Companies often rely on annual employee reviews to determine who gets promoted, who gets a raise, and who are the best candidates for layoffs. But research has shown the process can be influenced by factors other than job performance, such as gender and race.

A new paper examines how those two factors played out in worker performance ratings at a multinational company, particularly in cases where bosses got a chance to see employee self-evaluations before doing their own.

In such cases, manager scores closely correlated to how high or low employees had rated themselves, suggesting an “anchoring” effect. Overall, women and workers of color tended to give themselves lower marks. Women of color rated themselves the least favorably and got the lowest scores from managers.

Managers gave out lower scores across the board when they didn’t see employee self-appraisals beforehand.

The Gazette recently spoke with the paper’s co-author Iris Bohnet, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government and co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. In this edited conversation, Bohnet, a behavioral economist who studies gender, explains how gender and race appear to shape the way employees are assessed at work and what can be done about it.

Why were you interested in the dynamics of performance evaluations?

Most performance appraisal processes invite employees to evaluate themselves and then share those self-evaluations with their managers before managers make up their minds.

I was concerned about that process and have been for a long time.

There’s lots of research in behavioral science and in psychology suggesting that if you throw even a random number at somebody, that anchors people’s judgments. If we throw any information at evaluators during the performance appraisal process, it’s very likely that information is going to influence their decisions.

Assume you’re my manager, and we have a rating scale from one to 10. I give myself a seven, another person gives themselves a nine. You will be influenced by the seven and the nine. The question is how informative the seven and the nine really are.

Women and people of color tend to give themselves lower self-evaluations. We knew that going in. If we have reason to fear that people differ in their ability or willingness to shine the light on themselves, then we might bake inequity into the system by inviting people to share their self-evaluations.

“On the employee side, we do find that women give themselves low self-ratings, and in particular, women of color give themselves even lower ratings than white women.”

Overall, women received lower ratings than men, and employees of color were rated lower than white employees. Is that evidence of manager bias?

What we can say is certain outcomes are driven by the employees themselves; certain patterns are driven by managers.

On the employee side, we do find that women give themselves low self-ratings, and in particular, women of color give themselves even lower ratings than white women. I’m using the binary here on gender and race because these are global data. 

Then, the question is what managers do with this information, and we see three patterns: The first one is they take everyone down. The second one is they take people of color down more than white people. And the third one is that they take women down less than men.

Somewhat surprising, we saw the employee-manager gap was less pronounced for all women. We don’t quite know why that is.

Something complicated happens on race.

There are two things happening for women of color. Remember, they started out giving themselves the lowest self-evaluations. Managers give them, so to speak, a gender “boost” — they decrease their evaluations less than those of men of color, for example. So, in that sense, they didn’t treat women of color any differently than white women.

However, this “boost” was not enough to correct for women of color’s very low self-evaluations.

What makes this even more complicated was that managers treated all people of color more harshly. So that’s where your question about manager bias comes in.

Is there anything that managers do in addition to what the self-evaluations are causing? Yes. The self-evaluation effect is driven by gender, and then the manager effect is driven by the reverse gender effect, and the fact that they evaluate people of color more harshly than white people, particularly, in the U.S., Black people.

We’re trying to be careful in the paper to say that the data do not allow us to prove that the observed patterns are due to bias.

It seems unlikely that people of color are worse performers than white people or that women of color should have given themselves worse ratings than everyone else. That’s what we told the company: “It’s not that we can prove this is biased because we don’t have objective performance information available. But the patterns are so correlated with social identities or demographic characteristics that this should probably give you pause.” Which it did.

During one of the years, managers did not get to look at employee self-evaluations before they submitted their performance reviews. Can you explain what happened?

Yes, the company had a glitch in the system that kept them from following their usual process. In that year, while they collected self-evaluations, they were unable to share them with managers beforehand. In the data, we see the glitch must have happened because the managers’ ratings are much less correlated with people’s self-evaluations.

We’re also seeing that managers lower people’s ratings even more than normally.

However, we were surprised that it didn’t change the gender-race dynamics. That glitch year, everything was lower, less correlated, and the dynamics looked like every other year. Which is why we looked at the data more carefully and then saw that managers must have gone back to the prior year’s self-evaluations. Their assessment is more correlated with what people did and said last year.

When I tell organizations, people are not very surprised that managers would do that. In some ways, it’s further support for this social influence channel. Managers really rely on these self-evaluations.

Your research focuses on interventions. Are there any that could minimize the social effects on managers while they conduct appraisals?

The financial services company decided to no longer share self-evaluations based on everything I just told you, including the caveats that we couldn’t show it as powerfully as we would have liked to show it.

They also decided to do the analysis that we did for them on a regular basis. These are data analyses that a data science team in a large firm can easily do and that helps them diagnose potential issues and to identify potential hotspots.

Not sharing self-evaluations might be helpful if managers don’t have access to an employee’s rating history. At least, this is what we found for newly hired employees in the glitch year, where women of color ended up with ratings on par with white women and men.

That doesn’t mean you can’t ask people to do self-evaluations and discuss them once managers have made up their mind.

While we did not study this ourselves, it could also be useful to give more evaluations rather than fewer.

Most firms have these appraisals once a year and that leads to lots of issues, including the social influence channel we have discussed, but also lobbying from employees that knock on the manager’s door the week before the process starts to influence their judgment and remind them of the wonderful things they have done this year. That leads to differences across all kinds of dimensions because some people are less likely to do that.

Culturally, it may not be appropriate to knock on your manager’s door. Or maybe gender comes in: For women, it’s harder to negotiate assertively in those types of instances. There are companies and organizations that have moved to quarterly evaluations to increase the accuracy of their performance assessments.

And then, secondly, more is better than less. Peer evaluations are intriguing, so it’s not just the manager and the employee, but other people as well. More accurate data that paints a more accurate picture of performance. It shouldn’t be only the manager, who might be very removed from what an employee does on a daily basis.

There are companies which have also done away with these performance appraisals completely and just decide to give feedback on a very regular basis, sometimes weekly, and find that much more productive than these formal evaluations.

But I fear the final verdict is still out. We need more organizations to take a close look at their data and test what works and what doesn’t to make these subjective performance appraisals more accurate and fairer.

In the years since the cataclysmic shift in office culture triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, companies of all sizes have continued to redesign their workforces for a new era. In his book “The World Is Your Office: How Work from Anywhere Boosts Talent, Productivity, and Innovation,” Prithwiraj Choudhury, former Lumry Family Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, advocates for more than working from home. He’s a proponent of working from anywhere, or WFA, going beyond a hybrid model to allow for a truly global workforce. We asked Choudhury to help us develop the following quiz based on his research.

Step 1 of 9

11%

1. What percent of working Americans work from home for some or all the time? 

3%

11.5%

16.6%

21.6%

2. According to 2021 research, on average, how big a pay cut are employees willing to take in exchange for the option to work remotely at least part of the week? 

4%

7%

9%

12%

3. Only white-collar jobs can be remote. True or false? 

True

False

4. How much of the time should teams spend gathering to benefit from brainstorming, mentorship, and culture-building, according to Choudhury’s research?

5%

10%

25%

50%

5. To bring together its remote workforce, Cisco created a program where employees could gather in one place for months-long “workcations.” What did it call the program? 

Tokyomad

Dublink

Venywhere

Lisbonline

6. GitLab, the fully remote software-as-a-service company, uses what primary strategy to overcome the challenges of not being able to walk over and tap a colleague on the shoulder with a question?

Knowledge codification

Top-down decision-making

Radical independence

Skillsharing

7. What benefits do companies get from a fully remote workforce that they miss out on with a hybrid model? 

Reduced real estate costs

Access to a global hiring pool

Increased worker productivity

All of the above

8. Which of the following is not a benefit of West Virginia’s incentive program to attract remote workers? 

$12,000 to relocate there for at least two years

Additional tax credits for student loan payments

Up to $2,500 worth of outdoor activities like whitewater rafting and downhill skiing

Access to a coworking space

9. Which of the following was true of “virtual water coolers” set up at one major investment bank to help remote summer interns get face time with the higher-ups?

Interns were more likely to receive job offers

Interns were more likely to receive job offers, but only if they shared the same gender and ethnicity as the managers

The interns didn’t show up

Δ

As AI becomes more accessible to students, educators and school leaders are scrambling to figure out how best to integrate the technologies rather than fight against them.

To share the innovative ways in which they’re bringing AI into the classroom, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education brought together an education researcher, a tech entrepreneur, and a school superintendent to discuss what’s working, what’s not, and what we still don’t know about utilizing AI’s capabilities.

“I think it is important to recognize the moment we’re in. We are in a space that is emerging,” said Yenda Prado, research analyst at the education nonprofit Digital Promise.

Her organization’s work has centered around closing learning gaps for students performing below grade level, living in poverty or rural communities, learning multiple languages or in special education programs, and students of color.

“We’re very much interested in developing learner profiles. So what does the learner profile of an English language learner look like? What does the learning profile of a student with a learning disability look like? And how can we use those profiles to train learning agents to deliver instruction that is tailored to the specific need of a specific student?”

Kedaar Sridhar, the 2025 Harvard Education Entrepreneurship Fellow and co-founder of the startup M7E AI, said his company has developed a platform using AI to make STEM learning more accessible for some of the more vulnerable student populations.

“What I’m building is not student-facing, but it helps the ecosystem where you’re helping reduce teacher burden and improve the classroom experience,” he said.

M7E uses an AI platform to analyze math curricula, which is often wordy and sometimes confusing. The program is then able to simplify the language to make problems more straightforward, clearer, and easier to understand.

“We remove unnecessary or irrelevant struggle and focus on the productive struggle,” he said. “The desirable difficulties that come with actually building up a student’s core of knowledge, where they’re able to question and make decisions, and even be able to question what an AI might be able to output.”

Keith Parker, superintendent of the Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Public Schools in North Carolina, is using a “microschool” as a hub of AI experimentation in the classroom. Parker has been a voice for innovation since economic downturn in his region led to a shortage in resources and teaching staff.

“Economically, over the past 50 years, this part of the state has been challenged, and so my career is focused on building up systems and structures in public education,” he said.

To try out new classroom strategies, Parker and his leadership team started a district microschool — 25 fifth and sixth graders managed by three teachers who are free to develop their own curricula. Parker said he has plans to expand the microschool to grade 8.

“There will be no way three adults can teach 60 kids across grades five through eight and differentiate exactly what all those kids need,” he said. “So our great experiment here is — not only can AI be a supplemental tutor, but can AI also be a primary means of direct instruction to kids for some portion of the day.”

So far, Parker said that the focus for his teachers has been sharing how to create prompts that allow students to elicit what they really want to know from AI systems.

“Because the way you prompt and the way you engage with it can produce an entirely different response from the model,” he said. For instance, students in English class can generate character guides for the novels they’re reading or even prompt chatbots to take on the persona of characters for a student Q&A.

But, he said, every day sees new ways to use the tech. “We’re in the midst of a massive revolution in K-12 education,” Parker said.

According to Prado, the first step toward reimagining K-12 education will be further research into successful strategies and the student benchmarks they produce.

“We need to have educators involved in the actual co-design of these technologies,” she said. “That looks like researchers going into the school communities, developers going into the school communities, and engaging and testing things out and seeing what sticks and what doesn’t, and going through these rapid iterations of design.”

And, she added, that will help students and educators understand the capabilities of AI, what it’s good at, and what is better without it.

“Once we understand the things that AI can and can’t do, we can start thinking about the types of tasks that AI could and should not be doing, and how we support our school communities to develop the necessary AI literacy to feel empowered to make their own choices about how they use or not use AI,” she said.  

When neurologist Steven Arnold is deciding whether to treat an Alzheimer’s patient with a new therapy, he relies on averages. 

“Many people get put on something because it showed a statistically significant though slight benefit in a few thousand diverse people in a big placebo-controlled trial,” said Arnold, principal investigator at the Alzheimer’s Clinical & Translational Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. “They then just stay on it forever, because we think maybe it is slowing the decline more than the placebo.”

Arnold is frustrated with the status quo in medicine of doctors treating individual patients using results gathered from groups. He imagines a more personalized approach: understanding whether a specific medication is helping a specific patient — or even whether it’s likely to help before it’s ever prescribed. 

One emerging solution that’s showing promise: digital twins. 

A digital twin is a virtual model of a person, or a part of a person, that doctors can use to test treatment decisions, like an engineer might stress-test a simulated building against digital earthquakes. Fueled by increasingly rich health data from wearables, medical records, and large national cohorts, and powered by novel statistical methods and artificial intelligence, the once-speculative technology is moving closer to a reality. 

Digital twins can exist at multiple biological scales — cellular models, whole-patient simulations, or synthetic cohorts that represent entire demographics. Researchers across Harvard are developing all three. 

Hiroko Dodge, director of research analytics at the MGH Interdisciplinary Brain Center and a professor of neurology at the Medical School, uses digital twins to create chatbots that mimic the speech pattern of each participant in her behavioral intervention trial, which aims to improve cognition in Alzheimer’s patients through conversation.

“These twins allow us to validate our early detection methods for cognitive decline by analyzing each patient’s conversational patterns — without needing to recruit new patients,” Dodge said. “This is a typical digital-twinning application, but many other approaches also fall broadly under the category of digital twinning.”

Alongside Dodge, Mass General Research Institute investigator Chao-Yi Wu uses statistical manipulations to help clinicians like Arnold more precisely determine if a treatment will benefit specific patients.

“Everybody is different,” said Wu, who is also an assistant professor of neurology at the Medical School. “Everybody can take the same painkiller, but some people get a response from it and some don’t feel the difference. That’s the intuition: If we have a twin, if we have a digital person that’s similar to us, we can test different conditions to help with clinical decision-making.” 

Building off the recently released data of some 50,000 patients with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, Wu can create multiple digital look-alikes that share the patient’s age, gender, race, socioeconomic background — and even more obscure metrics that have been correlated with Alzheimer’s progression, such as walking speed. 

“A person can have 100 twins. Based on those 100 twins, you can compare your cognitive trajectory after you receive the medicine versus those 100 twins’ cognitive trajectory, and in a statistical way you can understand whether the change is real or just random noise,” she said. 

For clinicians like Arnold, the comparisons could offer a finer-grained view of whether a therapy is actually working. 

“One of the biggest challenges in dementia treatment is the heterogeneity of patients,” said Dodge. “Patients often have mixed etiologies and varying levels of person-specific cognitive reserve, both of which influence clinical outcomes. As a result, a treatment that shows promise in a randomized controlled trial may work very well for some individuals but not others. Knowing the trajectory a specific person would have followed without treatment could significantly increase patient care.”

Wu and Dodge also see digital twins’ potential to create entire patient populations, what they call synthetic cohorts, to simulate entire clinical trials before spending time and money on real-world research. In a recent paper, Wu used statistical methods generated by a synthetic control group for a randomized controlled trial and found that her synthetic patients responded similarly to the real-life placebo group in Dodge’s research studying the effect of conversation on cognition in Alzheimer’s patients. 

“We need better tools, a better method for understanding who responds and who doesn’t respond,” Wu said. “Digital twinning is a cost-effective way to do it.”

Meanwhile, Marinka Zitnik, an associate professor of biomedical informatics at the Medical School and an associate faculty at Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University, is using artificial intelligence to build digital twins at a cellular scale. 

Zitnik has developed an AI tool she calls COMPASS, which analyzes personal omics and clinical health data. Through her lab’s ToolUniverse system, COMPASS can be linked with large language models to create chatbots that doctors can interact with just like they would interact with ChatGPT.

In a trial version of the system, a clinician — say, an oncologist — can upload biopsy data from a patient’s tumor microenvironment, along with as much other health data as is available, such as medication history or blood pressure. The system harnesses AI to analyze far more information than a clinician could manage previously.

“Now the clinician can ask this model to perform various analyses,” Zitnik explained. “‘What’s the likelihood of the patient’s favorable response to this specific immunological drug?’ And the chatbot will now provide an answer and discuss.” 

Effectively, your doctor could have a conversation with a synthetic version of your cells. 

For all its potential, digital twinning is still in an early stage — and there’s no clear consensus on what a full twin would look like. Both Wu’s synthetic cohorts and Zitnik’s cellular chatbots are proofs of concept. Still, researchers say the timing is right. 

“This conversational interface is possible now with large language models over the last three or four years; it wasn’t possible 10 years ago,” Zitnik said. “There’s been an order of magnitude increase in enthusiasm and the number of people working on this idea of digital twins because we see the opportunity now with AI.”

For years, a mysterious bacterial toxin lurking in the human gut was suspected of driving colorectal cancer. Now researchers in a pair of Harvard labs have caught the toxin in the act of damaging DNA and creating the very sorts of mutations long implicated in the disease.  

The new study, published Thursday in Science, is the first to detail the structure of the DNA lesion formed by colibactin, a natural product toxin made by common gut bacteria. Leading the research team were Emily Balskus in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Victoria D’Souza in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

“This molecule has been really challenging to study because it’s very chemically unstable,” said Balskus, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry.

The findings, enabled by National Institutes of Health funding that was terminated and later restored, suggest colibactin may be a promising target for prevention of the deadly disease.

The major form of DNA in our cells is a double helix: two strands twisted together. Many carcinogens damage one strand or the other, but colibactin does something more extreme — it creates a cross-link.

“An inter-strand cross-link means that your DNA-damaging agent reacts with both strands of DNA,” Balskus said. “It links the two strands of DNA together, creating a particularly toxic form of DNA damage to the cell.”

This kind of a lesion can lead to broken chromosomes, faulty repair, and potentially cancer‑causing mutations.

“Every time the cell is trying to make a DNA copy out of its genome, it needs to unwind the two strands,” said D’Souza, professor of molecular and cellular biology. “The cross-link causes a major hurdle for replication.”

