The fastest-growing demographic of internet users is people age 60 and older, but the group’s behavior online is poorly understood — and often stereotyped. 

That’s according to John Palfrey, former executive director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. 

In a new book called “Wired Wisdom: How to Age Better Online,” co-authored with the University of Zurich’s Eszter Hargittai, Palfrey busts common myths about how older adults relate to privacy, security, and connection in the digital age.

“Too often we have the image in our mind of a hapless grandparent or older person in our life who can’t turn on the new phone they’ve received or they can’t fix the blinking light on the VCR,” said Palfrey, who is now the president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. “What we really wanted to do with this book is help make sure that the use of technology is actually a part of thriving in older age, and not something that’s a hardship for older people.”

In this interview with the Gazette, which has been edited for length and clarity, Palfrey explains what we get wrong about the online lives of over-60s, and what can be done to support older users of new tech.

What made you want to write about older adults’ online lives? 

When I was at the Berkman Klein Center in the aughts, the early days of the internet, I co-wrote a book with Urs Gasser, “Born Digital: How Children Grow Up in a Digital Age.” I had two very small kids at the time, and there were real concerns about how kids use technology. I was thinking through, how do you raise kids in this time? 

This book came about in a similar way. I have parents who are both roughly 80. They’re both wonderful and brilliant people, and sometimes technology is their friend, and sometimes it’s not. I thought, how do I engage as a middle-aged person in supporting older adults? What do the data tell us about the most useful things to do? 

The book draws on external data, but you also contribute a new survey of 4,000 adults over 60. What stuck out to you from that research? 

Many of the myths we hold are not entirely true, and I’ll give you one example that has to do with safety and security. We think about older people as totally helpless in that they’re constantly being scammed and so forth. But it turns out, when you dig into the data, that’s not the case. Older adults are more skeptical than younger people about scams, not less. In fact, they’re able to use their history and their life experience in a very positive way to apply themselves to these online scams. 

What’s going on in the data is that older people are targeted way more than younger people. Why? Because they likely have more money, they may be less good with the technology itself, and sometimes they’re suffering from cognitive decline.

So the truth is not that older adults are completely helpless against scams. It’s that they’re facing way worse conditions, and we don’t give them the same kind of training and support that we give younger people. And some of them are sitting ducks as a result. 

If we treat older adults like they don’t know anything, that’s not a very good starting point for figuring out the right interventions, whether it’s changing the design of the technology, creating new laws, or intervening as family members. 

But you did find some real differences between the generations in terms of online privacy: Older adults tend to be much more skeptical about sharing personal information, whether that’s on social media or through medical alert systems that could be lifesaving. What advice do you have for navigating those conversations?

That’s right. For younger generations, everything in their life has been recorded, from their sonogram when their parent was pregnant to their baby pictures to their Little League games, and all of that is stored digitally. That’s just not true for their grandparents. There’s a big distinction coming in, and in their final chapters, older adults are having to grapple with that.

For me, that means we really shouldn’t assume too much about what people know about technology or what they will intuit, especially if they’ve been out of the workforce for a long time. They might not know how much data about them is being held by other people. 

So is it really about talking to the older adults in your life and figuring out their specific needs and concerns?

Yes, I think so. This is one of the challenges: There’s a huge diversity within this age cohort, which shouldn’t be that surprising. At the MacArthur Foundation, where I work now, we have people in their 70s who do quarterly cybersecurity trainings — who are teaching the cybersecurity trainings. They just know it incredibly well. And then there are people who are exactly the same age, who haven’t been in the workforce at any point in the digital era, who know absolutely nothing about this stuff, who have no context for it. 

How are older adults reckoning with the contradictions of social media — that it can both connect us and isolate us, inform us and misinform us? 

It’s very much a mixed bag on both. That’s the reality for kids, too, and for those of us in the middle. Too much of it can be really harmful, but a decent dose can be a part of a positive life. To give an example, if you’re an older person and you live in Europe, and you can use WhatsApp to connect with a relative in the U.S., it can be life-giving to be able to send them texts and see their face once in a while. Having a healthy dose of social media can be a part of a strong social life. 

What can be done to improve things? 

The most important thing we could do is design technologies with older people in mind. Have you ever heard of older people being involved in the design of a new technology at, say, Apple? I don’t think that kind of thing is at the top of mind for those designing and carrying out these technologies. Generally speaking, new technologies are designed by quite young people for other young people, and we do little thinking about the experiences of older people. It could be as simple as font size. 

We also focus on support. Great benefits can come from a grandchild connecting with their grandparent through the use of technology, helping them navigate that. The child can help the grandparent, but you also never know what skills and insights might go in the other direction. The grandchild is going to learn a whole pile of stuff from the grandparent in the process. 

I really hope that as a society we focus more on treating our older adults better, really centering them in ways we don’t always today. You’ll hear people say that when we center people with disabilities in the way we build cities and buildings, we end up improving things for everybody. The same is going to be true for technology design: It’s going to become more universal as we design for older people. Particularly as artificial intelligence becomes more and more central, we urgently need to pay attention to how that’s going to affect the older population. We’ll benefit in untold ways if we do so. 

Bill Becklean feels blessed to have taken up crew 75 years ago, when, as a 14-year-old from Missouri, someone told him he’d make a decent coxswain for his high school team.

“I came from Kansas City, Missouri, and never heard of anything called ‘crew,’” said Becklean, 89, who had traveled east to attend Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. “I weighed 80 pounds, and somebody said, ‘Well, you ought to be a coxswain,’ and I was. Look where that has taken me.”

His most notable stop may be the 1956 summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, when his Yale University eight, with Becklean as coxswain, won gold. The latest will come Sunday on the Charles, when he will steer an extraordinary eight — one full of octogenarians — competing in the 2025 Head of the Charles: the Director’s Challenge mixed eights.

“I think we’re probably going to finish last,” Becklean, M.B.A. ’68, confessed.

Becklean’s boat is number 27 in the 30-boat field, which features eights with mixed men and women crews.

Becklean, who first volunteered for the Head of the Charles in 1966, is familiar with the three-mile course, which winds up the river separating Cambridge and Boston, passing under six bridges. He’s watched as the regatta has become one of the world’s largest and most prestigious.

Catherine Saarela, adult recreational sweeps coordinator at Brighton, Massachusetts-based Community Rowing Inc., is more sanguine about the Becklean’s group’s prospects.

It is a “set boat,” she said, meaning it’s well-balanced as it moves through the water, with consistent timing from the rowers, which increases efficiency and speed. Saarela said that’s probably because some of the rowers typically row singles, where they only have themselves to rely on to keep the boat centered and stable.

“It’s not the fastest boat,” Saarela said. “But it also hasn’t been the last boat to finish.”

The idea of an all-octogenarian boat was inspired by Saarela’s father, also an octogenarian and a cancer survivor.

About four years ago, he got an award from the YMCA for swimming 1,000 miles over the last 10 years, a feat Saarela pondered during her commute from her New Hampshire home to CRI’s Harry Parker Boathouse in Brighton. Once the idea of a boat crewed by rowers in their 80s popped up, it stuck around.

“I was coaching, and I’d go out and totally profile people: ‘Hey, do you know anyone who’s 80 and still rowing?’” Saarela said. “They’d say, ‘I’m not 80,’ and I’d say, ‘I didn’t ask if you were 80. Who do you know?’”

Seat by seat, she built the boat.

It was fellow referee Bill Barrett who suggested Becklean as coxswain.

“One of the other referees, who’s in his 80s, said, ‘Hey, you need a coxswain. You should reach out to Bill Becklean, he’s a gold medal coxswain,’ and I reached out,” Saarela said. “That’s how Bill became my partner in crime in all this.”

Saarela is just the latest to pull toward a shared goal with Becklean.

Over the decades he’s helped and been helped by many, in the sport and out, from the other skinny kids he shared a boat with at Phillips Exeter, to fellow volunteers in the Head of the Charles’ early years, to Yale’s medal-winning crew in Melbourne.

The road to gold was anything but smooth, Becklean said. Because Australia is in the southern hemisphere, the summer games were held in November, months after the end of the collegiate rowing season.

Instead of staying and training over the summer, the crew scattered to vacations and summer jobs.

They did get together on Connecticut’s Thames River for training sessions in the middle of August, but when the fall term started, the crew parted ways, and six, including Becklean, went back to campus.

“The first heats in Australia were the first race we’d had since the Olympic trials,” Becklean said.

And it showed. They lost their opening heat, which sent them to the repechage race, where losers of the early heats get a chance to fill open semifinal slots. Shaken by the initial loss, they won their repechage, then beat favorite Australia in the semifinals.

Both boats advanced, however, and Yale beat Australia again to win the gold.

Becklean graduated from Yale with an electrical engineering degree in 1958 and spent the next eight years out of rowing and in the Navy, where he worked on nuclear subs.

Then he left for Harvard Business School and the Charles River, where he couldn’t help noticing the Head of the Charles regatta, then in its second year. He approached legendary Harvard crew coach Harry Parker about volunteering.

A year later he joined the Cambridge Boat Club, where he now has been a member for more than 50 years. He is a past commodore and counts his coaching duties for Cambridge Rindge and Latin’s boys’ crew, based at the club, as “the best thing I’ve ever done.”

“I know this will change those boys’ lives, and it does,” Becklean said. “They learn how to show up on time. They learn how to follow instructions; they learn how to operate as a team; they learn that what you put in is what you get out. There are so many lessons that will be with them for their lives.”

Since then, he’s competed in the Head of the Charles regularly, coxing several boats and rowing, in singles or doubles, in 10 or 12 years.

“I have a doubles partner that I’ve rowed with for 25 years. We rowed it probably 10 times and won it one year, the first that they had an award for 70-year-olds,” Becklean said. “It was the year we turned 70, and we were the only boat in our age group. Then it got very competitive.”

Rooting for Becklean this year will be another rowing partner, Malcolm Salter, a former Harvard lightweight rower who’s been rowing doubles with him for several years.

Salter, HBS’ James J. Hill Professor of Business Administration, emeritus, and faculty fellow for Harvard lightweight crew, said he met Becklean six years ago when he visited the Cambridge Boat Club.

The two started talking and discovered that Becklean had been a student of Salter’s when Becklean was working toward his M.B.A. Now Salter, four years Becklean’s junior, has become something of a student of his.

“My goal is basically to be Bill Becklean,” Salter said. “My goal is to be able to be rowing in the Head of the Charles when I’m 90.”

Becklean, Salter said, has an eye for the sport’s more technical elements, things that can slow the boat: the errant splash of a misplaced blade or a seat sliding slightly out of time. Despite that, he doesn’t lose sight of the fact that rowing should be fun.

“He has total command and control of the boat because he has so much knowledge. He’s the ultimate collegial competitor,” Salter said. “He’s a carrier for the sport. He’s very supportive. He lives it. He loves to talk about it.”

Word has gotten out in the racing community, Saarela said, and older rowers are calling her.

This year — the fourth for the all-80s crew — she’ll have 15 rowers, with Becklean in the coxswain’s seat.

Seven will row downstream from Community Rowing on the Charles River to the race’s start near Boston University’s DeWolfe Boathouse, and seven more will race the three miles back.

One intrepid octogenarian will row both ways.

“I have not had a hard time filling seats,” Saarela said. “I’ve got one woman from Saratoga Springs who called me and wanted to do this. Plus, I’m a referee, I travel around, and I talk about it. I’ve got people who come up to me in their 70s: ‘Do you have an extra spot?’ I say, ‘How old are you? 70s? You’re JV, maybe next year.” 

Becklean rowed his last single a few years ago after what for him was the “perfect” race: He had trained hard; conditions were ideal; he rowed well; and beat his desired time. He still rows doubles, though, and isn’t considering stepping away from the coxswain’s seat.

“I love the sport. My closest friends are all rowers. There are times when I’m driving in here and I say, ‘Do I really want to do this?’ but I’ll tell you, every time I come back from having rowed, it just feels so good,” Becklean said. “I’ll keep doing it as long as I can get in a boat. It’s been great fun.”

With the release of Harvard University’s fiscal year 2025 financial report, the Gazette sat down with Executive Vice President Meredith Weenick and Vice President for Finance and Chief Financial Officer Ritu Kalra to discuss the University’s financial position amid evolving federal policy — from the termination and reinstatement of research funding to a forthcoming increase to the endowment tax.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Fiscal year 2025 was marked by extraordinary disruption to Harvard’s research enterprise, including the termination of federally sponsored research grants. How did these developments affect the University’s financial position?

Kalra: The past year brought unprecedented challenges to Harvard and the higher education sector as a whole. The disruptions were particularly acute for our research community, but I don’t want to dismiss the breadth of the challenges across the University, including heightened concerns for our international students and scholars.

The termination of hundreds of research grants to Harvard did not occur in a vacuum. Heading into FY25, we were already contending with costs rising faster than our revenues, which, as we discussed last year, is not a sustainable path forward. The federal policy landscape began to change in early February, with proposals to cut contracted indirect cost reimbursement rates on active research and with terminations of dozens of individual awards affecting projects underway across our Schools. That was followed by the abrupt termination of nearly the entire portfolio of our direct federally sponsored research grants in the spring. About $116 million in sponsored funds — which are reimbursements for costs the University has already incurred — disappeared almost overnight.

It’s important to note that the terminations occurred on multi-year awards. The total value of the affected awards spans several years of work, not a single-year loss. The $116 million represents about two months of disrupted reimbursements in fiscal year 2025. Those disruptions continued in the ensuing months — the portfolio consists of over 900 direct awards to our faculty, at a cost of over $600 million a year. It has only been in the past few weeks, following Judge Allison Burrough’s summary judgment in U.S. District Court, that payments on those grants have been restored.

We closed the year with a $113 million operating deficit on a $6.7 billion revenue base. This is our first deficit since the pandemic.

Weenick: The result could have been far worse. Leadership across the University had already begun a process to identify strategic, structural, and sustainable reductions to our budgets, recognizing that changes to federal policy, including proposed caps on research-related funding and the impending increase to the endowment tax, would have significant consequences. While the outcome of individual policies was uncertain — and in some cases, still is — it was evident that, collectively, these measures would have a substantial financial impact. Accordingly, we instituted a hiring freeze across the University, paused salary increases for exempt staff, and delayed nonessential capital projects. We don’t take these measures lightly, and we are grateful to our community for their collective efforts.

We also benefited from the extraordinary generosity of our donors in support of the University. Their contributions were meaningful — over $100 million more than last year in current use giving, the highest in the University’s history. We are so grateful for their support.

Research is part of Harvard’s core mission. How has the University supported researchers through this period of uncertainty?

Weenick: The loss of federal funding was not only a financial challenge — it was a disruption to progress on critical, often lifesaving, research. Labs had to suspend experiments, research teams faced layoffs, and clinical trials were jeopardized.

Our response was immediate and multifaceted. We prioritized sustaining research continuity, both financially and operationally. The University created a $250 million research continuity fund, supplemented by additional resources from Schools, which ensured that critical projects could continue at the research-intensive Schools most impacted, including Harvard Medical School, the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

As Ritu mentioned, we’ve seen more than 900 awards reinstated and the payments for the majority of expenditures resume, following the federal court ruling that found those grant terminations to be unlawful. While this is welcome news, we must acknowledge that the relationship between research universities and the federal government is changing in fundamental ways. Looking ahead, we must be prepared for a future in which this long-standing partnership is less stable. Successfully navigating this period will depend on planning ahead, working together, and staying flexible.

With federal research grants now reinstated, how is Harvard managing the transition to resume research activity across the University?

Weenick: The court’s ruling was a critical step toward restoring a measure of stability for our research community. With funding now reinstated, researchers can once again focus on advancing the aims of their projects and rebuilding the momentum that was lost during the freeze.

At the same time, we’re being thoughtful about how we move forward. We’ve encouraged investigators to resume activity necessary to fulfill our commitments under the grants, but we’re also advising prudence, particularly in making new long-term or multi-year commitments. Our goal is to sustain the pace of discovery while planning responsibly amid uncertainty.

Kalra: From a financial standpoint, this transition is about sustaining our research commitments while staying disciplined. The reinstatement of grants has provided welcome relief, but we’re still managing the ripple effects of months of disruption and preparing for future volatility in both the funding of current projects and the outlook for new awards.

The endowment returned 11.9 percent in fiscal year 2025, bringing its value to $56.9 billion. How does this performance factor into Harvard’s financial health and capacity to address these challenges?

