two separate decks and each run of cards generates a sequence of intertwined tales that include the stories of Astolfo’s journey to the Moon in the “Orlando Furioso” and the plots of “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” and “King Lear.”

The novel is divided into two sections: “The Castle of Crossed Destinies” (which takes place in a medieval castle and is built around the mid-15th-century Visconti-Sforza tarot) and “The Tavern of Crossed Destinies” (which occurs in a Renaissance inn and is built around the 17th-century Marseille tarot).

Calvino thought of adding a contemporary, post-apocalyptic coda to the book, titled “The Motel of Crossed Destinies,” generated by remixing fragments of comic strips and popular magazines, but never brought the project to fruition.

— Jeffrey Schnapp, Carl A. Pescosolido Chair in Romance and Comparative Literatures, founder of MetaLAB (at) Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society

Playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s “People Who Led to My Plays” (1987) is an extraordinary memoir, a journey into the mind of a brilliant artist, an explosive collection of lists, thoughts, photographs, and images that takes us into her life and development as an artist.

The memoir begins with her years as a young Black girl in elementary school in Ohio in the 1930s, and it ends with her traveling to Europe and Africa in 1960-61 with her own young family, where she finally discovered the distinct nonlinear style and voice that would make her one of the greatest playwrights of our time.

The structure of the book is exhilarating and unexpected. It is divided into five chronological sections, and each section is full of vignettes — sometimes a few paragraphs and sometimes only a line or two, each one beginning with an italicized name or place. A single page might include headings such as: “People my mother dreamed about,” “Julius Caesar,” “Lorca,” “My father,” “Paul Robeson.”

Threaded between these vignettes are family photos, pictures of movie stars, writers, art — all the people and places that shaped her plays.

Imagine someone taking you into a room that leads to a thousand other rooms — showing you this image and that, telling you what it is that struck their heart as they saw it or thought about it, speaking to you with a powerful directness and candor. This is a book that is at once a work of poetry, a scrapbook, a glimpse into the mind of an artist, and a portrait of the world.

I cherish my copy. Adrienne Kennedy taught at Harvard my freshman year, and her playwriting class was the first course I took. She gave me a copy of “People Who Led to My Plays” after I’d finished her course, over tea, and she wrote words of encouragement inside. It meant so much!

— Talaya Adrienne Delaney, research adviser in the humanities and lecturer at Harvard Extension School

It’s hard to call this experimental fiction since I don’t know that the author is explicitly trying, but it certainly falls under “weird books.” It’s a collection of fragments, aphorisms, short little things that Lichtenberg, the 18th-century German polymath, jotted down for himself. It feels quite modern, like a person’s “drafts” folder for the current social media age. 

— Tomer Ullman, Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Psychology

My pick is Tove Jansson’s “Moominvalley in November”(1970), translated by Kingsley Hart.

Queer Finnish artist and writer Tove Jansson’s balloonish, serene Moomins are popular children’s characters the world over, as are the other figures who populate their world of Moominvalley. But “Moominvalley in November,” the ninth and final book in the series, is an unlikely children’s book about adult problems, written after the death of Jansson’s mother and suffused with suppressed grief and rage, all written in the gentle, sparse style of the earlier books.

The Moomin family are absent — they are having an adventure at sea driven by Moominpappa’s midlife crisis, documented in “Moominpappa at Sea” — and in their absence, six lonely, neurotic strangers drift into their empty house and wait for them to return. Among them are Fillyjonk, a cleaning obsessive who has developed a phobia of cleaning; Hemulen, who cannot live up to the standards of masculinity he has set for himself; Toft, a small, quiet creature who becomes fixated upon an old biology textbook he finds in the Moomins’ attic, and from it accidentally creates a monster; and Snufkin, who has lost a tune.

It’s a bewildering, beautiful book about letting go of family, deeply weird, and I return to it over and over.

— Anna Wilson, assistant professor in the Department of English

“The Book of Margery Kempe” is, in the words of its most recent editor, astonishing.

Its very existence is something of a miracle. The sole surviving manuscript was discovered in the billiard room of a country house in Derbyshire in 1934. The befuddled owners turned to an expert, Hope Emily Allen (who had studied at Radcliffe) to tell them what they had. Allen immediately recognized it as a long-lost copy of Margery’s “Book” and took the lead as co-editor of the first scholarly edition in 1940. (A translation by B.A. Windeatt was published by Penguin in 1985.)

The book has pride of place as the first autobiography in English, authored around 1430 by a woman who couldn’t read or write, so she dictated her life’s story to two men, one of whom was her son.

Margery herself was no less astonishing than her book. The mother of 14 children, she abandoned her conventional role as a merchant’s wife to devote herself to her spiritual calling. “The Book’s” episodes move between local life in Norfolk and far-flung journeys across Europe, including pilgrimages to Rome and Jerusalem. It tells of Margery’s ecstatic visions and her public bouts of weeping she called “roaring.”

Fearless about professing her faith, she came under scrutiny by church authorities, but like Chaucer’s fictional Wife of Bath, Margery adeptly used the words of scripture to refute her accusers. Weirdly unique, uniquely weird: There’s nothing quite like Margery Kempe and her “Book.” 

— Daniel Donoghue, John P. Marquand Professor of English, general editor of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library

Spanning from the 1600s until today, we see the life of Addie LaRue, who made a bargain to live forever but is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. This story, published in 2020, felt like it was creating a mythos as it was told, spanning centuries of Addie’s life as we learn what it means to be remembered. This feels more like a late summer, early fall book if you are a seasonal reader like me!

— Meg McMahon, Harvard Library user experience researcher

Although the medieval writer Geoffrey Chaucer has long been called the Father of English Poetry, his most famous literary work is notably weird. “The Canterbury Tales” recounts how a group of pilgrims travel together from outside London to Canterbury and play a tale-telling game along the way.

So far, so good.

But for a supposed literary masterpiece, the “Tales” is wildly variable and uneven. It includes chivalric romances and stories of Christian virtue, fart jokes, and adulterous trysts. Parts of it are entertaining; parts are beautiful; parts are wickedly funny; parts are dull.

How are readers meant to feel about all this? Should they be offended, or bored? And which tale wins the prize? We’ll never know the answer to the last question because the work is unfinished. Not only that, but it survives only in pieces, which scholars are unsure how to arrange.

This is where the full weirdness of “The Canterbury Tales” emerges, in the murky intersection of historical accident, historical difference, and poetic invention. Chaucer was doing something quite new with the “Tales,” something that would have struck even his contemporaries as weird.

But plenty of the peculiarities we notice derive from the context we’ve lost between 1400 and today. Part of why I love reading Chaucer is the fun of following these tangled threads of the strange.

— Julie Orlemanski, Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute 

Many years ago, I bought a book called simply, “14,000 Things to be Happy About” (1990) by Barbara Ann Kipfer. The premise is so simple it’s almost absurd — the book is just a list of things: “bakery croissants,” “a bedroom library,” “ a stalled car catching,” “the taste of cake batter,” “snappy salutations,” “listening for the sound of a key in the lock,” “the tag on our pillows that says sternly for reasons no one seems to know ‘Do not remove this tag under penalty of law.’”

I smile every time I open the book. Every page has something that I either love or marvel that I can’t stand but someone else loves, which also brings joy. How can someone get happy about “the act of entering a room and forgetting why” or “the gap in the dressing room curtain that can never be completely closed” or “overcoming acalculia (inability to do basic math),” I think, and I laugh at the variety of this world.

I also love the book’s subtle instruction — these words are just words; what brings joy is the meaning we associate with each event it conjures.

It also serves as a reminder that books are objects of craft. So, my tattered copy of the book is right there in the living room next to the others, and I love the strange little book, if we might call it that, so much.

— Sarah Lewis, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and associate professor of African and African American Studies

With the rapid graying of the United States, due to extended lifespans and declining birth rates, concerns among older adults are also on the rise. Their worries range from financial concerns to physical and mental health issues to healthcare and housing.  Most older adults would prefer to stay in their own homes throughout their golden years, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll. But aging in place is not that simple.

In this interview, which has been edited for clarity and length, Ann Forsyth, Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor of Urban Planning at the Graduate School of Design, talks about what aging in place entails, how technology helps older adults, and what communities can do to assist those who want to avoid the nursing home.

In surveys, most older adults say that they would prefer to live in their own home rather than a nursing home. How would you define aging in place?

At its simplest, it is aging in your own home. But that leaves a lot of questions, such as which home is home? Is it the home you lived in in your 40s and 50s? Is it one that you moved into in your 60s and 70s in order to age in place? And then the issue is, for how long? Is it one that you would leave only when you die? Or do you stay in that home as long as you can look after yourself and then move somewhere else in your community, maybe a senior housing development? For many people, aging in place is really about staying outside a nursing home.

What challenges do people face when trying to live independently as they age?

The main issue is uncertainty. There are many positives about staying in your own home. It provides shelter, meaning, and continuity. You may want to stay in your own home, but you’ve got uncertainty about whether you’ll be physically able and mentally able to manage your household. There’s also uncertainty about how long your household will stay intact. If you’re married or have a partner, and something happens to them, then you’ll have to make different kinds of decisions. For older people, there is more potential for surprises that could undermine their ability to stay at home. Some people might worry about mental problems that could affect their ability to manage their home finances and so on. There’s a lot of worry and concern.

Most homes are not equipped for aging in place. Can design help?

It is tricky. What you have to do is balance two factors, one of which is compensation for losses or problems that might come along. For example, being able to get around without having to go upstairs, or when using a walker, or being able to use assistive devices that may need wider, bigger spaces and so on. But you also need to have an environment that provides some challenge and meaning because you need to physically and mentally challenge yourself to maintain your capacities. The stairs dilemma is quite interesting: Do you have a house without stairs so that it’s easier to get around when you are no longer as mobile? Or do you have stairs because they help you maintain capacity through incidental exercise? If you’re wealthy enough, you can have a bit of both because you can have a bedroom and bathroom on the main floor. That’s very complicated; it’s hard to find those houses, and they’re quite expensive. One way to think about it is when your home gets too challenging, you move, but at that moment, you’re facing a lot of challenges, and the thought of actually having to move and deal with all your stuff and emotions may be very difficult.

How can urban planning support aging populations?

This is an area where cities need to bite the bullet. In the U.S., the Americans with Disabilities Act has been terrific for helping make public buildings physically accessible and offering protection for a variety of disabilities. But there is a need to think comprehensively about not only the physical environment, but programming, and other aspects of the social environment, which is key to prevent loneliness and social isolation among older people. That is something that more cities will need to do more of.