The study was produced in collaboration with scientists Peter Villalta and Silvia Balbo at the University of Minnesota. The Harvard team also included Erik S. Carlson, a former postdoctoral fellow in Balskus’ lab, as well as graduate students Raphael Haslecker and Linda Honaker in D’Souza’s Lab and Miguel A. Aguilar Ramos from the Balskus Lab.

The researchers began by asking a deceptively simple question: Does colibactin cross-link any DNA sequence it encounters, or does it have favorite spots?

Colibactin is a toxin that is made by certain strains of E. coli and other gut bacteria that carry a biosynthetic gene cluster known as pks or clb. Because the compound falls apart quickly, the team had to produce colibactin using living bacteria to make it in situ for all their experiments.

These colibactin‑producing bacteria were used to generate the toxin directly in the presence of short pieces of DNA. The researchers then measured where cross-links formed, leaning on classical gel‑based sequencing as well as mass spectrometry with their collaborators from the University of Minnesota.

They found colibactin has a strong preference for cross-linking stretches of DNA built mostly from adenine (A) and thymine (T). Understanding that preference required shifting into structural biology, so D’Souza’s lab used nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to build a structural model of the lesion.

“I think the biggest hurdle for solving a structure by NMR is the need for a lot of material,” D’Souza said. “The team was able to produce enough and overcome that major challenge.”

The resulting structure explains why colibactin is so picky. AT‑rich segments of DNA have a minor groove — the narrow channel on one side of the helix — that is tighter and more negatively charged than in other sequences.

“The cool thing about colibactin is that it perfectly fit in terms of shape and charge complementarity,” D’Souza said.

These molecular details strengthen the case for further investigating the links between colibactin‑producing bacteria and colorectal cancer. Exposure to colibactin was known to generate mutations at the AT-rich sequences in the genome. Understanding colibactin’s specificity now explains the locations of these mutations, which have been detected in colorectal cancers.

Notably, the specific mutations attributed to colibactin are enriched in tumors from younger patients. It turns out that E. coli — the main colibactin producers — are most abundant in the infant gut microbiome. That lines up with the early‑life window when environmental risk factors for early‑onset colorectal cancer are thought to act.

The findings highlight the power of cross‑department collaboration, researcher say.

“When a project is as difficult as colibactin has been, you can’t expect one group to have all the expertise that’s needed to solve problems,” Balskus said. “At Harvard, we’ve benefited so much from having great access to experts across a wide range of different disciplines.”

Eight student-led projects that aim to break down campus divisions — through talks, film screenings, and art installations — won funding from the 2025-26 President’s Building Bridges Fund.

The presidential initiative, which seeks to build community across faiths, cultures, and backgrounds, received three times as many applications and is funding twice as many projects as it did in its inaugural round last year. Grantees, led by students from the College and six graduate Schools, were awarded up to $5,000 and will launch projects during winter and spring 2026. 

“There is interest across the University in creating new opportunities to deepen connections, build understanding, and strengthen relationships,” said Harvard President Alan M. Garber. “The threefold increase in Building Bridges applications this year demonstrates students’ eagerness to take risks and to learn from one another. It is an exciting and promising sign of renewal within our community, and I am honored to support an excellent slate of projects.” 

Last year, student project leaders took a variety of approaches to fostering respectful dialogue among their peers on challenging issues. This year is no different. Projects will delve into a diverse set of topics, including exploration of the rural-urban divide, progressive-conservative values, Black and Jewish solidarity, and shared identity through art.

“Our students continue to show that building community across difference is not an abstract aspiration but a daily practice they are eager to pursue,” said Sherri Ann Charleston, chief community and campus life officer at Harvard, whose office administers the program. “From the Law School to the College, our students are seeking not just to coexist, but to understand. These selected projects capture that spirit perfectly, utilizing everything from the arts to structured policy debate to weave a stronger, resilient community at Harvard.”

Summaries of the projects:

Harvard Rurality Forum (Harvard College) 

The Harvard Rurality Forum is a one‑day event aimed at convening Harvard affiliates, invited guests, and partner organizations on campus to examine the rural-urban divide. By placing rural perspectives alongside those shaped by the Boston metropolitan area, the forum aims to highlight differences in culture, economics, and daily realities while creating space for genuine understanding. Through conversations on issues such as agriculture, healthcare, and education, attendees will challenge assumptions, explore policy impacts, and develop the skills needed to engage constructively across cultural lines.  

The Black-Jewish Pluralism Project (Harvard Divinity School) 

This semester‑long dialogue series brings together students, faculty, and staff from across Harvard for monthly, cross‑school conversations on Black-Jewish solidarity in a polarized time. Each gathering will blend theological reflection, historical context, and ethical discussion to help participants examine their assumptions and move beyond performative allyship. The series will conclude with a collective ritual centered on moral responsibility and repair. Its purpose is to cultivate empathy, humility, and a shared commitment to justice across lines of faith, race, and ideology. 

Civil Society at the Cinema: Finding Common Ground Through Film (Harvard Kennedy School) 

Civil Society at the Cinema is a series of free film screenings and roundtable conversations held at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square. The program will bring together Harvard students, faculty, filmmakers, and community members to engage with works that probe challenging questions about the human experience. By including directors and speakers from varied backgrounds, the series aims to model how thoughtful disagreement can coexist with empathy, intellectual rigor, and a shared commitment to understanding one another. 

Breaking Bread, Building Bridges (Harvard Law School) 

Breaking Bread, Building Bridges is a six‑session dialogue series designed to bring conservative Christian and progressive leftist students at Harvard Law School into structured, meaningful conversations about urgent social, ethical, and political issues. The series aims to foster empathy, understanding, and honest moral inquiry between communities often perceived to be in conflict. Rather than seeking agreement, the project aims to humanize disagreement by showing how differing moral frameworks can still share commitments to dignity, justice, and the common good.  

From Dissent to Dialogue: Conservative and Progressive Legal Dialogue (Harvard Law School) 

The Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society at the Law School will co‑host a series of lunch talks, bringing members of the Law School community together for conversations that bridge ideological divides. The series aims to create a shared space for thoughtful, good‑faith engagement, encouraging students to question assumptions and learn from contrasting perspectives. By moving beyond siloed programming and placing speakers in direct dialogue with one another, the series will let students engage with high‑profile guests while modeling respectful disagreement and strengthening the culture of open inquiry at the Law School. 

Across the Aisle (Harvard Business School) 

Across the Aisle will provide structured, empathetic spaces for Harvard Business School students to explore differing political and social perspectives. Through facilitated dialogues, story circles, and community dinners held on campus throughout the semester, participants will practice curiosity and reflective inquiry to build trust across ideological lines. Led by the Business School’s Democrats, Liberals, & Progressives Club, the Conservative Club, and the Government & Public Policy Club, the project invites students to engage with one another openly rather than through debate or persuasion. By encouraging students to examine their values, communicate across disagreement, and question assumptions, Across the Aisle aims to strengthen leadership skills essential for navigating complexity.  

Gathering Under the Crest (Harvard Graduate School of Design) 

Gathering Under the Crest is a campus installation of light, triangular pavilions designed to provide participatory communal spaces for the Harvard community. Placed on campus, the 13 pavilions represent each of Harvard’s Schools, sharing a common form with subtle variations that reflect the diversity within the Harvard community. Students from every School will help shape their pavilion, contributing ideas that give each structure its distinct character. By offering welcoming places for people to gather, the project invites the community to see itself both literally and figuratively within a broader whole. 

Whose Genes? (Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences) 

Whose Genes? is an online map and conversation space that aims to explore how the Harvard community understands genes and what they can and cannot tell us about identity. Built from 50 interviews with faculty experts, collected questions from the broader Harvard community, and a public panel featuring four scholars with contrasting views, the project will make diverse perspectives on genetics and inheritance accessible in one place. The project aims to deepen public understanding of genetics, challenge deterministic assumptions, and encourage thoughtful engagement with questions about identity, biology, and difference.

Proposals were evaluated based on the potential to bring students together along one or more of the following dimensions: 

• Building meaningful relationships among affinity groups whose interests or perspectives on important issues may diverge; 
• Advancing intellectual excellence by listening deeply, navigating tension constructively, and fostering cooperation across differences to solve common problems; 
• Acting against discrimination, bullying, harassment, and hate; 
• And fostering dialogue and engagement across differences on campus about interfaith or intercultural issues, or a combination of both. 

The President’s Building Bridges Fund was established as a result of the preliminary recommendations from both the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias and the Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias, which emphasized the need to provide more opportunities for building community across campus. Students who led and participated in projects last year learned skills necessary to engage in difficult conversations and said they appreciated the additional opportunities to engage with peers with different points of view outside of the classroom.   

“True pluralism is not a given; it is an achievement that requires the intentional construction of bridges where there are none,” said Diana Eck, a member of the Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias, professor of comparative religion and Indian studies, emerita, and Frederic Wertham Research Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society. “These students have accepted the challenge to move beyond their comfort zones, designing initiatives that replace silence with conversation and assumption with inquiry. By fostering spaces where distinct religious, cultural, and political identities can interact constructively, these grantees are doing the essential work of the University.”

Many give much of themselves to help the homeless.

Take Mike Jellison. He knows about drug addiction, familial estrangement, prison, and recovery and brings it all to bear on his work as a recovery coach. And Katherine Koh. The Harvard Medical School assistant professor of psychiatry works with Jellison to help unhoused clients as part of the street team at Boston Healthcare for the Homeless Program.

Program president and founder Jim O’Connell, a physician, HMS assistant professor of medicine, and longtime advocate for Boston’s homeless, praised Jellison and Koh’s work at a conference at Harvard Business School on Friday. But he also noted that solving the crisis was beyond the reach of nonprofits like his, and requires government and corporate America to step up.

“We can take care of people; we can’t cure them,” said O’Connell, whose work with Boston’s homeless people was the subject of author Tracy Kidder’s 2024 book, “Rough Sleepers.” “We want to fix things, but we can’t fix things unless we work with all of you.”

That theme resonated throughout the two-day “Beyond Shelter Deep Dive” hosted by Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Initiative on Health and Homelessness, and the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University.

The sessions focused on what business can do to address America’s stubborn problem of homelessness. It brought leaders from business, government, and academia to Harvard Business School and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge for discussions that laid out the dimensions of the problem and its history dating to Colonial times, and explored innovations such as modular housing and efforts like Amazon’s Affordable Housing Fund and Denver’s innovative system of programs, which has helped reduce unsheltered homelessness.

Howard Koh, the Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of the Practice of Public Health Leadership, founder of the Harvard Chan School’s initiative, and co-chair of the event, said it’s time to set aside the idea of homelessness as a fixture in American society.

“We will never be able to make sustained progress unless all of us join together as one to address this public health, humanitarian crisis and reject the status quo as somehow normal or acceptable,” said Koh, who served as Massachusetts’ commissioner of public health and as assistant secretary for health in the Obama administration. “After all, that’s what leadership is all about.”

Peter Levesque, event co-chair and a senior fellow at the inter-faculty Advanced Leadership Initiative, said statistics show that 770,000 Americans are homeless on any given night, with 35 percent living on the streets and 65 percent in shelters, cars, and on the sofas of friends.

Even those statistics, he said, don’t capture the true extent of the problem, as many more live in overcrowded housing, just a step away from homelessness. And, while American businesses haven’t caused the problem, Levesque said corporate America has an interest in its solution.

“Corporate America is not on the periphery of these problems. They are instead at the center of it, not as a cause, but as a powerful catalyst for systems change,” Levesque said. “Corporate America has proximity to homelessness and a vested economic interest in solving it. Because to have a healthy economy, you need to have a healthy community, and stable housing is the foundation of a stable workforce.”  

Jeff Olivet, senior adviser to the Chan School’s initiative, said homelessness’ roots go back to Colonial times, when people with physical disabilities and mental illness, along with those displaced by wars, lived on the streets.

The roots of homelessness today date to the 1970s and the end of a massive post-World War II building boom that left the nation with a surplus of 300,000 housing units and little homelessness. That boom faded in the decades that followed and combined with societal trends such as the closing of large mental hospitals, the return of Vietnam veterans, some with severe PTSD, and a disinvestment in housing.

Today, Olivet said, the 300,000 housing unit surplus has become a 7 million unit deficit.

That deficit hits those with low incomes hardest. Today, only 35 percent of the nation’s lowest-income residents, and just 50 percent in the next-lowest income category, can find housing they can afford.

More resources are needed, and some of them can come from business, speakers said.

One example is Amazon’s $3.6 billion Affordable Housing Fund, which provides grants and low-interest loans to developers and has already funded 21,000 affordable homes in three areas: Nashville, Washington State’s Puget Sound region, and the Capitol region around Washington, D.C., and Virginia.

Michael Carney, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, said businesses also have the ear of politicians and, as they have in the past, can work together to sway policy.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2021, for example, the Delta variant hit India first and hard, causing huge amounts of death and suffering. Washington, though, was focused on domestic issues, not India. So the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Chamber Foundation, and the Business Roundtable convened a meeting of 45 global CEOs, Carney said.

“It was horrific what was happening. It was so bad that crematoria were melting,” Carney said. “In this Zoom meeting these CEOs came together and said, ‘This is unacceptable.’”

Within a week of that meeting, he said, the U.S. government shifted some attention onto India, and the business group, using corporate contributions, becamethe world’s largest private purchaser of ventilators, which they sent to India.

“That is the power of business,” Carney said, adding that those insights also apply to homelessness. “The big lesson we learned from our experience during COVID was that the-whole-of-society problems require the-whole-of-society solutions.”

In a seminar room in Farkas Hall, senior Aiyanna Ojukwu stood before a rolling whiteboard lined with index cards, each representing a plot point from her TV pilot episode. The story, as she explained to classmates grouped around a nearby table, follows a high school senior whose life takes a turn after an heirloom — a watch her parents gave her — goes missing.

“I think my original idea was it’s a windable watch, and if it gets off time then something bad will happen,” Ojukwu explained. “But if you can think of something better, this heirloom doesn’t need to be a watch. It just needs to be something that can be lost.”

Senior Solomey Alemseged had an idea: “Maybe it doesn’t tell time, but it tells something else.”

Ojukwu liked the proposal. “Maybe it shows how out of line you are, like a compass,” she mused.

“A moral compass,” senior Inseo Yeo added.

The creative volley continued for the College students enrolled in TDM 166H: “TV Writers Room,” who took turns workshopping their projects with the group.

Associate senior lecturer Phillip Howze has been teaching the advanced writing workshop in the Theater, Dance & Media program for the past three years. The technical skills needed for TV writing are different than for plays or film, he said.

“I’m a curious person and thus I’ve worked in a variety of fields. Relatedly, a TV writers room is really about bringing a whole spectrum of experience, personal experiences, ideologies, scholarships, and the multivalent aspects of your personhood, to bear on the story that you are writing collectively with a group of people,” said Howze. “To make a television show is to work incredibly collaboratively, and to risk failure really boldly, over and over again in a serialized, recurrent way. It’s like any creative practice. In order to do it, you need to practice the muscle.”

Howze, a playwright and screenwriter who has written for shows such as the Netflix series “Mindhunter” and National Geographic’s “Genius: Aretha,” says a TV writers room is a unique environment: a temporary assembly of people who meet daily to craft a story together, where the narrative is ongoing rather than being neatly contained like a movie.

In a professional writers room, Howze explained, the showrunner, or creator, typically brings in an idea that others build upon. There’s usually a “blueskying,” or brainstorming phase. Then writers hone the story until it fits the framework of an episode. He describes his course, a two-hour-and-45-minute seminar that meets once a week, as a “bootcamp” that mimics this process.

Ojukwu, who is concentrating in neuroscience and in Art, Film & Visual Studies with a focus on film production, described the collaboration as a “game of telephone,” where one person has an idea, the next person expands on it, and a third person writes even more.

“Everyone has been doing individual work, but there’s always the thought of ‘my community has chipped in,’” Ojukwu said. “I took this class because I was kind of sick of individualism tied to creativity. As if the only way you can truly be a ‘good creative’ is if you did it yourself with no help. That was kind of exhausting to me. I found that, outside of classes, I had a better time making stuff if it was with other people.”

The course “prioritizes community and collaboration in a way that I’ve never seen anywhere,” added Alemseged, who is concentrating in history of science and Art, Film & Visual Studies. “But there is this preservation of self-reflection and voice while pursuing that. There’s also this passion, like a fire being lit under everyone’s seat. Everyone is very eager to share and to collaborate.”

Outside of class, students write original work each week: scenes, character monologues, episode synopses, and elevator pitches. They often swap in class and take each other’s work home to expand on the ideas. They also watch shows as homework assignments and write responses. The coursework includes several shows primarily created by women and artists of color alongside the creative seeds that inspired them, such as Issa Rae’s web series “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl,” which later became the hit HBO show “Insecure;” Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s one-woman play “Fleabag” and its BBC TV adaptation; and the “Homecoming” thriller podcast and its Amazon Prime television version starring Julia Roberts.

Sharing work with peers can be daunting. Howze encourages students to present their writing to the class without disclaimers, and to practice letting go of ego, habits that will aid them in the professional writers room.

“The course really puts forward, to encourage and inspire students, that your lived experience and your unique perspective is not only of use to your own story, it could potentially be of use to Issa Rae, plus anyone else who you might wind up working next to in the context of a writers room,” Howze said.

Claire Liu, a senior concentrating in Theater, Dance & Media and economics, did her first Harvard internship in a writers room: a virtual position for The CW’s “Nancy Drew” show.

“I’m hoping to work in entertainment as a writer, director, and performer, mostly in film and TV,” said Liu. “It’s definitely something that I want to continue after graduation.”