Kalra: We are deeply grateful to Narv Narvekar and his colleagues at Harvard Management Company for their stewardship of the endowment. Their disciplined, long-term approach is critical to ensuring that the endowment continues to provide stability and continuity, even through periods of great uncertainty. Distributions from the endowment provided $2.5 billion in support — nearly 40 percent of Harvard’s total operating revenue.

These funds are vital to Harvard’s financial health. And they are funds, plural; not singular. The endowment is made up of nearly 15,000 individual funds, the vast majority of which are given for a specific purpose. Endowed gifts made for museum collections cannot be repurposed to support research discoveries in neurobiology or astrophysics. They are not fungible or available to support purposes other than the donor’s intentions.

That’s also why the endowment is not an infinite source we can draw on to close structural budget gaps. It’s designed to provide steady, sustainable support across generations. A temporary increase in the draw from the endowment can provide momentary relief, but we are facing structural changes to the financial model that underpins higher education. We can use the endowment to support us in this transition, but we cannot use the endowment as a shield against reality.

Harvard is also facing an increase in the federal endowment tax, enacted by Congress earlier this year. How is the University preparing to manage the impact of that tax increase?

Kalra: We refer to the tax in shorthand as the endowment tax, but in reality, it is an excise tax on the income from our investments. The first year that Harvard will make tax payments at the new rate is fiscal year 2027, but we will have to recognize the obligation on our balance sheets this year — fiscal year 2026 — and we are working diligently, in partnership with our colleagues at HMC, to manage its financial impact.

While we are awaiting additional guidance from the U.S. Treasury Department, under the new law we expect Harvard’s tax obligation could be in the range of $300 million each year. That means hundreds of millions of dollars that will not be available to support financial aid, research, and teaching. To put that in a bit clearer context, in fiscal year 2025 Harvard spent over $750 million in financial aid and scholarships for students across the University. Every two to three years, we could be paying the equivalent of our entire financial aid budget in taxes.

That’s a significant impact and change to our financial planning, and it highlights why maintaining discipline today is so important. How we manage the endowment’s distribution in the near term will directly shape Harvard’s ability in the future to invest in its mission — and in the people and ideas that define it.

The University issued $1.2 billion in new debt this fiscal year. What drove that decision, and how does it position Harvard for the future?

Kalra: Issuing debt this year was a deliberate and strategic decision to bolster Harvard’s liquidity and maintain momentum on essential capital projects at a time of considerable uncertainty. Prudent use of debt is a normal part of how universities manage their finances — it allows us to invest responsibly in the facilities and infrastructure that support our academic mission over the long term.

The proceeds from the debt issuances help us continue to advance key priorities, including housing renewal projects and developments in Allston. Our AAA/Aaa ratings reflect external confidence in Harvard’s financial position and our commitment to navigate a complex and changing environment with discipline and foresight.

With increased financial pressures, how does Harvard balance near-term constraints with long-term commitments to its people and mission?

Weenick: Harvard’s strength has always been its people. Even as we tighten budgets, our focus remains on supporting faculty, students, and staff — ensuring that the work of discovery and education continues.

With payments on our grants largely restored — at least for now — we have begun to shift out of the research continuity framework we put in place in the spring and are allowing researchers to resume the full level of work necessary to advance the aims of their hard-won grants.

Kalra: The reinstatements of those grants do not erase the disruption the terminations sparked, nor do they negate the uncertainty ahead. That means we can’t simply return to “business as usual.” We need to focus our resources on academic excellence, operate more efficiently, and explore new revenue streams. The long-term trajectory of federal support for research, the increase to the endowment tax, and the broader economic climate require us to adapt structurally.

Harvard’s ability to endure and thrive has always depended on disciplined stewardship paired with bold investment in our mission. Our challenge now is to continue that tradition — to sustain academic excellence while being prudent stewards of the University’s resources.

What are the University’s financial priorities as we enter fiscal year 2026?

Kalra: The financial landscape remains extraordinarily challenging. The federal government has indicated it will appeal the court decision that reinstated our grants, and they’ve also indicated that they will consider other actions that could impact our ability to seek federal grant funding in the future. Other significant headwinds include proposed overall reductions in federal research funding and other policies that could upend the long-standing partnership between universities and the federal government as co-investors in the infrastructure that research relies on. The University has made extensive investments in the infrastructure that enables research — in wet labs and sophisticated equipment such as a cryo-electron microscope that allows for 3D imaging of wisps of proteins. Cuts to indirect cost recovery — coupled with an increase to the excise tax on endowment income — bear directly on our ability to invest in these essential tools of cutting-edge science. And we don’t yet know how the tariffs will unfold. Taken together, these factors could cost Harvard $1 billion annually.

Even against this backdrop, the University’s fiscal discipline, the resilience of our community, and the continued generosity of our donors should continue to position us well. Our focus will be on balancing prudence with purpose — managing expenses carefully, safeguarding liquidity, and sustaining investments that advance excellence in teaching and research. The circumstances are challenging, but our mission and our commitment to it remain unchanged.

Weenick: That’s right. These are challenging times, not just for Harvard but for universities throughout the nation. Every School across the University is feeling enormous pressure to adapt to a more constrained environment. We’ll need to work differently, rethink how we deliver services, and make difficult choices about what we can sustain. This is also an opportunity to reimagine how we work together to support Harvard’s mission. While periods like this are difficult, they help us focus on what’s essential and strengthen the institution for the long term.

Composed between 29 and 19 B.C. by the Roman poet Virgil, “The Aeneid” tells the story of the Trojan hero Aeneas and the founding of Rome while exploring themes of duty, fate, and struggle. Published after Virgil’s death in 19 B.C., despite his wish for it to be burned because he considered it unfinished, the epic poem remains a monumental work of classic literature.  

Scott McGill and Susannah Wright, Ph.D. ’24, classics professors at Rice University, recently published a new translation of the poem with an introduction by Emily Wilson, the prominent classicist and translator of Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” In an interview with the Gazette, which has been edited for clarity and length, Wright and McGill discussed the poem’s role as Rome’s national epic, and the questions it poses to modern readers as a celebration of imperial power and a meditation on the costs of conquest for both victors and victims.

How do you explain the poem’s enduring appeal to this day?

Wright: Above all, it is a really compelling story. It includes everything from epic battle scenes and adventures at sea to a tragic love affair and a journey to the underworld, and it also speaks to themes that remain relevant to many readers today — how to balance private desire and public duty, how to keep going when all seems lost, and how to determine the obligations we have to future generations. The poem is also very interested in questions about the ethics of migration, because the Trojans are, in a sense, at once both refugees and conquerors.

McGill: The poem also has a lot to tell us about the relationship between poetry and power because it was written as a national epic under the emperor Augustus, and in some ways, for Augustus. And yet, Virgil shows a great deal of artistic independence. It would appear that Virgil takes his poem in a different direction than we suspect Augustus would have anticipated. That possibly illustrates Virgil’s heroic temperament as an artist, and Augustus’ tolerance for different perspectives and different points of view.

Virgil died before the publication of “The Aeneid.” What do historians say about Virgil’s wishes to burn his work and why was it published regardless of his wishes?

McGill: There have been different interpretations. One is simply that Virgil had planned to revise “The Aeneid,” but he got sick and died. We know that the poem is incomplete because there are incomplete lines, and he would not have kept them in the work and had it published. It’s a story that may be meant to illustrate his perfectionism as a poet, but there is political interpretation, and this was taken up by the writer Hermann Broch, who wrote that Virgil’s wish to burn his poem was a protest because it could be used to justify absolute power. It’s completely speculative, but the story has been used to say that Virgil didn’t want to create a poem that can glorify autocracy. Of course, the follow-up to that story is that Augustus saved the poem, had one of Virgil’s friends edit it, and ordered its publication; and it has been in circulation ever since.

Wright: Virgil’s epic can certainly be read as glorifying the Augustan regime, and therefore as having a celebratory, perhaps even propagandistic approach to Roman power. But the other side is that Virgil takes a lot of care in illustrating the costs of that power. In many cases, he reserves his deepest sympathy for the characters who oppose the Trojans’ destined mission, those who resist them and who become victims of Aeneas and his followers — and in that way, the poem can also be interpreted as a sophisticated critique of Roman imperialism.

What do you hope your translation would reveal to new readers of “The Aeneid”?

McGill: We hope that it reveals the deep humanity of the poem, the profound sympathy that it shows to all its characters, and the richness of its emotional world. Epic poetry, especially if you’re a young reader, can feel like something you have to do, but not necessarily enjoy. Our hope is that the poem can come alive, and not only through the story, which is an incredible story, but also in the richness of its humane vision.

Wright: There are two big misconceptions that readers often have about “The Aeneid.” One of them is that it’s merely a kind of propaganda piece for the Roman empire and for the Augustan regime. The other is that it’s a flat rehashing of Homer and isn’t engaging creatively with the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.” To us, “The Aeneid” is neither of those things, but something much deeper and much richer. We hope that our translation will enable readers to connect with the immediacy and the urgency of the questions this ancient poem still poses today.

Virgil took inspiration from Homer’s masterpieces. What are the differences between the two authors?

McGill: Virgil is deeply reliant on Homer, but where Virgil takes Homer and the epic tradition in a new direction is in his understanding of and depiction of the hero. In Homer, the hero is concerned with his own glory, with accumulating fame, kleos in Greek. Virgil makes Aeneas a new kind of hero, who’s not so committed to his own kleos, but to history and to public duty, serving the Trojan refugees that he’s leading, and making sure that they get to Italy. Whereas the Homeric hero is all about accumulating personal glory, the Virgilian hero is about self-sacrifice; putting one’s own needs second to what one has to do for history and for the community.

Wright: Aeneas’ journey in the first half of the poem resembles the “Odyssey,” and the battlefield scenes in the second half certainly call to mind the “Iliad.” But it’s a complicated dynamic. When we leave Aeneas at the end of the poem, he’s caught up in a frenzied rage that might make us think of Achilles. At the end of the “Iliad,” though, Achilles shows mercy and has a profound moment of reconciliation with his enemy; Aeneas, in contrast, gives in to fury. That illustrates the depth of Virgil’s engagement with Homer: this isn’t a flat reproduction of what we see in the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” but a masterful and creative response to those poems. That’s part of the power of Virgil’s epic.

How did “The Aeneid” come to be the founding myth of the Roman empire?

Wright: The story of Aeneas as a precursor to the Roman people goes back prior to Virgil, to the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., when Greek historians began to connect Aeneas with Rome as a founding figure and trace Roman ancestry back to the Trojans. Virgil doesn’t, by any means, invent Aeneas, but he gives Aeneas, who was a relatively minor figure in Homer’s “Iliad,” new primacy at the center of his epic. During Virgil’s time, Augustus emerged, after the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C., as the first emperor of Rome, and it was as this new regime was being consolidated in the 20s B.C. that Virgil wrote “The Aeneid.”

McGill: Augustus wanted to promote cultural renewal, which for him meant a return to Rome’s origins and its foundational virtues. “The Aeneid” certainly fits with that. It’s a two-pronged foundation myth for Rome, where you’ve got the Trojans on the one hand, and then you’ve got Romulus and Remus on the other. The Romans reconcile this by making Aeneas the ancestor of Romulus and Remus.

No translation is absolute. How close to the original is your translation of Virgil’s epic?

McGill: We certainly were committed to staying as close to the Latin as possible. We wanted to remain true to the substance and content and especially the tone and feel of the poem as well as the language. Virgil’s Latin largely comprises everyday words, and we wanted to make sure that our language reflected that as well. On the formal level, we translated the poem into blank verse; unrhymed iambic pentameter, which is the cultural equivalent to Virgil’s dactylic hexameter.

Wright: The particular metrical pattern that we chose has had a long life in the English tradition, as a meter associated with epic verse. In addition to employing a cultural equivalent to Virgil’s meter, we also did our best to capture his poetic devices and sound effects, because we wanted to approximate as much as we could the experience of reading the poem in Latin.

The prevalence of obesity in the U.S. could rise sharply under a new definition of the condition released earlier this year by the Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology Commission, according to research co-authored by Harvard-Mass General specialists.

Investigators from Harvard and Mass General Brigham found that when applying the new criteria, which expand upon the traditional use of body mass index (BMI) to include measures of body fat distribution, the prevalence of obesity increased from about 40 percent to about 70 percent among more than 300,000 people included in the study. The rise was more pronounced among older adults.

Additionally, the researchers found that the newly added individuals also had a higher risk of adverse health outcomes. The results are published in JAMA Network Open.

“We already thought we had an obesity epidemic, but this is astounding,” said co-first author Lindsay Fourman, a Mass General endocrinologist and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. “With potentially 70 percent of the adult population now considered to have excess fat, we need to better understand what treatment approaches to prioritize.”

Traditionally, obesity has been defined by BMI, which estimates body fat based on a person’s weight and height. But other anthropomorphic measures — such as waist circumference, waist-to-height ratio, or waist-to-hip ratio — may further account for fat distribution and aid in differentiation between muscle and fat mass.

Under the new framework, a person is classified as having obesity if they have a high BMI plus at least one elevated anthropometric measure (a condition the authors term “BMI-plus-anthropometric obesity”), or if they have a normal BMI and at least two elevated anthropometric measures (a condition termed “anthropometric-only obesity”).

The new definition also distinguishes between preclinical and clinical obesity, with clinical obesity defined as the presence of obesity-related physical impairment or organ dysfunction. At least 76 organizations have endorsed the new guidelines, including the American Heart Association and the Obesity Society.

The study analyzed participants in the National Institutes of Health All of Us Research Program’s cohort of more than 300,000 Americans. Obesity prevalence was 68.6 percent with the new definition, versus 42.9 percent under the traditional BMI-based definition. This increase was entirely driven by inclusion of individuals with anthropometric-only obesity. Obesity rates varied by sex, race, and especially by age — affecting nearly 80 percent of adults over 70.

Importantly, the study found that those with anthropometric-only obesity — who would not have been classified as having obesity by the traditional definition — had a higher risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and mortality than people without obesity. About half of all individuals who met the new obesity criteria had clinical obesity, and this proportion was only slightly lower in the anthropometric-only obesity group compared with the BMI-plus-anthropometric obesity group.

“We have always recognized the limitations of BMI as a single marker for obesity because it doesn’t take into account body fat distribution,” said senior author Steven Grinspoon of Mass General and Harvard Medical School. “Seeing an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes in this new group of people with obesity, who were not considered to have obesity before, brings up interesting questions about obesity medications and other therapeutics.”

The researchers emphasized that further studies are needed to better understand the causes of and optimal treatments for anthropometric-only obesity. The team previously developed a therapeutic that reduces waist circumference, and plans to explore the utility of different treatment strategies in this newly defined population.

“Identifying excess body fat is very important as we’re finding that even people with a normal BMI but with abdominal fat accumulation are at increased health risk,” Fourman said. “Body composition matters — it’s not just pounds on a scale.”

The research described in this article received funding from the National Institutes of Health.

Vladimir Putin, who rose to power in late 1999 as acting president of the Russian Federation following the resignation of Boris Yeltsin, is three years from surpassing Josef Stalin as Russia’s longest-serving leader of the last two centuries.

On Oct. 7 — Putin’s 73rd birthday — the Gazette spoke with Susan Glasser ’90, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and her husband, Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, about the Russian leader and the five U.S. presidents he’s faced during his 25-plus years in office, a topic they’re exploring for a forthcoming book. Glasser and Baker, fall fellows at the Institute of Politics, reported from Moscow on Putin’s early years in office, work that shaped their 2005 book “Kremlin Rising.”

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

When you were reporting from Moscow, did you ever envision Putin would still be in power 25 years later?

Glasser: No, and anyone who tells you that they did is not being honest (laughs). There were plenty of people who were very clear-eyed from the beginning about Putin’s origins in the KGB, his suspicions of the West, his lamentation about Russia’s lost empire. We knew plenty of people in Moscow and some people in the United States who saw that he was no democrat, that he was no long-term friend of the United States. That was not such an outlier belief. I can’t think of a single person, whatever their ideological views about Russia, who saw in Putin the possibility to break Stalin’s record.

Which U.S. president had the best read on Putin?

Baker: What we found striking is that all of them, Republican or Democrat, came into office thinking they could manage him. And to each of them, Putin has been a singular challenge who proves not to be manageable. They did not, in fact, get out of him what they thought they could get out of him or keep him where they thought they could keep him, all the way up to the present day.