In terms of housing, there are two philosophies; one is clustering older people together so it’s easier to provide services like classes or meals, versus integrating them with the wider community. Both of them have benefits, and can be done at different scales, so you don’t have to have a massive retirement community like Sun City with tens of thousands of older people all in one place. You could have an apartment block filled with older people in a part of the city. That configuration allows them to be together, to meet and support each other, and to keep reforming their social networks as people depart.

There’s also age-specific housing for older people, or co-housing programs that try to mix older and younger groups of people, and both can work with or without external support. The debate always centers about how much clustering there is of older people to make services and socializing easier versus how much they’re just scattered throughout the environment, which makes it more complicated for services. But one successful example of the scattered housing is the Village model in Boston and elsewhere now, where people that are scattered throughout the city find each other through this villages group that provides services, social connection, and a sense of community.

What role can technology play in helping older adults age at home?

There are many kinds of technologies that can make aging in place much easier. We’re not only talking about walkers and wheelchairs, but also digital technologies and even ordinary appliances. In a study I did with Yingying Lyu, a Harvard graduate who now works at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, we found that older folks in rural China prefer to use a rice cooker or a slow cooker because it makes them feel much safer than using gas-stoves or wood. Robotic vacuums are also helpful, but there are other kinds of technology that are changing old age. For example, going up and down stairs can be complicated, but with the help of robotic shorts, we might be fine with stairs. Technologies can also help caregivers. A lot of robots can help people lift things, and they could help caregivers transfer someone from a bed to a wheelchair or help get them out of the bathtub. Technology already helps older folks maintain family ties and social relationships through video conferencing on computers and phones.

People are living longer and having fewer children. How might these demographic changes affect the care of older Americans?

There are big challenges these days with smaller families, more mobile populations, and older people living so much longer. As families reduce in size and disperse more, there will be less labor to do that informal, unpaid care that families do for their older relatives. There will be more need for paid care. That’s going to be a huge challenge in most parts of the world.

There are a number of strategies for minimizing the amount of care older people need, and that includes improving people’s health, so that they would need less care. It also includes finding new sources of caregiver labor force, such as attracting people from different industries into caregiving or relying on immigration, which is often used to increase the caregiving workforce. And then promoting cooperation among older people to care for each other, using technologies, both for caregivers and older people, and improving the environment. Of course, all of these strategies need resources, and communities and governments need to be better prepared to deal with the impact of demographic changes on aging populations.

Judith D. Singer, James Bryant Conant Professor of Education, will step down on June 30 from her role as senior vice provost for faculty, the University announced today.

A statistician by training and community-builder by practice, Singer was the first woman to be elected as both a member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the American Statistical Association. At Harvard, she is widely known for helping a wide-ranging group of academics pursue meaningful work — recruiting outstanding scholars and nurturing their efforts across decades.

As senior vice provost for faculty, Singer has overseen faculty development across the University since 2008. Her team coordinates efforts to recruit and retain scholars, help advance their research and teaching, and support their work-life balance. She serves as an adviser in the ad hoc tenure process, chairs the Provost’s Review Committee on Faculty Appointments, oversees funding for scholarly appointments, and guides all policies and practices affecting institutional faculty affairs.

“Few people have done as much to nurture and sustain academic excellence across the University as Judy Singer,” said President Alan M. Garber. “When I returned to Harvard in 2011, she quickly became one of my most trusted advisers, a person of great discernment who is valued for her good humor as well as her knowledge and wisdom. I am grateful to Judy for her tireless work to fulfill our mission and to strengthen our community. I wish her all the best for her next chapter.”

“As senior vice provost for faculty, Judy has advanced faculty excellence through tireless and thoughtful work on the appointment and retention of exceptional scholars across disciplines, the shaping of policies that enhance their teaching and scholarship, and the development of initiatives to support work-life balance,” said University Provost John F. Manning. “We are deeply grateful for her extraordinary service to the University over many years.”

Singer has led major changes to every phase of faculty life, from streamlining recruitment and promotion to strengthening retirement benefits. Working alongside partners across all the Schools, she developed best practices for faculty recruitment and retention, creating resources and providing consultation to Schools on faculty appointments, programming, and benefits. She has helped create and implement fair, rigorous, and consistent processes for University-level review of academic, endowed chair, and University Professorship appointments.

Her office also launched the University’s online central faculty hiring portal and, in 2020, supported the transition to remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic and explored its long-term implications for faculty.

Singer has also worked to build a broad network of support for faculty. She oversaw the formation of University-wide faculty medical leave policies, childcare and other dependent care resources, financial support programs, and improvements to the faculty mortgage-loan programs. Over the years, she and her team have created professional development events, covering topics such as op-ed writing, academic publishing, and media training, as well as networking events for faculty members and their partners. She has also worked to collect and analyze data that help support recruitment and retention policy and decision-making across all areas of faculty affairs.

“Judy Singer began her role at a time of turmoil at the University,” said Steven Hyman, who was University provost in 2008 when Singer was appointed. “With energy, intelligence, great judgment, and relentless determination, she improved processes for faculty hiring, promotion, retention, and even quality of life. Her success served equity, the prioritization of excellence, and much else that the University prizes.”

Drew Faust, Harvard president at the time of Singer’s appointment, echoed the sentiment: “Judy Singer has brought fierce energy and a deep commitment to excellence and intellectual rigor to her role as senior vice provost. Her dedication to the fundamental values of scholarship and of universities has had an impact on the quality of the faculty that will be her enduring legacy.”

A prominent member of the faculty herself, Singer has focused her academic work on improving the quantitative methods used in social, educational, and behavioral research. Her scholarship has been especially influential in the development and application of multilevel modeling, survival analysis, and individual growth modeling — and in making these and other sophisticated methodologies more accessible for applied researchers.

A scholar with wide expertise, she has published prolifically across statistics, education, psychology, medicine, and public health, including nearly 100 academic papers and book chapters as well as three co-authored books: “By Design: Planning Better Research in Higher Education,” “Who Will Teach: Policies that Matter,” and “Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis: Modeling Change and Event Occurrence.”

She serves as a fellow of the American Educational Research Association; previously she served on the board of directors of the National Board of Education Sciences and as a founding board member of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness.

Singer began her academic career in 1984 as an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In 2001, she was named James Bryant Conant Professor of Education. She served as academic dean of HGSE from 1999 to 2004 and, along with her longtime research collaborator, John B. Willett, was acting dean from 2001 to 2002.

She holds a B.A. in mathematics from the State University of New York at Albany and a Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University.

“It has been an honor to work closely with presidents, provosts, and deans these last 18 years toward our shared goal of supporting excellence across Harvard’s faculty,” said Singer. “I have been fortunate to lead a remarkable team in building the frameworks, practices, and resources that enable Harvard to attract and retain the best and brightest scholars from around the world and support them in their work.”

To learn more about faculty affairs at Harvard, see the Office of the Senior Vice Provost for Faculty website.

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on March 3, 2026, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Thomas Noel Bisson was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Born: March 30, 1931
Died: June 28, 2025

Thomas Noel Bisson, Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History, Emeritus, died on June 28, 2025, at the age of 94. A distinguished historian and teacher of medieval Europe, he focused on institutions, the transpersonal structures of governance that emerged painfully and fitfully from the doings of those in service to the great and the powerful, particularly in the portentous 12th century C.E.

Bisson was born in New York City in 1931, but his formal schooling began in China; he remembered riding to school in a rickshaw. His father, the American political writer and journalist T. A. Bisson, was studying Japan and China. His maternal grandfather, John E. Williams, had been Vice-President of the new Nanking University and was murdered during the Nanking Incident (1927). The elder Bisson ultimately lost his academic appointment during the McCarthy era, finishing his career in Canada.

Thomas Bisson was educated at Haverford College (B.A. 1953) and Princeton University. At Princeton he took his Ph.D. (1958) with Joseph R. Strayer, the eminent historian of medieval institutions, and studied also with Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz of the Institute for Advanced Study. Bisson taught at Amherst College, Brown University, and Swarthmore College before moving to the University of California, Berkeley, for 20 distinguished years (1967–1987). He came to Harvard in 1987, where he was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History from 1988 until he retired in 2005. He chaired the Department of History from 1991 to 1995 and, at both great institutions, trained as graduate students many of the next generations’ leading medievalists, of whom he was justifiably proud. After his retirement, Bisson continued to prove his dedication to the liberal arts through his quietly thoughtful undergraduate teaching, including First-Year Seminars. Many of his former students gathered joyously at his home on Hammond Street to honor him for his 94th birthday in the spring of 2025.

Bisson pursued his abiding interests in medieval Europe’s history in ways that typify the man and the scholar: quietly, rigorously, and thoroughly. He had a profound respect for others and the rare ability to listen carefully. As a mentor of graduate students, he was famously strict while always remaining deeply humane. Despite a discipline of steel, Bisson’s gentle laugh abetted a modest sidelong glance and quiet thoughtfulness that endeared him to those around him. As a close colleague, Tom was simply wonderful. Bisson’s seven monographs and five edited volumes of his own and others’ articles are mostly weighty tomes whose rigorous scholarship illuminates the medieval forms of what would lead to big institutions in the modern world; they continue to serve as foundational works across the later medieval history of Europe. Their impact can be judged by their translations into the native languages of the places he studied: French, Catalan, and Italian.

Bisson’s “Assemblies and Representation in Languedoc in the Thirteenth Century” (1964) shed light on the rising institutional power of new socioeconomic groups before and after the incorporation of this region into the Capetian kingdom of France. The book was followed by his innovative “Conservation of Coinage” (1979), where Bisson’s meticulous study of charters and coins brought to light a remarkable manifestation of what he saw as the spirit of suspicion against arbitrary rule across France, Catalonia, and Aragon in the 11th and 12th centuries. Both books bear witness to the broad European range of Bisson’s historical curiosity. His austere 1984 study, “Fiscal Accounts of Catalonia Under the Early Count-Kings” — the money trail in contemporary parlance — was another impressive contribution to understanding the early mechanisms of secular governance. Bisson’s deeply empathetic experiment with microhistory yielded in 1998 those medieval Catalan peasants’ “Tormented Voices” that echo the violent impact of fast economic change; perhaps his favorite work, this Catalan story resonated with Bisson’s personal concern with the public good in our own time. His greatest monograph is surely the 2009 “Crisis of the Twelfth Century,” where he tracked how arbitrary lordship shifted toward more settled forms of power. Crisis displayed Bisson’s virtuosic command of the evidence across all of Europe, down to Magna Carta and “a Parliamentary Custom of Consent.” He distilled much of his deep research into “The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History” (1986). His final work was, again, one of austere and lasting scholarship: a critical edition, translation, and commentary of Robert of Torigni’s “Chronography” (2020), a crucial source for Anglo-Norman history, whose mysteries Bisson unraveled and clarified as none before him.