Howze also brings in guest speakers from the television industry. Recently it was Monet Hurst-Mendoza, who was a writer/producer for Seasons 21-24 of NBC’s “Law and Order: SVU.” She watched the students simulate a writers room, working together on Ojukwu’s time-travel pilot, as well as others, including a dream sequence involving a Los Angeles cult and a family of dinosaurs that survived the meteor strike.

Howze hopes students will come away with more confidence and conviction in their creative selves than they had at the start of the semester.

“By the end of the class, I hope students leave prepared to go into a writers room skillfully, but really any collaborative creative space, with a healthy balance of conviction and grace. Not only do we nourish their talents as emerging artists, we also tend to the need for more good citizens of the art world,” Howze said.

More than half of middle-income older adults in the U.S. believe that their savings won’t last them through retirement, according to findings published in November by the Pew Research Center. John Y. Campbell, the Morton L. and Carole S. Olshan Professor of Economics, isn’t surprised that people are worried.

“What does concern me is that it’s not always the right people who are worried,” said Campbell, co-author of the new book “Fixed: Why Personal Finance is Broken and How to Make it Work for Everyone.”

In the book, Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai (Ph.D. ’03) of Imperial College London argue that the financial system acts as a “reverse Robin Hood,” setting the most vulnerable up for failure. In an interview edited for clarity and length, Campbell broke down the challenges of saving for retirement and what can be done to fix them.

Why is it so hard to save for retirement these days? 

Life expectancy is high; if you retire at 65, you’re going to need to fund potentially decades of living expenses. A great many people underestimate how much they need to accumulate in a 401(k) or an IRA to fund a retirement of that length. People also tend to have smaller families and fewer people to rely on. And housing and higher education are so expensive — for many people going to college in this country, higher education imposes quite a debt burden on them, which makes saving for retirement much harder. 

But there’s also a challenge that comes from the complexity of the financial system itself. If you feel confused and you don’t know what you’re doing, you naturally become very anxious. Unfortunately, one very natural human reaction is to ignore the problem, tell yourself you’ll deal with it later. That’s a very big mistake.

You argue in the book that the complexity of the financial system perpetuates inequality. How so? 

Some inequality in the financial services sector is inevitable: For example, there are fixed costs to providing a financial service, and those fixed costs are going to be a bigger proportional drag on return for a small saver.

But there are also differences that arise because many financial products require skill to manage. If you’re unskilled, you’re going to make mistakes that generate fee revenue for the financial service providers. They may pocket some of that as profit, but they’re also competing for business, so part of that will get passed on in the form of lower prices up front. 

As a result, if I know what I’m doing, I’m going to get a cheap product that’s only cheap because of the revenue that comes in from other people — often poorer, less-educated people — making mistakes. 

Let me give you some examples. If you pay a late fee because you forgot to pay your credit card bill, that’s revenue the credit card company can then use to offer airline miles or cash-back rewards that savvier consumers benefit from. Or mortgages: Richer, better-educated consumers are more likely to refinance a fixed-rate mortgage at a beneficial time and end up paying much less over time. Essentially, it adds up to a reverse Robin Hood maneuver in which money is taken from poorer people and given to rich people. 

It’s tempting to spend that extra $5 on a coffee instead of saving it for later. How much of the challenge of saving for retirement is caused by human psychology? 

The challenge is really in the interaction between human psychology and the financial system. The market forces of capitalism meet the demand that’s being expressed, as opposed to the demand that would be expressed if people knew what they were doing. 

But it’s not determinative. People hate to shop around for financial products because they find personal finance confusing, so they just stick with whatever bank they know. That’s a huge mistake. People can really alter their fortunes by just putting in a little more effort to look around. And of course you can make small changes like setting up some money to automatically transfer into savings from each paycheck.

What are the consequences when the financial system does a poor job of setting people up for retirement?

As people have become aware of the inequalities, they’ve become very suspicious of financial institutions. Under these conditions, some people seek out alternatives to formal finance. They might keep their money under the mattress and miss out on earning interest; they might borrow from friends and family or turn to loan sharks; or they might invest in cryptocurrency. That’s jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. 

We need formal finance; it’s safer than the alternatives, and it funds investments in the future. That’s why we’re not revolutionaries: We want to reform the system and preserve traditional institutions. 

You propose a financial “starter kit” to help people navigate the system. Can you explain that? 

We push for a regulatory intervention to promote a set of straightforward, well-designed financial products that most people can start with. 

An example might be access to 401(k) plans, which are currently available to people who work for large employers, but not so much for smaller employers and the self-employed. And when you move jobs, you may end up with multiple 401(k) plans that you have to remember to roll over into one another and so on. 

Our starter kit would include a 401(k) plan that you’re offered when you work your first job, even if you’re a teenager bagging groceries at the supermarket, and it should carry with you for your lifetime. I would argue it should have a Roth structure, but that’s a technical detail. The main point is broader and simpler access to a retirement savings product for the retirement problem. 

What are some practical ways to gauge the health of your retirement fund? 

It’s always best to consult with a financial adviser. But as a rule of thumb, you want to retire with six years of income saved up. At 50, you should have about four years of income saved up, and plan to accumulate the remaining two years of income in the last 15 years or so of your working life. 

But that number depends in part on the rate of return you can earn on that money, because in retirement, you’re not just spending the principal you’ve saved, but also the investment income. The inflation-indexed bond yield is a good proxy for a safe rate of return. For much of the 2010s and into the pandemic, that rate of return was zero or even negative, implying that you wouldn’t earn any safe investment return at all after correcting for inflation. Recently that has come up a lot, which is great news for investment savers. Now the inflation index bond yield is about 2 percent, which is about the historical average. 

Many people do, and many people should, own significant stock investments as well. You can get a good idea of the long-term return on stock investments by looking at how expensive the stock market is in relation to earnings over 10 years, what’s called the cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio. The record was 45 during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, and right now it’s at 40, the highest it’s been at any time since. So if you’re an aggressive stock investor trying to take some risks and get a higher return, this is a rather daunting environment, because stocks are so expensive. But if you’re a conservative bond investor just trying to keep your money safe, things are better than they were a couple of years ago. 

It’s well known that stress can trigger hair loss. A new paper explores how this happens and how our response to stress can have long-term consequences for our scalps, research that may eventually yield insights into autoimmune diseases.

In research published in Cell, Ya-chieh Hsu, professor of stem cell and regenerative biology, and her lab found that the hair loss resulted from a two-part reaction.

The first part, the immediate loss of hair, was simple. “Stress has an immediate impact through the activation of the sympathetic nervous system,” explained Hsu, who is also a principal faculty member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

She said that it begins with our natural “fight or flight” response, which releases norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that — among other effects — kills highly proliferating cells in the hair follicle when the level is too high.

Hair loss in such circumstances is usually temporary.

“Because stem cells are spared in this case, you could regenerate the hair follicle, so you will have temporal hair loss, but then your stem cells are going to get activated to regenerate new hair,” said Hsu.

However, imaging by co-author H. Amalia Pasolli, an electromicroscopy biologist, revealed additional, more far-reaching details. The Rockefeller University professor found that the hair follicles that had been killed by the norepinephrine “looked like hydrochloric acid had been poured on them” and had died by necrosis, said Emily Scott-Solomon, a postdoc in Hsu’s lab who led the work.

This surprising finding prompted Scott-Solomon to take a closer look at the tissue, leading to the discovery of a secondary reaction.

Following the release of norepinephrine, the researchers found, the body perceives inflamed or necrotic tissue as a hostile invader.

That, in turn, triggers a “cascade” of immune reactions to activate autoreactive CD8+ T cells, according to Hsu. These T cells, which typically work to protect healthy cells, “now see hair follicles as a foreign object they should attack,” she said.

This secondary attack can have lingering effects, as the overreactive T cells can trigger recurrent autoimmune attacks on the hair follicle when additional stressors occur.

That possibility has opened avenues of exploration to understand other autoimmune diseases, such as Type 1 diabetes, lupus, or multiple sclerosis. With autoimmune diseases, Hsu said, “You always need a trigger, and the trigger is not necessarily genetics.”

Because of its broad range, she continued, such work requires considerable cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Her three co-first authors on this paper include postdocs Scott-Solomon, who trained as a neurobiologist; Shlomi Brielle, who handled bioinformatic analyses; and Alexander Mann, an immunologist.

Hsu also credited Dana Farber Cancer Institute’s Judith Agudo, an expert in immune attack and tolerance, as a crucial collaborator.

“A study like this is important both for its findings and for how it was conducted,” said Mann, who works in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and Department of Immunology at the Harvard Medical School lab of Assistant Professor Ruth Franklin, an expert on inflammation and another key contributor.

“First, it is really a great example of interdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together neuroscience, stem cell biology, and immunology. It highlights how much new biology can be discovered when researchers with different expertise work together,” Mann said. “On the immunology side, this study demonstrates one way that autoimmune diseases can be triggered and raises many more questions about the causes of autoimmunity.”

The impact of our lived experiences on our bodies is a topic that has long entranced Hsu, who is also involved in the Biology of Adversity project at the Broad Institute, which looks at how adverse experiences reshape our tissues and drive disease.

“My lab has been really fascinated by how our experiences in this world regulate tissue,” said Hsu, noting their other ongoing studies on the impact of stressors on the body, such as what role external stressors have in recurrent T-cell attacks.

“I find it fascinating to see that how we live our life has the same impact on our tissues as many of our genes,” said Hsu. “In stem cell and tissue biology, we tend to focus heavily on the genes we carry.”

 Equally important, she points outs, “is to think about how lifestyle and stress shape us.”

This research was partially supported by the National Institutes of Health, including awards from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

Exposure to light at night raises cardiovascular disease risk by up to 50 percent over sleeping in the dark, new research shows. But scientists say the effect isn’t from lack of sleep, but from disruption of the body’s master biological clock, the circadian rhythm.

Angus Burns, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said the work highlights the potency of our circadian rhythm, which not only regulates sleep, but also independently affects nearly every organ in the body, changing how they function when we nod off.

For those experiencing the brightest nights, the research showed increased risk of between 30 percent and 50 percent for heart attack, stroke, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and coronary artery disease.

“The reason it’s exciting is it adds light exposure as a novel risk factor for cardiovascular disease, and that’s something you can recommend to patients quite easily,” Burns said. “I think it should be added to guidelines about reducing risk for these cardiovascular outcomes.”

Burns and colleagues almost missed the chance to conduct the study.

Burns was intrigued when he learned of the UK Biobank database, which used biosensor-loaded wristwatches to track more than 100,000 participants, night and day, for a week. The resulting database is the largest known of physiological information related to participants’ sleep and wake habits.

But even though the schematics said the devices contained light sensors, the data downloaded from the watches didn’t include exposure to nighttime light sources.

So Burns reached out to the engineer who designed the watches, who told him the light exposure data was there, but had to be extracted separately.

The data did include light intensity but unfortunately provided no information about sources, such as streetlights, cellphone screens, nightlights, and television.

The resulting study analyzes data from 88,905 participants. In an article posted to JAMA Network Open in October, Burns, co-first author Daniel Windred from Australia’s Flinders University, and colleagues compared data on nighttime light exposure to health outcomes over the next 9½ years, using information from electronic medical records.   

The researchers spent several years figuring out the best way to analyze the enormous data trove that resulted. The effort has been fruitful, and earlier publications linked light exposure patterns to higher risks of premature mortality, Type 2 diabetes, and psychiatric disorders, including depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder.

“I think the general public are certainly beginning to appreciate the health impacts of lack of sleep, but appreciation for the health impacts of disrupting circadian rhythm falls behind,” Windred said. “Much of our recent work shows that markers and determinants of circadian disruption, like bright night light exposure, are strong predictors of poor health outcomes. For example, we find that sleep regularity, which captures circadian disruption, is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration.”

The current research highlights the sensitivity of the body’s circadian clock to disruption. Our bodies reach peak sensitivity to light stimulus between midnight and 6 a.m. Exposure in that period, particularly to bright light, causes your body clock to begin to reset, sending signals throughout the body, Burns said.

The study found a dose-response relationship between nighttime light exposure and cardiovascular disease risk.

For heart attack, for example, compared with those in the darkest 50th percentile, those who experienced some nighttime light — in the 51st to 70th percentile — had a 20 percent increased risk of heart attack.

Those who experienced more light, in the 71st to 90th percentile, had a 27 percent increased risk.

And those who experienced the most nighttime light, in the 91st to 100th percentile, had a 47 percent higher risk.

“There are various risk factors that predict cardiovascular disease, including smoking, alcohol, diet, physical activity, and sleep,” Windred said. “It was interesting to find that night light exposure predicted cardiovascular disease risks independently of these known risk factors. Light exposure appears to be an additional dimension of our lifestyle that we should be paying close attention to for optimal health.”

Modern life can work against a well-functioning circadian clock, Burns said.

Today, not only are our nights not as dark as in the past, but for many of us our days are not as bright. We evolved outdoors where sunlight sends a strong daytime signal that helps set our circadian clocks. Today, we spend 90 percent of our time indoors under weak artificial light.

Though we may perceive that as adequate for our chores, office light gives off 200 to 400 lux — a measure of illumination — while the sun generates 10,000 lux even on a cloudy day.

The result, Burns said, can be a weak circadian signal, resulting in things like feeling sluggish during the day yet too awake at night to sleep at a reasonable hour.

“There’s strong evolutionary pressure for a period of activity and a period of quiescence for your whole body,” Burns said. “Unfortunately, modern life is a challenge to that biology, as I’m sure most people really appreciate.”

Research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Australian Research Council.

Schadenfreude seems to permeate American politics these days as viral clips and memes of politicians making real or AI-generated gaffes and off-color remarks are gleefully shared by ideological foes.

The German word, which means taking delight in another’s misfortune, describes a response that was once taboo to express openly. Now it’s been embraced by partisans as a powerful weapon to reinforce political support and group identity.

In this edited conversation, Susanna Siegel, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy, who has written about this dark side of American politics, explains how reveling in someone else’s setbacks — or accusing others of doing so — is poisonous to democracy.

How do scholars look at schadenfreude and its use in politics?

Schadenfreude is the celebration of someone else’s pain or other negative condition. Schopenhauer compared it to cruelty. Like many emotions, it can play out in politics. We saw this happen with the slogan “own the libs.” Owning the libs is celebrating the pain, offense, or fury of a political opponent.

Schadenfreude can operate as a kind of psychic dynamite.

We see this most clearly when we look at attributions of it. Would you sign up for a cooperative venture with someone who celebrates your pain? Probably not. Would you be a more likely to be indifferent to their pain, or even to feel glad about it, if they were celebrating yours? Quite possibly.

In these ways, accusations of schadenfreude, if they stick, get in the way of building civic communion. 

Some believe there’s a big difference between reveling in the misfortunes of a stranger or a generic group, like New York Yankees fans, and celebrating a co-worker’s failure or police shutting down the neighbors’ noisy party. Is one type of schadenfreude less “bad” than another?

I don’t see a sliding scale of badness; I see a difference in kind. There’s an important difference between the interpersonal context and the public or political context.

Consider a classic trope in slapstick comedy — the klutz. If while engaged in deep conversation with a friend I accidentally walk into a pole, my friend may laugh, amused by the collision. Yet their reaction isn’t cruel. Why not? Because amusement is not the only way my friend relates to me. They’re also disposed to care whether I am injured, would help me if I needed help, and so on.

By contrast, if someone posted a picture of the collision on social media with the caption “Can you believe what this incompetent woman did?” it’d be much different because there is no surrounding relationship.

Discussions on social media can easily go south because they lack surrounding cues (tone of voice, gesture, the world of embodied signals) that can modulate what people hear in the words they read.

This difference between embodied and decontextualized messages has important upshots for politics.

When memes, tropes, or talking points convey via social media that political opponents are celebrating your pain, these messages are crafted to seem complete without any surrounding context. They can give the impression that you don’t have to know anything else to orient yourself to the accused. And that’s part of what gives them power to propagate.

It’s what [philosopher and psychologist] John Dewey called “sensationalism.” Sensational messages make an impact in isolation from broader context. Sensationalism underlies virality.

Sports team rivalry is a red herring in this context. Teams are there to compete. Games of all kinds are a circumscribed context in which aggression, competition, the energizing quality of attack and defense have an outlet.

How do we break out of this downward spiral schadenfreude seems to cause — accusing others, sometimes falsely, of doing it to justify our hostility toward political opponents?

Since attributions of schadenfreude are a way to create enemies, schadenfreude is a key form of political communication for politics that rely on vilification, politics that replace diplomacy and institutionalized norms with arbitrary impositions of will, and politics that operate through patronage, kickbacks, and other interpersonal forms of power.

When schadenfreude infuses politics of this kind, the important point of intervention isn’t on the psychological feeling. It’s on the vilification narratives that make the psychic dynamite explode.

Forty years after Steven Gortmaker first sounded the alarm, clinicians, patients and researchers are still struggling with childhood obesity. In fact, it has gotten worse over the decades.

All along, the broad outlines of the problem have been apparent: America’s kids eat more and move less than earlier generations. It has also been apparent, however, that basic formulation is misleadingly simple. The issues are complex and thorny and touch on lifestyle, culture, genetics, economy, and more.

“We’re one of the world leaders, watching obesity grow,” said Gortmaker of the situation in the U.S. The emeritus professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health added that the government has been reluctant to take steps that might blunt the epidemic, such as sugary beverage taxes and bans on food advertising to children. “It’s hard to make a dent in some of the drivers here.”

So the problem endures, even with decades of research to guide treatment and prevention programs. Physicians are hoping that recent advances, including surgical procedures and new potent anti-obesity drugs, will help the nation gain ground — or at least stop losing it — on a major public health issue.  

There is much at stake for the nation’s children and teens.

Weight problems are associated with greater risk of high blood pressure, prediabetes, Type 2 diabetes, polycystic ovary syndrome, chronic liver disease, kidney problems, cardiovascular disease, joint and movement problems, and social stigmatization.