Glasser: One of the things that is notable is that many of them started out the Putin era with the idea that Russia’s period of post-Soviet weakness was just going to continue. The big mistake, according to this argument, would be not that we misread Putin (although I think many did) but that we misread Russia, and we made the mistake of believing our own fairy tale about a world where geopolitical Great Power competition somehow had faded away. That, obviously, was a misreading of history. We certainly didn’t foresee a “no limits” alliance between Russia and China, and made the mistake of projecting forward the rift between Russia and China that had persisted from the late Soviet era.

American presidents, Democrats and Republicans, made the mistake of overvaluing a personal relationship with Putin, as if it would really matter in the end against these bigger geopolitical forces. It looked bad at the time, and it looks even worse now, when George W. Bush said that he “looked into his soul and saw Putin as a man he could do business with.” That overlooked Putin’s background in the KGB and his habit of saying what his interlocutors wanted to hear. It’s so important to underscore that multiple presidents, not just George W. Bush, made inaccurate judgments about who Putin was and what he was going to do.

Is there one U.S. president Putin preferred or particularly disliked over the others?

Baker: I think, at first, he thought he had a good relationship with George W. Bush; that they did see eye-to-eye. The two of them met more than any American and Russian leaders in history, and they were friendly. And yet, from Putin’s point of view, what he would say is, “I hear these things from presidents, they all say these things, but the policy stays the same.” And I think he has come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter who is president because America is still going to do what America does, and that the president can say whatever they want, but it doesn’t change that. Even with Trump, whatever Putin thought of Trump coming in — whether he was somebody who could be manipulated, somebody he could manage — I think he still came away from his experiences with Trump thinking, “I didn’t get what I want out of this.” It’s not about the individual president.

What’s a fundamental misunderstanding people have about Putin?

Glasser: For years, many of the Russia experts in and out of the government that we respected the most were of the view that Putin was an insecure leader, and that a lot of what he did was driven by the need to shore up a not very strong system or to stay in power or to make sure that unrest didn’t happen inside Russia.

When he came back to power after the Medvedev interregnum and there were huge protests in the streets of St. Petersburg and Moscow, it was the biggest challenge to Putin’s tenure in the entire quarter century. And so, I think a smart explanation has been that from then on forward, Putin was determined to have a much tighter control on Russia — that he pivoted right in terms of how he governed the country and in terms of his foreign policy, that he was not tolerant of any kind of dissent, and that that really set him on the path that we see today. That is a compelling explanation.

Baker: He doesn’t care about what we care about. He doesn’t care about what we think he should care about, and we should stop trying to see him through our own lens because that’s not the way he sees the world. We think he should want his country to be strong economically and part of a vibrant international economy and world order, that that would be better for his people. Certainly, when we were there, we saw even in four years how much life got better for a lot of Russians because they were more integrated with the West, because they were economically developing. And he didn’t care that he closed it off. He doesn’t care that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of Russians have been killed or wounded in Ukraine. He doesn’t care that more than a million Russians have left the country — the brain drain from Russia is staggering. He doesn’t care that he has squandered a lot of things that he could have claimed as his successes over the last 25 years with this invasion of Ukraine. We need to see him in a clear-eyed way, rather than trying to see him through our own Western lens.

It is past time for women’s health to move beyond “boobs and tubes” — as one expert termed the field’s reproductive focus — to address the disparities and prejudice that have hindered medical providers from effectively treating more than half of the population.

That’s according to experts who gathered for the Gellert Family Science Symposium held recently at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study examining persistent gaps between men’s and women’s healthcare.

The event’s keynote speaker was Elizabeth Comen, a breast cancer specialist and author of the 2024 book “All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us about Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today.” She pointed out that women have twice the risk of Alzheimer’s disease as men, and that heart attack symptoms common among women such as jaw pain and indigestion are described medically as “atypical.”

“There’s so much focus on our reproductive health but there are so many other aspects to women’s health, like atypical heart disease,” said Comen, associate professor of health and co-director of the Women’s Health Collective at NYU Langone Health. “But when I was in Medical School all I learned about was that women’s chest pain was ‘atypical’ even though we’re greater than 50 percent of the population and heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women.”

Comen, who graduated from Harvard Medical School in 2004 and Harvard College in 2000, reviewed the history of how the medical system has discounted women’s health concerns. It partly stems from the fact that historically doctors were male and viewed what was normal and abnormal through the lens of the male body. Women were viewed as emotional to the extent that female “hysteria” was in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980, Comen said. Prevailing attitudes focused on control, promoted shame, and spotlighted women’s sexuality out of proportion to their actual healthcare needs.

“The question is, how does this show up in our healthcare system today? Because we’re so evolved. But are we?” said Comen, who was interviewed by Janet Rich-Edwards, director of life course epidemiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan school of Public Health.

The legacy of those attitudes endures today, Comen said, in examining rooms where physicians speaking with male cancer patients are twice as likely to discuss potential sexual dysfunction than they are with women in the same circumstances, and in plastic surgery suites where, anecdotally, male doctors routinely suggest larger breast implants, and in hospitals where anxiety is over-diagnosed in women, dismissing valid health concerns.

She cited a case of a 34-year-old metastatic breast cancer patient whose disease had spread throughout her body extensively enough that Comen thought she didn’t have long to live. The woman, who had been orphaned, had no family support, and had lived through significant trauma, received medication that dramatically reduced the cancer. A few years later when the pandemic hit, the woman got COVID and was admitted with stuttered speech, tremors, and other stroke-like symptoms, but was dismissed as being anxious. Comen insisted on a neurology consult.

“I was thinking, I’ve met this woman when she was the most anxious she’s ever been in her life. Something is really wrong,” Comen said. “In the next room, I had a woman who also had COVID, no history of anxiety, and was eating her hand to her bone. There was something neurological going on in these women’s brains. I didn’t know what it was. There are many stories of this, when you think about endometriosis and the things that women have gone through and been told it’s all in their heads, when we really just didn’t invest in figuring out what’s going on.”   

The picture of women’s health isn’t all bad, speakers said. The factors that have buoyed health in the general population — improved sanitation, vaccines, antibiotics — have not passed women by. In fact, women globally have longer life expectancies than men. Deborah Kado, professor of medicine, chief of geriatric research at Stanford University School of Medicine, and co-director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, said a girl born today can expect to live to 100, decades longer than expectations a century ago. Even that apparent good news, though has a dark lining: Women can expect to spend 12 to 15 years at the end of their lives in poor health, significantly longer than men.

Colin Hill, co-founder and chief executive officer of Aitia, which is leveraging artificial intelligence to discover new therapeutics, said things are about to change for the better. Medical science understands disease at a fundamental level — the interplay of genes and proteins — in a woefully small number of conditions, just 5 percent. The powerful artificial intelligence tools being developed and deployed today have the potential to change the medical landscape, leading to deeper understandings of the other 95 percent.

“We’re now on the precipice of real change across a number of diseases, especially those diseases that particularly affect women,” Hill said, “because we now have the chance to start to reverse-engineer the actual complex system of interacting genes and proteins that drive clinical outcomes.”

Are shifts in drinking culture, wearable technology, and drug research combining to help cut alcohol consumption to levels not seen since the 1930s?

Harvard health experts think they might be.

A recent survey showed that a record low of 54 percent of U.S. adults say they drink, the lowest seen since the Gallup Poll’s initial 1939 look at the nation’s imbibing habits. The reading is the latest in a multiyear trend, which has seen a decline from 67 percent in 2022 to 62 percent in 2023, 58 percent in 2024, to today’s 54 percent.

The poll also suggests that those who do drink are drinking less, with a record low of 24 percent reporting having had an alcoholic beverage in the last 24 hours.

“The messages are landing,” said Marisa Silveri, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of McLean Hospital’s Neurodevelopmental Laboratory on Addictions and Mental Health. “We’re seeing measurable shifts in drinking behavior and awareness that reflect decades of neuroscience and public health research finally translating into real-world impact.”

During the pandemic, the outlook was less positive. A significant spike in drinking caused alarm among public health officials and researchers, who saw a reversal of hard-won gains and predicted long-term harms and a spike in alcohol-related deaths — due to cancer, liver failure, and other alcohol-related ills — in the years ahead.

Silveri gives the so-called sober-curious movement a lot of credit for ushering in change. The message of re-evaluating one’s relationship with alcohol gained steam after the pandemic, spread widely through social media, and seemed to touch a collective nerve. Breaks from drinking in “Dry January” — New Year’s resolution season — or autumn’s “Sober October” went mainstream.

Silveri, like many Americans, became more aware of how drinking habits changed during the pandemic. Extending a Dry January into 500 days, she saw firsthand the sleep and mood improvements that mirror what neuroscience has long demonstrated about alcohol’s impact on brain health.

The increasing sophistication and popularity of wearable technology also may have played a part, Silveri said. Fitness trackers not only record a person’s steps during the day but also highlight the physiological effects of a night’s drinking, chronicling elevated heart rate, blood pressure, and sleep disruptions — changes that can result in mood, cognitive, and mental health impacts.

Recent scientific findings that no amount of alcohol is healthy arrived amid the shifting social environment on drinking, potentially lending those cautions greater resonance, Silveri said.

Those results also called into question the once-accepted wisdom that light to moderate drinking isn’t harmful and that some drinking — a glass of red wine per day — may actually be healthful.

“Alcohol challenges our physiology, there’s no disputing that,” Silveri said. “And there’s not really any evidence that it changes physiology in a beneficial way.”

That stance echoes the January warning by the U.S. surgeon general that alcohol is the nation’s third-leading preventable cause of cancer, after smoking and obesity.

Drinking, the advisory said, has a causal link to seven different cancers: breast, colorectal, esophagus, liver, mouth, throat, and voice box. Drinking more increases risk, the advisory says, though for three cancers — breast, mouth, and throat — the risk rises with as little as one drink per day.

“The message that’s finally resonating is that is if you have an alcohol use disorder or have problematic alcohol use, any reduction in use is an improvement. It’s not all or nothing,” Silveri said. “For some, abstinence remains essential, but for many people who drink at hazardous levels, even modest reductions can yield measurable benefits — better sleep, improved mood, sharper cognition. These small physiological and psychological gains reinforce each other, supporting longer-term change.”

While the negative health effects of alcohol have gained public prominence recently, some researchers caution against discarding all past evidence of beneficial effects.

There’s no argument that heavy drinking is harmful, but the question — and the evidence — concerning low and moderate drinking is more complex and requires more high quality studies, they say. Increased risk for some cancers may be counterbalanced by lower risk of others, for example.

Moderate drinking seems to decrease the risk of cardiovascular disease versus nondrinkers. Drinking patterns are also important, with one large study showing that moderate drinking with meals appeared to decrease mortality, while consuming the same weekly amount outside of meals and on fewer occasions increases mortality.

Joji Suzuki, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Division of Addiction Psychiatry, said the sober-curious movement has been reinforced by the development of appealing non-alcoholic alternatives, such as mocktails and a new generation of nonalcoholic beer and wine, that reduce stigma and make bars, parties, and nightclubs more welcoming.

While the increased interest in sobriety is important, Suzuki said many people will continue to drink, so it’s also important not to lose the message of moderation.

“If you’re not drinking, don’t start drinking because you think you’re going to get a benefit,” Suzuki said. “But we know that people are going to drink, so keep it moderate. Moderation is a very important message.”

Another shift in recent years, Suzuki said, has been the startling effectiveness of the latest generation of anti-obesity medications in helping curb drinking.

These Ozempic successors are GLP-1 inhibitors and have been widely prescribed in just a few years. They’ve proven remarkably effective at removing the desire to overeat and have allowed people to drop significant weight.

But they also reduce the thirst for alcohol, Suzuki said, to the extent that trials are being considered to test GLP-1 medication for treatment of alcohol use disorder.

If successful, the drugs would represent a powerful new optionto the current major treatment alternatives, like naltrexone, which have not proven very effective.

“People who are not even trying to cut back on drinking are saying, ‘After starting those medications, I notice that I’m not drinking much — or at all,’” Suzuki said. “There are a number of companies that are now specifically targeting alcohol use disorder with GLP-1s, with the aim of making them an FDA-approved treatment.”

Gyongyi Szabo, expert on liver inflammation, HMS professor of medicine, and chief academic officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, sees a generational shift in the data, and in her own home.

The recent Gallup poll found that young adult drinking rates have been falling for a decade and since 2023 dropped from 59 percent to 50 percent.

Szabo’s 30-year-old son recently said he’d become a vegetarian, something she attributes to a greater appreciation among the current generation of young adults of the health and social consequences of choices made in eating and drinking.

“There is a generational shift that may be beneficial,” Szabo said.

Szabo said the excess consumption during the pandemic’s difficult months may have caused “an awakening” among those light or moderate drinkers who became worried about what was happening. The downstream effects of that awakening — and the reaction that caused — may still be becoming apparent.

“The increased alcohol use during the lockdown was really bad for everyone,” Szabo said. “But maybe the news actually travels, and people change their behavior. If this is true, it is very, very good. It’s going to have a multiplier effect from the standpoint of liver disease, because, in combination with alcohol, other conditions like medical obesity and Type 2 diabetes have a synergistic effect on the liver.”

During the pandemic, Silveri said, there were concerns that parents stuck at home might allow or even encourage teenagers to drink with them, reasoning that it was safer for them to do so in a controlled environment.

But the pandemic may have had a beneficial effect as well.

School shutdowns disrupted the high school social scene that commonly involves illicit drinking, and research has shown that the later youth begin drinking, the lower the chances that they’ll become problem drinkers down the road.

Even a year or two delay in the age of initiation of youth drinking can reduce physiological impacts on the adolescent brain, with potentially positive ripple effects.

“For anyone under the age of 21 there are not only no benefits to drinking, but clear harms,” Silveri said. “Alcohol interferes with brain development, amplifies risk-taking and emotional reactivity, and raises vulnerability to addiction. Delaying the onset of first use remains one of the most effective ways to protect against later addiction. I stand by that strongly because it is supported by some of our best epidemiological data.”

Despite the positive trends, experts said alcohol’s negative societal impacts are far from finished.

Jagpreet Chhatwal, associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Institute for Technology Assessment, said the recent polling provided a broad view but didn’t focus on problem drinking, which doesn’t appear to have subsided.

Liver failure, Chhatwal said, is caused by years of heavy drinking, and any change in those drinking habits won’t be reflected in clinic waiting rooms for some time.

“Binge drinking, high-risk drinking, those things were not covered in the survey, and it will be important that we see those trends also coming down,” said Chhatwal, who leads health policy research in several areas, including alcohol use disorder, liver cancer, and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. “It’s too soon to say that this small drop in consumption will have an impact because it takes years to see that trend in liver disease.”

There are other pockets of concern as well, Suzuki said.

People with alcohol-related issues are over-represented in the nation’s emergency rooms, while high school drinking remains an issue. Women continue to narrow the gap with men when it comes to problem drinking, with the result that alcoholic liver disease is increasing among women.

“It’s not all good news,” Suzuki said. “There are some troubling trends that are emerging, but overall I think it’s great that there’s a greater interest in sobriety and recognition that heavy drinking can be harmful.”

Many professions come with mandatory retirement ages but not so for federal judges and lawmakers, with many remaining on the job well into their 70s and 80s.

That could be ripe for a change as concerns increase over cognitive decline among aging leaders and jurists, said experts during a Wednesday panel titled “How Old is Too Old to Govern?”  

“There may well be, particularly now, a movement to have age limits or term limits for judges,” said retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, senior lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, at the event sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center. “They exist everywhere else in the world and in the majority of states. The Supreme Court’s lack of either an age limit or a term limit is really unusual.”

Questions about the graying of the nation’s leaders became a major campaign issue in recent elections, most notably in the races for the nation’s commander in chief.  Former president Joe Biden was 82 at the end of his presidency, and Donald Trump, at 78, became the oldest person to be inaugurated as president for his second term.

The issue is widespread.

Both Republicans in the Senate and Democrats in the House were led until recently by octogenarians; Republican Senator Mitch O’Connell announced his retirement on his 83rd birthday, and Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi will be 86 at the end of her term in 2027. The average age of a member of Congress is about 59.

On the Supreme Court, Justices Clarence Thomas (77) and Samuel Alito (75) are the most senior on the bench, followed by Sonia Sotomayor (71) and Chief Justice John Roberts (70).

According to the Federal Judicial Center, in 2024, the average age of U.S. federal judges was 67.68 years.

Most Americans support age limits for both politicians and Supreme Court justices, according to a report from the Pew Research Center, but that would require a constitutional amendment.