Bisson earned all the major fellowships and awards, including All Souls College and Guggenheim fellowships. His work was recognized by elections to the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, British Academy, Royal Historical Society, Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, and Institut d’Estudis Catalans. His North American peers signaled their esteem by electing him President of the Medieval Academy of America, and the government of Catalonia awarded him the Cross of St. George, one of their highest civil distinctions.

Bisson lost his beloved wife, Carroll (Webb), a deeply cultivated Classicist, in 2005, after 43 harmonious years of shared pleasure in literature, music, and travel. A lifelong baseball fan, Bisson avidly followed the Red Sox. He was a talented and dedicated pianist, whose later musical life centered on the interplay of music and text in Schubert’s Lieder. Just a few weeks before his passing, he described with quiet joy the last time he had played “Wandrers Nachtlied” with family. Among scholars, Bisson will be remembered as an immensely productive yet meticulous historian whose painstaking research and writing bowed to few fashions. He did not fear tackling deep and difficult questions on the basis of the original, often unknown archival documents; the impact of his teaching has already stretched over three or four generations of medieval historians. Bisson is survived by his daughters, Noël Bisson, Dean for Academic Programs in the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Susan Bisson Lambert, as well as by four cherished grandchildren.

Respectfully submitted,

Dimiter Angelov
Charles S. Maier
Michael McCormick, Chair

The true genius of Toni Morrison, says Namwali Serpell, isn’t found in the first read, but in the second, third, or fourth. This was how Serpell fell in love with Morrison’s prose, which she argues is designed to be a simultaneously cerebral and beautiful experience for readers.

“If you have to read and reread in order to put together what’s happening, then you are a co-creator of that literary experience,” said Serpell, a prize-winning novelist and a professor of English. “She saw this as specifically important for Black literature. Her highest aspiration, as she put it, was to create something at the level of jazz, which she saw as the highest form of Black art.”

Serpell’s new book, “On Morrison,” is a chronological walk through the Nobel laureate’s novels, from “The Bluest Eye” (1970) to “God Help the Child” (2015). It also explores the short story “Recitatif” (1983) and the play “Desdemona” (2011).

The ideas that animate the book took shape in the classroom, in a Morrison course Serpell first taught in the English Department in 2021. “The book is like the experience of taking a class with me,” she said. “My aim is to give you an appreciation for how carefully constructed Morrison’s works are, and how successful they are in using form to make you feel things you’ve never felt before.”

In this edited conversation, Serpell discusses Morrison’s approach to form, her talent for self-reading, and the value of being “difficult.”

What was it like to spend so much time with Morrison’s work for this project?

“The book is like the experience of taking a class with me.” 

Namwali Serpell

A lot of my thinking about Morrison is influenced by Morrison herself, who was an incredible reader of her own work. She was a critic herself, but she also had what I like to think of as the beautiful audacity to write about her own work. She was very good at close-reading even the meter, the rhythm of her own sentences, or explaining why she included certain colors at the beginning of a novel. She also spoke a lot in interviews about what she was and wasn’t trying to do. Her own practice of self-reading is so inspiring.

You’ve said that Morrison’s skill as a writer is too often overshadowed by her public persona. Could you explain what you mean by this?

Turning her into a kind of institution, or monument to Black excellence, I think, does a disservice to her legacy. She was deeply interested in form, but her novels often get read only in terms of their political content or their political aim or their representational goals. While we have a wonderful icon and a model of success, what we don’t have is a deeper understanding of how she changed the novel: the experiments she did, the ways she broke open the form, and infused other forms into it. The ambition that she had as an artist has been so influential on other writers that some of her techniques we now take for granted. She’s much more interesting on the page than we take her to be.

Did you learn anything new about Morrison?

I never met Morrison and I didn’t really want to. As they say, never meet your heroes. I have also loved having a purely literary relationship with someone who had purely literary relationships with a lot of other writers herself. But whenever I told someone that I was writing the book, I immediately got anecdotes about the time that they met Toni Morrison. Some of the things that I learned from them were that she had a wonderful sense of humor, bordering on the raunchy sometimes. Her sensibility was oriented toward class politics, but Morrison also delighted and luxuriated in beautiful, well-made things. Fashion was important to her. And when she got the phone call about winning her Nobel, apparently she closed the door to her office and danced.

You have written about Morrison’s “difficulty,” both in her texts and in her personality. Can you share more?

I felt that she was in need of a defense. It felt to me like she had not been taken seriously for the difficulty of her work, but rather rejected for what was perceived as the difficulty of her personality. She had a very contrarian sensibility when it came to politics. She also suffered no fools. She came to believe that it was a good thing for Black women to be seen as “difficult,” because that meant that they had insisted on being taken seriously. I thought that was a very interesting way of thinking about the attribution of difficulty to Black femalehood: If you lean into it, it is a way of asserting the importance of what you’re doing.

Morrison articulated, over the years, many different reasons why difficulty in a text was not simply a sign of showing off your intelligence, but was, for her, about engaging the reader and drawing them into participating in the making of the book.

Where should a first-time Morrison reader begin?

People often want to start with “The Bluest Eye” but it’s actually one of her most difficult books. I think it’s better to ease in with “Sula” (1973) or “Home” (2012). She described “Sula” as “hermetic,” by which I think she meant it’s tight — well-crafted and well-shaped, like a poem. It’s not very long, but it’s very, very moving and very beautiful. If you want to start with later Morrison, “Home” is pretty straightforward. One of the characters will, in certain chapters, talk back to the narrator. It’s a little experimental, but actually pretty easy to figure out. It’s delightful.

Pure, clear water: yes. Soda and other sugary drinks: no. Alcohol in its many forms: maybe, but always in moderation.

In a conversation Thursday at the Harvard Chan School, experts zeroed in on beverages, emphasizing health effects that are no less serious than the risks and benefits that come with food.

“From our first cup of coffee in the morning, to a glass of wine at night, to an energy drink, these beverages are woven into our lifestyles, our celebrations, and our cultures,” said Timothy Rebbeck, the Vincent L. Gregory Jr. Professor of Cancer Prevention and director of the Chan School’s Zhu Family Center for Global Cancer Prevention. “Yet the health impacts of the beverages, especially when it comes to cancer and the long-term effects on chronic disease and health, have been confusing and sometimes controversial.”

Alcohol, with its mixed health profile, took center stage, with Professor of Medicine and of Epidemiology Eric Rimm and Professor of Epidemiology and of Nutrition Walter Willett outlining the pros and cons. On one hand, Rimm said, moderate alcohol use has been shown to protect from heart attack and, on a population scale, lower mortality for those consuming between half a drink and a drink a day. On the other hand, studies have shown that alcohol increases the risk of several types of cancer, including breast cancer.

“What we know is that people that drink about a half a drink to a drink a day live the longest, so they die less of heart attacks,” Rimm said. “They may have a bit more cancer, but the absolute risk of heart attacks is much greater than the absolute risk of breast cancer or colon cancer.”

Willett acknowledged that the increased cancer risk can be small, especially compared with major hazards like smoking. Still, on a population scale, the increased risk of breast cancer due to drinking is large enough to counterbalance the benefits of screening, he said.

Willett and Rimm also offered practical advice to help consumers understand what the competing statistics might mean at the individual level. One has to evaluate these risks within one’s own context, they noted. For example, Willett said, a young woman with a healthy heart may want to focus squarely on alcohol’s breast cancer threat. That calculus may be different for others, depending on their specific circumstances and family background.

Though the discussion focused on the health claims surrounding moderate drinking (one drink per day for women, two for men), another panelist, Stanford’s Anna Grummon, noted that alcohol’s biggest societal impact comes from dependence and heavy drinking, conditions that lead to dangerous behaviors like drunk driving and physical violence, and can devastate families.

“What we see in the data is that many of the harms that we worry about with alcohol consumption, a lot of those are not necessarily around heart disease or cancer, but around addiction and motor vehicle crashes, and these are significant contributors to the overall death rate in the U.S.,” said Grummon, director of Stanford’s Food Policy Lab. These effects suggest that policy makers might want to “nudge” consumption downward so that more people are meeting the level of “moderate” drinking, she added.

“I don’t think any policymaker is interested in getting to zero consumption. I don’t think we want to go back to prohibition,” Grummon said, “but I think there’s interest in moving the curve a little bit to the left towards lower consumption and more people meeting the guidelines that Eric mentioned.”

The mixed picture for alcohol consumption was in contrast to what panelists agreed is a much clearer one for soda, energy drinks, and other sugar-sweetened beverages, including sugary fruit juices. A 12-ounce can of a popular soda brand has 10 teaspoons of sugar, an amount almost nobody would add to a cup of coffee or tea, Rimm said. Sugar-sweetened beverage consumption is linked to rising obesity, which itself raises cancer risk, and diabetes, which increases risk of heart attack and stroke.

“When you compare a soda to water, or soda to coffee, or soda to tea, whatever you’re comparing it to always wins,” Rimm said.

One answer for those who don’t want to give up sugar is to switch to drinks with artificial sweeteners. Willett said that sweeteners, especially aspartame, have largely proven to be safe and significantly improve a drink’s health profile. But the best choice is water, he said. And since the water supplies in most major cities are safe, a person can take it right from the tap.

Willett pointed out that the failure of the national government to act on regulating these drinks isn’t unique. Campaigns that wound up curbing smoking and banning trans fats, for example, both started at the local level, grew to the state level and then gathered enough momentum that the national government acted.

“That’s where the action is,” Willett said. “It’s state and local, even sublocal —institutional — and people can make a difference there.”

More than 40 percent of Americans think that listening to audiobooks is less rigorous and really doesn’t count as reading.

Cognitive neuroscientist Nadine Gaab disagrees, and she and other education scholars say the view is counterproductive when it comes to learning and development.

Not only does the brain operate the same when reading print books or listening to audiobooks, Gaab said, but the learning process is also the same.

“The theory of learning styles has been debunked,” said Gaab, the Silvana and Chris Pascucci Professor in Learning Differences at Harvard Graduate School of Education. “It’s not the case that someone learns better by listening or by reading. You may have a preference, but learning is sort of the same regardless of the modality. ”

Reading is a complex skill that involves the early development of brain regions that support sound and language processing, the essential milestone skills for learning to read, said Gaab. The neural networks that process written and oral language are deeply intertwined and largely overlap when reading print books or listening to audiobooks.