Obesity rates among children and adolescents were around 5 percent in the 1960s. They began rising in the mid-1970s until 2020, when some 20 percent of U.S. children and adolescents — 14.7 million kids — qualified as obese.

In addition, another 16.1 percent of children and teens have a BMI in the overweight category, meaning that more than one in three U.S. children and adolescents are considered either overweight or obese.

Experts await the latest numbers, but say obesity rates spiked during the pandemic and there’s been little evidence of a decline since then.

In fact, the opposite might be true. A 2025 study shows numbers rising among youth in the two highest BMI classifications, which increased 2.5 times between 2008 and 2023.

Gortmaker is a decadeslong veteran of the battle against pediatric obesity.

In 1985, he and colleagues tied childhood obesity risk to TV watching. Every hour of television per week was associated with a 2 percent rise in obesity.

A few years later, in 1987, he and colleagues identified rising obesity among U.S. children as a serious national problem, one, they said, that the medical profession should no longer ignore.

And in 2001, Gortmaker and colleagues, including Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital David Ludwig, linked increased consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages to obesity among children.

Diet and lifestyle are undeniably important, but there are other factors.

Thinking about food and nutrition has shifted dramatically over the years. For decades, science erroneously backed low-fat diets, which promoted meals low in satiating fats but ignored the role of refined carbs like sugary beverages in promoting excess weight gain.

And, while consensus seems to have formed around the benefits of eating a diet rich in whole foods — fruits and vegetables, healthy fats, and healthy proteins — it ignores the fact that those foods and their preparation can cost more, which drives financially struggling families toward cheaper, highly processed foods that can promote weight gain.

Even that complex landscape misses the significant variation that exists between individuals, both in genetic background and in everyday life circumstances.

Disadvantaged families experience additional stress that studies have shown is associated with disordered eating behavior among children, like sneaking food and eating when not hungry.

Genetic background is also significant, and some people gain weight more easily than others. And, adding pounds can prompt physiological changes that make them harder to lose.

“For sure, many elements of our environment in modern society are contributory, but I don’t think that’s the whole picture,” said Margaret Stefater-Richards, medical director of the EMPOWER Program at Boston Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. “Even when weight gain is related largely to the environment, that creates a physical change that can make treating the disease much harder than just changing the environment.”

The battle against pediatric obesity is largely being waged on two levels: individual and societal.

Children and teens with obesity engage with specialists who today provide multidisciplinary care that acknowledges the condition’s complexity by addressing several aspects of a child’s life.

Ensuring a healthy lifestyle and nutrition are central pillars. But care can also address mental health issues and, beginning at 12 or 13, can include more intensive interventions such as bariatric surgery and GLP-1 medications, which have proven effective in reducing body weight by 10 to 20 percent.

Lauren Fiechtner, director of nutrition at Mass General Brigham for Children and HMS associate professor of pediatrics, spent 15 years developing one such program. The multidisciplinary Healthy Weight Clinic teams pediatricians, dietitians, and community health workers to guide children and their families through a yearlong treatment program addressing both lifestyle change and social determinants of health.

The clinic involves 30 hours of direct contact, occurring every other week for the first six months, then monthly thereafter. Those face-to-face or telephone sessions are augmented by multiple weekly educational texts about weight control and making healthy lifestyle changes and community resources in the area. It is one of six family healthy weight programs recognized by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A randomized control trial showed it is effective at reducing BMI, binge eating, and improving quality of life. Today, Fiechtner said, it is being used in nine states, with additional expansion and training of other pediatric practices planned.

Such intensive lifestyle interventions are part of what experts describe as a layered approach to obesity in children and adolescents. While a healthy diet and increased physical activity are key elements, experts say that many patients need more support.

“Physical activity  — while it has many health benefits, including weight maintenance — is actually not great for weight loss,” said Rachel Whooten, assistant professor of pediatrics at HMS and a specialist in pediatric endocrinology and obesity medicine at Mass General Brigham for Children.

For many patients, struggling with weight has been a constant for years, Whooten said. Many have experienced bullying, social ostracization, and have a negative self-image. So Whooten often doesn’t focus on a numerical weight goal but rather on improving their ability to do things they enjoy in life. 

“We have to establish what success is,” Whooten said. “We try to move away from a number on a scale and instead feel happy, healthy, well-supported, and able to do what you want to with good energy.”

Bariatric surgery is considered an effective and long-term way to reduce weight and is available for youth with severe obesity who are age 13 or older.

GLP-1 medications, two of which — Wegovy and Saxenda — have been approved for children 12 and older with severe obesity, are another powerful tool, clinicians say. Those medicines, however, may soon be harder to get, with insurers expected to reduce coverage in January for obesity alone, leaving the drugs available to those with diabetes or diabetes and obesity.

A wild card in that scenario is the deal President Trump announced in November with drug makers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to reduce the cost of two popular GLP-1 drugs, Wegovy and Zepbound, as well as two obesity pills expected to soon gain regulatory approval.

New research into obesity’s genetic roots has the potential to further individualize treatment. Stefater-Richards is growing gut organoids in the lab from tissue taken during bariatric surgery in hopes of better understanding the biological processes at work and identifying new drug targets.

“We know how these medications work, but clearly GLP-1 is not the only mechanism regulating body weight,” said Stefater-Richards, who was the first author of a review article on GLP-1 medications in April in the journal Pediatrics. “There are other types of medications out there that may be developed to produce a bigger effect.”

While clinicians and medical researchers focus on the patient, public health researchers like Gortmaker and Erica Kenney, associate professor of public health nutrition, have been focusing their efforts at a community and societal level, developing and deploying programs to prevent obesity and turn the epidemic around.

Kenney’s research focuses on improving food quality and access to disadvantaged children. She’s also looking hard at food marketing to children, particularly campaigns that target youth on social media.

Kenney has also worked with Gortmaker on the Harvard Chan School’s Childhood Obesity Intervention Cost-Effectiveness Study, CHOICES. Founded by Gortmaker, the study’s researchers focus on policy implementation, using microsimulation modeling to compare costs and outcomes of policies and programs to determine bang for the buck.

The group has created a National Action Kit, which outlines 19 different programs and policies that would reduce childhood obesity across four broad areas: at school, early childcare and out-of-school community, government, and clinical.

Some of the suggestions have already been enacted and have been shown to make a difference.

One policy change led to improved foods available in WIC, the government’s major food aid program for low-income mothers and children, leading to less juice, more whole grains, and more fruits and vegetables purchased. Enacted in 2009, Gortmaker said the changes have been shown to reduce obesity among kids.

Efforts toward a similar change to the government’s largest food program, SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — which serves some 42 million Americans — are now just being initiated. Waivers effective in January have been granted to 12 states, allowing them to exclude certain foods, such as sugary beverages, from SNAP benefits.

Another policy in the CHOICES National Action Kit, adopted in 2018, requires calorie counts on fast food restaurant menus. CHOICES estimates that saves $22.60 in healthcare costs for every dollar invested in implementing this change.

One early and obvious target — reducing consumption of sugary beverages — has proven anything but easy. One victory removed soft drinks from schools, which CHOICES is following up with a push to ensure that water is available on school lunch lines — another cost-effective strategy to prevent excess weight gain.

Efforts to reduce sugary beverage consumption more broadly, through increased taxes, has been a tougher sell. They’ve been adopted in major municipalities, such as San Francisco, Seattle, and Philadelphia, but not at the state or national level in the U.S.

Experience shows, though, that they can be effective, with consumption declines of up to 20 percent in Seattle and Philadelphia, along with evidence for impact on weight.

Another recommendation from Gortmaker and Kenney is to improve both food and physical activity environments in all school settings — early care, primary and secondary schools, and out-of-school time — along with improved nutrition education programming, which is very limited.

A lack of such programs, Gortmaker said, leaves food industry advertising as a major influence on children’s and adolescents’ food choices.

“If children aren’t getting nutrition education in schools, they are certainly getting tons of nutrition marketing from the food industry,” Gortmaker said. “It’s driving profits for these industries.”

William Shakespeare is the most celebrated playwright in the English language, but we really know so little about him.

He wrote 154 poems and about 39 plays between 1592 and 1612. But he didn’t leave diaries, journals, or any other biographical record, so his “passionate life — his access through personal experience and observation to the intense emotions he represents — is almost completely mysterious,” according to Stephen Greenblatt, John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities and one of the foremost experts on the Bard of Avon.

Scholars agree that this much is known: Shakespeare was born in Stratford, England, in 1564 and died in 1616. At 18, he married Anne (also known as Agnes) Hathaway, who was 26 years old. They had three children: Susanna, and twins Judith and Hamnet, who died at 11 of an unrecorded cause. The family lived in Stratford and Shakespeare in London, where he plied his trade for two decades.

The upcoming holiday season film “Hamnet,” based on a 2020 bestselling novel by Maggie O’Farrell, fills in some of the gaps in Shakespeare’s life with marvels of historical fiction. O’Farrell’s book reimagines the life of Shakespeare’s family and delves into the grief and loss over the death of the young boy and how it led to the creation of one of the playwright’s greatest works.

It is “a story of deep loss,” Greenblatt wrote in a 2021 review of O’Farrell’s book, “and its impact upon a marriage that was already buckling under almost intolerable strain.” He added, “With her touching fiction O’Farrell has not only painted a vivid portrait of the shadowy Agnes Hathaway Shakespeare but also found a way to suggest that Hamnet was William Shakespeare’s best piece of poetry.”

Moviegoers who insist on verifiable historical accuracy, be forewarned: In the new telling, written by O’Farrell and Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao, Hamnet dies of the plague, which according to Greenblatt, seems a “reasonable hypothesis,” since the disease was commonplace in 17th-century England.

Also, in O’Farrell’s story, the love between Shakespeare and his wife survives their son’s death. For Greenblatt, that is a surprising plot twist. “I have a very different account of the relationship between Shakespeare and his wife,” Greenblatt said.

In his review, Greenblatt wrote that “scattered archival traces” suggest an “unhappy marriage.” He pointed to Shakespeare’s will, which lacks “any significant bequest to his wife of 34 years,” or any terms of endearment, which was customary at that time. Shakespeare bequeathed his wife his “second best bed with the furniture.”

Greenblatt continued, “There is no evidence that the busy playwright shared his rich inner world with his wife or that he involved himself in the daily lives of his offspring.”

But there is a point of agreement between the scholar and the fiction writer: the possible link between Hamnet’s death and the writing of “Hamlet.”

In the 2004 article “The Death of Hamnet and the Making of ‘Hamlet,’” Greenblatt argues that “Hamlet” could be traced to Shakespeare’s “personal experience of grief” over his son’s death.

The play was written in or around 1600, four years after Hamnet’s death, and is among “one of the deepest explorations of grief and loss ever written,” Greenblatt said.

For her part, O’Farrell said, in a 2020 interview with the Folger Shakespeare Library, that she believes it unlikely that “without [Hamnet’s] death, we would have the play ‘Hamlet.’” She said she first heard about Hamnet in high school from an English teacher and she had always been intrigued by “the link between this lost boy and this stupendous tragic play.”

In Greenblatt’s view, “Hamlet” must have been fueled by Shakespeare’s own heartache and the “accidental conjunction of names” because Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable in Stratford records of the era.

“Most interesting, of course, is that among Shakespeare’s Stratford friends was a couple, Hamnet and Judith Sadler,” Greenblatt said. “When Shakespeare and his wife had twins, they named them Hamnet and Judith. Elizabethan spelling being quite irregular — names were spelled in a startling range of ways — it was not difficult to confound the names Hamnet and its close cousin Hamlet.”

The legend of Hamlet, a Danish prince, and his revenge for the murder of his father had been around for centuries, said Greenblatt. Shakespeare’s principal source of inspiration for his “Hamlet” was an account by a French writer, François de Belleforest, he said.

Scholars agree that a play about Hamlet had been performed on the English stage and was likely authored by Thomas Kyd, an English playwright and Shakespeare’s contemporary. The play didn’t survive.

“Scholars call the lost play the Ur-‘Hamlet,’ that is, the ‘original’ ‘Hamlet,’ but there was nothing original about it,” said Greenblatt.

It is likely that as the leading playwright in a theater company of which he was a shareholder, Shakespeare decided to take on ‘Hamlet.’

“If the so-called Ur-‘Hamlet’ was exciting the London public, then Shakespeare may have decided — or been pressured by his colleagues — to do his own version,” said Greenblatt.

“The trouble, of course, for everyone else is that Shakespeare was an astonishing genius. We know almost nothing about the Ur-‘Hamlet’ except that whoever wrote it seems to have come up with the idea of the ghost who calls for revenge — that was not part of the legend. In other words, the ghost was not Shakespeare’s own idea. But just think of what Shakespeare did with it.”

Community colleges are scrambling to adjust to the many disruptive changes AI is bringing both to the classroom and to how the institutions need to think about preparing students for the future.

That was the subject of a Harvard Business School conference focused on overcoming the unique financial, administrative, and curricula challenges facing the schools, which offer both vocational training and an option for the first two years of a bachelor’s degree program.

What has become clear is that AI cannot be ignored.

“More than 70 percent of employers say they’d rather hire someone with less experience but who understands AI than someone with more experience. That’s a big change,” said Lisa Gevelber, chief marketing officer for Gemini, Google’s AI product.

The daylong conference was organized by the Project on Workforce at HBS, the Education Design Lab, and Axim Collaborative, a Harvard-MIT nonprofit that supports organizations that help students overcome obstacles that keep them from completing a community college education. It featured leaders from both the public and private sectors as well as community college administrators and scholars.

Schools get free access to Google AI for Education, where they can find AI training for students, faculty, and staff, as well as a career certification program. They can also share best practices with other schools. Understanding how to use AI will help students land not only a good job, but meaningful work for the rest of their lives, said Gevelber. “And that’s really our goal.”

To avoid creating a new digital divide, it will be “very, very important that we create an AI-literate generation of people up and down the income distribution across the country,” said Joseph Fuller, faculty co-director of the Project on Workforce at HBS. “If we can give them the social and hard skills that will allow them to consider entrepreneurship, that can unlock a lot of dynamism and have a great impact on income inequality issues.”

“We know that not all postsecondary pathways look the same, so we are focused on making sure everybody has an educational opportunity to thrive in a changing economy. Community colleges provide critical pathways to work and four-year degrees, so we were honored to support this important work,” said Stephanie Khurana, Axim chief executive.

Besides helping students with classes and preparing for the future, AI can also help inform curriculum.

It’s not enough to tell people struggling to finish community college what opportunities for education and training are out there, said Deniece Thomas, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development. They need to be shown practical pathways that make it possible for them to complete their studies.

In order to overcome the frequent disconnect between state agencies and local education officials, Tennessee works closely with a wide range of institutions to ensure residents get clear, up-to-date information about the assistance available to them, she said.

Getting accurate and timely labor market data, and insights into what industry sectors are looking for so students learn marketable skills, historically has been a huge challenge for community colleges. Now, AI tools can extract data and interpret market information to help bridge that gap.

“Credentials of value to us are critical,” said Mike Flores, chancellor of the Alamo Colleges District in San Antonio, Texas. “And that our students come in and are able to exit with a credential that’s going to provide them with a family-sustaining wage, or they’re able to transfer to the University” and graduate with a bachelor’s degree that provides them with that salary.

As more firms eliminate jobs because of AI, especially at the entry level, community colleges need to “be realistic” about which jobs will still exist and which skills still marketable, said Fuller.

According to the project’s research, 12 percent of jobs today are being done more productively by AI than by human workers. However, in about 17 percent of jobs, AI can take over tasks that once required specialized training or credentials, opening those positions to a broader range of the workforce.

“So, this is not all doom and gloom,” said Fuller. “We just have to be realistic.”

Outside of the tech community and the academy, at the moment most people are only dabbling with AI and learning what it can do. That’s fine for individuals, but it’s not a winning strategy for community colleges, Gevelber advised school administrators.

Food can tell stories that the history books leave out. 

That was the message of an A.R.T.-hosted conversation about a forthcoming stage adaptation of Jessica B. Harris’ book “High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America.” 

The production, conceived by American Repertory Theater Associate Artistic Director Dayron J. Miles and co-created by movement-based artist Mayté Natalio, aims to bring the history of African American cuisine to life through all five senses. Miles and Natalio were joined on the Nov. 20 panel by Harris and moderator Charles M. Blow.

“Food, like theater, tells stories of history, memory, and connection,” said Blow, a journalist and the inaugural Langston Hughes Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

The show, which is still in development, will be a tactile, immersive experience, Natalio said. “I want moments of people actually putting their hands into black-eyed peas or putting their hands into rice. … There’s that concept of lineage and passing down that we’re trying to do subtly.” 

The performance will drop audience members into critical moments in African American history, from slave ships crossing the Atlantic to Revolution-era Philadelphia to the Great Migration.

But food will be the centerpiece. Audience members will sample the recipes brought to life on stage, then take part in a family-style meal. 

“At the A.R.T., our mission is to expand the bounds of theater, always including the audience as a partner,” Miles said. “We want to transcend the opportunity of building community into communion, going to that next level and sharing food.” 

The creators lit up in anticipation of dramatizing some of the historical figures in Harris’ book, including Hercules Posey and James Hemings, enslaved chefs who cooked for George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. 

“They existed at the same time,” Miles said. “They lived blocks away from each other in federal Philadelphia. We don’t know if they ever met, but they probably met. What was that conversation like? What was that exchange?”

Food was also a part of the panel discussion. Audience members enjoyed gumbo and Hoppin’ John prepared by Chef Lambert Givens of Hunter’s Kitchen & Bar in South Boston. 

Black-eyed peas, a key ingredient in Hoppin’ John, originated on the African continent and were brought to America on slave ships as sustenance for the enslaved passengers, according to Harris.