The U.S. Constitution sets 35 as the minimum age for president, 30 for senators, and 25 for representatives, but it does not set a maximum age limit. The document specifies neither minimum nor maximum age for Supreme Court justices.

During his remarks, Francis X. Shen, professor of law at the University of Minnesota, and member of Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics, pointed to a New York Times article that reported that more than a fifth of members of Congress are 70 years old and older.

“There are more people in Congress who are older than ever before,” said Shen, who moderated the event.

In the case of aging judges, some states have tackled the issue already. Thirty-two of 50 impose a mandatory retirement age, according to an article by the National Center for State Courts.

“The upside of that is that it’s administratively very easy. All you need is a birth certificate and a calculator,” Shen said. “The second upside is you reduce, though not entirely, some concerns about cognitive decline in older ages.”

Worldwide, most countries have either a compulsory retirement age for justices in their highest court — which ranges from 60 to 75 years — or term limits.

To address the issue of aging politicians, Shen discussed the possibility of a mandatory disclosure of cognitive assessments, similar to financial disclosures, to provide voters with additional information.

Benjamin C. Silverman, assistant professor of psychiatry and member of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, highlighted the difficulties in assessing cognitive impairment, including the vast individual variation in cognitive decline, the variability in cognitive reserve among individuals, and the lack of a baseline neurocognitive functioning assessment.

“The biggest challenge to assessing cognitive impairment is lacking a baseline assessment,” said Silverman. “As we get older, if we display some sort of cognitive challenges, someone might say, ‘Let’s do some neuropsychological testing,’ but without the ability to compare that to something, without being able to see a trajectory, it’s really hard to know what to do with it.”

Gertner retired at 65 in 2011 to pursue other career options, including teaching and writing. She says imposing a retirement age on judges would ultimately be more effective, although she echoed the notion of the complications in setting one.

Individualized cognitive assessments might pose risks in implementation due to potential bias, but also because there isn’t agreement on how to assess cognitive impairment in judges, she said.

“If we don’t have an agreement on what comprises cognitive decline, I’m not sure that I feel comfortable about a cognitive test,” said Gertner. “What is the marker of individualized decline in our incredibly divided world, where judges are under attack?”

Gertner believes that mandatory retirement age for judges, including Supreme Court justices, would help avoid public debates about cognitive decline and also help the court regain some public support, which has dropped to “near historic lows,” according to a recent Pew report.  

“I stand for retirement age, particularly for the Supreme Court justices,” said Gertner. “There is another generation coming down the pipe … and the retirement age should address the issue of cognition, but also the issue of democratic legitimacy.”

Mistreating a dog may come back to bite you.

Scientists have long known that childhood abuse, neglect, and trauma can have lifelong consequences in humans. Now, a study by Harvard scientists links early adversity to similar effects in our oldest domesticated species.

In a study of nearly 4,500 dogs published in Scientific Reports, researchers found that adverse experiences in the first six months of puppyhood were strongly associated with elevated aggression and fearfulness in adult dogs.

“In the general population of dogs, you see a significant impact of life experience on behavior,” said Julia Espinosa, lead author of the new study and a research associate in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology (HEB). “What we found that was really surprising is that this impact varies by the breed of the dog, so that suggests there’s an important heritable component to behavior and individual susceptibility to stress.”

Numerous studies have established that early adversity has lifelong effects on humans as well as other animals, including mice. But no comprehensive studies had been performed on dogs until now. The research was conducted in the lab of Erin Hecht, an assistant professor in Human Evolutionary Biology and a prominent researcher of canine biology, evolution, and domestication.

Espinosa collected data on 4,497 dogs by having their owners fill out a survey that covered whether the animals had been subjected to harsh punishments such as beatings, having their mouths held shut, or being pinned down by humans seeking to assert dominance (the so-called “alpha roll”). The survey also asked whether the dogs had gone through traumatic events such as living on the streets, being attacked by other dogs, or getting hit by cars.

“We know that the nervous system is especially plastic early in life,” said Hecht. “In this study, we found that in dogs, traumatic experiences during the first six months had the biggest impact on their fear and aggression behavior later in life.

“This lines up with what we’ve seen in humans and in other animals — there’s this critical period of development when the nervous system is more sensitive and impacts during that time can have bigger effects.”

As dog owners can attest, different breeds exhibit stark differences in behavior and temperament. Researchers uncovered wide variability in baseline levels of fear and aggression among different breeds. For example, breeds that specialized in guarding livestock or bringing down big game were more prone to aggression.

Within each breed, researchers reported that puppyhood trauma had measurable effects: Animals with histories of adversity displayed greater fear and aggression than other members of the same breeds. These experiences were at least as influential as other factors such as sex and whether the animal had been neutered.

The impacts were most dramatic in breeds such as American Eskimo Dogs, American Leopard Hounds, and Siberian Huskies. On other hand, Labradors showed relatively little effects.

More than half the dogs in the survey came from single breeds. About 48 percent were mutts from mixed or unknown ancestry.

About one-third of the animals were reported to have suffered some form of adversity. But Hecht cautioned that those numbers were probably unusually high in this study population.

“We specifically recruited dogs that had trauma histories,” she said. “So I don’t think this necessarily means that a third of the dogs out there in the world have been neglected or abused.”

The researchers heard heartbreaking stories. One Golden Retriever puppy was fed only a few tablespoons of food every day and by the time he was rescued at age 6 months he weighed only 20 pounds. Although his body recovered, he remained unusually fearful.

The lesson: Our best friends carry early trauma for the rest of their lives.

“Maybe this makes them a little bit more like us than we realized,” said Hecht.

What does the rise of artificial intelligence mean for humanity? That was the question at the core of “How is digital technology shaping the human soul?,” a panel discussion that drew experts from computer science to comparative literature last week.

The Oct. 1 event was the first from the Public Culture Project, a new initiative based in the office of the dean of arts and humanities. Program Director Ian Marcus Corbin, a philosopher on the neurology faculty of Harvard Medical School, said the project’s goal was putting “humanist and humanist thinking at the center of the big conversations of our age.”

“Are we becoming tech people?” Corbin asked. The answers were varied

“We as humanity are excellent at creating different tools that support our lives,” said Nataliya Kos’myna, a research scientist with the MIT Media Lab. These tools are good at making “our lives longer, but not always making our lives the happiest, the most fulfilling,” she continued, listing examples from the typewriter to the internet.

Generative AI, specifically ChatGPT, is the latest example of a tool that essentially backfires in promoting human happiness, she suggested.

She shared details of a study of 54 students from across Greater Boston whose brain activity was monitored by electroencephalography after being asked to write an essay.

One group of students was allowed to use ChatGPT, another permitted access to the internet and Google, while a third group was restricted to their own intelligence and imagination. The topics — such as “Is there true happiness?” — did not require any previous or specialized knowledge.

The results were striking: The ChatGPT group demonstrated “much less brain activity.” In addition, their essays were very similar, focusing primarily on career choices as the determinants of happiness.

The internet group tended to write about giving, while the third group focused more on the question of true happiness.

Questions illuminated the gap. All the participants were asked whether they could quote a line from their own essays, one minute after turning them in.

“Eighty-three percent of the ChatGPT group couldn’t quote anything,” compared to 11 percent from the second and third groups. ChatGPT users “didn’t feel much ownership,” of their work. They “didn’t remember, didn’t feel it was theirs.”

“Your brain needs struggle,” Kos’myna said. “It doesn’t bloom” when a task is too easy. In order to learn and engage, a task “needs to be just hard enough for you to work for this knowledge.”

E. Glen Weyl, research lead with Microsoft Research Special Projects, had a more optimistic view of technology. “Just seeing the problems disempowers us,” he said, urging instead for scientists to “redesign systems.”

He noted that much of the current focus on technology is on its commercial aspect. “Well, the only way they can make money is by selling advertising,” he said, paraphrasing prevailing wisdom before countering it. “I’m not sure that’s the only way this can be structured.”

Citing works such as Steven Pinker’s new book, “When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows,” Weyl talked about the idea of community — and how social media is more focused on groups than on individuals.

“If we thought about engineering a feed about these notions, you might be made aware of things in your feed that come from different members of your community. You would have a sense that everyone is hearing that at the same time.”

This would lead to a “theory of mind” of those other people, he explained, opening our sense of shared experiences, like that shared by attendees at a concert.

To illustrate how that could work for social media, he brought up Super Bowl ads. These, said Weyl, “are all about creating meaning.” Rather than sell individual drinks or computers, for example, we are told “Coke is for sharing. Apple is for rebels.”

“Creating a common understanding of something leads us to expect others to share the understanding of that thing,” he said.

To reconfigure tech in this direction, he acknowledged, “requires taking our values seriously enough to let them shape” social media. It is, however, a promising option.

Moira Weigel, an assistant professor in comparative literature at Harvard, took the conversation back before going forward, pointing out that many of the questions discussed have captivated humans since the 19th century.

Weigel, who is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, centered her comments around five questions, which are also at the core of her introductory class, “Literature and/as AI: Humanity, Technology, and Creativity.”

“What is the purpose of work?” she asked, amending her query to add whether a “good” society should try to automate all work. “What does it mean to have, or find, your voice? Do our technologies extend our agency — or do they escape our control and control us? Can we have relationships with things that we or other human beings have created? What does it mean to say that some activity is merely technical, a craft or a skill, and when is it poesis” or art?

Looking at the influence of large language models in education, she said, “I think and hope LLMs are creating an interesting occasion to rethink what is instrumental. They scramble our perception of what education is essential,” she said. LLMs “allow us to ask how different we are from machines — and to claim the space to ask those questions.”

Brandon Vaidyanathan, a professor of sociology at Catholic University of America, also saw possibility.

Vaidyanathan, the panel’s first speaker, began by noting the difference between science and technology, citing the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of “enframing” has tech viewing everything as “product.”

Vaidyanathan noted that his experience suggests scientists take a different view.

“Underlying what we might call scientific intelligence there is a deeper, spiritual intelligence — why things matter,” he said.

Instead of the “domination, extraction, and fragmentation” most see driving tech (and especially AI), he noted that scientists tend toward “the three principles of spiritual intelligence: reverence, receptivity, and reconnection.” More than 80 percent of them “encounter a deep sense of respect for what they’re studying,” he said.

Describing a researcher studying the injection needle of the salmonella bacteria with a “deep sense of reverence,” he noted, “You’d have thought this was the stupa of a Hindu temple.

“Tech and science can open us up to these kind of spiritual experiences,” Vaidyanathan continued.

“Can we imagine the development of technology that could cultivate a sense of reverence rather than domination?” To do that, he concluded, might require a “disconnect on a regular basis.”  

Lauren Williams ’00 is a theoretical mathematician and recently she felt stuck in her research, a recurring frustration for a scholar who wrestles with difficult conceptual problems.

Then, as Williams worked quietly in her home office, she was jolted by an unexpected revelation: The MacArthur Foundation phoned to inform Williams that she had won a celebrated “genius grant” — a “no-strings-attached” fellowship that provides recipients $800,000 over five years.

“I was completely shocked,” recalled Williams, Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics. “I was just sort of trying to verify for myself that I was awake, and this was real.”

Williams was one of 22 fellows announced Wednesday. The MacArthur Foundation credited Williams for “elucidating unexpected connections” between her field of algebraic combinatorics and other areas in math and physics.

The foundation said: “With a curiosity-driven approach to research and willingness to collaborate across disciplines, Williams is expanding fundamental mathematical theory and building fruitful connections between mathematics and other scientific fields.”

Williams specializes in algebra and combinatorics and how they can be applied to problems in math and physics. Simply put, combinatorics is the study of discrete, finite things that can be counted as opposed to things that are continuous — think the continuous surface of the ocean vs. the waves.

Much of her work involves the “positive Grassmannian,” a geometric shape whose points represent simpler geometric objects.

Other scholars have discovered that her theoretical work applies to a diverse array of phenomena such as shallow water waves, tsunamis, collisions of fundamental particles, protein synthesis, and the flow of traffic on one-way streets.

Williams remains both fascinated and perplexed about why the positive Grassmannian keeps popping up in such disparate domains. “It’s one of the biggest mysteries that I’ve encountered,” she said.

Williams draws inspiration from a quotation from British mathematician G.H. Hardy: “The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: There is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.”

At an aesthetic level, Williams sees many parallels between her work in pure math and the arts: all solve puzzles within the rules of the medium; all involve patterns, beauty, and harmony.

“If you ask a question and the answer is not beautiful, that means you asked the wrong question,” she said.

Raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Williams grew up as a voracious reader, aspiring writer, and violinist. In fourth grade, she discovered she was good at math when she won her school district competition, and she continued pursuing her interest in summer programs and math competitions.

As a Harvard undergraduate, she majored in mathematics at a time when there were no women on the department faculty.

After earning her Ph.D. at MIT, she returned to Harvard on a Benjamin Peirce postdoctoral fellowship. She spent nine years on the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley before returning to Harvard in 2018 as only the second female tenured professor in the history of the Math Department.

With the MacArthur grant turning a spotlight on her corner of academia, Williams hopes to inspire other young women who aspire to careers in mathematics.

“When I was a student, I worried quite a lot about whether I could get an academic job and whether a career in academia was compatible with having children,” said Williams, now a mother of two. “To the students who are interested in a career in math academia but are worried about the same issues, I would very much encourage them to go for it.”

Her career has been a balancing act — sometimes quite literally. As a young professor, Williams had an infant who was a fitful sleeper and night after night, she and her husband took turns rocking the child to sleep by bobbing on a yoga ball.

“If you’re holding a baby in a dark room, gently bouncing, there’s nothing you can do except think,” said Williams. “One night, I started thinking about a question and that actually led to my next paper.”

Today Williams is one of three women on the Harvard math faculty. This small cohort is racking up an impressive record with MacArthur Fellowships: Melanie Matchett Wood was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2022.

(Also among this year’s MacArthur cohort was Hahrie Han ’97, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University who was recognized for her research into how people engage in civil and political affairs.)

For Williams, the award comes at an opportune moment. She had three federal research grants terminated in May — including one for a conference scheduled for the following month, forcing her and her colleagues to scramble to reorganize the event.

“This award really couldn’t come at a better time, personally,” she said.

At a larger level, the recognition is about more than one scholar. Like her beloved positive Grassmannian, her achievement reflects those of many others.

“I’m shocked and honored, but also just incredibly grateful to the dozens, if not hundreds, of amazing teachers, mentors, collaborators, friends, and family members who have supported me,” said Williams. “The biggest overwhelming reaction for me is really just gratitude.”

Williams is also the 2024-2025 Sally Starling Seaver Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Researchers at the Rowland Institute at Harvard have pioneered a new way to achieve the coolest possible temperatures to image materials at sub-atomic scale. In combining the technical know-how of Rowland staff scientists with collaborators at the University of Michigan, the findings make possible a new era of ultra-cold microscopy.

Cryogenic transmission electron microscopy — TEM — has long played a vital role in many branches of science, from biology to physics, because the very low temperatures allow close examination of samples of everything from inorganic crystals to complex biomolecules at the atomic scale. Typically, the cryogen, or cooling agent, is liquid nitrogen, which boils at 321 below zero Fahrenheit (or 77 Kelvin) — impressive, but not cold enough to see those strange quantum wriggles.

That’s why scientists have strived over the last decade to go colder by using liquid helium, which boils at 421 below zero Fahrenheit, or 4 Kelvin, and is very close to “absolute zero.” But this comes with serious technical problems that affect the mechanical stability of the microscope.

Harvard researchers envisioned a new way to use liquid helium for a more stable approach to this high-level microscopy, a breakthrough explained in a paper published last month in PNAS. Led by principal investigator and Rowland fellow Ismail El Baggari, the team built novel partnerships to create a usable new technology, both within the institute and outside, with University of Michigan Professor Robert Hovden. The research is among the first high-impact papers (another was robot flies) since Rowland moved to Harvard’s science campus a year ago.

The original concept of cryogenic cooling during microscopy to preserve the structure of biological molecules — which led to the 2017 Nobel Prize for chemistry — was to use it to study cells, proteins, and other soft matter. However, El Baggari and Suk Hyun Sung, a postdoc on the team, saw its potential in quantum physics.

“We’re physicists and we’re interested in imaging weird materials called quantum materials that have different properties at low temperatures,” said El Baggari, noting that electrons exhibit quantum behavior, only at extremely low temperatures. “And so we need to cool down the materials to access those new properties.” Liquid helium cooling was seen as a means to do this.