“There isn’t much of a difference between the brain network for reading and the brain network for language comprehension,” said Gaab. “The brain area we call the ‘letter box,’ which processes print, is not as engaged when you listen, but it has been shown that when some people listen to words, they visualize them, so the letter box gets activated as well.”

Listening to audiobooks meets derision in some circles, where it may be seen as “cheating,” but Gaab rejects that notion. Both print books and audiobooks offer advantages to readers, she said. While readers can review and go back to print books easily, audiobooks offer voices and sounds that make the story compelling and attractive.

Librarians wholeheartedly agree.

Readers should reflect on their choices by focusing on the purpose of their reading, said Alessandra Seiter, community engagement librarian at the Harvard Kennedy School. Some might favor print text because it helps them absorb information better, and others might prefer audiobooks because they allow them to multitask and save time.

“There is nothing wrong with audiobooks,” Seiter said. “There is no purity about reading words on a page.”

There are clear practical implications, said Alex Hodges, director of the Monroe C. Gutman Library at the Graduate School of Education. Print texts offer readers the chance to highlight passages or write notes that might help them retain information better, Hodges said. Audiobooks, on the other hand, may impart a more relaxed experience.

Laura Sherriff, librarian for the Cabot Science, Fine Arts, and Lamont libraries, would like to remove the stigma around audiobooks. In her former life working at a bookstore, she saw kids starting out with “Harry Potter” audiobooks and coming back to buy the print books. “It was their gateway to reading,” she said.

Regardless of their form, either print or audio, books introduce readers to new knowledge, imagined worlds, and complex language, said educational linguist Paola Uccelli, John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Graduate School of Education.

“In both formats, readers encounter not only new information but also text-specific linguistic patterns — and new possibilities for making meaning through language — well beyond what they are likely to experience in casual conversations,” said Uccelli.

“Audiobooks, particularly when students find them engaging and have opportunities to participate in book discussions, can be a powerful tool for helping developing readers expand not only their background knowledge but language resources essential for making meaning from text.”

Gaab’s lab examines how people learn from infancy through adulthood, with an emphasis on language and reading. She often recommends that parents of children with reading difficulties try audiobooks, along with print books, and reminds them that “the most important thing is that children are motivated to learn and excited to read.”

And adults, she said, should be less critical of audiobooks because that’s essentially how we all started.

“If you’re a good reader as an adult, it does not matter whether you read it or you listen to an audiobook,” said Gaab. “We all start as listeners to audiobooks. As children, we were sitting in our parents’ laps while they read books to us. So, we all have been audiobook lovers at some point in our lives.”

Treatments for cardiovascular conditions have never been better. Knowledge about how to improve heart health has steadily improved. Yet, in the U.S., progress in cardiovascular health has largely stalled out and in some ways worsened — even as increasingly effective treatments and interventions come to market.

The problem, said Rishi Wadhera, lead author of the Inaugural Journal of American College of Cardiology (JACC) Cardiovascular Statistics 2026 report, is “uniquely American.”

“Many other higher-income countries are grappling with rising obesity and diabetes,” said Wadhera, Harvard Medical School associate professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. “But the U.S. stands out for how consistently those risks translate into worse cardiovascular outcomes, and how wide the gaps are by income, race, ethnicity, and geography.”

And, in fact, there is growing concern about a worsening problem among younger adults with just-released research showing a sharp rise in hospital death rates from severe first heart attacks among those aged 18 to 54. Most of the deaths were men, but women succumbed at higher rates.

In the JACC report, Wadhera and his colleagues presented a comprehensive picture of cardiovascular risk factors in the U.S., highlighting the disparity between medical knowledge and treatments and the chronic problems faced by tens of millions.

Among other stark statistics, the paper showed that one in two U.S. adults suffer from high blood pressure — with little change between 2009 and 2023.

Though interventions have improved, many who need help don’t get it. The report states that only two in three American adults with hypertension, considered among the most dangerous cardiovascular risk factors, receive medical treatment, with no improvement in the figure since 2009-2010.

This lack of treatment leads to deaths. From 2000 to 2019, hypertension-related cardiovascular deaths nearly doubled, from 23 to 43 per 100,000 — with men experiencing higher rates than women and Black adults higher than white adults.

Among other stark statistics, the paper showed that one in two U.S. adults suffer from high blood pressure — with little change between 2009 and 2023.

Especially concerning to Wadhera and his colleagues is that younger Americans are facing a greater burden of heart problems.

“We’re seeing cardiovascular risks factors and diseases show up earlier in life, which changes the entire arc of health for individuals and also increases the likelihood of decades of chronic illness and catastrophic health events later on,” Wadhera said. “The story of young adults was stark and compelling.”

Wadhera stressed that the report also highlighted some positive trends. Mortality from coronary artery disease dropped by about 50 percent between 2000 and 2020, and the quality of care for those who suffer a heart attack or stroke improved. Far fewer people smoke, too, limiting a major factor that plays into heart problems.

Wadhera cited the decline in smoking as an example of how research and public health campaigns can lead to meaningful improvements in health.

“The declines didn’t happen by accident,” he said. “They were the consequence of sustained education, prevention, public health efforts, health system efforts, and so on.”

He hopes that the report’s accessible presentation of trends not only helps researchers and clinicians, but also policymakers who make decisions that directly affect cardiovascular health — including on structural factors that drive disparities.

“There are obviously genetic determinants of obesity,” Wadhera said, “but at the same time, we do have to think about how our communities are constructed, how our environments are constructed, and whether they make it easy for people to make healthy choices.”

Despite overall decreases in smoking, he pointed out that smoking rates are much higher in lower-income than higher-income adults. Similarly, though most people understand the importance of diet and exercise in preventing hypertension and obesity, millions of Americans live in obesogenic environments with little public space, low-quality food, and poor transit options outside of driving.

“There’s a widening gap between what’s possible and what’s delivered,” Wadhera said. Until the nation aligns its health system, public policy, and community investments around prevention and risk-factor control, he added, the U.S. will continue to experience avoidable heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular deaths.

Quadree “Dree” Palimore paced the floor in a campus studio recently as Yerim Colin prepared to sing. The students were workshopping a number from Palimore’s original musical — an ambitious retelling of the life of Frederick Douglass.

“It’s been 30 days of your freedom, 30 days of you having your own identity,” Palimore prompted Colin. “What’s on your face, how are you going to express that to an audience? Think about that during the opening segment.”

The idea for the musical came to Palimore, now a senior, as a first-year, when a writing course on slave chronicles had him read the abolitionist’s memoir, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.” He was inspired, in part, by Douglass’ relationship to music.

“In his ‘Narrative,’ he writes a lot about the role music had played for him as a slave, how he remembered hearing slave songs,” Palimore explained. “He wrote a lot about what he believed the power of music to be. That was compelling to me. There is power in a story. I think the use of song and music can elevate these emotions and experiences that this young man was facing.”

The first song came to him one day during sophomore year, while jamming with friends in Eliot House. His friends set down their guitars and left to take a break, but Palimore stayed, chasing notes on the keyboard.

“I had never written my own song. But I knew when I played that melody for the first time, that it felt different,” he recalled. “Out of the blue, I started playing the first melody ever for the musical.”

Now in his final College semester, Palimore is finishing the writing process for his musical, titled “Bailey: An American Narrative” after the abolitionist’s birth name. The show spans the seven-year period from October 1838 (about a month after 20-year-old Frederick Bailey escaped slavery in Maryland) to 1845, the year he published his memoir.

“The moments right before changing his name to Frederick Douglass feel important to me, because those were the days when he was making the big moves to do the things that he really wanted to do,” Palimore said. “I constantly think about how he reconciled being free with having that history attached to his name. How did he cry about it? How did he overcome it? How did he try to run from it?”

Palimore conducted extensive historical research, dug in the archives, and consulted Harvard experts, including Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies; Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor; and John Stauffer, Sumner R. and Marshall S. Kates Professor of English and of African and African American Studies.

But much of his writing process has also been imaginative. Palimore is fascinated by the idea of Douglass at his own age, and while writing his sections of dialogue tries to envision what the young abolitionist would have thought, journaled, and prayed about.

The music in the show is a mix of genres: rap and spoken word, some jazz, gospel, and orchestral. Palimore was also inspired by 19th-century music and has arranged what he’s calling a “2025 version” of the 1840s anti-slavery song “Come Join the Abolitionists.”

A vocalist and member of Harvard Glee Club, Palimore had only beginner piano chops and no composing experience when he began the musical, but he dove into learning. He declared a secondary in Theater, Dance & Media, signing up for courses such as “The Making of a Musical: The Creative Process” with Professor of the Practice of Theatre Diane Paulus and head of dramaturgy Ryan McKittrick, and “Beginning Acting” with head of directing Marcus Stern. He transferred from Mather House to Eliot, to be closer to the friends with whom he freestyled.

In the summer of 2024, Palimore did a directing internship at the A.R.T. for “Romeo and Juliet.” He attended an Office for the Arts vocal workshop with “Hamilton” actor A.D. Weaver and presented material from “Bailey” at the OFA’s Creative Careers Conference.

“Just being at Harvard, there are a million opportunities, so I tried to take as many as I could,” Palimore said. “Academic opportunities, of course, but also having access to piano rooms in the music building.”

Stew Stewart, professor of the practice of musical theater writing, has served as a mentor to Palimore during this project.

“Dree is a bracingly unique student whose fierce intelligence and visionary ambition fuels a passion for learning and creating that gave me the feeling of collaborating with an equal, more so than merely a professor passing on wisdom and knowledge,” Stewart said. “The more a student brings to the table the more we have to work with, and Dree’s got enough stuff for a few tables.”

Realizing he needed time to focus solely on writing the musical, Palimore took a gap year after junior year. He lived at his family home in Urbandale, Iowa, and worked at Target, melodies running through his head as he operated the elevated lift in the stockroom.

“I would take my 15-minute breaks and put my AirPods in and listen to the songs that I was composing, and I would take notes in my Pages app on my phone,” Palimore recalled. “I would be excited to go home to work on it.”

Palimore is planning a first table read of the show for April. He dreams about his work being performed on bigger stages in the future.