“You’re not doing much fresh anything, because it’s not going to last,” she explained. “You’ve got to have something that is going to be nutritionally nourishing enough to keep your cargo alive, so black-eyed peas fit the bill.” 

The humble pea continues to have a rich role in cuisine throughout the Americas, from acarajé, a classic street food in parts of Brazil, to rice and bean dishes eaten throughout the Caribbean. In some parts of the U.S., black-eyed peas remain a New Year’s staple for good luck. 

Harris’ best-seller inspired a Netflix docuseries by the same name. It was the show that first inspired Miles to develop a theatrical experience for A.R.T. 

“We, as descendants of Africa who were taken, can only [trace our roots] back so far,” Miles said. “I think I’ve always longed for that bigger and deeper and more ancient connection.” 

Watching the docuseries gave him that feeling. He called A.R.T. Artistic Director Diane Paulus as soon as he saw it. 

Miles and Natalio have been developing “High on the Hog” through the Harvard ArtLab faculty in residence program. 

The show is expected to be one of the first A.R.T. productions to be staged in the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Creativity & Performance, which is scheduled to open in the fall of 2026. 

“As we were designing the building and working with our architects, we already knew that we were going to do this show,” Miles said. “This show was like the North Star. It was the challenge, the assignment that we gave our architects. We were like, [the building] needs to be able to facilitate immersive experience.”

The event was co-presented by A.R.T., the ArtLab at Harvard, and Harvard University’s Committee for the Arts (HUCA), which sponsors the ArtsThursday program.

It’s no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic was a seismic event for the nation’s schoolchildren.

But the disruption wasn’t evenly distributed. And scholars are only now beginning to understand the differential effects.

Sean Reardon, a renowned sociologist of education and inequality at Stanford, brought one such pattern to campus last week: Girls’ math scores suffered more than boys’ during and after the pandemic, and lower-income girls now face steeper “gender gaps” in math than do those in more affluent communities, all for reasons that are less than completely clear.

The public seminar was held last Tuesday evening by the Center for Education Policy Research. It was a homecoming for Reardon, who earned his masters’ and doctorate at Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) in the 1990s.

At a packed lecture hall in HGSE’s Longfellow Building, Reardon previewed unpublished results developed alongside two of his graduate students, Sadie Richardson and Sofia Wilson. They’re based on an ongoing analysis of the nation’s educational recovery from COVID-19, conducted at Stanford’s Education Opportunity Project, where Reardon is faculty director.

That project has established a clearinghouse of American education data, bearing on segregation and inequality of opportunity as well as COVID-related learning loss. And, even with the peak of the pandemic still in recent memory, the amount of data available is massive, Reardon noted, because of its granularity.

At each of 7,000 school districts across 41 states, he said, “We might have up to 336 observations: 14 years, six grades, two subjects, two genders [under study].” In the end, that means the analysis weighed roughly 320 million test scores altogether.

That data — skewed as it is by geography, test type, and availability of data — requires statistical massaging before sociologists can make fair comparisons. Still, its scale allows for rigorous insight.

Reardon said: “You know the old joke: The couple comes out of the restaurant and the wife says, ‘The food was terrible!’ And the guy says, ‘Yeah, but at least there was a lot of it.’ Our data is imperfect, but there’s a lot of it.”

The scale allowed for what Reardon dryly called “a difference-in-difference-in-difference-in-difference analysis … a four-way interaction” between pandemic effects, individual school districts, time, and gender.

The Stanford model anticipated that girls’ math scores would lag behind boys’, as they’ve done historically (though the opposite is true in reading). And, after a period of tightening, it showed that the math gender gap was arguably widening again even before 2019.

But with the most recent data subjected to a large and complex multivariate model, Reardon’s early conclusion is that the setback the pandemic dealt to American girls’ achievement in math was unexpectedly large — and difficult to explain.

One hypothesis, Reardon said, is “that girls were expected to take on more caregiving roles during the pandemic. Younger kids are at home, they can’t go to childcare, and so older girls might have less time to spend on school.”

There’s some evidence to suggest that uneven uptick in non-school responsibilities was real for girls around the world, but Reardon noted that on its own it likely wouldn’t explain a relative decline in math or affect third- through eighth-graders as profoundly.

Reardon’s lab has also weighed a related theory that the pandemic, which some argue caused a reversion to traditional gender roles, saw girls “given a message that maybe math isn’t as important,” or — separately — a possibility that girls were more affected by the psychic toll of loss and lockdowns.

Though Reardon’s model had millions of scores to work with, his team also included other variables. Notably, that included an array of socioeconomic and political measures from a school district’s poverty rates and COVID-19 mortality to an index of “social connectedness” derived from Facebook data.

With those factors added, the conclusions became even more surprising, Reardon noted.

First of all, actual pandemic-related disruption (time spent in remote schooling and local rates of temporary joblessness or remote work) didn’t seem to affect the gap. But other things did.

“Prior to the pandemic, this is the pattern: Score gaps are more boy-favoring in math in affluent places and less so are reversed in poor places,” Reardon said. But in this preliminary study, his team found that, between 2019 and 2024, the pattern flipped: Girls fell behind boys by more in districts with fewer resources.

And they define “resources” broadly. Gaps tended to grow more in communities with low levels of wealth, high rates of COVID mortality, low levels of school staff, or low social capital.

Taken together, Reardon’s team proposes that the widening gender gap in math appears to have been driven by “non-school” factors.

The disruption of community life, feelings of threat and grief that accompanied the pandemic, Reardon concluded, led to “more social isolation, more anxiety and depression, maybe a reversion to traditional gender roles … or more caregiving,” which in turn may have taken a toll on girls’ progress in particular.

Reardon’s talk kicked off CEPR’s annual series of public seminars, part of its Partnering in Education Research program. The next event is scheduled for Dec. 2, with education economist Mahounan Yedomiffi.

“I see the admissions are up,” says Atul Gawande. 

He’s looking at a chart on the wall at Clinic 7, a medical center that primarily serves South Sudanese refugees in Kenya. In the clinic around him, mothers do their best to soothe malnourished babies. 

“The World Food Program cuts started in February, so it’s two months of a lack of food, and now we’re starting to see the surge.” 

The moment is captured in “Rovina’s Choice,” a 22-minute New Yorker documentary from the New Yorker that follows Gawande, professor of the practice of surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, as he investigates the fallout of the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID. 

In public health, “You don’t let problems simply be statistical,” Gawande said in an interview with the Gazette. “You identify where the problems are, you shine a light on them, and you find approaches that remedy the situation in a systemic way that turns things around.” 

For more than two decades, Gawande, who is also an acclaimed writer, has been applying that framework to surgical patients, to end-of-life care, and to global health through his work at USAID during the Biden administration and with Ariadne Labs, a center for health systems innovation that he launched in 2012. His foundational belief: Humans are the only species to have figured out how to double their own lifespan, but work remains to deliver those advances to everyone. 

Gawande’s focus on systemic improvements began at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and in his surgical training at the Brigham. A series of studies, some of which he conducted, had shown that two-thirds of adverse outcomes in hospital settings — causing disability or death — were due to a lack of execution, not a lack of knowledge. 

Gawande wasn’t satisfied with publishing the findings in a medical journal: He wanted to save lives. He led the development of the World Health Organization’s two-minute safe surgery checklist, launched in 2008, which was shown to cut the rate of surgical death by more than 40 percent.

The checklist includes basic questions — What is the anticipated blood loss? Are there any patient-specific concerns? Are there any equipment issues? — that may go uncommunicated or be forgotten under pressure.

“Most of the difficulty is good clinicians, good people in healthcare who are achieving poor outcomes, often due to errors or incoordination,” he said. “Punishment and more training were not going to solve the problem. Instead, you need systems.” 

The work led to Ariadne Labs, a joint center between BWH and the Chan School. The lab develops simple tools that improve the delivery of care for patients around the world. Its safe childbirth checklist was found to have reduced intrapartum stillbirth by 11 percent in a meta-analysis of studies involving 300,000 births worldwide.

Even as his research, public health leadership, and writing took up more of his bandwidth, Gawande remained committed to practicing surgery. It required careful balance of his time, but it kept him up to date on what doctors really faced in the operating room. (It also kept him up to date on music. He often curated playlists to buoy his team through 12- to 14-hour surgeries, and the playlists had to have a little something for everyone.) It also served as an escape.

“There’s no email,” he said. “You don’t get interrupted. You can focus on one thing. Nobody’s allowed to have a bad day; you have to leave it at the door, and if you can’t leave it at the door, then you have to go out the door. We’re all there, focused on one thing together.”

Gawande had to pause his practice in 2022 when he accepted President Joe Biden’s nomination to the role of assistant administrator for global health at USAID, which Gawande described as “the best job in medicine you’ve never heard of.” 

Although he worried that by leaving the operating room he’d lose access to the most exciting innovations in medicine, he found that he gained access to new worlds of medical experience. He managed a team of 2,500 supporting healthcare systems in 65 countries on a budget of about $8 billion a year — as he saw it, delivering arguably the greatest impact of any U.S. agency.

“It amounted to $24 per American taxpayer, out of the $15,000 per taxpayer that goes to the U.S. government. It was a tiny fraction, and they reached hundreds of millions of people.” 

According to an analysis in The Lancet, USAID’s work saved about 92 million lives over two decades.

Gawande stepped down from his post at USAID at 11:59 p.m. on Jan. 19, the day before President Trump’s inauguration. The same week, Trump signed an executive order halting U.S. foreign assistance. USAID was ultimately dismantled.

“The current estimate is about 600,000 lives lost so far” as a result of those cuts, Gawande said. 

Gawande returned to Harvard just as the federal government began imposing deep cuts to research funding, hindering efforts by Ariadne Labs to make surgery safer and improve primary care around the world.

“My feelings are a mix of feelings of horror and anger,” he said. “But also determination. We work to make the human consequences more visible as a first step to address and rectify what’s happened.” 

It was that determination that took Gawande to Clinic 7 at the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya earlier this year. Kakuma was one of many settings where USAID had scaled up public health approaches shown to cut the death rate of severe acute malnutrition in children from 20 percent to less than 1 percent. But funding cuts had sacrificed community health workers, nutrition staff, supplies, and food aid, leaving refugees with just one meal a day. A system that had succeeded had now collapsed.

Gawande followed Rovina Naboi, who had fled war-torn South Sudan and was raising her children in Kakuma. Rovina took her young daughter, Jane Sunday, to the faraway Clinic 7 for life-threatening complications of malnutrition. But resource shortages due to aid cuts forced her to make a terrible decision.

“We’re seeing a massive level of loss,” Gawande said. “It’s horrifying. But I think we can get back on the path of holding accountability, making the loss visible, and beginning to move forward in a way that could help rectify what’s happened.” 

Back at Harvard, Gawande could eventually return to the operating room, and the idea appeals to him: He’s eager to see firsthand how artificial intelligence is working in hospital settings. But right now he’s focused on answering a more urgent call.

“At the current moment, the biggest threat to advancing human life expectancy is the government itself,” he said. “So that’s where I’m concentrating.”

Long before modern pharmaceuticals, our ancestors turned to plants to find cures for ailments from infections to parasites to fevers. A new study by Harvard researchers reveals the deep roots of that relationship: Several hot spots of medicinal plant diversity correspond to regions with long histories of human occupation and ancient medicinal traditions.

“It seems to be a relatively straightforward effect of the time in which humans had to experiment on these new landscapes that they settled in,” said co-author Charles C. Davis, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology and curator of vascular plants in the Harvard University Herbaria. “Human ingenuity takes time — and I think that that’s what we’re seeing. As humans were exploring the flora, they were identifying which plants might actually be useful for medicinal purposes.”

In the study, published in Current Biology, Davis and his colleagues tallied the number of plants used in regions around the world as medicines, lotions, fragrances, intoxicants, and other non-nutritional uses. Those numbers were compared against a baseline of overall floral diversity in 369 regions around the globe.

The analysis included more than 32,000 medicinal plants among more than 357,000 vascular plant species, suggesting that about 9 percent had some kind of documented therapeutic use. The study included only vascular plants — which comprise the great majority of land plants — and did not include mosses, hornworts, and liverworts.

In general, diversity is lowest at high latitudes and increases toward the equator — and that pattern held true for medicinal plants. Not surprisingly, tropical regions with higher plant diversity had more types with documented medicinal uses.

Diversity of medicinal plants

Yet a few regions showed intriguing departures from this trend. The researchers discovered hot spots where the numbers of medicinal plants were relatively high compared to the baseline floristic diversity — particularly India, Nepal, Myanmar, and China. Not coincidentally, these regions also have ancient medicinal plant practices, such as Ayurveda of India and Nepal and traditional Chinese medicine.

“It seems that centuries to millennia of cultural knowledge and human interaction with plants have helped build and maintain this rich diversity,” said lead author Nawal Shrestha, research associate in organismic and evolutionary biology and currently assistant professor at Kathmandu University in Nepal.

Conversely, a few “cold spots” had lower-than-expected numbers of medicinal plants including the Andes, the Cape Provinces at the southern tip of Africa, Madagascar, Western Australia, and New Guinea. Surprisingly, some of these are megadiverse regions with abundant varieties of plants. But the authors acknowledged that the relative paucity of medicinal plants in these areas may reflect incomplete ethnobotanical documentation or heritages wiped out by colonialism.

“Many of these areas have rich local knowledge that has not yet been systematically recorded or incorporated into global databases,” said Shrestha. “It really highlights the need to work with local communities and revive traditional knowledge to better capture these resources.”

Overall, plant biodiversity turned out to be the strongest predictor of the regional diversity of medicinal plants. Strikingly, the second leading predictor was the time of settlement by modern humans — a dynamic not explored in previous studies. Regions with longer histories of human occupation tended to have more plants harvested by humans for medicinal purposes. For example, much of sub-Saharan Africa (the continent with the longest record of human presence) had more plants used for medicinal purposes, while similar latitudes of South America (settled between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago) had relatively fewer.

Plants lie at the root of our healing traditions. At least 25 percent of modern prescription drugs contain ingredients derived from plants. Fever bark (Cinchona lancifolia) was the original source of the antimalarial medicine quinine; foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) contains compounds used in heart medications; Madagascar periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus) was the source of the chemotherapy drugs vincristine and vinblastine; while the Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia) provided the anticancer drug paclitaxel, otherwise known as Taxol.

Numerous studies have documented our ape cousins using plants for medicinal purposes such as wound healing or lotions. Traces of medicinal plants such as yarrow and chamomile have been recovered from dental plaque of hominin fossils.

The earliest known written documentation of medicinal plants comes from a 5,000-year-old clay tablet from ancient Sumer, which recorded drug recipes from more than 250 plant ingredients. References to medicinal plants also appear in ancient texts such as the Bible, the Talmud, the “Iliad,” and the “Odyssey.” Hippocrates — the so-called “founding father” of medicine — recommended some 300 plant remedies such as wormwood for fever, garlic for intestinal parasites, and opium as a narcotic.

But today this ancient heritage is threatened by global losses of biodiversity. Davis said the new study underscored the urgency of conservation and noted that somewhere amid the verdant biodiversity scientists may find “the next great cure.”

“Our findings reveal areas where not just biodiversity, but priceless traditional and local medical knowledge are at risk,” he said. “They must be prioritized for conservation and revitalization — and for future public health benefits to humanity.” The study was conducted with researchers from the Missouri Botanical Garden, New York Botanical Garden, VinUniversity in Vietnam, and LVMH Recherche.

On July 4, 1776, a band of revolutionaries that included Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams announced the birth of a new nation in a bold assertion of national identity known as the Declaration of Independence.

Walter Isaacson’s new book, “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written,” takes as its focal point the document’s second line: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

In this edited conversation, Isaacson ’74, a journalist and author of best-selling biographies of Benjamin Franklin (2003) and Steve Jobs (2011), digs into the story behind the drafting of the sentence, explains why he believes it is so foundational, and argues that a re-examination of the ideas could remind our riven nation of the common values to which we aspire.

What makes this particular sentence “the greatest”? 

I think it’s a sentence that gives the mission statement for what our country can be.

We’re about to enter our 250th birthday, and we’re so polarized that we’re not in the mood for a birthday party. And I think it’s important for people to focus on what’s the mission of our country, what common values do we share, and maybe that’ll lower some of the temperature at least for a year, so that we can have a 250th celebration.

I also think there’s a philosophical depth and beauty to the “We hold these truths to be self-evident” sentence — every word of it.

I go back to my Harvard days when political philosophers John Rawls and Robert Nozick taught John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and what do we mean by “we”? What is a social contract? What is common ground, and how did the commons develop from private property?

I just felt going back to those concepts would be a way for people to have a slightly deeper appreciation for a sentence most of us know almost by heart, but we haven’t reflected on what each word means and how we can live up to the aspiration.

The drafting committee made a number of important edits to the original text. Which ones were particularly meaningful?

Jefferson writes the first draft. He sends it over to Benjamin Franklin on Market Street in Philadelphia, and said, “Would the good Dr. Franklin, with his great wisdom, help improve this?”

Jefferson had started that second sentence by saying, “We hold these truths to be sacred.” And you see on that draft, the dark black slashes that Benjamin Franklin used when he was editing documents, and he changes “sacred” to “self-evident.” They were trying to create a new type of nation in which our rights were based on rationality, not on the dictates or dogma of a religion.

But then, Jefferson says that they’re “endowed with certain rights,” and John Adams puts “endowed by their Creator.” So, you can see just in those edits, our founders balancing the role of divine providence and the role of rationality in creating our rights.