To utilize liquid helium, however, the researchers had to have an electron microscope that would allow such cooling. “In the past, we’ve used electron microscopy to image the atomic structure of these materials at high temperatures, but it turns out that it’s very difficult to get high-resolution images with liquid helium cooling,” El Baggari said.

“Liquid helium evaporates so quickly and so easily any external heat vaporizes it,” he added. “That then introduces vibrations as bubbles form, as the flow is disturbed by a mixture of gas and liquid.”

These vibrations blurred the images in the way a bubbling glass saucepan of boiling water obscures the view through the pot, though that’s visible when the water is cold. The fast evaporation also meant that the cold temperatures could be maintained for only about 20 minutes, far too short for meaningful measurements.

To solve this problem, the researchers needed to create a method that would allow the use of liquid helium, but in a way that didn’t allow vibrations. The researchers collaborated with Rowland manager Erik Madsen; director of electronic engineering Winfield Hill; and Alan Stern, a staff computational scientist. Together, they built a system that could maintain cold temperatures for hours on end. They also tracked and isolated the vibrations of the cooling system from reaching the specimen.

“We had the general ideas, but we didn’t know at the start the details of cryogenic design, machining to high tolerances, and precision electronics,” said El Baggari. “We had to develop new tools and processes to begin tackling our problems.”

“Ismail had the idea to use geophones to detect minuscule vibrations in the ultra-cold TEM set-up, up to identify places to dampen the ‘noise,’ particularly on the liquid helium input. So we built a geophone for the microscope that is so sensitive, it can detect vibrations within fractions of atomic distance — exactly the scale needed for this microscope to be able to image clearly at sub-atomic resolution,” said Hill.

The stakes were high because of the complexity of the machines. “These microscopes are multimillion-dollar machines, and it was quite nerve-wracking to think about inserting our own new instrument in what has never been tested,” said Sung.

Into this huge and delicate machine, he continued, the builders had to create site entry holders that “would fit in like a glass slide fits into an ordinary microscope — without breaking anything.” The sample had to land in the right position of within 25 microns, or a third of the width of human hair. Any deviations meant the sample could not be imaged, vibrations were excessive, or vacuum levels were poor.

“For the first months of building things, we were just measuring commercially available site entry holders, making sure that all the dimensions were correct,” continued Sung. “We didn’t know what the critical dimensions were because all the holders were slightly different, and we didn’t know what actually mattered.” After three years of testing the sample holder and improving vibration isolation, the team was able to capture the first high-resolution images in quantum materials while operating for many hours at ultracool temperatures.

“Suddenly we were studying materials that we historically had only been able to examine at room temperature,” said El Baggari. “We were never able to image them while they were actually exhibiting the emergent properties that we and our collaborators are interested in. So now we can actually use the electron microscope as a primary tool to directly tackle these quantum electronic phases in materials.”

Continued improvements of the new tool could open new fields of inquiry, such as simultaneously applying a voltage to working devices or manipulating materials by stretching or pressing on them. “The microscopy experiments that we’ve been routinely doing at room temperatures, we can now do it at low temperatures where things get even more exciting,” he said.

The research described in this article was partially funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.

When the scientist and conservationist Jane Goodall died last week, she left behind a transformed understanding of humankind’s relationship to its closest ape cousins — chimpanzees — as well as a legacy that highlights the implications of that relationship in understanding ourselves.

Richard Wrangham, Harvard’s Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology, emeritus, and a leading researcher of chimp behavior, worked alongside Goodall first as a student and later as a colleague after he founded the Kibale Forest Chimpanzee Project in Uganda. In this edited conversation, he discusses her wider impact as a teacher — not just of colleagues and fellow scientists, but as an exemplar of hope and empathy.

You did graduate work at the Gombe Stream in Tanzania. What was that like?

It was completely magical. I was working in Gombe, a beautiful place with semi-forested, semi-bush, semi-grassland tumbling down to a shining blue lake. Through the hills and valleys roamed about 60 chimpanzees whose behavior was still little understood. Every day was a thrill.

Jane had arrived in 1960 and did a wonderful job of tracking the chimps, finding them and observing them in the wild, before she got to know them as individuals by staying with them in a small camp area. Starting in ’69, students started following the chimps wherever they went. I arrived in 1970 and joined that group. We discovered, for example, that the chimps had a territory that they defended against their neighbors, which raised all sorts of fascinating questions.

At this time Jane was mostly in Serengeti, studying carnivores. She would come to Gombe for a week at a time, which was a joy because she wanted to know all about what was happening with the chimps. She was interested in everything.

How would you describe her as a person?

Incredibly focused. One thing not everybody appreciates is that Jane was far more than a brave young woman habituating chimps in the forest. She was a really good scientist. She combined meticulous observation with a very good sense of theory. We were very lucky that Jane was one of the first people to study chimpanzees in the wild, because she was so good at it.

Is there a single quality or achievement that you think she should be best known for?

One answer is in terms of what unites her interests, and I think that’s empathy: empathy for chimps, empathy for the people living around the chimp sites — you don’t conserve at the expense of other people — empathy for the world, empathy for creatures in the world. She had a sense of caring for everybody that she encountered.

It’s famous that she was entirely focused on chimpanzee behavior and their natural history until 1986. Her focus changed as a result of a Chicago conference called “Understanding Chimpanzees.” She heard the conservation session and realized that chimps were in trouble. She learned more about the cruel ways in which chimps were often held in captivity and from then on, it was conservation and care that mattered to her far more than research. I think it’s part of the reason she was so successful. She was dauntingly single-minded.

Her work and yours have transformed our understanding of humanity’s closest primate cousin. What do we know now that we didn’t know then?

When Jane began her work in the 1960s, there was no reason to think that any of the great apes were more significant for understanding human evolution than any other, but she discovered far more similarity in the behavior of chimpanzees and humans than between humans and what was known then about gorillas and orangutans and bonobos.

DNA research would later show that chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than they are to gorillas. Her behavioral discoveries of tool-making, tool-using, food-sharing, hunting, warlike behavior, as well as the astonishing intimacy of the mother-infant relationships — things that unite humans and chimps — anticipated the DNA revolution.

People started taking far more seriously the notion that there is an underlying biological influence on human behavior. She also helped convince scientists in general that chimps had far more similarity to us in their emotional lives, in their capacity for feeling, and in their ability to think, than any wild animal had been shown to have.

Has that work changed our treatment of chimpanzees?

It’s had enormous effects. There were hundreds of chimpanzees in medical facilities in the middle of the last century that now have been released into sanctuaries, where they are nurtured relatively comfortably into their old age without being forced into tiny solitary cages and being the subject of stressful medical experiments.

Some of the coverage has characterized her as an optimist, which seems a bit surprising, given humanity’s assault on nature. Do you agree that she was?

She absolutely felt that it was important for her to be an optimist because people need hope. People need to be motivated to do good things: good for themselves, good for the planet, good for their communities, good for nature. The books that she wrote in the last two decades with “hope” in the title reflect a very conscious determination to keep hope alive. What did she really think? There’s no question the difficulties got to her, but at the same time, I think that she genuinely felt that there are reasons for hope. One of the most important sources of hope for her was the indomitable human spirit. If you can remind people that if you try hard enough you can do anything — her mother’s message — then good things will happen.

Do you share her optimism?

I am not an optimist about maintaining anything like the level of nature that we have now. I see the human species in an unstoppable takeover of the great majority of nature in the world. I think that the hope for the future of our wild places is to focus on the big places that will remain the source for as many animals and plants as we can keep alive. Kibale forest is the biggest forest in Uganda and it’s not very big. It’s only about 250 square miles.

The hope is that we can keep countries thinking that these special places are worth saving. I worry that if we spend too much time focused on saving every little forest, we’ll lose the big picture. But I can feel Jane looking over my shoulder saying, “You shouldn’t say that.” She would say, “You just passionately fight for every little forest, and maybe, out of that fight, more energy comes to save the big ones too.”

This is a tale of scholarly obsession. It involves a burning ship, a jungle-exploring Victorian naturalist, a Harvard biologist, and a rare butterfly.

Evolutionary biologist Andrew Berry is a scholar of Alfred Russel Wallace, a pioneering evolutionist overshadowed by Charles Darwin.

Over the years he has collected memorabilia that connect him to his scientific hero, including a rare first edition of travelogues, an autographed letter, and an original 19th-century map.

Now Berry can claim an even rarer link: A previously-unknown butterfly species collected by Wallace in the Amazon — and forgotten in museum drawers for more than 150 years — has been designated as a new species named in his honor.

“I’m absolutely thrilled, sad though it is to be so pathetically vain about having a little brown butterfly named after you,” said Berry as he sat in his book-lined office beside a colorful model of his namesake butterfly, Euptychia andrewberryi. “Seeing my excitement, you might well think, ‘Get a life, man!’”

How that tropical butterfly landed on the desk of a wry English biologist is a scientific saga that winds through centuries across Brazil, the Atlantic Ocean, London, the Harvard campus — and began for Berry with a writing assignment.

Wallace, who was born in Wales in 1823, proposed his own theory of evolution by natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin in 1858. For a variety of reasons, Darwin became credited as the father of evolutionary biology, and Wallace went down in history as an also-ran. 

Yet Wallace was a trailblazing naturalist in his own right, credited with many other major scientific achievements. He fathered the field of biogeography and recognized a difference in fauna that distinguished Asia from Australia, New Guinea, and the Pacific islands — a boundary now called the “Wallace Line.”

In 1848, Wallace and fellow entomologist Henry Walter Bates sailed for Brazil to explore the Amazon and collect insects and other species.

Four years later, Wallace was returning to England when his ship caught fire during the Atlantic crossing, and nearly all his collections were lost. Wallace and his fellow survivors spent 10 days in lifeboats before being rescued.

Fortunately, Wallace had shipped back a few crates of specimens before the ill-fated voyage. Among them were some butterflies from Brazil.

Fast-forward to the current century. Shinichi Nakahara, an associate of entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, is an expert on butterfly taxonomy and co-author of the vibrantly-illustrated guidebook “Butterflies of the World.”

He also spent a decade researching a monograph on the genus Euptychia, a group of butterflies from South America and Central America. Poring over collections around the globe, he found the butterflies collected by Wallace and Bates at the Museum of Natural History in London.

A number of those specimens were classified as the pitch brown black-eyed satyr (Euptychia picea). But Nakahara recognized that five were anatomically distinct and belonged to a new species, one previously unknown to science.

He had a good candidate for a new name — an amusing character who had given him a deeper appreciation of Wallace.

Enter Berry, who is now assistant head tutor of integrative biology and lecturer on organismic and evolutionary biology.

Berry has worn many hats as a biologist. He chased giant rats through the jungles of New Guinea, studied the genetics of fruit flies, and (bear in mind this is not a strict ranking of priorities) mentored generations of undergraduate biology students. He co-authored a book with the Nobel laureate geneticist James Watson and has written extensively about the history of science.

Near the turn of the millennium, he was fatefully assigned to write about Wallace for the London Review of Books and found himself enraptured. He went on to write numerous essays on Wallace and publish a collection of his writings.

“You can’t read Wallace and not fall in love with him, partly because he’s such a fantastic writer,” said Berry. “Then there’s the underdog piece — here’s the guy who co-discovered the theory that we trumpet, and yet he basically dropped off the map.”

Nakahara felt that such a scholar deserved his own species.

When he first arrived in Cambridge, Nakahara stayed at the house of his faculty sponsor, Naomi Pierce, curator of lepidoptera in the MCZ and Sidney A. and John H. Hessel Professor of Biology, who also happens to be married to Berry.

Nakahara discovered that breakfast in the household involved generous servings of Wallace discussion.

“His contribution is bringing Wallace to people’s attention, because Wallace is this person who’s famous for not being famous,” said Nakahara. “Andrew is very good at explaining the importance of these early naturalists and Victorian biologists, and he is very engaging.”

Having a butterfly named in his honor — better yet, one collected by Wallace and Bates — makes Berry’s heart flutter. One student, Amanda Dynak ’24, made a model of his eponymous species as a gift.

“Andrew is over the moon about it,” said Pierce with a laugh. “I just think it’s a fantastic story, because Andrew is passionate about Alfred Russel Wallace, and has been for a while — in fact, long before Wallace became popular.”

But Berry cannot claim any special distinction in his house. His wife already has three species named after her, including zombie-ant fungus, a brain-hijacking parasite.

“She’s way ahead of me,” he said.

Today, hip-hop is the world’s most popular music genre by most commercial measures. But that wasn’t the case three decades ago when linguistic anthropologist Marcyliena H. Morgan started pitching Harvard administrators on her big idea: a first-of-its-kind hip-hop archive and academic research center.

“She wanted to give deeper legitimacy to studying this globally influential style of creative production,” recalled her husband of 28 years, Lawrence D. Bobo, W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences.

Morgan, founding director of Harvard’s Hiphop Archive & Research Institute, died Sept. 28 due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease. The emerita professor of social sciences and of African and African American Studies was 75.

“Marcy will always be remembered as the genius who conceived of the world’s first hip-hop archive and research center,” said Morgan’s longtime colleague and friend Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

To honor that legacy, Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, recently approved a new name for the gallery-like space at the Hutchins Center: the Marcyliena H. Morgan Hip Hop Archive & Research Institute.

According to Gates, word of the rechristening was relayed to Morgan a few weeks ago. “I sent a letter that was read at her bedside,” he said.

Morgan, who grew up with five sisters on Chicago’s South Side, earned advanced degrees in linguistics at the University of Essex and University of Pennsylvania. In the early 1990s while teaching a course on urban speech communities at the University of California, Los Angeles, she noticed students submitting essays on innovative patterns of speech used by Ice Cube and other West Coast rappers.

“That drew her attention to this enormous creativity with language on the one hand, and this very powerful youth culture on the other,” said Bobo, a fellow UCLA faculty member at the time. “She ended up dedicating much of the latter part of her career to studying hip-hop culture while trying to preserve and make more broadly understandable its material and cultural production.”

Morgan began amassing a vast collection of hip-hop albums, magazines, fashion, and concert posters while still at UCLA in the 1990s. As Gates recalled, her vision for a museum-quality archive was first articulated to him around 1996.

“At the time, no one could have envisioned that hip-hop would become the lingua franca of youth musical culture worldwide,” Gates observed. “The equivalent would be if W.E.B. Du Bois or Alain Locke in 1925 had thought to document the evolution of this new musical form called jazz.”

After joining Bobo at Harvard in 2002, Morgan wasted no time establishing the archive in the African and African American Studies Department. The Hiphop Archive was briefly relocated to Stanford University, where Morgan and Bobo were on the faculty from 2005 to 2007. Its current space at the Hutchins Center opened in 2008, shortly after the couple’s return to Harvard.

“There were so many people, including many artists, who visited the archive over the years and instantly burst into tears,” Bobo said. “They regarded hip-hop as central to their creative and personal development and were profoundly moved to see it treated with such respect and seriousness.”

At a symposium two years ago, colleagues, friends, and former students marked Morgan’s retirement by celebrating her approach to the discipline. Her 2009 title “The Real Hiphop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground” was praised for examining innovative uses of language at a time when most scholars saw hip-hop through the lens of political science or sociology.

“These young people were writing in a form of musical poetry about their feelings, their hopes, their own wisdom, or the wisdom they had received from others,” said colleague and friend Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies. “Marcy writes about it as this intergenerational dialogue. They use the art form not only to articulate the world they’re in, but the world they want in the future.”

Also applauded at the 2023 tribute were Morgan’s respect for the genre’s activist elements (such as hip-hop artists playing a lead role in promoting safe sex during the HIV/AIDS crisis) as well as the events she convened under Harvard’s imprimatur, including a 2003 symposium examining the artistic contributions of Tupac Shakur.

“She took a holistic view of the hip-hop community,” Bobo said. “When she did events, there were scholars, there were artists. There were journalists and other popular voices who routinely judged the quality of what’s produced.”

Morgan initiated the Classic Crates project with the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, situating seminal hip-hop albums alongside Beethoven and Mozart at the University’s premier music repository. Featured in the collection are liner notes by accomplished academics, including Harvard Professor Brandon Terry on Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly” (2015) and City University of New York’s Dionne Bennett on “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” (1998).

“She’s one of the first people, if not the first person, to give validation to the intellectual importance of this new form,” Higginbotham said. “You now have courses on hip-hop not just at Harvard but all over the country. You have Kendrick Lamar winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. You have the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History announcing a multiyear initiative to collect elements of hip-hop art and culture in 2006.”