“Nothing else had ever brought me such fulfillment, staying up until 3 a.m. composing a work and then dreaming about it that same night, and then waking up at 7 a.m. and immediately pick up my laptop to implement those cello parts,” Palimore said. “I had never felt a certain way about anything before. The opportunities and experiences at Harvard revealed to me that art is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

The Y chromosome is among the smallest in the human body and carries the fewest genes. Researchers are paying renewed attention to its role in cancer — specifically, what happens when it vanishes. 

Women typically have two X chromosomes, and men an X and a Y. Men generally face a higher cancer risk than women in most shared anatomy, with the biggest differences in bladder, gastric cardia, and larynx disease. Researchers think lifestyle factors, such as diet, exercise, and exposure to carcinogens, explain some of the disparity, but not all.

Recent evidence suggests the disappearance of the Y chromosome in tumor cells may explain some of the gender gap in some cancer types, like kidney cancer. Understanding the connection could eventually lead to new therapies.

The gradual loss of the Y isn’t unusual. By the time they’re 70 years old, about 40 percent of men have lost at least some of the Y chromosome in their blood cells. In addition, the chromosome is frequently lost in tumors.

The Y chromosome primarily carries genes that provide instructions for male sex differentiation and fertility. But it also carries some known to suppress tumor growth — a protective ability that is lost if those genes are damaged or destroyed.

Luis Antonio Corchete Sánchez, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research at Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute and co-author of a recent review article on the issue in the journal Trends in Cancer, likens Y-chromosome gene loss to library books sent through a paper shredder: “You’ve lost those books forever; you can never recover that information,” he said. 

Loss of the Y chromosome, or LOY, in tumors is a separate process from aging-related LOY, said Esther Rheinbay, Corchete Sánchez’s co-author. About 30 percent of primary tumors in men harbor either complete or partial LOY. In papillary renal cell carcinoma, a type of kidney cancer, the rates may be as high as 80 percent. 

But the causality is far from clear. Scientists don’t know whether LOY causes tumors to grow, or whether LOY and tumor growth both result from some third process. The answer may vary by type of cancer, or even by individual patient. 

“We know, at least in some tumor types, Y chromosome loss occurs very early in tumor evolution, but probably along with other alterations,” said Rheinbay, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and principal investigator at the Krantz Family Center. “One thing we’re trying to understand is: What’s the order of events? Is [LOY] oncogenic on its own, or does it need collaborators? That’s something we simply don’t know yet.” 

“Every time we find more insight into the loss of the Y chromosome, we find more questions and more potential research gaps,” said Corchete Sánchez. 

Studies of people with less common chromosome patterns, like males with an extra X chromosome or females missing or partly missing an X chromosome, suggest that X chromosomes may offer some protection against solid tumors, while the presence of a Y chromosome is associated with greater cancer risk.

But the little chromosome has proven frustratingly difficult to study.

“The Y chromosome is really rich in repetitive regions, so it’s hard to decide where the signal is coming from,” Rheinbay explained. “Together with the fact that it’s small, and there are very few genes relevant for cancer, it’s been deprioritized in analysis.”

Rheinbay’s team has been developing specialized tools to better define the status of the Y chromosome in cancer.

The same peculiarities that make the Y chromosome hard to study also offer promising opportunities for new cancer therapies. 

“LOY in cancer cells leads to this exposed X chromosome,” Rheinbay said. “Because that doesn’t happen in most other cells, there’s a therapeutic window where we can potentially treat those cancer cells, and they will be way more sensitive to the drug than the normal cells with Y chromosome. That’s what we want: a treatment that kills the cancer but doesn’t hurt normal cells.”

“It’s exciting to venture into an area that has not been explored,” added Rheinbay. “And always thinking about the impact we could have on patient treatment makes it very exciting and very motivating.”

Just 10 sessions of yoga can cut the length of the initial, most severe period of opioid withdrawal nearly in half, dramatically increasing the odds of successful recovery, new research shows.

The first days of withdrawal pose highest risk of dropout and relapse as they are marked by often severe sleeplessness, anxiety, pain, and other symptoms, according to Associate Professor of Psychiatry Kevin Hill of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Division of Addiction Psychiatry and an author of the study.

“If we can make the treatment period shorter and more pleasant we have a better chance of success,” Hill said.

In the study, which ran April 2023-March 2024, researchers from India’s National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience, Harvard Medical School, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center found that 10 group sessions of 45 minutes each spread out over two weeks cut the withdrawal period from nine days to five.

Researchers also saw improvement in secondary measures, including anxiety reduction, reduced time to fall asleep, and average pain perception.

The study, published in January in JAMA Psychiatry, examined 59 men, ages 18 to 50, who were experiencing mild to moderate withdrawal symptoms. The subjects also received treatment with buprenorphine, a drug that reduces cravings without intoxicating effects.

Opioid addiction has become a global problem, with an estimated 60 million nonmedical users worldwide, according to the study’s authors. Only one in 11 of those with an opioid use disorder receives treatment. The study, led by Hemant Bhargav of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, was conducted in India, where opioid use is growing and users make up an estimated 2.1 percent of the population.

Matcheri Keshavan, the Stanley Cobb Professor of Psychiatry at HMS and BIDMC and an author of the paper, said that during withdrawal, the normal balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems becomes disrupted.

The sympathetic nervous system, responsible for “fight or flight” responses, becomes overly active, boosting stress, anxiety, and cravings. That imbalance is manifested by sweating, shakiness, and increased heart rate variability, a key measure linked to greater cravings and increased risk of relapse.

Yoga and other meditative practices promote the parasympathetic nervous system, calming the body and regulating breathing and heart rate.

While medication is used to blunt cravings, meditation and cognitive behavioral therapy are often used to address sleeplessness, anxiety, and stress reactions due to the sympathetic nervous system imbalance.

The problem, however, is that the distress and impaired concentration common during withdrawal can make initiating meditation or cognitive behavior therapy a challenge. Yoga’s blend of physical postures, breathing techniques, meditation, and relaxation can be initiated more easily during withdrawal.

The study, supported by private funding, used yoga modules designed to address sympathetic nervous system hyperactivity. They included relaxation practices, mindfully performed postures, sectional breathing, stimulation and relaxation through slow breathing practices, and guided relaxation with affirmation.

A shorter withdrawal period is associated with recovery success but is just the first step of a long process, Hill said.

Withdrawal, often done in an inpatient setting, is usually followed by an outpatient program that allows greater freedom while continuing intensive daily therapy. Subsequent phases become less restrictive as the patient resumes the activities of daily life.

“If you complete treatment and get to one to three months of abstinence, the odds of success go up dramatically,” Hill said.

The beneficial impact of yoga on withdrawal wasn’t completely unexpected, Keshavan said, since yoga’s calming, parasympathetic-boosting effects are well known. In fact, he said, because of those effects, it is already used to treat anxiety and depression.

The study, however, is the first randomized control trial to document its utility in the context of addiction and withdrawal, providing counselors and addiction specialists evidence for an effective and inexpensive tool that could improve prospects for recovery success.

“We are excited about this,” Keshavan said. “Hopefully, this will stimulate a larger application of this mode of intervention across multiple substance-use disorders, not just opioid dependence.”  

Also important, Keshavan said, is that yoga is relatively easy to learn. Those 10 sessions provide a foundation for individuals to develop their own practice, a potential resource in their battle with addiction.

“An intervention like yoga is something that these individuals are likely going to practice even after they end the treatment,” Keshavan said. “So it could have long-term benefits.”

Leading a healthy life is simple, said Ezekiel J. Emanuel, M.D. ’88, Ph.D. ’89, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, in his latest book “Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life.”

In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Emanuel talks about his six no-nonsense rules for achieving wellness and longevity, which includes having the occasional ice cream as part of your healthy diet.

Your book starts with the first rule, “Don’t be a schmuck,” and ends with a plea to “Be a mensch.” How can these two principles help us live a long and healthy life?

“Don’t be a schmuck” is mostly a recommendation to not do risky, stupid things such as smoking, drinking alcohol, doing drugs, or not taking your vaccines. But there are other schmucky things you can do. When I was writing this chapter, I was thinking, “What’s the stupidest thing you could do?” I thought it was BASE jumping, which is jumping off a mountain in one of those wingsuits. I looked up the data, and the chance of dying doing that is one in 2,300, and I went, “Wow, that’s pretty bad.” But then I learned that the risk of dying climbing Mount Everest, even if you’re an expert mountaineer and a Sherpa, is one in 100. That takes the cake. Almost nothing can be schmuckier than that. It’s true that the riskiest thing we do every day is start the ignition on our car, but we have to calibrate the risks by recognizing the risks that are worth it and the risks that are not.

When I say, “Be a mensch,” what I want to communicate is that the purpose of your life should not just be to live longer. It should be greater than that; it should be trying to make the world a better place. Benjamin Franklin said it best when he said, “The noblest question in the world is, ‘What good may I do in it?” That’s part of what being a mensch is.

Social relationships are considered one of the strongest predictors of a long healthy life, but how can they affect our physical health?

When you tell people that having social interactions is good, they immediately think you’re talking about psychology or spirituality, but interacting with people actually changes the brain as well as the body. A social interaction leads to the release of oxytocin, the so-called love hormone in the brain that makes us feel better and promotes bonding. It also increases dopamine in the brain, which is the neurotransmitter related to the reward system, so it feels like a reward to interact with people. We also know that social interactions regulate the sympathetic nervous system by decreasing the release of cortisol, the stress hormone. Most recently, researchers who used data from the UK Biobank, where hundreds of thousands of people have donated their genetic codes and have filled out lots of questionnaires about their social life, compared people who are lonely and don’t have a lot of social interactions to people who do. They found specific proteins that are elevated in people who are more lonely and socially isolated that relate to increased inflammation and lead to increased heart disease and risk for cardiovascular problems, including stroke.

What is the most effective way to keep our minds active?

Keeping your brain healthy is about creating neural connections and making them stronger so that they don’t deteriorate. You can’t just do the same thing over and over again. You have to do new things and do them seriously, so that they actually make solid brain connections. But as you age, you’re going to inevitably lose neuron connectivity. The best way to keep your brain healthy is by learning new things and challenging yourself by taking up new hobbies or activities. About a little more than a decade ago, I committed myself to doing something totally new every year. One year, I learned how to make chocolate bars from bean to bar. I went to Madagascar, harvested beans, and made a chocolate bar. My most recent one, the Zeke Bar 4.0, is a dark chocolate with dried cherry in it, and it’s a big award winner. In 2025, I began raising bees and put hives in my backyard and harvested the honey and put it in contests and also got awards. This year, I’ve begun ballroom dancing. I’m a terrible dancer, but I’m going to learn to be better. It will force different parts of my brain to work, and it’s all to strengthen the brain and keep it active.