I also went back to figure out what did Franklin mean by “self-evident”? You think, “Maybe that’s just a fancy way to say obvious?” No. Franklin had just been staying in Scotland at the home of David Hume, who had come up with the concept of certain truths that were true by reason or by definition, like “all bachelors are unmarried,” and those self-evident truths he built a philosophy on by contrasting them with synthetic truths, like “Philadelphia is bigger than Charleston.”

And so, you can see when they say people are equal, they don’t mean that they surveyed different people and said, “They’re all equal.” They say, it’s self-evident they’re equal because of the way we enter the social contract. Those were the things I was trying to explore.

I think it gives us some sense of common values that may make our discussion of history a little bit less disputatious, to use Franklin’s word.

The phrase “all men are created equal” referred only to land-owning white men. Indeed, 41 of 56 of the signers enslaved people. How aware were the signers of the contradiction between this lofty statement and their own reality?

They were very aware of the contradiction, even Jefferson, who enslaved more than 400 people and didn’t free most of his slaves even when he died.

But I think they understood the sentence would not only endure, it would grow. It was an aspirational sentence. And of course, the horrible contradiction in the sentence is that Jefferson can write “all men are created equal” and still be an enslaver.

But that sentence does set in motion 250 years of an unfinished project to make the ideals of that sentence real.

That unfinished project, four score and seven years later, is Lincoln at the cemetery at Gettysburg quoting that sentence and saying, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” So that’s part of the process — the Civil War dead all the way through the Civil Rights movements, including women and others, in that phrase.

Jefferson in particular, but also Franklin, think about that sentence as something that has to be made true. It just doesn’t become true on its own.

Franklin, who had once owned two or three slaves when he was a young printer in Philadelphia, becomes appalled at the notion of slavery and becomes, near the end of his life, the president of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery in Pennsylvania.

So that moral growth you see in Franklin is in some way analogous to our nation’s moral growth, in fits and starts, in the subsequent 249 years.

Did the founders anticipate that the guarantees of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” might someday be interpreted to include issues that they could not foresee, such as same-sex marriage or universal suffrage?

Yes. One of the things you see, both in the Declaration and 11 years later in the Constitution, is certain phrases that have the potential to grow and gain meanings as society changes.

The notion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: In the book, I talk about how that defines common ground and the American Dream, which were based on individual rights in the founding of our country.

That sentence talks about the nation being individuals who come together, but it also talks about what we put into the commons. That includes the pursuit of happiness, which in their minds also meant a place of opportunity where each generation could do better.

They’re saying, “What do we put in the commons? What type of services do we put in common — police, health care, schools, defense, fire corps?”

That whole concept of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is how do we both give rights to the individual and respect the type of things that have to be shared in common, and how that together allows each generation the chance to succeed.

With the nation’s political climate so polarized, you write, “One way to restore stability to our politics is to look at issues through the two ideals at the heart of the Declaration’s key sentence, common ground in the pursuit of the American dream.” What do you mean by that?

We get so polarized in our fight, say, over healthcare in the past month or so, that we have to remember that it’s simply about a balance of what goods and services should be totally in the realm of the private individual, and what should be shared in commons.

Benjamin Franklin serves as a guide to this because on healthcare, he says let’s have a public-private partnership for a hospital that will serve all the people of Philadelphia. They decide whether there should be a widows and orphans fund in Philadelphia. They decide that whether the firefighting corps should be paid for by individuals, and only those people should get fire protection, or whether it should be some service that is shared in commons.

They create a balance. Some things get shared in Commons and some things remain or get put in the private realm. Those are the type of fights we’re having now.

But if we looked at it through the notion of the importance of common ground, why our common ground and common shared services give everybody a stake in the health of our democracy and give everybody a foundation for opportunity, for them and their children, then I think we can say these aren’t existential arguments. They’re just a question of getting the balance right.

And that’s what the founders, especially Franklin and Jefferson, who were scientists, understood by studying Newton, by helping understand the flow of electricity, the notion of balances, pluses and minuses, equilibrium and contending forces. And if we could just get back to that sense of what is our common ground, then maybe some of these fights wouldn’t be so bitter.

Olivia Hogan-Lopez ’26 learned some important lessons sailing on the ocean as a girl. One was to keep her eyes open.

“When you’re on the water for so long, you notice it changing from oil and gas spills in the harbor,” said Hogan-Lopez, of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and a member of the Harvard sailing team since 2022. “In more recent years there’s also been a notable increase in red tides and bacteria blooms which negatively impact our beaches and local aquatic systems.”

Over the past several months, Hogan-Lopez, an environmental science and engineering concentrator, has researched the impact of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances on humans and the environment. A broad class of chemicals, PFAS are found in everyday products ranging from rain jackets to water bottles and nonstick cooking pans.

Known as “forever chemicals,” PFAS are extremely persistent in the environment, and some have long half-lives in humans, said Elsie Sunderland, the Fred Kavli Professor of Environmental Chemistry and professor of Earth and planetary sciences. “They have been statistically associated with increased incidences of a wide range of chronic diseases that indicate adverse impacts on immune health, cardiovascular health, inflammation, and risks of certain cancers. Our lab focuses on better characterizing sources of PFAS exposures and interventions that can help people reduce their exposures to these chemicals.”

According to a study conducted by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, PFAS can be found in the blood streams of 98 percent of the U.S. population.

“We don’t really know how it accumulates and bioaccumulates in people,” said Hogan-Lopez. “That is a big part of my research. I’m really interested in figuring out how and what organs it stays in and how that might be linked later to different cancers.”

“We have been so happy to have Olivia in the lab for the last couple of years,” Sunderland said. “During her first year working with us, she mainly worked as a research assistant. This past year she has branched out and is now pursuing her own personal research toward a thesis project examining how PFAS partition and accumulate in different tissues.”

Inspired by environmental toxicology courses, such as “Introduction to Environmental Toxicology,” Hogan-Lopez switched her research focus from mercury to PFAS. Using fish organs and several different types of PFAS, she watches how the chemicals interact with uncontaminated fish organs, clocking the time it takes for them to contaminate the organs.

“I’m really pleased with how it’s turning out, and I have high hopes for the project, but I think, in science, you always have to be careful,” said Hogan-Lopez. “My experiments have been working and I’m really proud and excited to see where it goes. There have been bumps along the road, but it’s a great learning process.”

Another key lab lesson is one she’d already learned sailing: perseverance.

 “Sailing is very similar in that when you’re having a tough time you keep pushing through,” she said. “The coaches are so great, and they tell it to you so many times and then it finally clicks.”

Now a senior, Hogan-Lopez hopes to make the most of the time she has left at Harvard.

“I’m really excited about my thesis and learning through this experience,” Hogan-Lopez said. “I’m really excited about sailing. I want to learn as much as I can before I go.”

A San Francisco pedestrian was severely injured in 2023 when a driver struck her, throwing her in the path of a self-driving car that dragged her 20 feet while attempting to pull over. In the complex circumstances and legal fallout of the crash, educators saw a learning opportunity for future engineers to grapple with the ethical challenges of emerging technologies.

“We framed the case as a cautionary tale and a challenge for improving design in cases where collisions are unavoidable,” said Michael Pope, who led a discussion on the crash for students in “Planning and Learning Methods in AI,” a course in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “How should we design systems for these kinds of unpredictable scenarios? How should we think about the training regime and the learning models we’re using in these systems?”

Pope is a postdoctoral fellow with Embedded EthiCS, a program launched in 2017 that brings philosophy scholars into computer science classrooms to help students grapple with the ethical and social implications of their work. This year brings new emphasis on ethics of AI.

“Students are basically getting a flavor of humanistic education inside their computer science courses,” said Matthew Kopec, program director for Embedded EthiCS. “Having conversations in the computer science classroom about these topics that anchor into their core values, where they can actually talk with each other, learn that different individuals have different values, and defend their values. That’s not something that usually happens in a computer science classroom.”

‘I’m just building a robot here’

Courses tackle a range of issues. An ethics module from “Introduction to Computational Linguistics and Natural-Language Processing” had students discuss the responsibilities of companies that create AI chatbots. In “Introduction to Robotics,” they debated the future of work as automation and AI replace certain jobs. In “Advanced Computer Vision” last year, students examined deepfakes and how the same AI technology that’s used to create online misinformation could also be used to authenticate content and restore digital trust.

In “CS50: Introduction to Computer Science,” where engaging in full-group discussions is difficult due to the class size, philosophers worked with the teaching team to insert short ethics explainers and reflection questions into problem sets. One problem set asked students to build a website that included a blurb about ADA accessibility. Another about filtering and recovering file data had a question about why it might be necessary to blur images; students were then asked to describe a scenario in which data recovery might violate someone’s privacy, and how that work could be done responsibly.

David Malan, who teaches the popular entry-level course, said his motivation for incorporating ethics material was to get students thinking about whether the fact that they can do certain things, technologically, means that they should.

“Too often our students, even after they graduate and are in the industry, are perhaps put in situations where they’re asked to do something by their manager or by the company and they don’t necessarily feel they’re in a position to question or challenge it,” Malan said. “What we wanted to do within the class is create an environment in which students are prompted to think well in advance about how and whether to solve certain problems now that they have the technical savvy to do so.”

Huzeyfe Demirtas, a philosophy postdoctoral fellow in Embedded EthiCS, said many of his computer science students are excited to engage with the philosophy curriculum. But some still view computer science as separate from ethics or social responsibility. Those are the students he’s particularly interested in reaching.

“It’s not so infrequently that we hear things like, ‘Well, I’m just coding’ or ‘I’m just building a robot here,’” said Demirtas, whose own research focuses on questions of moral responsibility, free will, and the metaphysics of causation. “That’s a bit misguided. From simple things like building emojis all the way up to large language models, self-driving cars, and autonomous weapon systems, you name it, we’ll come up with some social, ethical implications.”

Demirtas taught an ethics module this month for the computer science course “Systems Security,” in which students discussed how a company should respond to an attack on its system from an outside hacker. Is it morally OK to booby-trap your own data with a bug that would destroy a hacker’s mainframe? What are the ethics of hacking the hacker to retrieve stolen data?

Demand explodes with ChatGPT use

Kopec said interest in Embedded EthiCS has skyrocketed among computer science faculty. In the early days of the program, it took considerable effort on behalf of co-founders Barbara Grosz and Alison Simmons to convince computer science faculty to add a philosophy module to their already-packed curriculums, he said. Now, demand outweighs the capacity of Embedded EthiCS to run them.

“I haven’t run into a CS professor who doesn’t think that computer science has ethical implications anymore,” Kopec said. “Because of the rapid change with ChatGPT and how it upended everybody’s life, everybody is now convinced that we need to rush to get more ethical reasoning skills and more ethical reflection into the student populations, especially students who are learning computer science. Now the question is, ‘How do you do it, and how do you do it quickly?’”

It’s a question that other colleges and universities are considering as well. Embedded EthiCS has helped other institutions, including Stanford University, University of Toronto, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and University of Nebraska–Lincoln, launch responsible computing programs. With National Science Foundation funding, Harvard has also helped nine members of The Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions, including two California State University campuses and New Mexico State University, pilot ethics programs focused on AI.

Kopec recommends the model of inserting ethics modules in pre-existing computer science curricula because it can be implemented fast to keep pace with AI development without having to wait for a faculty hiring, curriculum building, or course approvals process.

“Over the course of one week we can get all these teams together, train them up really quickly on what an approach like ours is, and then they can leave with all the tools that they need to get a program like that up and running at their own institution,” he said.

While the program gives computer science students a new perspective, it also offers an opportunity for the philosophy researchers to discover new areas of interest. Demirtas’ forthcoming paper examines the so-called “Explainable AI” problem: We often don’t know how complex AI systems make decisions, so what are the ethical implications when those enigmatic “black boxes,” are used to make policing or healthcare decisions?

“I think it’s definitely a two-way street. The research in tech ethics is just getting better overall. Research in philosophy is definitely improving the more we interact with computer scientists,” Kopec said. “I also think that various areas of computer science research will be better informed, because those computer scientists are interacting with philosophers when they’re doing the research.”

Crimson kicker Kieran Corr secured a 45-43 win over Penn last Saturday by hitting a 53-yard field goal with just five seconds on the clock. We asked the sophomore: How do you stay cool under pressure?

Take a deep breath and just trust in your abilities and stay confident.

For kicking, you kick 1,000 balls over a season in practice, and then how many field goal attempts do you actually get? Maybe 15 or 20, if you’re lucky. You just have to be ready no matter what opportunity comes to you at any point in the game.

I’m not trying to teach myself how to kick the ball — like have your foot at this angle and swing this hard. I’m really just trying to keep it simple and trust my abilities. My mindset is if I just do everything I’ve been doing, this should go in, not that I need to change anything or rise to the occasion or do anything special.

When I run out there on the field, I try to get out there first or just run toward the upright. I’m just trying to focus on the kick and not anything else beforehand.

It really just comes down to trying to keep my body loose — doing practice moves and then taking my steps back the same way every time. Three steps back, two to the left. Then getting my feet in good position. I look up, and I give the holder a nod when I feel ready.

It’s just a routine at that point, trying to minimize the distraction, not thinking about anything else. Just follow through.

That was my first game-winning kick. So the game was just over after that kick, which was such a weird feeling to me. As soon as I saw it go in, my instant reaction was, “All right, let’s make the next one.” I was just instantly thinking about the next kick. I’m always just thinking about making the next kick.

And right now, that’s my mentality. How can I focus on the next kick at Yale?

A big thing with kicking is that you’re never as good as they say you are, and you’re never as bad as they say you are, because you’re only as good as your last kick.

Nothing we do during the game is going to radically change how we’re going to perform, because all that work has been put in prior.

It’s exactly like an exam, because you study and you do all the work beforehand, and then that might be like 95 percent and then 5 percent is your actual performance on the exam. You put in so much work just to show a tiny bit of results.

There’s nothing you can do to affect the outcome of the kick, other than just kicking the ball. So there’s no point in worrying about external things. Just control your thoughts, and then the results will follow.

— As told to Anna Lamb/Harvard Staff Writer

In the 60 years since the U.S. government began allowing immigrant physicians into the country to solve the U.S. shortage, foreign doctors have become the invisible foundation of American medicine. Nearly one quarter of the physicians in the country are international medical graduates, according a 2023 report by the American Association of Medical Colleges.

In her new book, “The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed U.S. Healthcare,” Eram Alam, an associate professor of the history of science, explores the history of the migration of foreign physicians to the U.S. In this interview, edited for clarity and length, Alam discusses how foreign physicians ended up tending to millions of American patients in rural and underserved urban communities and how they have changed U.S. healthcare.

Nearly one in four doctors in the U.S. are foreign medical graduates. How did the U.S. become so dependent on foreign physicians to provide healthcare to Americans?

It all really started with the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Three months prior to this legislation, Medicare and Medicaid passed in the United States, and almost overnight, 20 million people had health coverage. The problem was, there weren’t enough doctors to take care of everyone. Part of this bill was designed with attention to the physician scarcity in the U.S., especially in what are called “shortage areas” across the nation. These are urban and rural communities that lack a sufficient number of healthcare workers, and where hospitals tend to be under-resourced, and a large number of patients are on Medicare and Medicaid. These aren’t usually the kinds of places that appeal to most American-trained doctors. If you have options, you might not jump at the chance to practice medicine in a small rural town in Arkansas, for example. So, immigrant physicians were and still are invited to work in these shortage areas.

What are the root causes of the physician shortage in the U.S. and what are the possible solutions?

This has been a problem since the early 1900s, when U.S. medical professionals worked hard to keep the field socially exclusive. They promoted medicine as a white, male, elite profession — one reserved for the wealthy and well-connected. For the first half of the 20th century, organized medicine actively limited entry, keeping the profession small and making it difficult for women and minorities to join. Then, in the post-World War II years, the landscape began to shift. The population was growing, the Civil Rights and women’s movements were gaining momentum, and more people began to see healthcare not as a luxury but as a right. So the population boom, the physician shortage, and the rise in medical demand all came together at the same time and it was clear that the U.S. was simply not equipped to meet this new level of need.

“Experts have said that to end the doctor shortage in the U.S. more work needs to be done to recruit talent from different communities, and to offer loan forgiveness programs so that people can become physicians without incurring massive debt.”

Experts have said that to end the doctor shortage in the U.S. more work needs to be done to recruit talent from different communities, and to offer loan forgiveness programs so that people can become physicians without incurring massive debt. Also, there is a need to reorganize the way that U.S. healthcare functions by using physician assistants and nurse practitioners, and reintroducing community health workers into the picture. Finally, as the wealthiest country in the world and the one that spends the most on healthcare, the U.S. should invest in training and producing enough doctors so that it can share medical expertise globally, rather than relying on importing physicians from abroad.

By some accounts, there are more than 200,000 foreign-born physicians in the U.S. Where do they come from, what specialties do they practice, and where do they go?

The numbers are a little bit vague. There may be 200,000 to 300,000 foreign-born physicians in the United States, and many practice in primary care, the front line of the health system, and other specialties considered the least prestigious and least lucrative in this country. They work in underserved urban and rural areas, where there’s often just one physician for every 3,500 residents. A large number come from India, followed by Pakistan and the Philippines, and, more recently, from Nigeria.

One downside to relying on foreign-born physicians is that many of them receive their medical training in their home countries, often at schools that are funded by local taxpayers. When these doctors move to the United States to practice, it means that the investment made by their own countries benefits the U.S. instead. As a result, their home countries are left with fewer doctors to care for their own populations.

You interviewed many immigrant doctors for your book. What’s the common thread in their experiences working in the U.S.?

Early on, many of the physicians said they felt like they were on the margins of the profession. They explained although they understood the medical sciences, it was the social and cultural side of medicine that took longer to learn. Many of them work in places where they’re often the only doctors around, caring for people at their most vulnerable. That creates a complicated dynamic: They’re the ones providing essential care, yet they’re also very different from the communities they serve. They frequently mentioned that learning to navigate those social and cultural landscapes took time.