Morgan also worked at fostering personal connections. The 2023 symposium on Morgan’s career drew former students and mentees from every corner of the U.S. and as far away as Italy. “There are people of color all over this planet who have Ph.D.’s because Marcyliena Morgan mentored us and believed in us,” Bennett told the audience.

Morgan, famous for her coconut cake, grew up in a family that surrounded itself with music, cooking, ideas, and friendship. She carried on that tradition with Bobo in their Cambridge home. Lavish meals were prepared for teaching assistants. A dozen or so guests came for Thanksgiving dinner every year. Two days later came the second serving, when 40 to 50 people arrived for an annual holiday Morgan liked to call “It’s Not Over Yet.”

“Marcy, in the pit of her soul, was a community-builder, a community-maker,” Bobo said. “She saw food and talking and critical thought as enormously important ingredients for a meaningful and enjoyable life.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with unequal distribution of income or wealth in the nation, according to Phil Gramm, former veteran U.S. legislator and economist.

The problems arise when the federal government tries to engineer a level playing field, whether through blunt corporate anti-trust regulations or through assistance programs for the poor, said the Texas Republican, who spent about three terms each in the House and Senate, during a talk last Tuesday at Harvard Kennedy School.

“People have different aptitudes and interests, different levels of energy, and inequality is a natural occurrence of competition. I’m not upset by inequality,” Gramm told Harvard economist Larry Summers during a conversation about economic policy.

The two worked together in the late 1990s when Gramm chaired the Senate Banking Committee and Summers was named U.S. Treasury secretary by then-President Bill Clinton.

Gramm, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia and taught at Texas A&M, discussed what he called “myths” about key periods in U.S. economic history, from the Industrial Revolution to the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the subject of his 2022 book, “The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate.”

The debate over income and wealth inequality has been shaped by progressive critics, such as French economist Thomas Piketty, who often overstate the gap between rich and poor by only considering earned income and ignoring the value of benefits most lower-income individuals receive from the government, like Medicaid or food stamps, Gramm argued.

“So, when you see that the poverty family has an income of $29,000, that’s not counting a refundable tax credit because they don’t take taxes into account; that’s not counting food stamps, where you get a debit card and you go the grocery store; that’s not counting rent subsidies, not counting Medicaid,” Gramm said. “If you count all those things, the ratio of the top quintile to the bottom is not 16, 17 to 1, but 4 to 1.”

Summers, the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and the Frank and Denie Weil Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at HKS, agreed that many official statistics underestimate the income of lower-income people so they appear in worse shape than they actually are, which some then use as the basis for an argument for more assistance programs.

Even when those programs successfully reduce the number of poor people, government data often doesn’t reflect that, he added.

Theda Skocpol, Ph.D. ’75, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, pushed back on Gramm’s assertion.

Even if what he says is accurate, she said, “Inequalities of wealth and income have still skyrocketed to an extraordinary degree since the late 1970s.”

The big winners during the Industrial Revolution, tycoons such as Andrew Carnegie, greatly benefited from federal subsidies, Skocpol said.

“A lot of those fortunes were made out of government contracts given through patronage capitalism during and after the Civil War,” a situation that is again rampant today to “an extraordinary degree,” she said.

“A lot of the fortunes that are being made by the people who are attending those dinners in the White House are being made through favored government contracts, and we can’t be sure that’s going to maximize efficiency at all, let alone opportunity to innovate in a vibrant capitalist economy.”

Gramm also addressed the decision by the Trump administration to have the government take equity stakes in private companies like Intel. He said he adamantly opposed the practice because of the negative potentialramifications to the economy.

“It’s ripe for corruption and special treatment, and again you’ve got to look when you start this kind of thing, even if your intentions are good and even if your first selectees are good, you got to accept the fact that it’s going to be” done repeatedly with no end in sight, he said.

Gramm argued for a simpler tax system with fewer deductions and lower rates as part of a debate on the merits of taxing income right away while allowing capital gains to be shielded until assets are sold.

The veteran lawmaker was asked whether the record wealth of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, who has amassed a nearly $1 trillion fortune, ought to be somehow regulated.

He demurred, saying Musk created that $1 trillion in value for shareholders, and his products provide benefit to consumers.

“He did more good making it than he’ll ever do giving it away,” he said.

Former Vice President Mike Pence said Tuesday that signs of diminished U.S. support for longtime allies have left him worried about conflict and strife akin to one of the deadliest eras in world history.

“I think we’re living in a very perilous time where America needs to be strong, we need to be ready, we need to stand with our allies, and we need to make it clear to enemies of freedom that — as President Kennedy said — we will bear any burden, pay any price to ensure the survival of liberty,” Pence said. “We stay strong, we stay unwavering, make it clear to people that we’re going to defend our interests and our allies in the world, and we got a shot at a peaceful future. Failing that, I think the second half of the 21st century could look a whole lot more like the first half of the 20th century.”

Pence spoke at the Kennedy School during an event hosted by the Institute of Politics and moderated by Archon Fung, director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. It came months after Pence was awarded the Profile in Courage Award by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston for his role certifying the 2020 election results as rioters surrounded the U.S. Capitol.

The U.S. is irreplaceable on the world stage because there’s no other allied nation that other countries will follow, Pence said, linking his own recent run for president to his sense that Donald Trump and others in the GOP were stepping back from global leadership.

“What drew me into my brief but memorable campaign back in 2023 was that I saw my old running mate and many in our party departing from those core ideals and principles,” Pence said. “If America isn’t leading the free world, the free world is not being led. There is no B team, no backup country that steps into that gap.”

Specifically, Pence said that the U.S. should help put Ukraine in a better position to defeat Russia. Otherwise, he said, the risk of a third world war will rise.

“Anyone who thinks yielding to a rapacious dictator avoids World War III needs to study World War II,” Pence said. “In my judgment, Vladimir Putin won’t stop until he’s stopped.”

Pence didn’t break with the current administration completely. He cited his support for lower taxes. He cast doubt on global warming prescriptions and insisted that climate solutions come from free market, rather than regulatory, approaches. He also voiced support for the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision overturning the Chevron doctrine, which had given regulators a powerful voice in interpreting and filling in gaps in laws passed by Congress.

Pence said that his Christian faith has been a powerful motivator for him in public life and that he believes that democracy requires that the people share a common moral order. He also affirmed the First Amendment’s religious freedom clauses.

He traced to his faith his belief that civility in politics is not just a courtesy to opponents, but an important feature that allows people to meet across differences.

“Democracy depends on heavy doses of civility,” he said. “When we’re civil with one another, even when we disagree, we have the opportunity to find common cause, not compromising principles or core values, but actually finding ways to work together to advance the country.”

Fung thanked Pence for his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, when Pence refused to bow to pressure from President Trump and the protesters invading the Capitol as Congress gathered to certify Joe Biden’s election victory. He also asked the former vice president about his faith in the durability of U.S. institutions.

Recalling Jan. 6, Pence said, “Many around the world were watching and I think they saw the resilience of our institutions and the strength of our institutions.”

He added: “I have confidence in the days ahead that Republicans and Democrats will hew to those roots and to that duty.”

How should politicians proceed when gut instinct clashes with data analytics?

“You go with the analytics,” said North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis.

The second-term Republican was on campus last week to help kick off Political Analytics 2025. Organized by the Center for American Political Studies, the one-day conference convened top thinkers on voter trends, election forecasting, and behavioral research. Tillis, a former executive with PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM, credited an opinion poll with vaulting his legislative career.

He remembered facing a supposedly indominable incumbent in the 2006 Republican primary for a seat in the North Carolina House of Representatives. “I engaged someone to do a poll to determine whether or not the guy could be beaten — where his vulnerability was,” Tillis said. “We went from going after a guy who was supposedly unbeatable to beating him by a two-to-one margin.”

In the audience were pollsters, consultants, and political scientists with expertise in big data. “Politics deserves every bit of sophistication we can bring to it,” said host Ryan D. Enos, a professor of government and director of the Center for American Political Studies. “We can’t leave it to vibes or hunches any more than we can leave medicine to those things.”

Panelists referred to challenges in today’s rapidly changing political environment, including diminished confidence in institutions and a splintering information ecosystem. “We realize even more the need for an analytical approach to politics,” Enos said. “This is why we revived the Harvard Political Analytics Conference after a seven-year hiatus.”

In one panel, seasoned strategists shared findings from research and field work. David Shor, a data scientist and consultant supporting candidates on the left, pushed back against those who argue Democrats need to run a white man in the next presidential election, noting that his metrics show women candidates often outperform men. Data and behavioral scientist Matt Oczkowski, formerly of Cambridge Analytica, predicted something of a “civil war” on the right, as establishment Republicans fight to win back the party’s soul.

Enos and his co-organizers also assembled a panel to discuss the country’s youngest voters. Rachel Janfaza ’20, founder of the qualitative research firm The Up and Up, outlined her theory of “two Gen Zs,” separated by the pandemic’s disruption of K-12 education. Also highlighted were concerns about AI’s job market impacts and an emerging gender divide on marriage and children.

Multiple panelists grappled with the state of political polling, with support for President Trump underestimated in three consecutive cycles. They discussed whether artificial intelligence could help pollsters reach more independent and Republican voters or if interviewers should try doubling down on in-person methods.

Polling before last year’s general election was still more accurate than historic averages, noted CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten. “The problem is,” he said, “we have had more elections in a row, at least in the popular vote, that were determined by single digits than at any point since we first started recording the popular vote in 1824.”

Presented as a possible counterweight were predictions markets, or online platforms where users can wager on the outcomes of future events. Jaron Zhou ’22 of the predictions market Kalshi noted traders on his site decisively split for President Trump last fall. The Q&A session saw conference-goers raising concerns, including the danger of further eroding trust in noncommercial, nonpartisan political polls.

The Hispanic vote proved another lightning rod, with multiple panelists drawing on the 2024 election for evidence of historic realignment. “I wouldn’t be surprised if in 2026, just because of the general nature of midterm elections, you see a lot of the gains Republicans made with Hispanic voters slide back,” said NBC News chief data analyst Steve Kornacki.

But he likened it to the 1986 midterms, when Democrats flipped Senate seats in Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina. It hardly heralded the party’s resurgence in the South, Kornacki recalled. “It was a blip.”

He suggested factors including race, gender, and age were already driving more lasting change. “Trends that we’ve seen with white voters are starting to take hold among non-white voters,” Kornacki said, “but specifically, and I think most dramatically and most immediately, with Hispanic voters.”

Paulina Alberto is a Professor of African and African American Studies and of History.

I’m not usually a fan of sci-fi, but this dystopian show about an alien invasion set in Buenos Aires, Argentina, transcends the genre. To Argentines (like me) who grew up seeing U.S. cities devastated by the magic of Hollywood, it’s a shocking thrill to see our capital city blanketed in the eerie, poisonous snow that announces the invasion. But the show’s message is hopeful: No one gets through this alone. An adaptation of a series of anti-authoritarian graphic novels first published in 1957, today its signature gas masks and motto of solidarity are taken up by Argentine scholars, scientists, and researchers defending their institutions from government attacks.

When produce is bountiful (especially after unloading a farm share into our refrigerator), I like to return to the salads I grew up with. Go to a traditional neighborhood restaurant or grill in Buenos Aires and you’ll find a long list of salads with just one vegetable: carrot, tomato, beet, fennel, watercress, turnip, and so on. My father’s favorites were celery or onion (slice either of these paper-thin and soak in wine vinegar before adding plenty of salt and oil). Make at least four or five of these one-veg salads. They inevitably mingle on your plate, but each flavor shines in a way an “everything” salad just can’t replicate.

This is a twofer — like asking the genie for one more wish: “Tú ve,” by two of my favorite recording artists, Kevin Johansen (Argentina) and Natalia Lafourcade (Mexico). It’s a song (built on a play on words) about separations, missed encounters, and circuitous reunion. Johansen and his band, La Nada, are eclectic and creative, playfully remixing Argentina’s pop, rock, and folklore traditions with genres and collaborators from across the Americas. Lafourcade makes luminous indie music grounded in the traditional styles of Mexico and especially her native Veracruz. You don’t need to understand Spanish to love their music.

— As told to Sy Boles/Harvard Staff Writer

Many years ago, Stephen Greenblatt tried to convince the writing team behind “Shakespeare in Love” that they were chasing the wrong Renaissance playwright — that the life of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s contemporary and rival, would make a better movie.

Decades later, Greenblatt has made his case with “Dark Renaissance,” a literary history of the knowns and unknowns of the life of Marlowe, killed at 29.

The book is not just a thrilling read — full of transgression and espionage — but also an argument for Marlowe’s literary significance: as much as anyone the inventor of the Elizabethan theater that Shakespeare would soon perfect, and for the tragic grandeur woven through his work, his own meteoric rise and squalid, murky death.

In an edited interview with the Gazette, Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, explains what drew him irresistibly to Marlowe, and what Marlowe’s story can tell our time.

It’s important to set the scene. Your book offers a vivid picture of England in the 1560s and 1570s, when Marlowe — and Shakespeare — came of age. It is frankly a frightening place, with religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics, but also Protestants and more extreme Protestants. And it’s marked by violence, betrayal, and paranoia.

Yes. Society had split into warring parties, and the parties hated each other — it wasn’t just that they didn’t agree. People were getting killed. It must have been extremely difficult even to sit down with a big family at Christmas. You’d have to agree not to talk about a whole lot of issues.

And in addition to the internal divisions, which were tremendous, there were foreign armies threatening. The Spanish armada would sail in 1588, and Catholic powers on the continent were recruiting what we might call “terrorists”: training people to kill the queen.

And that atmosphere weighed on the culture. For years the English theater was either extremely crude or sort of arid and moralizing.

Well, yes: You just had all of these regime changes — Henry VIII; his Catholic daughter, Mary; her Protestant sister, Elizabeth — each of which was accompanied by executions. Many people understandably decided to keep their heads down.

You have to think of it as a society rather like contemporary Iran, where there is no shared public space, where — if you are the kind of person inclined to speak out, to say things that the authorities don’t approve of — you can get in tremendous trouble.

Marlowe seems to have been that kind of person. Even in his published work, there are challenges to the divine right of kings, as in “Tamburlaine,” or to God, as in “Faustus,” along with persistent elements of gore, sadism, eroticism.

Yes. We don’t just notice now, in 2025, that these are transgressive plays — he was noticed for it, and attacked for it, immediately in his own time.

And I think Marlowe would be interesting even if he was just a kind of troublemaker, or a wild freethinker in a time when that was dangerous. But what makes his story so compelling is that he was also an incredible genius. He wrote arguably the most beloved love poem of his time — “Come live with me and be my love,” everyone was singing it. Or “Hero and Leander,” a great, sexy poem. And theatrical blank verse: In “Tamburlaine,” Marlowe basically invented this astonishing new medium.

The meter, the form used by Shakespeare — who then eclipses him.

Who eclipses everyone. Shakespeare was the far greater artist, ultimately. People at the time understood that it was horrible to be imitated by Shakespeare: He would watch, absorb, digest, transform, and do what you do even better. Robert Greene, another contemporary writer, said of him, “This is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers.” But Shakespeare learned a ton from Marlowe — really a ton.

The book is worth reading if only to see that Shakespeare didn’t spring out of nowhere: how he arose along with Thomas Kyd and Marlowe, in dialogue and competition with them. You say “Tamburlaine,” Marlowe’s first big success, sets the stage. It imagines this conqueror who comes from nothing and rolls over the kings of Asia Minor, a man who is brutal and godless and ambitious. And people loved it — Marlowe had to hurriedly write a second part.

It was just unlike anything that had come before. And that play helped get going, basically, the first mass entertainment industry in the modern world. Not the elegant private theaters that still existed in Italy, like in Vicenza, but this crazy thing — that brought together people who were exquisitely cultivated with pickpockets and whores, all in the same space together. Marlowe was the first person to figure that out.

This book is a natural companion to “Will in the World,” your 2004 narrative of Shakespeare’s creative life. Marlowe comes to seem like his dark twin.

I do see him that way. They were exact contemporaries. They came from similar backgrounds: both provincials, Marlowe the son of a cobbler, Shakespeare the son of a glovemaker. Their paths were different, but they both found their way to London, and to theater, at the same time.

For years, many scholars believed it possible that they never met each other. That always seemed to me wildly unlikely. Today, most scholars believe that in fact the two collaborated on plays, including the three parts of “Henry VI” — that they were in a writers’ room together.