Eating healthy is key to a long and healthy life, but what about diets and fasting? And how bad is the occasional indulgence in treats like ice cream?

We have to do the wellness behaviors for years and decades if they are going to do any good. Constant deprivation requiring great expenditures of willpower are not the way to wellness. Indeed, people who constantly diet with willpower fail at it and never lose weight.

We have to develop good habits and stick to them. Habits we enjoy are ones we will stick to. Furthermore, wellness behaviors are not like an Olympic gymnastics event. Perfection is not required. Ninety-percent is an A, and eighty-five percent is a B+ — good grades for wellness and organic chemistry. That is what is needed. Eating should be pleasurable — eating good food with people you like, and an occasional treat is a wellness trifecta.  

What are the biggest misconceptions about exercise and sleep?

On exercise, one misconception is that people focus on aerobics, or vigorous exercise, but you actually need three different kinds of exercise. You need the aerobics to get your heart rate up; it’s good for the heart and your brain circulation. But you also need strength training because it keeps us from becoming frail. You also need to exercise for balance and flexibility, and the best answer is yoga. The second big misconception about exercise is that more is better. You reach a plateau after about 150 minutes a week of vigorous exercise, and you get no added benefit. Plus, you risk repetitive motion injuries. Many of the wellness gurus talk about 10 hours a week of exercise, and that’s way too much, in my opinion.

About sleep, the biggest misconception is that sleeping pills work. They don’t. There are other things you can do to sleep better: Sleep in a cool, dark room. Don’t look at your phone for the hour before. The dinner glass of wine can disrupt your sleep. Don’t take a nap or consume caffeine after 2 p.m.

There is widespread agreement the Outer Space Treaty needs updating, but it won’t be easy given the current state of international political division. Ely Sandler has an idea.

The international accord, which governs activities in space, was first established under the auspices of the U.N. in January 1967. Back then, few nations had ventured into space. “Star Trek” had just debuted on TV, and the Apollo 11 moon landing was still two years away.

Since then, military and exploratory activity by the U.S., China, the European Union, Russia, India, and Japan has surged. Private U.S. firms, like SpaceX and Blue Origin of the U.S. and China’s Orienspace, have launched rockets and satellites. Technologies have evolved, but the treaty has not kept up.

Sandler, a Belfer Center research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, recently published an analysis of the dilemma. In this edited conversation, he details his proposal to advance discussions on space by adopting an approach being used to work on contentious climate change issues.

How is space governed currently?

At the international level, space is essentially not governed. There’s one treaty that covers all of outer space — that’s the Outer Space Treaty. It was signed in 1967, at the height of the Cold War, and came out of arms control to try to stop the buildup of nuclear weapons in space.

It has a few general principles about how you should behave in space. For example, you’re supposed to give something called “due regard” to other spacecraft; you’re supposed to rescue other astronauts if they’re in distress. But those terms were never defined.

At the moment, almost all space law is domestic. If you want to launch a satellite from the U.S., you comply with domestic U.S. legislation. Same goes for Russia; same goes for China; same goes for the European Union.

Theoretically, the Outer Space Treaty has protocols for liability. If your object hits someone else’s object, it has a very theoretical standard for how you could resolve that dispute. But this treaty was never built upon. We didn’t have secondary legislation; we didn’t have common law; we didn’t have regulations. There are no standards for what you are and are not supposed to do.

So, in essence, there is no protocol for adjudicating disputes in space.

What are the most urgent issues?

Very short-term, I think the most pressing issue, together with space debris and space traffic management, is space situational awareness. We need to make sure that we put stuff in space that 1) doesn’t hit anything else, and 2) it comes down and doesn’t stay in space and create more debris. That is the issue we want to solve just based on the fact that we’re putting more satellites in space.

Looking out into the future, we’re going to have to figure out how to circumnavigate the lunar surface.

Within the next five years, you’re going to have at the very least Russia, China, the U.S., and India all back on the moon with semi-permanent presences. That’s going to start to be crunch time for figuring out how we interact with each other.

When you land on the moon, it spews up loads and loads of lunar regolith, the dust, rock, and other loose material on the surface. And so, you need rules of the road. This is also going to apply to Mars and further celestial exploration.

Where is the Outer Space Treaty, and the smaller accords that followed, falling short?

I think there’s two main problems. One is that they were not designed for the current era of space-faring which is driven by commercial companies. They were not designed to be regulating private companies. Technically speaking, what they say is that private organizations, if they were to launch satellites or spacecraft, would be governed by the launching state. But that was thought to be an impossibility — private space flight.

That meant also, because space was so much less used, they didn’t anticipate things like orbital debris. There is no international protocol for space situational awareness — making sure you know where your items are in space.

The other main one is space debris — making sure that we don’t accidentally have collisions that then create more collisions and eventually, there’s so much debris in space that we can’t, for example, use low Earth orbit.

Right now, there are about 14,000, maybe 15,000 satellites in orbit, but there are about 1.4 million objects larger than an inch that are floating around the Earth. The debris is little pieces of former satellites, stuff that’s come from spacecraft, that’s going many, many, many times faster than a bullet. And so, if it hits a space station or if it hits a person, it’s deadly.

There are many, many more things happening in space that we need to think about: The Outer Space Treaty doesn’t ensure safe circumnavigation of the moon, which is now a big deal. It’s unclear on whether or not you can use the resources you find in space.

But maybe the bigger problem is, even those issues which it set out to solve, there are so many undefined terms that it renders them essentially legally meaningless. It’s not just that it was not written for the current context, it’s that we never added meat to the bones of the treaty, and so it’s rendered it, in practice, empty of any binding constraints.

You say drafting a new treaty to address these things would be impossible and instead, propose establishing a Conference of the Parties, or COP, to create a set of definitions and protocols that guide everyone. How might that work and what are the benefits?

The irony is while there are some really contentious issues in space, there are a lot of things we all agree on. We all agree that once you put your satellites in space, you should deorbit them. We all agree that if you have a robust liability regime, it’s going to disincentivize collisions, which is good. We all agree that we should have protocols to communicate between satellites so they don’t crash.

The issue is we don’t really have a mechanism for that to become binding international law that we can then all use, and that’s because the era of treaty-making is definitely over.

What COPs allow you to do, and what they’ve done in other international areas including the environment, is make incremental progress by “thickening” the existing obligations of the treaties. The negotiators all get together and discuss the treaty itself and how it’s going and then, essentially, the minutes of those meetings almost become guidance to the original treaty.

The special thing about COPs is it becomes international law.

For example, there’s a U.N. subcommittee called the U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Use of Outer Space, where we have agreed on loads of things. But the U.N. subcommittee, by definition, is nonbinding. With a COP, those things become the definition under the treaty.

The other thing is if you have the same negotiators every year returning to the COP, talking about the same issues, it also maybe creates a forum where the U.S. and China can talk about space issues. At the moment, we don’t talk about it at all.

You can criticize the climate COP and say they’ve not been effective, but almost every year, almost every world leader comes together and talks about climate. That is an incredible venue for creating momentum, and that’s exactly what we need in space.

What would need to happen for a COP to move forward?

In writing the paper, I spoke with almost every space-faring nation. People really want regulation of space because everyone recognizes the benefits are high, and unlike climate, where decarbonization has an incredibly high cost, the costs here are really low, so it is to everyone’s benefit to do this.

The question is: Does skepticism between Russia and China, between China and the U.S., prevent everyone from acting in their own self-interest and coming together, combined with the current U.S. administration’s broader skepticism of international agreements and the U.N.? This is a political question.

And so, what we’re hoping to do in the next year is to do more work, talking to all of the different space-faring countries, in particular the British or the Indians, who are less politically sensitive to the U.S.-China divide, and try to see if this, or something like this, could begin to be proposed.

What is the likelihood that will happen?

The chances that in the next year we actually have a space COP are vanishingly slim. What we’re trying to do is say that there is more that can be done than signing a new international treaty that hands over custodianship of the moon to a sub–U.N. body and giving up entirely on international organizations. There are many, many ways in which nations can come together and solve very, very complex problems with solutions they all agree to.

Second in a series about the ongoing work of American Ancestors and the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative

When the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery released its 2022 report, it identified 79 people who had been enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff before the Civil War but noted the figure would likely rise as research continued.

After building a list of about 3,000 members of Harvard’s faculty, staff, and leadership who worked at the University when slavery was legal in the U.S., American Ancestors has turned to the next critical step: determining which individuals enslaved people and uncovering the names of those they enslaved.

The work reflects the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative’s founding commitment to identify, engage, and support direct descendants of people enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff.

To date, researchers have identified 1,314 formerly enslaved people connected to Harvard and 601 living descendants.

The process of identifying enslaved people is complicated. Institutions often didn’t keep robust records on them the way they did for free people. Instead, the records of the enslaved are often connected to those who owned them. To discover living descendants, researchers at American Ancestors, a genealogical nonprofit that has partnered with Harvard, examine the family histories of both enslavers and the people they enslaved.

“There’s an incredible interconnectedness between all of these families,” said the organization’s chief research officer, Lindsay Fulton, “not just between the enslaver family and the enslaved family, but also in the greater community of Harvard faculty, leadership, and staff. It’s a community of people.”

Understanding whether a certain member of Harvard’s community held enslaved people involves careful research. For each member of Harvard’s faculty, leadership, and staff, researchers go through a specified list of documents. These include probate records, land and property deeds, birth and death records, marriage records, town records, newspaper records, court records, tax records, church records, census data, and personal papers.

The group also uses targeted internet searches and an AI-assisted search tool to search quickly through large amounts of archival material.

A rigorous search for humans once considered property

Often, not every source proves fruitful. Some documents have disappeared. In other cases, information that would indicate whether someone held enslaved people is missing or excluded. Some families have well-preserved sets of personal papers; others have none at all.

Different sources vary in usefulness for free versus enslaved people — largely because the enslaved were considered property.

Harvard faculty, leadership, and staff are much more likely than enslaved people to have accessible birth, marriage, and death records. They are also easier to search in a database than enslaved people, in part because they are likelier to be recorded with a first and last name.

When identifying enslaved people in documents, researchers are often most successful looking through Colonial probate, church, vital, and tax records. Probate filings might note that enslaved people were bequeathed in wills and appraised by estate inventories. Enslaved people within a certain age range were considered taxable property, and so would appear in the tax records of their enslavers.