“They explained although they understood the medical sciences, it was the social and cultural side of medicine that took longer to learn.”

But 60 years after they started coming to this country, the public image of the South Asian physician changed over the years. How so?

It has evolved a lot. Back in the 1960s, South Asian physicians were just starting to arrive in the U.S., and many people thought of them as outsiders or newcomers to the medical scene. And today, they are a prominent and visible part of the profession, both as first- and second-generation immigrants. We see this not only in the ubiquity of physicians of South Asian origin in hospitals and clinics, but also in mainstream media, from well-known figures like Deepak Chopra, Sanjay Gupta, and Vivek Murthy, to fictional characters on television and in film.

That’s a huge shift — from being largely invisible or unfamiliar in the 1960s to someone like Ashish Jha leading the White House COVID response. Over time, as more first-generation South Asian doctors arrived and established themselves, they became crucial to the healthcare system. They also started to recognize their collective power, organizing and speaking out about issues like workplace discrimination. That growth — from simply being present to actively shaping policy and public perception — played a big part in how they moved into the mainstream and gained wider acceptance and respect. The first immigrant wave really paved the way for the second generation.

Finally, what impact do you think the recent restrictions on the H-1B skilled labor visa program will have on the U.S. healthcare labor force?

Many foreign-trained physicians come on this H-1B visa and they work in underserved hospitals, which tend to be underfunded. Before, the hospitals had to pay approximately $5,000 to sponsor a physician’s visa to work in the United States. Now, they’d have to pay $100,000 per physician. That is a massive increase. In many of these hospitals, especially in rural communities, 100 percent of the physicians are immigrant physicians. These institutions won’t be able to absorb the cost, and the consequences will be that they have fewer physicians, which will affect health outcomes dramatically. The American Medical Association and other organizations have petitioned the administration to make an exception for physicians because immigrant physicians provide vital care to millions of Americans.

Richard Weissbourd and Kiran Bhai are part of the leadership team at Making Caring Common, a Harvard Ed School initiative focused on making moral and social development a priority in child-raising.

Can we become better people — more caring, generous, honest, and just?

The idea that our moral capacities are fixed seems to be deep in the American psyche. At family gatherings, in the playground or classroom, children are often labeled “good” or “bad.” Many Americans are even more inclined to see adults’ moral qualities as set in stone. 

But research indicates that both children and adults have a great capacity for moral growth, and the cost of assuming their morality is fixed is high. Children have nuanced combinations of moral strengths and weaknesses that can evolve in different directions over time — and categorizing a child as bad can cause us to treat them in ways that lead them to fulfill our negative expectations.

When it comes to moral development, we need to adopt what psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset:” a belief in our own capacity, and the capacity of the children we interact with, to continually become more able to be and do good. A child may struggle to share, but that doesn’t mean they’re selfish. It means they’re not able to share yet and they need support and guidance in developing this ability.

There is much that adults can do to support a child’s moral growth, including modeling care, respect, and fairness, guiding children in thinking hard from many perspectives about moral dilemmas, and helping them manage emotions that can cause them to harm others.

Parents and educators can encourage children to be caring — to reach out to a friendless kid on the playground, say, or to be respectful with others even when they’re in a bad mood — and provide them with opportunities to practice caring day to day, whether pitching in around the house or classroom, helping an elderly neighbor, or taking care of a pet.

At the same time, parents and educators can work to expand both their own and their children’s circle of care to include not only their family and friends but those who may drop off their radar — a bus driver, for instance, or a server in a restaurant, or the school custodian.

Crucially, parents can advance children’s moral development — and directly model a growth mindset — by talking openly to them about their moral mistakes and how they plan to avoid repeating them. Through these actions, parents can cultivate a family identity that centers on adding value to others, a powerful way that children internalize a deep and lasting commitment to caring and fairness. 

Our belief in moral growth is no trivial matter. Our country these days often seems to be in a moral free fall. Individualism often eclipses concern for the common good, and Americans of different political stripes are at each other’s throats. We can reverse these trends, but we’ll need to start by believing that we can and must be better.

— As told to Sy Boles/Harvard Staff Writer

Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, explained how “common knowledge” operates on campuses, in politics, and across the wider culture in a conversation with the Kennedy School’s Jennifer Lerner Wednesday at the IOP Forum.

“I know something. You know it. I know that you know it. You know that I know it. I know that you know that I know that you know it, and so on ad infinitum,” said Pinker, defining the term at the center of his latest book, “When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.”

Common knowledge undergirds all sorts of human affairs and social conventions including language and currency, helping shape everything from stock market booms and busts to the formation of political movements, he said.

“Why does a word mean what it means? It’s not because any panel of dictionary editors legislated what the correct meaning of a word is,” Pinker said. “A word means what it means because everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows that that’s what it means.”

Lerner and Pinker spoke about how norms, which are a kind of common knowledge, affect higher education. Pinker, who serves on the Council for Academic Freedom, an association of University faculty that promotes free inquiry, intellectual diversity, and civil discourse on campus, said he’s fascinated by the psychology behind “cancel culture,” especially at colleges.

“Contrary to what ought to be the ethos of academia, namely that only by expressing an idea can we find out whether it’s any good, why is there an urge that certain ideas not be expressed at all?” Pinker wondered.

That state of affairs is not in anyone’s interest, especially at colleges and universities, where students and faculty ought to be free to evaluate hypotheses without judgment or intimidation, he argued.

“In academia, people often treat opinions as signs of internal moral worth,” he said. “You’re a good person or a bad person according to what you believe.”

Asked whether highly objectionable speech in the classroom deserves to be restricted, Pinker said no, the content of someone’s ideas, no matter how odious, shouldn’t lead them to be punished.

“Yeah, it hurts when someone criticizes one of your ideas,” but “too bad,” he said. “If you’re part of this community, you’ve got to sign on to the agreement that your ideas are fair game and that you don’t have any proprietary interest in them not being criticized.”

Today’s media fragmentation and political news silos — along with the emergence of social media figures who amplify conspiracies in order to make money — have made it more difficult for society to identify commonly held objective truths, Pinker noted.

It’s not that common knowledge is in decline, he said. Human beings have mostly fallen short of consensus on life’s biggest questions. What’s changed is that academics, journalists, and others in liberal democracies have started to believe that objective answers to these questions exist and that tools like science and scholarship can lead us to the truth.

“These are deeply weird beliefs in the context of human history,” where it hasn’t been possible until recently to find ‘true’ answers to these questions, he said.

“And so what we’re seeing, I think, is a regression to the way that people always have dealt with big questions that are outside the realm of immediate experience. Namely, why would anyone think there’s a true or false answer to begin with?

“I think what we need to do is not ask the question, why are people no longer believing in the truth, but what is it that ever gets people to sign on to the idea that there is a truth these big questions in the first place?”

Patterns of cardiovascular health during young adulthood strongly predict the risk of heart disease, stroke, and death decades later, according to a new study led in part by Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Using data from the long-running Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study, which has followed more than 5,000 adults across the U.S. over the past 35 years, researchers found that individuals whose cardiovascular health declined between their 20s and 40s were up to ten times more likely to develop heart disease by their 60s than those who maintained or improved their heart health. The study’s results are published in JAMA Network Open.

“In short, our study suggests that change matters: Improvements in cardiovascular health can decrease future heart disease risk and the earlier good habits and heart health are obtained and maintained, the better,” said lead author James Guo, a resident physician of internal medicine at BIDMC and a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School.

Investigators assessed participants’ heart health using the American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8 (LE8), a measure that combines eight key factors known to support and define cardiovascular well-being (diet, physical activity, sleep, body mass index, blood cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, and avoiding tobacco exposure) into a single score ranging from 0 to 100. A higher score reflects better cardiovascular health.

The team identified four distinct longitudinal trajectories of cardiovascular health that tracked cardiovascular health measured by LE8 through the participants’ young adulthood, between their 20s to 40s: persistently high, persistently moderate, moderately declining, and moderate-to-low declining. While all four patterns showed decline in cardiovascular health, some trajectories demonstrated steeper declines than others.

Compared with those maintaining persistently optimal heart health, individuals with poorer cardiovascular health trajectories during young adulthood faced significantly higher risks — ranging from two to ten times greater — of developing cardiovascular disease later in life, including heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, the need for coronary revascularization, and cardiovascular-related death. Even modest declines in LE8 scores were consequential: for every 10-point drop out of 100 points between participants’ 20s and 40s, the risk of developing cardiovascular disease later in life increased by 53 percent.

Young adulthood is a time of transitions: finishing school, starting careers, forming families, and navigating changes in healthcare. It is also a period when heart health often fluctuates. This makes the early years of adulthood an ideal window for what researchers call primordial prevention, building and sustaining healthy behaviors before heart disease risk factors like high blood pressure or diabetes appear.

“These findings highlight a broader public health message: Investing in risk factor prevention through health promotion during young adulthood can yield lifelong benefits, reducing the overall burden of heart disease for future generations,” said Guo. “I believe strongly in the adage attributed to Benjamin Franklin, that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Cardiovascular disease prevention starts with cardiovascular health promotion in early life.”

This study was supported in part by the American Heart Association and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

Elika Bergelson is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Psychology. She also identifies as a cold person (physically if not emotionally).

One fascinating aspect of the human mind is that there are many ways in which information gets encoded, stored, and retrieved. That is, you can “look things up” in different ways: Think of words that start with B! Name all the fruits you’ve ever eaten! This made it hard — but fun — to try to sort by “favorite things.” Here are my top three … all of which happen to be proficient at keeping warm.

Starting around sixth grade, my parents encouraged me to read magazines like National Geographic every weekend, find 20 words I didn’t know, and memorize their definitions and etymology. One article I read was about emperor penguins, and I got obsessed with the whole species from there. When they slide on their bellies, it’s called “tobogganing”; they’re stylishly dressed; and their young huddle together to stay warm and be cared for communally in what are called crèches. Wait ’til you hear about some species’ mating behaviors. 10/10.

This is an amazing kitchen gadget, well worth its weight in counter space. You just add however many cups of rice you want, fill up to the right line with water, press a button, and go. It sings you a song when you start it and another one when it’s ready! It has a programmable timer so you can schedule your rice to be done when you get home … and if you’re late, it will just keep it warm for you. And it’s not just for rice: We use it for steel-cut oats overnight all winter. We even made a cheesecake in it once! 11/10. 

I am a cold person (mostly physically). I am also a dedicated all-weather bike commuter, and I firmly believe that there’s no reason to feel cold if you just dress right. Fleece-lined tights are awesome because they’re relatively thin but warm, and you can be secretly wearing them under your pants from November through March, and only you will know. Win-win. 9.5/10 for surviving winter in New England.

— As told to Sy Boles/Harvard Staff Writer

“We can call it the birth certificate of the U.S.”

David Armitage, Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History, was guiding students back to the world of 1776 as part of his “Declarations of Independence” course, which turns a wide-angle lens on the one-page document that revolutionized global politics, starting in the very nation it announced.

Armitage, author of “The Declaration of Independence: A Global History” (2007), situates the document on a continuum of international calls for rebellion, secession, and natural rights. His syllabus traces its intellectual forebears to the 14th century. The first-year seminar also features analyses and appreciations dated as recently as 2015.

“A birth certificate is an official document which includes the name of the new baby,” Armitage continued. “This is the first public printed document in which the very words ‘United States of America’ appear.”

The semester’s first few weeks were spent digging into letters, pamphlets, and addresses produced around the time the U.S. took its first breaths as an independent republic.

The “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms,” published by the Continental Congress in July 1775, outlines the familiar grievances — on taxes, trade, and military aggression — that had driven the colonists to violence in Lexington and Concord earlier that year.

Soon, the congressmen were logging 12-hour days from their base in Philadelphia, running a military campaign against the world’s leading superpower while laying the foundations for an entirely new way of governing.

“Today we think the outcome was inevitable,” Armitage said in an interview. “But it all could have gone badly wrong. I try to recover that sense of impending doom at the same time as flourishing possibility.”

The founding of the U.S. is top of mind as the country nears a big milestone in 2026. “I wondered about teaching this course in the spring,” shared Armitage, who last offered the curriculum to College first-years about 10 years ago. “But now these students can be experts in time for the 250th birthday next year.”

At the course’s first session, 11 first-years shared their motivations for applying to the course.

Air Force ROTC student Anne Sun ’29 of San Marcos, California, was among those expressing an interest in government and democratic stewardship.

“Knowing my service to the country, I really wanted to understand its roots and ideals,” she later said.

Others were primed by 21st-century cultural products. Credited as inspiration were Nathan Hale’s “Hazardous Tales” graphic novels, the PBS animated series “Liberty’s Kids,” and of course, the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” which just celebrated its 10th anniversary.

“‘Hamilton’ has been vital in animating a sense of how alive and current and engaging the founding period can be,” Armitage said.

The British-born, naturalized U.S. citizen first turned his attention to the Declaration of Independence circa 2003, a time of increased isolationism in U.S. politics.

“I felt very strongly that it was imperative to globalize American history,” Armitage said. “My claim was that if you could show that for the single most important, prestigious, and resonant statement of American values at the very moment of the United States’ birth, then you could globalize pretty much any other aspect of American history.”

His scholarship showed Thomas Jefferson, primary drafter of the Declaration of Independence, to be an adherent of a style typical of the era’s diplomats. Residents of the 13 colonies saw their belonging in a world of deeply interconnected trade and empire. The document’s assertion of state rights would have been paramount.

Eighteenth-century white Americans were less concerned with the “self-evident” truths that helped propel later struggles for racial and gender equality, though African Americans of the time were quick to see the promise.

“The document’s major purpose was putting up a shingle to the rest of the world and saying three things,” Armitage explained. “No. 1, we’re open for business. Two, you can make alliances with us. Third, we are going to be good members of the international community, and we will respect its laws and its rules.”

The 1,400-word Declaration is arranged into five sections, with its poetic statements on liberty and equality situated in the second. The third and longest section functions as a charge-sheet against King George III. As Armitage explains in his book, the climactic accusation concerning “domestic insurrections” features coded 18th-century language suggesting the monarch had encouraged uprisings by enslaved Black populations. It’s packaged with more overtly racist phrasing condemning Britain’s alliances with Indigenous North Americans.

“They did consciously profess liberty, justice, and equality while still hindering the liberty and equality of people of color,” observed Chuka Okwumabua ’29 of Atlanta. “But they recognized this hypocrisy; they were not naïve. Jefferson talked about the fact that in the future there would be more progress and equality for all.”

Learning about 1776, in the language of 1776, upends romanticized notions of U.S. history.

“I had no idea that the colonists thought of themselves as fellow British citizens who really wanted reconciliation before independence,” Sun said. “I didn’t know that the British king forfeited his right to rule, that he was the one who declared Americans to be rebellious.”

The uneven reach of Europe’s great Enlightenment-era thinkers also surprises.

“I always thought the Founding Fathers were all reading the same texts,” Okwumabua said. “In actuality, there was a societal consciousness being developed across mankind during this period, with people from all around the world coming to share certain ideas.”

The U.S. may have formalized the world’s first Declaration of Independence. But it was hardly the last. Armitage’s quest to globalize American history has also meant tracking the document’s impact across five continents.

“I’ve found about 140 or 150 other declarations of independence,” he told the class. “In fact, more than half of the countries now represented at the United Nations have a document they call a declaration of independence.”

Students saw for themselves during a whirlwind visit to Philadelphia to catch the Museum of the American Revolution’s “The Declaration’s Journey” exhibit, for which Armitage served as a consultant.

The show, mounted in celebration of next year’s 250th, features an original 1776 broadside as well as objects connected with declarations of independence for Haiti (1804), Chile (1818), Mexico (1821), India (1947), and more.

“To see that the formatting, the wording, was almost a direct replica of our Declaration of Independence was incredibly inspiring,” Sun shared.

A special viewing was also arranged at Houghton Library, which holds one of 24 known surviving copies from the Declaration’s original printing.

Also displayed for the class were other Revolution-era objects, including a first edition of Thomas Paine’s pro-independence “Common Sense” pamphlet and John Hancock’s July 6, 1776, letter to a Boston-based general, instructing him to read the Declaration to troops on Cambridge Common.

The general public will be able to see some of these treasures when Houghton opens its own semiquincentennial exhibit next summer.

“I like to introduce my students to the physical forms in which these ideas and documents originally circulated,” Armitage explained. “I want them to see, oh, a broadside, single sheet of the Declaration is very different from a little book.”

America’s birth certificate appeared downright modest, its proportions akin to a placemat. A burst of rust-color stains cloud the document’s title. Wrinkles show where it was once folded, perhaps for placement in a pocket.

Yet the ideas it articulates, in tiny lettering, keep changing the world.

“It’s sobering to realize that the founders weren’t these gods, these deities who created a perfect nation from scratch,” Okwumabua said. “They put some of the pieces in place. But we, as contemporary Americans, have equal power to continue that legacy.”

Three Harvard College seniors are among the 32 U.S. Rhodes Scholars selected for 2026, a tie with three other schools for the highest number of U.S. awardees. Three newly announced international students have also won Rhodes Scholarships this year, adding to two previously named from Australia and Pakistan.

The scholarship, established in 1902 through the will of Cecil Rhodes, provides full financial support for two to three years of postgraduate work at Oxford for students focused on exemplary academic study and public service. The eight students from Harvard will start at Oxford in the fall, pursuing graduate studies in a diversity of fields — from computer science to comparative literature.

Sazi Bongwe is an English concentrator from Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served as a writer and editor for the Harvard Crimson and Harvard Advocate. His work has also appeared in media outlets such as The Nation and Africa is a Country. At Oxford, he hopes to pursue two one-year master’s degrees, one in literature and another in visual arts.