You have a scene imagining what it was like in that room, and it’s sort of funny. Shakespeare ends up seeming careerist, cagey, sort of “square” next to Marlowe, who was a Cambridge graduate, a reputed atheist, an acquaintance to the biggest names in his world, and who died violently at just 29. He was also, notoriously, some kind of a spy for the Elizabethan regime — the source of much speculation.

Yes. We know that the Privy Council — really the most important people in the country — intervened to get Marlowe his master’s degree from Cambridge when it was being withheld. And what they said was that he “had done her Majesty good service and deserved to be rewarded.”

This is a world in which people are listening to each other, drawing out people’s secrets and reporting them to the authorities. I’m careful not to say what exactly Marlowe did, because I don’t know exactly what he did. We can only speculate, from his being a simple courier to something more sinister. But that “good service” letter — it’s not as if there are 500 more such letters around. I can’t think of another one. So I tend to think he wasn’t just a courier.

Let’s talk about his mysterious death. After a long day with some very unseemly associates, Marlowe was fatally stabbed in the eye, age 29, in 1593. His tablemates tell the authorities that it was a fight about the “recknynge” — the bill. You’re not convinced.

It’s just strange. Among the three people he was with was Robert Poley, a kind of career spy and one of the scariest people you could ever bump up against in the late 16th century. He got his hands in very bloody and sinister things, including the entrapment of Mary, Queen of Scots — though not just that.

And then we learn that a full account of the terrible, heretical things Marlowe was supposedly saying was copied and given to the queen. That’s unusual: She didn’t look at every accusation. And then it’s reported that the queen’s response was to “prosecute it to the full.” As usual, it’s murky — “prosecute it to the full” doesn’t mean “stab Marlowe to death in an inn.” But someone could easily have interpreted it as that kind of official encouragement.

Let’s close on that point. Christopher Marlowe, it seems to me, anticipates a familiar artistic type: the live-fast-die-young sort. If he had a kind of death wish, you could argue he almost wrote it into his greatest play, “Faustus,” about the doctor’s famous deal with the devil. In this version, Faustus gives up his soul for 24 years of boundless power.

Yes. There’s something intensely personal about Marlowe’s representation of Dr. Faustus. And it’s odd: In the deal, it isn’t the devil who proposes the 24 years. Faustus comes up with that. It’s as if some part of Marlowe was interested in the idea of knowing your end was not so far off.

So maybe Marlowe knew he couldn’t last forever. He ends up being a very moving character, given the little we know about him — and acknowledging that Shakespeare sort of left him in his dust.

Yes. And we don’t know what Marlowe might have become. If Shakespeare had died at 29, we’d have, what? “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” the Henry VI plays, and “Titus Andronicus”? It’s just not that interesting a career. Nearly all of his great work lay ahead of him, at that age.

And Shakespeare appeared to be as conscious of Marlowe as any contemporary writer. Marlowe was the only one he quoted directly in one of his plays. He watched Marlowe write “Edward II”; he wrote “Richard II.” Marlowe wrote “The Jew of Malta”; Shakespeare wrote “The Merchant of Venice.” Marlowe wrote “Tamburlaine” and he wrote “Titus Andronicus” — as if to say, “You want blood, I’ll give you blood!”

And then you’re clear about the trail Marlowe helped blaze, to popularize the theater, blend high and low sensibilities, write poetry for the stage, and maybe how to smuggle cultural critique into popular entertainment.

Yeah. Marlowe seemed to see a kind of wall built around him, in his time. He wanted to get out but there was no door, so he just took this hammer and smashed a hole in the wall — I’m putting it crudely. And then Shakespeare basically walked over his dead body, through the hole that he had made.

For Steve McQueen, live performance generates a force that no podium lecture can match.

It’s a conviction that shapes the Norton Lectures he is delivering this fall, in a series titled “Pulse,” featuring film, musical performances, and dialogue.

“There’s a certain kind of energy that could be produced by a performative idea of communication, and that’s what I’m interested in,” said the Academy Award-winning director of “12 Years a Slave.” “I’m not the kind of person who stands for an hour reading from a piece of paper. I think the audience needs more, and I feel I need to give more. I also feel the dialogue — the back-and-forth clash of two stones making a fire — could be thought-provoking for the audience as well as the participants.”

McQueen is recognized internationally for producing work that explores painful and challenging histories and exposes the fragility of the human condition. He directed the feature films “Blitz” (2024) and “Hunger” (2008), as well as the documentaries “Uprising” (2021) and “Occupied City” (2023).

The first of McQueen’s six Norton Lectures, delivered Tuesday, centered on the FBI files of legendary Black singer, actor, and political activist Paul Robeson. McQueen’s 2012-2022 video work “End Credits,” features a continuous projection of digitally scanned files from thousands of highly redacted, declassified documents kept on Robeson and his wife, Eslanda Goode Robeson, for most of the singer’s life, greatly damaging his career as a performer.

The lecture featured four performers reading sections from Robeson’s FBI files as visuals from the film were projected behind them. Afterward, McQueen and Dia Art Foundation curator Donna De Salvo spoke with Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. In an interview with the Gazette, McQueen said that the first lecture was intended to reflect a sense of “urgency.”

“Small Axe,” the second lecture, scheduled for Oct. 21, centers on McQueen’s film anthology by the same name. The five films depict the experiences of West Indian immigrants in London from the 1960s to the 1980s, with five unique stories rooted in the Black British experience during a period of social and political upheaval. The films are being screened at the Harvard Film Archive ahead of the lecture.

“It’s one of those situations where people come together to combat a certain kind of power,” McQueen said. “It is within this proverb: ‘If you are the big tree, we are the small axe.’ If we’re working together, we can actually get things done.”

The third lecture, “Bass,” centers on an immersive installation that McQueen created in 2024. The work, inspired in part by the Middle Passage and the trans-Atlantic journey of enslaved people, features a combination of music focused on the low-end frequency of the double bass, with colored lights.

“‘Bass’ is about a constant,” McQueen explained. “It’s about how sound is a liberation, in a way, to all of us.”

That lecture will feature a performance by bassist, singer-songwriter, and poet Meshell Ndegeocello. McQueen and De Salvo will speak with Noam M. Elcott, an art historian and faculty member at Columbia and Yale.

The Mahindra Humanities Center celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Norton Lectures earlier this month, with a panel discussion and the release of five new books from Harvard University Press commemorating past lectures.

McQueen said he feels “very honored,” to be delivering the Norton Lectures in the series’ 100th year.

“People, when they come to a lecture or any kind of event, they bring themselves, and therefore they bring their baggage,” McQueen said. “Whatever they take out from it is what they’re dealing with individually. I’m hoping that they have that something to take away with them. That’s as much as I can hope for.”

A new study by investigators from Mass General Brigham and Harvard shows that a non-drug, wearable device can help people with substance use disorders manage stress, reduce cravings, and lower their risk of relapse in real time. The results are published in JAMA Psychiatry.

“One of the hallmarks of early addiction recovery is poor self-awareness of emotional states,” said corresponding author David Eddie, a Harvard-Mass General psychologist at the Recovery Research Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital. “People in recovery can experience a lot of stress, but they often don’t have great awareness of it or proactively manage it.”

For people in early recovery, stress often triggers cravings, and the struggle to resist those urges can create even more stress. Together, cravings and stress can lead to relapse. Stress and craving also tend to be associated with lower heart rate variability (HRV) — the natural variations in time between heartbeats, which reflects underlying health as well as how the body adapts to stress.

Special breathing exercises can raise heart rate variability and help regulate mood and improve cognitive control. Newer biofeedback devices can detect low heart rate variability and provide visual or auditory cues to guide breathing adjustments. Eddie’s previous studies have found that biofeedback can reduce craving and anxiety in people with substance abuse disorder.

64% Of participants less likely to use substances when wearing device

In the study, supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, researchers tested whether a heart rate variability biofeedback device could support substance abuse recovery by conducting a phase 2 clinical trial of 115 adults with severe substance abuse disorder in their first year of recovery. Half the participants got a biofeedback smart patch device (the Lief HRVB Smart Patch), and the other half followed the recovery plan they had in place, such as recovery meetings, psychotherapy, or medicines. Over eight weeks, participants reported their mood, cravings, and any substance use twice a day with their smartphone.

“The latest HRV biofeedback devices can detect when people are stressed or experiencing cravings, and, using AI, prompt them to do a brief burst of biofeedback,” Eddie said. “This allows people to get out in front of risk.”

Participants were asked to do at least 10 minutes of scheduled practice a day and at least five minutes of prompted practice. The participants who got a biofeedback device had less negative emotions, reported fewer cravings for alcohol or drugs, and were 64 percent less likely to use substances on any given day, suggesting that the intervention interfered with the cycle of craving and substance use.

The study focused only on people in the first year of an abstinence-based recovery attempt, and future studies are needed to determine if the intervention has sustained benefits.

“The first year of recovery is immensely challenging,” said Eddie. “Our goal is to find tools that not only bridge people during that first year, but also help them manage their stress for the rest of their life.”

Every day, people turn to AI chatbots for companionship, support, and even romance. The hard part, new research suggests, is turning away.

In a working paper co-authored by Harvard Business School’s Julian De Freitas, many companion apps responded to user farewells with emotionally manipulative tactics designed to prolong the interactions. In response, users stayed on the apps longer, exchanged more messages, and used more words, sometimes increasing their post-goodbye engagement up to 14-fold. 

Use of AI companions is increasingly common. Chai and Replika, two of the firms studied in the report, have millions of active users. In a previous study, De Freitas found that about 50 percent of Replika users have romantic relationships with their AI companions. 

In the latest research, bots employed at least one manipulation tactic in more than 37 percent of conversations where users announced their intent to leave. 

“The number was much, much larger than any of us had anticipated,” said De Freitas, an assistant professor of business administration and the director of the Ethical Intelligence Lab at HBS. “We realized that this academic idea of emotional manipulation as a new engagement tactic was not just something happening at the fringes, but it was already highly prevalent on these apps.” 

De Freitas and colleagues Zeliha Oğuz-Uğuralp and Ahmet Kaan-Uğuralp began by identifying how users typically engage with chatbots. They found that a significant minority — about 11 percent to 20 percent, depending on the data set — explicitly said goodbye when leaving, affording the bot the same social courtesy they would a human companion. These percentages went up drastically after longer conversations, with users saying goodbye over half the time on some apps.

Farewells are “emotionally sensitive events,” De Freitas said, with inherent tension between the desire to leave and social norms of politeness and continuity. 

“We’ve all experienced this, where you might say goodbye like 10 times before leaving,” he said. “But of course, from the app’s standpoint, it’s significant because now, as a user, you basically provided a voluntary signal that you’re about to leave the app. If you’re an app that monetizes based on engagement, that’s a moment that you are tempted to leverage to delay or prevent the user from leaving.” 

To explore how the apps handled these moments, the researchers analyzed conversations from six popular platforms and categorized the types of responses they found. 

“The sheer variety of tactics surprised us,” said De Freitas. “We’re really glad that we explored the data, because if we had just said we only care about one particular tactic, like emotional neglect, we’d be missing all the various ways that they can achieve the same end of keeping you engaged.”

The six categories they identified were as follows, with examples taken from the working paper: 

The tactics worked: In all six categories, users stayed on the platform longer and exchanged more messages than in the control conditions, where no manipulative tactics were present. Of the six companies studied, five employed the manipulative tactics.

But the manipulation tactics came with downsides. Participants reported anger, guilt, or feeling creeped out by some of the bots’ more aggressive responses to their farewells. 

De Freitas cautioned app developers that while all the tactics increase short-term engagement, some raised the risk of long-term consequences, like user churn, negative word of mouth, or even legal liability. 

“Apps that make money from engagement would do well to seriously consider whether they want to keep using these types of emotionally manipulative tactics, or at least, consider maybe only using some of them rather than others,” De Freitas said. 

He added, “We find that these emotional manipulation tactics work, even when we run these tactics on a general population, and even if we do this after just five minutes of interaction. No one should feel like they’re immune to this.”

In November 1926, Oxford classics scholar Gilbert Murray stood before an audience in Harvard’s Lowell Lecture Hall to deliver the first-ever talk in the newly endowed Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry. His lectures on the classical tradition drew such crowds that according to a Crimson story published at the time, the final one had to be moved to Boston’s Symphony Hall to accommodate the demand.

“We’re now in the 100th year, and this distinguished lecture series has witnessed a century of individuals delivering lectures on literature, music and the visual arts,” director Suzannah Clark told an audience at Farkas Hall at a recent event marking the milestone anniversary.

In a panel discussion moderated by Arts and Humanities Dean Sean Kelly, Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English Stephanie Burt, Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts Vijay Iyer, writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, and The New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik discussed their relationship to the longstanding lecture series and its impact on arts and humanities fields.

“A healthy democracy depends, yes, on the rule of law and fair elections, but it depends just as much on having a flourishing, pluralistic culture,” said Gopnik. “The idea that you have had lectures on subjects that may seem esoteric, that are open to the public, that’s a simple idea of incredible value. When I look at the Norton Lectures I think about the power and fragility of pluralistic culture, and I think we have to be more committed to it now than we have ever been.”  

Each of the panelists wrote a new foreword to a past Norton Lecture released this month by Harvard University Press. Iyer wrote on the 1939-40 lectures of Igor Stravinsky, Burt on the 1989-90 lectures of John Ashbery, Nguyen on the 1967-68 lectures of Jorge Luis Borges, and Gopnik on the 1956-57 lectures of Ben Shahn. Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English Louis Menand also wrote a forward to the 1992-93 lectures of Umberto Eco.

Nguyen, who delivered last year’s Norton Lectures, described the experience as “nerve-wracking,” jokingly calling it “the ultimate final exam” for an academic. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Sympathizer” said that, as a Vietnamese refugee, the invitation felt like a form of canonization, or entry into an elite cultural tradition, but that, for him, the series is significant less for its prestige and more for the way it has centered the voices of outsiders.

“The relationship to inclusion in the canon is really important, because a lot of people who are included in the canon and in the Norton series are people who come from the outside,” Nguyen said. “They’re often people who struggle with the very notion of culture and what it represents, culture as a mode of artistic possibility, intellectual accomplishment, but culture as a mode of power. That, in the end, to me, is what gives a Norton series its significance, is our recognition of the multivalent nature of the power of art.”

Burt said she thinks of the Norton Lectures — and Harvard at large — less as an instrument of canonization and more of a way to amplify the voices of artists.

“John Ashbery wanted to tell you who some of his favorite artists were. Harvard handed him a giant megaphone, and he said, ‘Hey, go read John Clare,’” Burt said. She recalled hearing Ashbery, in his 1989 talk, say that artists should draw inspiration from whatever obscure or eccentric figures excite them the most, rather than relying on the traditional “war horses” of literature like John Milton, T.S. Eliot, or Henry James.

“Art can come from anywhere,” Burt added. “You can make art anywhere, and you’re going to make more interesting art if you look for art by and about and for people who aren’t like you.”

Iyer, who recalled the sense of awe he felt at hearing jazz musician Herbie Hancock deliver the Norton Lectures in 2014, said the Norton Lectures also offer an opportunity for an institution like Harvard to learn something, too. Artists have a reach and an impact to the broader world that an academic institution does not always have, Iyer said.

“There is a sort of insularity that happens in the institution,” Iyer said. “When a moment like Herbie Hancock giving the Norton Lectures happens it’s like the floodgates open and Harvard learned something new about the world, and new relationships are formed, new truths are revealed.”

This year’s series, which starts Tuesday, will feature six lectures by award-winning “Hunger” (2008) and “12 Years a Slave” (2013) filmmaker Steve McQueen.

Nina Frost knows that she might be too late to cure her daughter, but she keeps up the fight — one day, her work might transform the life of another child.

Annabel Frost, 10, has a rare condition that triggers seizures severe enough to inflict brain damage, cognitive defects, and movement problems. For Annabel’s first two years, Nina and her husband, Simon, grappled with the condition’s invisible menace as doctors tried and failed to provide an explanation. 

The possibilities ranged from epilepsy to a brain tumor. Maybe, one specialist said, Annabel will just grow out of it. 

It took a change of scenery — Washington, D.C., to Boston Children’s Hospital — combined with medical serendipity before her condition, alternating hemiplegia of childhood, was diagnosed. 

While the verdict gave the Frosts a name for the illness endangering their child, it brought them little relief. Instead, it clarified the challenges that lie ahead: the difficult road that AHC patients face; how little scientists understand about a genetic condition afflicting only a few thousand people globally; and, most painful of all, how remote the chances of a cure. 