Church records are also useful, often recording baptisms, as well as the civil marriages of enslaved people, which Massachusetts began to allow in 1705. The First Church of Cambridge, for example, recorded the 1729 baptism of “Titus, an Indian manservant of Pres. Wadsworth” — one of four enslaved people who lived and worked in Harvard’s Wadsworth House.

Puritan churches also recorded the public confessions of churchgoers, which sometimes included enslaved people, who were often identified as property of their enslaver.

Court records are also useful for identifying enslaved people throughout the Colonial period and beyond. They appeared in various legal proceedings, including property disputes and criminal cases. In the second half of the 18th century, enslaved people increasingly sued for their own freedom, appearing in records alongside the person who enslaved them.

However, even when enslaved people are referred to in historical documents, they are not always easy to identify. Some probate records are brief, but in estate disputes, filings can stretch to several hundred pages — with the names of the enslaved mentioned only in passing. Names can also shift over time, with enslaved people sometimes being referred to only by first name, sometimes in association with their owner, and sometimes with a different first or last name.

In personal papers, those discovered to be enslavers often reference free and enslaved people without clear distinctions. Gabriel Raeburn, senior research project manager at American Ancestors, recalled reading someone’s letters that referenced family members alongside people they were enslaving. He knew one man was enslaved only because he had previously reviewed his bill of sale.

Researchers also point out that the term “slave” was often not used in official documents. Instead, enslaved people are often referred to as servants along with a racial descriptor. Raeburn adds, “The archives are created by the enslavers themselves for the most part,” and they often didn’t seem to believe it was worth recording the life events of those they enslaved.

The complexity of the research makes it crucial that American Ancestors researchers systematically study and record every source that could be associated with a member of faculty, staff, and leadership.

Building on collaborative work

Researchers at American Ancestors underscore that their efforts build on archival work by Harvard-affiliated researchers and exist among a broader landscape of organizations seeking to document American slavery. Those include the Universities Studying Slavery (USS) consortium, run out of the University of Virginia, as well as the Northeast Slavery Index, which indexes records and identifies enslaved people throughout the region.

Raeburn also pointed to research by organizations like the Boston Task Force on Reparations, Medford’s Royall House and Slave Quarters, the Longfellow House, and local churches and historical societies, whose work has helped document enslaved people in Massachusetts.

Kirt von Daacke, managing director of USS and an assistant dean and professor at the University of Virginia, emphasized the importance of schools working together as they research institutional slavery.

“[O]ne cannot really tell the history of slavery at a university without expanding the research lens to include the many communities beyond the university gates that the school was embedded in,” he said.

He thinks that the efforts universities have taken in the past 10 years to collaborate on best practices and share findings have produced “excellent results, even if they are all imperfect and incomplete.”

Fulton agrees.

“Standing on the shoulders of people who have done this before is really important to this particular work,” she said, “because we’re looking for records that are typically overlooked.”

As the work continues, researchers expect to identify many more enslaved people connected with the University. The team will continue to build on existing research — and leave a fuller picture of a long-obscured history.

Excerpted from “The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy” by James Traub ’76.

Schools are not the cause of our polarization. The same deep forces that afflict many Western nations have wrenched us apart: the transition to a postindustrial economy and the attendant erosion of working-class security, the demographic shift toward a “majority minority” nation, the cultural upheaval that has dethroned men, and especially white men, from their age-old dominance — and the rise of entrepreneurs of outrage eager to exploit all that free-floating anger. Schools cannot make us a more just or equal society. Nor can we expect schools to cause young people to treat one another with respect and tolerance when the larger culture is aflame with disrespect and intolerance. Nevertheless, school and society have a reciprocal relationship: just as an increasingly coarse and intemperate culture is infecting our schools, so a conscious and thoughtful effort to promote civic education can help knit us back together.

What’s more, schools matter more than they have in the past. First of all, the crisis that we now face is not just partisan but cognitive. Americans don’t simply disagree, as we always have, on what is and is not true; rather, we no longer have common criteria for truth. Social media imparts a specious, but very powerful, authority to our prejudices and illusions. In “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth,” social critic Jonathan Rauch describes an “epistemic” crisis in which institutions to which the public once looked as sources of knowledge, whether universities or newspapers, have given way to “platforms” that disseminate information not according to its accuracy but its popularity. We cannot return to the world before social media; we can only seek to strengthen the institutions — above all, school — that once constituted our epistemic foundation.

That is a very great deal to ask of any institution, even one that reaches all children during their docile and teachable years. Yet we do so in part because of another new phenomenon. Schools were not traditionally expected to bear the civic burden on their own. The remarkable civic bonds to which Alexis de Tocqueville attributed the underlying strength of American democracy had been fostered far more by the astonishing profusion of newspapers and “voluntary associations” than by schools, of which he barely took notice in his great work, “Democracy in America.” This civic vitality remained central to American life through the middle of the 20th century. But local newspapers, once the heart of small-town America, have been heading toward extinction since 1970; older Americans get their news from television, younger ones from social media. At the same time, the union hiring halls and churches and PTAs and Rotary Clubs where Americans once gathered suffered a steady decline in attendance and membership. We have very few civic levers other than school left to pull.

Yet today’s schools are not the kind of instruments that Horace Mann or Thomas Jefferson imagined they would be. Despite all those years of schooling, the typical American student is stunningly ignorant of her history and government. In the 2022 tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 20 percent of students scored at the “proficient” level in civics; 31 percent fell “below basic.” (Two percent were “advanced.”) In history, the figure for proficient was an astonishing 13 percent, with 40 percent below basic. Though American students do poorly on almost everything, they recorded higher levels of proficiency on every other tested subject. School is scarcely the only place where Americans learn about their history and government, but adults do little better on such tests than students do. Studies regularly find that no more than one-third of Americans can pass the test administered to would-be citizens, which requires six out of ten correct answers on questions such as who the United States fought in World War II, why the colonists fought the British, or what — anything — Ben Franklin did.

Ignorance is not the sum of our problem. Mann imagined schooling as a bulwark against our fallen nature; yet a universal public institution is bound to reflect the culture in which it is embedded. Red and blue America have, inevitably, spawned red and blue curricula, pedagogy, state standards, “evidence-based research,” and the like. The publication by The New York Times Magazine in 2019 of the “1619 Project,” with its claim that America is a “slavocracy” defined by white supremacy, provoked a counterblast by the Trump administration, the “1776 Report,” which offered a patriotic account of America as an exceptional nation dedicated, if imperfectly, to its founding principles. There aren’t, as I found, very many ideologically pure 1619 or 1776 schools out there, but there are a great many 1619 or 1776 state legislators, curriculum experts, district and state superintendents, and college professors who shape the larger debate over the schools as well as the particulars of what students learn.

The adoption of state history and civics standards, once a sleepy affair conducted by professionals, has sunk to the level of gladiatorial spectacle; so, too, with school board elections. The idea of a national narrative in which all Americans can find a place seems an artifact of a vanished era of consensus. The culture war has so deeply pervaded the schools that many states have adopted standards in history and civics that are either blatantly red, blatantly blue, or, yet more common, blatantly vapid. A 2021 study of such standards by the Fordham Institute, an education think tank and advocacy body, found only five states with “exemplary” standards and a full half of them with “inadequate” ones — a D or an F. Some states apparently concluded that the only way to escape public wrath was, as Fordham put it, to “paper over differences, avoid specifics and settle for vague generalizations.”

Yet despite nostalgia for a supposed golden age of civic awareness, American students are probably no more ignorant today than they were 40 years ago when NAEP first administered tests of historical and literary knowledge. At that time the majority of high school juniors thought the Jim Crow laws had been enacted to protect Black people; only a third could place the Civil War in the second half of the 19th century. Yet three-quarters of those students reported that they were taking an American history class at the time. Nevertheless, the results did not provoke fears that American democracy was going into eclipse — because it wasn’t. Republican President Ronald Reagan spoke of democracy in mystical terms and earnestly sought to propagate it abroad. Reagan ridiculed, but never demonized, his opponents; he formed a close bond with House Speaker Tip O’Neill, an unreconstructed New Deal Democrat. Civic ignorance does not cause polarization; but civic education matters more when so many other forces pull us apart.

But what, exactly, do we expect it to do? Is civic education only a question of mastering a certain body of knowledge? The answer depends on one’s conception of democratic citizenship. If citizenship can be reduced to “voting wisely,” then “knowing well” is enough. But if we understand democracy as a system where each of us is responsible for our destiny, and we are called on not merely to vote and serve on a jury but to think and debate and even organize and protest, then civic education must also entail preparation for a full democratic life. Civic philosophers speak of the “dispositions” that students need to acquire: tolerance for difference, the capacity to listen, the negotiating skills that help us bring people with unlike views to agree on a common course of action. The political scientist Danielle Allen has described the ultimate goal of civic education as “participatory readiness,” by which she means the ability to adopt a wide range of civic identities, whether as voter, advocate, or protestor.

Civic education must impart knowledge and democratic dispositions. Should we also look to schools to shape the moral nature of children? The Founders, whose own views of citizenship were deeply shaped by the work of the classic republican thinkers, believed, like Aristotle and Cicero, that republics ultimately rested on the virtue of citizens. As James Madison put it, “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any form of virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.” The true patriot set aside his merely personal interest for the honor and glory of the nation. He was endowed with the virtues that enabled this ethos of self-sacrifice — prudence, courage, disinterestedness.

Why do American schools seem to do such a poor job of teaching the subject matter of civic education? The most common explanation is that at some point, schools lost faith in their civic function and stopped teaching that material. Virtually everyone over a certain age believes that when they went to school, they got a firm grounding in the rudiments of American government. There is some evidence that this is true, though the chronology seems all wrong. A leading education historian concludes that the civic focus of public schools began to erode around 1950. Yet even in the supposed golden age, students took on average only one more civically oriented course than they do today. What changed most drastically was not the curriculum but the pervading civic culture.

A second explanation, which clearly also contains a good deal of truth, is that teachers are now so afraid of discussing anything in detail that they content themselves, as the Fordham study put it, with vapid bromides. Yet that hardly explains why students did so poorly on tests of historical and civic knowledge 40 years ago, when classrooms were not yet burning ground. It appears that we have been doing something wrong for a long time, something that applies to subject-matter knowledge more broadly. How we have failed is itself a matter of bitter contention, because the education world is every bit as polarized on questions of pedagogy as it is on content.

Pedagogical progressives believe that students are not learning history — or other topics — because most teachers are intent on jamming disjointed facts and dates into the heads of bored, passive students in an exercise mocked as “drill and kill.” Schools fail because they do not encourage “critical thinking.” Schools shy away from the issues of identity that preoccupy non-white students or from the controversial questions that would make young people care about their classes.