Anil Cacodcar, of Lafayette, Louisiana, is a double concentrator in economics and human developmental and regenerative biology. His senior thesis uses news coverage of fentanyl and its relationship to overdose deaths to examine the role of fear in regulating human behavior during epidemics. As chair of the Harvard Public Opinion Project, he leads a group of researchers producing the nation’s largest survey on political attitudes of young Americans. He also volunteers with Boston Healthcare for the Homeless. He plans to continue studying economics at Oxford.

Jay Chooi, of Malaysia, is a joint computer science and mathematics concentrator. At Harvard, he has worked on AI preparedness and safety. His recent investigation with the MIT Technology Review found that OpenAI products Sora and Chat GPT-5 reproduced caste-based biases widely experienced in India.

Emma Finn, of Annapolis, Maryland, is a dual concentrator in mathematics and classics, completing theses in both disciplines. She will also earn a master’s in statistics this spring via the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Finn plans to spend her first year at Oxford exploring how creativity emerges in biological and mechanical systems while completing a project-based research in statistics course. Her second year will be spent pursuing a master’s in statistics and machine learning.

Yael S. Goldstein, from Barrington, Rhode Island, is a philosophy concentrator whose senior thesis examines the human right to housing. Goldstein has volunteered with the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter, and as a host for WHRB, Harvard’s student radio station. The accomplished classical musician performs oboe and English horn with the Harvard Bach Society Orchestra. At Oxford, Goldstein plans to continue studying philosophy.

Helen He, from China, is a joint concentrator in computer science and East Asian studies, with an interest in using technology to tell stories about human history. She plans to spend her first year at Oxford pursuing a master’s degree in computer science. For her second year, she is considering graduate-level studies in the Traditional China department, devoted to the philosophy, culture, and history of pre-modern and early modern China.

The southern tip of South America was one of the last regions of the world to be populated by modern humans, but the early history of settlement has remained murky.

A new study by Harvard researchers sheds new light on this mystery with the discovery of a previously unknown ancient lineage that endured for more than eight millennia and gave rise to a surprisingly diverse mix of indigenous cultures.

“We found this new lineage, a new group of people we didn’t know about before, that has persisted as the main ancestry component for at least the last 8,000 years up to the present day,” said Javier Maravall López, lead author of the new paper and a Ph.D. student studying human evolutionary biology at the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “It’s a major episode of the history of the continent that we just weren’t aware of.”

In a paper published in Nature, a team of international researchers analyzed DNA from more than 230 ancient people going back 10,000 years in the central Southern Cone of South America, an area roughly bounded by the Andes Mountains, Amazon rainforest, and the grassy plains of the Pampas. Most of the DNA samples came from modern-day Argentina.

The southern tip of the Americas was one of the last corners of the globe reached by the diaspora of modern humans. The oldest firmly established evidence of human presence in the region is an archaeological site about 14,000 years old at Arroyo Seco in the Pampas of Argentina (when it was settled remains a hotly contested topic, and some scholars contend that the region was populated thousands of years earlier).

Previous genetic studies have shown that by 9,000 years ago Native Americans had begun to differentiate into three identifiable groups: one in the central Andes, another in the tropical lowlands of Amazonia, and a third to the south in the Pampas, Chile, and Patagonia. But much of the population history remained unknown, and studies of ancient DNA have lagged behind efforts in Europe and Asia.

“This part of the world was almost a blank spot on the map,” said David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, professor of human evolutionary biology, and senior author of the new paper. “Like most of South America, there was very little data.”

In the new study — a collaboration of 68 co-authors across the globe — researchers obtained new samples of ancient DNA from bones and teeth of 238 indigenous individuals up to 10,000 years old.

The new study boosted the number of ancient DNA samples from the central Southern Cone more than 10-fold. These new data were combined with existing ancient DNA from 588 other indigenous people from across the Americas who lived from 12,000 years ago up to the time of European contact.

Researchers sequenced the ancient DNA and focused on a select set of 2 million positions on the genome known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which vary between humans. With statistical analysis, researchers can make inferences about the genetic relationships among the individuals — and identify which ones shared common ancestry and which were more distantly related.

They discovered a lineage that appeared by 8,500 years ago and became the core component of the ancestry of central Argentina, mixing with other populations on its edges.

This finding is intriguing because the people of that region developed a diverse array of languages and cultures. Apparently, that diversity grew on home soil among largely homogeneous populations — not from migrations by other peoples.

“People with the same ancestry, in an archipelago-like fashion, were developing distinctive cultures and languages while being biologically isolated,” said Maravall López.

All told, the researchers found the region hosted at least three “deep lineages”: the newly discovered one in central Argentina, another present in the Andes by about 9,000 years ago, and a third established in the Pampas by 7,700 years ago.

This newly identified central Argentina lineage expanded to the south, mixed with the Pampas population 3,300 years ago or earlier, and, eventually, became the dominant ancestry.

In the northwest, the central lineage interbred with another ancient population from the Andes region, possibly by 4,600 years ago.

Researchers also found hints of the common ancestors of all these populations.

One person who lived in the Pampas about 10,000 years ago belonged to a population that already had become distinct from others in the Andes and Amazonia — and had genetic similarities to all later peoples in the Southern Cone.

In future studies, researchers hope to fill in the remaining gaps in the timeline and geography of these ancient Americans. In Europe, Central Asia, and China, researchers are building large databases with increasingly dense samples from specific places and time periods.

Reich hopes similar databases will be assembled in South America.

“With large ancient DNA sample sizes it is possible to learn details about the questions that really matter to many archaeologists — questions about how people are related to each other at a fine scale within archaeological sites as well as regionally,” he said. “With ancient DNA data technology now, it is possible to build refined maps of population size change and migration, as now exist in rich detail in Europe, and as this study begins to do for Argentina. Such maps are transformative for our understanding of how people lived long ago, revealing demographic information about the past that was simply inaccessible before.”

While past studies have explored how cancer patients’ financial health influenced their risk of mortality, new research digs in deeper by zeroing in on objective data: credit scores. It found that when a cancer patient’s credit score drops — regardless of where it started pre-diagnosis — odds of survival decrease drastically. The findings were presented earlier this month at the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress and have not been peer-reviewed.

Previous research relied on self-reports of financial burden, according to study author Benjamin James, chief of general surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. While helpful for understanding patients’ subjective experiences, such reports are prone to recall bias. It’s incredibly difficult to gather objective measures, James says, because clinical and financial data are housed by separate institutions with different privacy rules.

After years of negotiation, James and his team received deidentified clinical data from roughly 90,000 cancer patients in the Massachusetts Cancer Registry alongside financial information from a national credit bureau. The researchers adjusted for mortality-dependent variables, such as cancer type and stage, socioeconomic status, and race, and divided the credit scores into tiers (300-600, 600-660, 660-780, and 780-850). They found that patients who experienced a drop of two tiers within a year were 29 percent more likely to die. For those who experienced a two-tier drop within six months, that number increased to 63 percent.

In this conversation edited for clarity and length, James explained the implications of his team’s findings.

You focused on credit scores — why is that?

A credit score is a really good marker of somebody’s overall financial health. And, crucially, it changes over time. The crux of the question that we’re asking in this study is: What is the impact on patients’ long-term survival if they’re experiencing financial toxicity? If you get a medical bill that you can’t pay, or you can pay it but it means you’re going to have to refinance your home, is that more likely to cause you to die of your cancer than if you didn’t have that debt?

So, what did you find?

We looked at three main things. First: What is somebody’s mortality from their cancer diagnosis based on where their credit score started? What we found is that patients with a lower credit score at baseline were more likely to die. Now, that’s actually not very surprising, because that relates to social determinants of health. The literature has shown time and again that patients that are in lower economic status, that are of minority race — in general, they’re more likely to die. Sadly, that’s not a new finding.

The second question, though, was new: Regardless of where the credit score starts, if that score drops or increases in the 12 months after diagnosis, how does that impact their mortality? We adjusted for all those social determinants of health and just looked at the credit score. What we noted was that when a patient’s credit score dropped by two tiers, their mortality increased by nearly 30 percent.

And finally, when we looked at how the credit score changed over time on the six-month timescale, we actually saw an even bigger change. In this case, a two-tier drop was associated with a 63 percent increase in mortality. In other words, somebody getting the exact same cancer diagnosis has a 63 percent higher likelihood of dying just based on how their credit score is dropping.

You found an association between credit score declines and mortality. What might be the reason for the link?

I think there are lots of potential reasons. The obvious one, which may or may not be true, is that somebody is obtaining less care because they can’t afford it. And if they’re obtaining less care because they can’t afford it, they may be more likely to die of that diagnosis. The assumption is that if somebody is sick and they have cancer, we’re going to treat them. And that’s just not true. There are plenty of people out there who have to make financial choices that ultimately impact their survival. They may look at a family of four and say, I can either get this additional chemotherapy to improve my survival, or, you know, decide that I can’t cause this amount of financial hardship to my family. 

“The assumption is that if somebody is sick and they have cancer, we’re going to treat them. And that’s just not true. There are plenty of people out there who have to make financial choices that ultimately impact their survival.”

The other explanation, which I’m less convinced by, is that, as somebody is more likely to die, their credit score is more likely to go down — say, you stop pursuing treatment and you’re in palliative care, not paying anything, and then your credit score goes down. It’s chicken or egg: Are you more likely to die because your credit score is going down, or is your credit score going down because you’re dying? I don’t believe the latter is the main cause of what we’re seeing, however, because the vast majority of patients in the study do not have end-stage disease.

We can’t tease out the causes in this current data set, but we’re currently doing a prospective study where we’re surveying patients over time and collecting their financial data at the end of the study. So it’s a combination of both objective and subjective financial toxicity, in order to understand how they correlate with each other. We’re at the very beginning stages of that research, but that’s ultimately the way we’ll find out what’s really going on.

What about if a person’s credit score increases? Does that have a protective effect, where a person is less likely to die?

No, it doesn’t. The way I view it: Those who are able to pay things are able to pay things. So regardless of whether their credit score goes up, they’ll just continue to be able to pay for treatment. But at this point, we don’t really have a good explanation for why improving somebody’s financial health, particularly if they started at a lower tier, doesn’t seem to make a difference in their survival.

How can cancer patients protect themselves from this huge increased mortality risk? Are there any ways to intervene?

I think it all comes down to policy reform. That’s ultimately what we can do about this. I don’t personally believe that when people have medical debt that they can’t pay, that that should translate into an impact on their credit score. And so, there’s legislation out there about saying that medical debt shouldn’t be included in credit health. I think we also need to stop the aggressive, predatory collection agency practices of coming after you for your medical debt. There’s a bill that’s sitting with the Massachusetts legislature right now that makes the argument that we should not allow hospitals to sell medical debt to collection agencies. They should have to negotiate that on their own with the patient, as opposed to selling it.

“I think it all comes down to policy reform. That’s ultimately what we can do about this.”

Also, providing people with financial navigators at the start of their diagnosis is important. It’s very hard as a provider to have cost conversations with patients when they get diagnosed. We as providers don’t feel comfortable doing it because it’s a hard conversation to have, and it can feel like it’s not our responsibility; plus, we don’t know what the financial implications of their diagnoses are. But if I published this study, and a provider can look at this and say, “Wow, my breast cancer patient is more likely to die if their credit score goes down,” they may use that information as an awareness tool for their patients moving forward, which might allow patients to plan better for their diagnosis. You walk into the office, you get a cancer diagnosis, and you’re told that you have to start thinking about the finances of this as well, because it will impact your long-term survival.

This research was conducted in Massachusetts, where 97-98 percent of the population has healthcare insurance coverage — one of the highest coverage rates in the country. Could these associations between financial health and mortality look even worse in other states where more people are uninsured?

Whatever our findings are in Massachusetts, we have to assume that they would be substantially worse in most other states. If we are showing that patients are more likely to die as their credit score goes down, in a state where the majority of patients have health insurance, you can only imagine what would happen in other states that don’t have that kind of coverage.

That’s especially pertinent right now as we’re on the verge of 25 million Americans losing their health insurance coverage, depending on which way things go. These 25 million are the exact patients who are already at risk given their socioeconomic status, and most won’t be able to afford private insurance.

Even being insured doesn’t mean you don’t have out-of-pocket costs. Co-payments are going up dramatically. We know that 11 percent of people’s spending is on healthcare costs. And we know that of the $200 billion spent annually on cancer care, $21 billion of that is paid out of pocket by patients. People are making choices: Are they going to go into debt, or are they going to choose to not have the medical care that they need?

Colorectal cancer diagnoses have become increasingly common in adults 50 or younger in recent years, particularly in high-income countries like the U.S. The drivers of the trend are unclear, but a new study led by Harvard and Mass General Brigham researchers, as part of the Cancer Grand Challenges PROSPECT team, suggests an important link to ultraprocessed foods.

By analyzing diets and endoscopy results, the study of almost 30,000 women found that participants who consumed the highest levels of ultraprocessed foods had a 45 percent higher risk of developing adenomas, which can be precursors of early-onset colorectal cancer, compared with participants who consumed the lowest levels. The results are published in JAMA Oncology.

“Our findings support the importance of reducing the intake of ultraprocessed foods as a strategy to mitigate the rising burden of early-onset colorectal cancer,” said senior author Andrew Chan, a gastroenterologist at the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute and a professor at Harvard Medical School. “The increased risk seems to be fairly linear, meaning that the more ultraprocessed foods you eat, the more potential that it could lead to colon polyps.”

The consumption of ultraprocessed foods — ready-to-eat foods that often contain high levels of sugar, salt, saturated fat, and food additives — has risen in parallel to the rise of early-onset colorectal cancer. Chan’s research group previously found an association between ultraprocessed foods and colorectal cancer more broadly, but this is the first study to link ultraprocessed foods with early-onset colorectal cancer.

The researchers analyzed data from the Nurses’ Health Study II, a long-term prospective study of female nurses who were born between 1947 and 1964 — a generation that is known to be at elevated risk for early-onset colorectal cancer. They analyzed 24 years’ worth of data from 29,105 female nurses who received at least two lower endoscopies before they turned 50 to screen for colorectal cancer precursors. The participants also completed dietary surveys every four years, from which the researchers estimated their average daily intake of ultraprocessed food. Though diet was self-reported, this type of survey has been validated for its ability to accurately reflect a person’s dietary patterns.

On average, participants consumed 5.7 servings of ultraprocessed foods per day, which amounted to 35 percent of their total daily calories — slightly lower than the national average in the U.S.

From the endoscopy results, the researchers identified 2,787 participants who developed precursor polyps for colorectal cancer. Women who consumed the highest amounts of ultraprocessed foods — 10 servings per day on average — had a 45 percent higher risk of developing conventional adenomas, the precursor most associated with early-onset colorectal cancer, compared with those who consumed the lowest amounts (three servings per day on average). There was no association between ultraprocessed food intake and serrated lesions, another type of precursor, but one that develops more slowly and is less commonly associated with early-onset colorectal cancer.

“One of the strengths of our study was that we had detailed information about other colorectal cancer risk factors in the participants, such as such as body mass index, Type 2 diabetes, and low fiber intake,” said Chan. “Even after accounting for all these other risk factors, the association with ultraprocessed foods still held up.”

The authors noted that ultraprocessed foods do not fully explain the rise in early-onset colorectal cancer, and that they are working to identify other risk factors. They’re also working on ways to better categorize ultraprocessed foods, since some foods in this category might be more harmful than others.

“Diet isn’t a complete explanation for why we’re seeing this trend — we see many individuals in our clinic with early-onset colon cancer who eat very healthy diets,” said Chan. “Identifying other risk factors for early-onset colorectal cancer is one of the focuses of the work that we’re leading here at the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute.”

The research described in this article received funding from the National Cancer Institute.

Tony Cunningham is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition and the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Clinic at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Every Thursday evening of the summer and now into the fall, our neighborhood gathers on the lawn of the historic Loring Greenough House in Jamaica Plain for food trucks, local brews, music, and activities hosted by local groups and organizations. It’s an easy, joyful way to spend time outdoors with friends and family, and — having small children — it’s a great chance for them to work out some energy while we actually get to engage in conversation with fellow adults. We feel incredibly lucky to have such a vibrant community tradition just down the street (and the beer trucks don’t hurt). Don’t let the promise of kids in attendance scare you, either, it’s well worth a Thursday afternoon trip down to JP to experience for yourself!

Few places recharge me and my family quite like Ogunquit, Maine. Only about a 90-minute drive from Boston, the beach is gorgeous, with soft sand and huge waves. At low tide, mini tide pools form that warm up quickly, even in the colder months, and are a ton of fun to splash around in and hunt for sea life. The ocean views along the Marginal Way are spectacular in every season, and the town itself has a welcoming, inclusive energy. My family has celebrated many milestones there over the years, usually over an incredible meal from one of Ogunquit’s many standout restaurants. Between the scenery, the food, and the people, it’s one of our favorite places to be!

As both a sleep researcher and a sleep clinician, sleep is my passion — and also one of my favorite pastimes when I can get enough of it. I spend my days (and some nights) studying how sleep shapes emotion, memory, and mental health, and helping others find the rest they need. Researching the sleeping brain is kind of like studying the ocean or outer space — there is a lot more unknown than known. While I do my best to prioritize sleep whenever I can, with young kids at home I’m often daydreaming about catching up on some much-needed “fieldwork” someday. Until then, I’ll keep making sure everyone else sleeps a little better, and maybe sneak in a nap when I can!

Looking to get a bit more sleep yourself? Here’s a tip: Caffeine has a six-hour half-life, which means that half of the caffeine in that 6 p.m. energy drink or Frappuccino will still be floating around your brain at midnight — not super helpful when you’re hoping to get the sleep needed to retain everything you learned that day!

— As told to Sy Boles/Harvard Staff Writer