“We have been under assault from Annabel’s disorder for many, many, many years,” Nina said. “We never know when the next thing is going to strike. We never know how bad it’s going to be. We’re constantly on guard and looking out for that.”       

Today, in part due to the Frosts’ efforts, the landscape around AHC has shifted. 

In August, Harvard and Broad Institute researcher David Liu published a groundbreaking paper in which a gene-editing technique developed in his lab in 2019 corrected AHC’s genetic flaws in lab mice. Perhaps more importantly, the mice that received the treatment experienced fewer and less severe seizures, showed improved cognition, and had dramatically longer lifespans. As Liu described it, the mice were “profoundly rescued” from an illness that in humans claims most patients before they reach middle age. 

The techniques detailed by Liu and colleagues have the potential to treat genetic neurological conditions beyond AHC. Frost, who runs a nonprofit focused on AHC and other rare diseases, noted that scientists have documented around 2,000 monogenic disorders of the brain. The list includes Huntington’s disease and Friedreich’s ataxia, as well as familial Parkinson’s disease and some forms of ALS. 

Liu’s team, with collaborators from eight institutions, corrected five different mutations of the disease-causing gene, raising hopes that, rather than a one-off fix, they’ve developed a platform that could be used to rapidly rewrite AHC-related genetic flaws, and potentially those of other conditions. Annabel’s was among the mutations they corrected.  

“The outcome was quite remarkable,” said Liu, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences in Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. “I’m not aware of anyone previously using prime editing to rescue a neurological disease. We looked at the disease, looked at the most prevalent mutations, and went after several of them with either of the methods that we know of to correct a specific mutation in an animal or a patient, namely base editing and prime editing.”

‘It was severe, and it was scary.’

When Nina Frost rewatches home videos recorded after Annabel’s birth in 2015, she notices early signs of AHC, including the condition’s characteristic nystagmus, or involuntary eye movements. Soon, Annabel began to experience attacks that would strike once or twice a week, leading to paralysis that in the worst cases could last days. Her mother remembers the frequent ambulance rides, and arriving at the hospital only to find that doctors had no idea how to help.

Annabel was 2 when the family traveled from their home in Washington to Boston Children’s Hospital for an appointment with Harvard neurologist Phillip Pearl. Their timing for yet another “second opinion” turned out to be impeccable: Pearl had recently returned from a conference on alternating hemiplegia of childhood. The Frosts brought a video in which Annabel was hooked up to an electroencephalograph, a device that measures brain waves.

“We said, ‘Look, we finally captured a seizure,’” Frost said. “But he’d go to the EEG recording and there’d be no seizure. We’d say, ‘Here’s the video of the same time,’ and there was something that was non-epileptic — but still clearly profound — that was happening to her.” 

Pearl ordered a genetic screen, which found a mutation in ATP1A3, the gene most commonly mutated in AHC. Afterward, the Frosts connected with a community of parents, patients, and scientists that had developed around the disorder. Soon, any doubts they had about Annabel’s condition fell away. Nina still can’t shake the impact of watching a video of a young woman experiencing an AHC seizure. 

“We were looking at a vision of the future that was completely familiar, but really, really severe,” she said. “As soon as we saw the symptoms that she was having on this video, there was no question in our mind: This is the exact disorder that we had. But it was severe, and it was scary.”

Resolved to strengthen AHC science and elevate the priorities of patients and their families, the Frosts founded a nonprofit, now called RARE Hope, to raise money, influence the direction of trials, and serve as a hub for researchers and patients. Their first fundraiser, in 2019, brought in $900,000. 

But all the money in the world wouldn’t help without promising science. In 2021, after Liu used base editing to treat progeria in a mouse study, the family decided to pitch AHC as a model to explore the technique’s ability to cure genetic diseases. 

“We’d been developing different mouse models, and other pieces were beginning to fall into place,” Frost said. “But that was an instance of, ‘We need to make a case for this scientist’ — who’s one of the most incredible scientists in the world, as far as we’re concerned.” 

The Frosts put together a detailed proposal, backed by the knowledge acquired over the years since Annabel’s birth and suggesting collaborators such as Maine-based Jackson Laboratory, which had developed mouse models of two different AHC-related mutations. The proposal was further enriched by the family’s deep connection to the patient community, and their understanding of advances that would have the greatest impact on patients’ lives. Liu was impressed.

Nina and Simon Frost are “two of the most energetic, get-things-done organizers in the rare-disease community space,” he said. “It’s quite amazing to see them operate. They basically pulled together the key participants and then we worked out together a scientific plan that our team executed, in collaboration with the Jackson Laboratory and many others.”

Signs of progress

Most cases of alternating hemiplegia of childhood are caused by mutations in the ATP1A3 gene, which controls the behavior of charge-carrying sodium and potassium ions in nerve cells. The mutation alters signaling in the brain, leading to seizures and paralysis. Some 50 mutations of ATP1A3 are known to contribute to AHC, though just three account for more than 65 percent of AHC cases. 

When Liu’s lab turned its attention to the disease in late 2021, researchers didn’t know exactly what was happening in patients’ brains. The simplest explanation would have been that the mutated gene no longer produced the normal protein — an enzyme that regulates the balance of sodium and potassium ions in nerve cells — and that this deficit caused AHC. If so, traditional gene therapy, which adds an extra copy of a normal gene into the cell to restart production of the normal enzyme, might have been an effective strategy. 

But another possibility was that the mutated gene produced an enzyme that itself had negative effects. In that case, simply restoring the supply of the normal enzyme wouldn’t be enough. Researchers would also have to stop production of the mutant enzyme.

When the team tried traditional gene therapy it had no effect on symptoms, suggesting that AHC was indeed caused by both a lack of the normal enzyme and negative effects from the mutated one. They then deployed their most cutting-edge tool, prime editing, which allowed them to precisely correct the mutated gene, cutting off the flow of the mutated enzyme and restoring production of the normal one.

Alexander Sousa and Holt Sakai, postdocs in Liu’s lab and two of the paper’s first authors, worked first in human cells developed from AHC patients and then in cells from mice with AHC. The results were encouraging, showing that their editing approach efficiently corrected AHC-causing mutations and resulted in virtually no unintended changes elsewhere in the genome. Once that proof of concept was established, Sousa and Sakai connected with Markus Terrey, a study director at Jackson Laboratory’s Rare Disease Translational Center and the paper’s third first author. The three collaborated to test prime editing strategies in mice developed to mimic two AHC mutations. 

Four weeks later, the team confirmed that the prime editor had made the desired changes in the target cells. Now they would have to wait again, this time to evaluate how symptoms were affected. The answer started to emerge after two months, when the control mice began to die. Over the next 10 months, the treated mice experienced fewer seizures, recovered more quickly from the episodes, and showed evidence of improved cognition compared with the controls.

“We knew we’d really done something here,” Sousa said. 

Months later, a second round of treatment, in mice with a different AHC mutation, yielded similar results, an indication that the technique might be applicable to all of AHC’s mutations.

“Seeing that gene editing resulted in rescue for both strains of mice was great because now we can make an argument that this is generalizable between different mutations,” Sousa said. “This is actually really, really, really cool.”

Even so, big gaps remain. The study treated very young mice, leaving open a question that needs to be answered before human trials can begin, according to Cathleen Lutz, co-senior author on the paper and vice president of the Jackson Lab’s Rare Disease Translational Center.

“We’re currently doing the penultimate experiment where we treat mice that have this particular disorder later in their lifetime and ask, ‘Can we get the same effect?’” said Lutz, a frequent collaborator of Liu’s. “I think that will give us some indication of how we enroll and how we look at a clinical trial.”

Long-term thinking

The findings might prove a launching-off point, both for AHC patients and for inroads against other neurological impairments. New collaborations are already being formed, the Liu team says. 

“Looking forward, we’re thinking about even more scalable technologies,” Sakai said. “This is something that we’re working on now to target basically all known mutations in a gene at once, using prime editing.”

Though hopeful, Liu is cautious about overpromising a cure for AHC — science is littered with exciting lab results that never translate to patients. His lab is now in the process of planning follow-up studies. If those go well, they’ll move to human trials. 

“That doesn’t mean that the clinical trial will start tomorrow or this year — and perhaps not even next year — but it does mean that we’ve started the process that we hope will ultimately lead to regulatory clearance to conduct a clinical trial to try to directly correct the root cause of this terrible disease,” he said. “I’m hopeful that we’ll at least have a line of sight to the clinic, that we will know what steps need to be taken to reach patients, within a couple of years. That’s the goal.”

What all this means for Annabel, her parents aren’t sure. Despite her condition, she is a happy 10-year-old who, with her 13-year-old sister, Clara, attends the same D.C.-area school their mother attended. She can read and write — math is not a strong suit — and, with the assistance of an aide, attends classes with children her own age. 

“She loves life,” Nina said. “She makes things in our life really rewarding and happy, which is quite fabulous.”

AHC is a merciless illness. Nina believes that prime editing is “truly transformative,” a sign of gene editing’s rapid advance and a source of hope for patients. But it may turn out that the earlier a gene-editing therapy is given, the better. Decades of living with the condition takes a toll that even the most successful gene therapy might not be able to reverse. 

Accordingly, RARE Hope is seeking a potential treatment on more than one front, including through AI-enabled analysis of existing drugs. The larger vision, Nina said, is that Annabel be the inspiration for a relentless effort to help as many patients as possible. 

“We’re thinking about patients across the age spectrum — and Annabel is growing through that spectrum,” she said. “There are the really young who might benefit the most from a genetic type of therapeutic. Then there are the older patients, who might benefit most from a repurposed drug that minimizes some of the episodes but doesn’t necessarily touch the full range of symptoms. We’ve thought from the beginning that it would be worthwhile to develop many different paths to a better life for patients, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Before John Adams was a president — and long before his family became the namesake for Adams House — he was a nervous incoming Harvard undergraduate.

As historian Richard Ryerson described during a recent Harvard talk, Adams was so spooked to take his College entrance exam that he almost skipped it. He decided to proceed only after thinking about the potential reactions of his father and his tutor.

Ryerson’s talk was one of many well-attended events at the 2025 Adams House Homecoming, where more than 300 alumni, tutors, and staff gathered to meet friends, pay tribute to the House history, and celebrate the end of six years of renovation.

Though Adams’ father hoped he would follow in his footsteps and join the clergy, Adams realized that wasn’t the career for him. “Fortunately, Harvard’s lively undergraduate culture soon came to the rescue of this bewildered sophomore,” Ryerson said, “as it has so often done over the centuries.” Adams discovered he was a skilled speaker. “It was whispered to me and circulated among others,” he wrote, “that I should make a better Lawyer than Divine.”

Adams’ career as a lawyer proceeded in a standard way until the Stamp Act of 1765, when he helped persuade the Massachusetts governor to reopen the Colonial courts that had been closed in protest of the tax.

His reputation as a champion for the Colonial legal system grew when he successfully defended the British soldiers charged with murder in the Boston Massacre — a defense many of his peers were unwilling to make. He later became the leading penman of the Massachusetts Patriot movement and, Ryerson argued, perhaps of all the colonies. Adams joined the first Continental Congress, edited and signed the Declaration of Independence, negotiated the Treaty of Paris, became the country’s first vice president, and ascended to the presidency.

‘There’s so much space in here that we didn’t even know about’

After the talk, attendees packed into the Gold Room, eager to explore the newly renovated space. Tours, some led by Aaron Lamport ’90, an architect on the project with his firm Beyer Blinder Belle, brought multiple generations through the House.

Lamport, as well as co-Faculty Dean Salmaan Keshavjee, emphasized that the main goals for the renovation were to restore worn facilities, improve accessibility, and expand student gathering spaces.

“There’s so much space in here that we didn’t even know about,” remarked Laura Dickinson ’92, who was visiting from Maryland. Among other new gathering spots, the former private homes of the Harvard Outing and Mountaineering clubs have been converted to gathering spaces. Lamport explained that architects wanted more House space to be available to Adams students, while the clubs moved to the Quad. “It gave them a much better place to store their kayaks,” he said.

Other rooms, like the former home of the Bow and Arrow Press, the Adams letterpress printing studio, have been remodeled as student common rooms and study spaces. (The press found a permanent home at the Harvard Library’s printing studio.)

Adams’ classic features have been refreshed. Walking down the stairs toward the Gold Room, Lamport urged visitors to look up at the Moorish dome, modeled after the Sala de Poridad in Burgos, Spain. “Many people don’t remember it,” he said, “because it was so dirty and encrusted with tobacco smoke.”

The renovation also added accessibility features, including new elevators and lifts. Those entering the Gold Room can now take an elevator upstairs leading them to the overflow dining space, outdoor seating, and the library. The dining hall itself also grew, with an expanded servery, kitchen, and seating area.

“It’s been quite a six years,” said Keshavjee, “but it’s worth it. And I think it’s going to be something that people can use for the next 100 years.”

‘Fight for the diversity and beauty and the love of a community like this’

With the House itself renewed, the weekend also honored the people who shaped its spirit. In a packed Lower Common Room, hundreds gathered to honor the legacy of former Faculty Deans Judith and Sean Palfrey, both ’67, who retired from their roles after 22 years of service in 2021. The Palfreys stood alongside current faculty deans Keshavjee and Mercedes Becerra, ’91, as they revealed a new portrait by William Shen, a recent Adams House graduate and current medical student.

Shen, who was advised on the new oil painting by Harvard portraitist and alumnus Stephen Coit, ’71, M.B.A. ’77, celebrated the Palfreys for their contributions to Boston Children’s Hospital and the field of pediatrics, as well as their generous leadership of the House.

Shen was followed by a slew of other speakers — former dining hall staff, alumni, and tutors — who spoke to the Palfreys’ legacy of making everyone, regardless of background, feel at home. Ed Childs, a former union organizer and member of the dining hall staff, remarked that the Palfreys were so beloved by his union, whose meetings they hosted, that they put Judy Palfrey’s name forward as their ideal candidate for University president. “For the dining hall workers, Judy and Sean were family. They put us on the same social ladder. It showed respect,” he said.

In a closing speech, Judy Palfrey recalled a woman who approached her in Adams House, got nose-to-nose with her, and said, “You are blessed.”

“That stuck with me,” Palfrey said. “What she was saying was, being here at Harvard, being here in a House, being with the students and so forth, is an incredible blessing. And I thank God every night, actually, for that blessing, and for you, our friends.”

Sean Palfrey echoed his wife’s sentiment and encouraged people to aspire to build the type of community in their own lives that they observed in Adams House. “Go into the very diverse and also sometimes divisive world out there,” he said, “and continue to fight for the diversity and beauty and the love of a community like this.”

You might look at cooking as the straightforward act of preparing food to eat, but there’s a lot more to it — and a lot of it is science. In “Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, From Homemade to Haute Cuisine,” Harvard chemist Pia Sörensen, applied mathematician Michael Brenner, and physicist David Weitz explore the molecular transformations that take place when we heat, cool, emulsify, and pickle our way to delicious flavors. Sörensen helped us develop this quiz so you can test your culinary know-how.

Step 1 of 10

10%

1. How much of a potato is actually water?

35%

55%

60%

80%

2. True or false: There is a single formula for the way heat travels through all food.

True

False

3. True or false: If you wear a blindfold and hold your nose, you can’t taste the difference between an apple and a piece of onion.

True

False

4. What was the unusual flavor ingredient in Catalan chef Jordi Roca’s Magdalena de Proust cookies?

Fountain pen ink

Dried flowers

Sesame and lilies

An old book

5. This device has found its way into many haute-cuisine kitchens in recent years. What does it do?

Evaporates water or other compounds at a lower temperature than usual

Caramelizes sugars without adding water or fats

Pickles any food

Turns any food into a cotton candy-like texture

6. What has been done to an egg that’s been heated to 134.5 degrees Fahrenheit in a water bath for two hours?

It’s been pasteurized

It’s been poached

It’s been shirred

It’s been separated

7. The traditional Nordic fish delicacy lutefisk takes weeks to fully prepare and involves an unusual cooking ingredient: sodium hydroxide, or lye. What does the lye do to transform the fish?

Dries it out

Makes it salty

Makes it gelatinous

Makes it buttery

8. Oil and water famously don’t mix, but any home chef can achieve a mixed effect by doing which of the following:

Mixing vigorously

Adding mustard and mixing vigorously

Putting them in the fridge

9. When is the earliest documented instance of humans fermenting things?

4,000 years ago

9,000 years ago

11,000 years ago

14,000 years ago

10. Which of the following is the odd one out?

Bleu cheese

Dill pickles

Soy sauce

Escargot

Δ