The rival, “traditionalist,” diagnosis is, in effect, the exact opposite: students haven’t learned history or government — or science or literature — because most schools have adopted some version of the progressive pedagogy that emphasizes the acquisition of content-neutral skills such as critical thinking rather than building the foundations of understanding through the teaching of vocabulary, the reading of difficult texts, and the study of chronology and narrative. Few teachers have the subject-matter knowledge that would allow them to bring their subject fully alive; their own training emphasizes skills acquisition rather than knowledge. During my time in classrooms, I saw very little evidence of drill and kill but all too many signs of flimsy understanding producing dull and empty lessons.

I spent the 2023–24 school year sitting in classrooms around the country, talking to scholars and reformers of all stripes, studying the historical development of curriculum and pedagogy, and wading into the battles over state standards in history and government. In the course of that year I visited schools in Texas, Illinois, Oklahoma, New York City, Arizona, Massachusetts, and Minnesota; in some cases I went back a second time. All of the schools I visited had some illustrative value: some offered unusual civics programs and some specialized in history; some were blue and some were red; some were exemplary and some very much not. When I wasn’t visiting schools I was reading curricular manifestos, state standards, foundation reports, ideological screeds — and talking to their authors as well as to teachers, school board members, instructional providers, and others.

My ultimate goal was not to expose the bad but to unearth, and explain, and celebrate the good. I found that the growing concern over our civic life has produced promising new buds. Dozens of nonprofit instructional providers now provide nutritious, often winsome, curricular material on American history and government for teachers who do not have the background knowledge or the time to assemble it. States are mandating more classes in government and, at least in some cases, devising more rigorous standards in history. Thanks to a genuinely bipartisan effort among scholars and educators, “Educating for American Democracy,” a new “roadmap” — not, to be sure, a curriculum — is available to schools that want to steer clear of red-blue mayhem. Among the most intriguing of recent school reforms is the so-called “classical school,” a model based on the study of great books and the conscious molding of character. Classical schools constitute a throwback to an earlier age, or perhaps an imagined era, of verities — the good and the true—widely shared and unironically pursued. They are, not surprisingly, far more popular in red America than blue; yet they speak to a hunger for civic, moral, and intellectual coherence that may well transcend politics. It is that wish to escape the steel cage of our culture wars, to find our way to a deeper and less ideological connection to our history and ideals, that gives me some small, modest hope for our future.

Copyright 2026 by James Traub. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

During a campus talk Thursday, conservative columnist David Brooks spoke about what he sees as the flaws in higher education that perpetuate social and economic inequality, and the leading role that schools like Harvard can and should play in bringing about change.

The Kim and Judy Davis Dean’s Lecture in the Social Sciences was part of a five-year initiative at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute to confront threats to academic freedom and examine how Harvard and other American colleges and universities have sometimes fallen short of their own intellectual ideals, said Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Brooks, a former New York Times columnist who is now a staff writer for The Atlantic, attributed the current embrace of political populism on the right and left and the vilification of academia largely to an educational “caste system” that vaults graduates of a small number of elite universities to the apex of society while constraining social mobility for those without a college degree.

This inequity of opportunity leaves many Americans feeling resentful and distrustful of higher education, expertise, and institutions.

Gripped by a growing sense of isolation and interpersonal distrust, particularly among younger Americans, the country finds itself today in “a mess,” said Brooks, who’s also a senior fellow at the Jackson School for Global Affairs at Yale University.

“I think populism grows out of this pervasive loss of trust, of faith in the system,” Brooks said. “And you get this sense from people across the political spectrum, ‘We’ve just got to burn it all down.’”

Brooks expounded on his 2024 piece for The Atlantic, “How The Ivy League Broke America,” laying out what he sees as the many failures of higher education, particularly what he views as a false meritocracy.

Making student intelligence, rather than legacy status, the basis for college admissions over the last century has been a well-intentioned shift toward greater fairness, Brooks said. But schools now “overrate” intellect while traits like creativity, drive, good judgement, or the ability to get along with others, which are also important predictors of life outcomes, get overlooked.

That shift toward meritocracy has not had the kind of broad, democratizing effect on social mobility as was hoped, he said. Wealthy parents have gamed the system by providing their children with help that greatly boosts their chances for admission over similarly capable but less affluent kids.

“And so, you can have all the free tuition you want, but if you’re measuring kids by how they do on these metrics, rich kids just have a huge advantage,” Brooks said.

Brown-Nagin, who co-chaired a working group on fostering open and constructive dialogue on campus, asked what College faculty can do to help make everyone feel comfortable expressing their views.

Brooks suggested faculty assign more ideologically diverse syllabuses that expose students to different, even conflicting, points of view on topics. He also suggested they teach social and negotiation skills so that students learn to work well on a team and tackle the issue at the heart of a disagreement without getting caught up in emotion.

Social distrust, he said, which is at the root of the nation’s loneliness epidemic and a source of populist anger, can be overcome if enough people step up and promote unity — whether through sports and social activity clubs, civic groups, or neighborhood volunteering.

One of the most consequential things that can inspire and transform lives, he said, is getting to know people from different walks of life. “The act of meeting somebody and seeing a role model and seeing a pathway — that’s tremendously powerful,” Brooks said. “To create a society where there’s fluidity, to me, that ameliorates a lot of the wrongs that come with inequality.”

The popularity of pricey GLP-1 drugs has hit the budgets of users — and just about everyone else.

In the U.S., about 12 percent of adults say they’re already on them. And worldwide, more than 25 percent of adults could benefit from the weight-loss treatment, according to new research from Mass General Brigham.

The Trump administration in November announced new deals to lower the cost of the notoriously pricey drugs to a $50 monthly copay for people who rely on Medicare for health insurance. But costs vary widely — causing some states to end coverage or restrict who qualifies for them under Medicaid plans.

And the newly launched TrumpRX platform offers some GLP-1 discounts aimed at those who lack insurance or would pay more under their coverage.

The drugs’ popularity and price are already driving up the cost of health insurance across the board, says Luca Maini, assistant professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. 

“If you look at the change in your health insurance premium this year over last year, about 30 percent of that is GLP-1s,” Maini said. 

The Gazette spoke with Maini about how public and private insurers are adjusting to the surging use of GLP-1s.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Why have these drugs been so expensive? 

They’re expensive in part because they’re effective, and patients value what they offer. But they’re also patent-protected, so generic drug manufacturers can’t produce these compounds for another few years. The companies that make these products are effectively monopolists. 

Now, there is some competition, because there are a handful of these molecules that can be used for weight loss. And the price has come down quite a bit, even in the last few years. A recently approved Wegovy pill will cost $150 a month for patients without insurance. But we can expect the cost to remain relatively high, at least while the patents are in effect. 

Why is there so much variety in what a patient ends up paying for these drugs? 

It depends on the type of coverage you have. Medicaid has very low out-of-pocket costs and covers virtually all drugs, but only a few states cover anti-obesity medications. Even patients in one of those states that do face substantial access restrictions. A Medicaid patient would need access to a physician who can write a prescription, and to go through administrative hurdles like prior authorization. Medicare Part D, which is the part that covers prescription drugs, does not cover drugs that treat obesity — though that may be changing under the Trump administration’s recent deals with manufacturers.

Employer-sponsored plans tend to be more generous when it comes to coverage, but they also require more cost-sharing and, again, administrative hurdles like prior authorization.

And lastly, out-of-pocket payers can access these drugs through the direct-to-consumer, telehealth services that are popping up online, which offer prescriptions at around $100 or $200 per month these days. 

How unusual is it for so many patients to be eligible for a new class of drugs but face such a high cost? 

It’s pretty much unprecedented, especially when you’re talking about one in four adults being eligible for these drugs under the widest standards. The only comparison I can think of is statins [commonly prescribed to lower cholesterol].

A similar share of adults is eligible for those drugs, but much cheaper generics are available — and when they first came out, they weren’t nearly as widely prescribed. 

On the flip side, I’m reminded of the treatments for hepatitis C that arrived on the market a little more than 10 years ago. Of course, fewer people need treatment for hepatitis C, but the products were much more expensive when they first came out, so the burden on the healthcare system was comparable.

What happened in that situation was that the drugs were heavily rationed — in a sense that’s the natural solution, and the same thing is happening with GLP-1s. It’s part of why the fully out-of-pocket, direct-to-consumer channel is so popular: because a lot of patients can’t get the drug reimbursed through their insurance. 

How disruptive have these drugs been for insurance companies? 

Well, it’s certainly disruptive, but the solution, from the insurers’ perspectives, is clear: Raise the cost of coverage, or at least the cost of insurance plans that cover these drugs.

One thing that’s different about these drugs is that at least when it comes to treatment for obesity, patients can basically predict perfectly whether they’ll need them, and that means the insurer can do the same thing. So it’s actually fairly easy for them to figure out what kind of budget impact this will have on their bottom lines, and how much they need to raise premiums to make up the difference.

That’s already happening. If you look at the change in your health insurance premium this year over last year, about 30 percent of that is GLP-1s. 

Should we expect those insurance premiums to keep going up or has the impact of GLP-1s mostly been factored in at this point? 

I would say the biggest adjustment has been factored in, though some uncertainty remains.

The biggest uncertainty is how long patients continue to take these drugs. They’re meant for long-term use. But evidence shows that as of now, GLP-1s have pretty unpleasant side effects, and a lot of patients stop taking them. So the financial impact may not be as steep as it would appear.

The other factor is whether or not these drugs end up having benefits that reduce costs in other areas. Obesity is a comorbidity that tends to worsen other outcomes, whether that’s cardiovascular health, risk of falls, things like that.

So it remains to be seen how much money is saved if some of those outcomes are improved. 

How is this shaking out in other countries?

The main difference is that in most other countries the fraction of people who would benefit from these drugs is smaller. Still, the majority of European countries, for example, have imposed very strict utilization controls, generally limiting use to patients with high body mass index.

Is there any relief on the horizon? 

Yes. In the short term, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that administers Medicare and partners with state governments to manage Medicaid, is testing what would happen if Medicare Part D covered GLP-1s for obesity — to get a sense for how much it would cost, and what those positive externalities might be. 

And finally, even if it turns out these drugs have to be taken for life — and most people do — in about next five years or so, these patents will start to expire, and we’ll have generic manufacturers making their own GLP-1s.

At that point, they’ll be very, very cheap. So even in the worst-case scenario, from a spending perspective, we can think of this moment as a very expensive blip.