Colloquy

The history of slavery in the United States, including at the country's colleges and universities, is deeply disturbing and painful. But Professor Sara Bleich, PhD ’07, says it’s critical that our society continue to do so—and that universities have a responsibility to lead the way. Harvard’s inaugural vice provost for special projects and a former member of the Obama and Biden administrations, Bl...

Technological disruption of human occupations is nothing new. In recent decades, blue-collar occupations have borne the brunt of the upheavals—think of all the factory workers now working at Wal-Mart thanks to the integration of robots on assembly lines. But all that may be changing now. Given artificial intelligence’s ability to do thought work—from crafting feature stories in seconds to writing...

With filmgoers buzzing about the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown , University of Pennsylvania Professor Jeffrey Edward Green, PhD ’07, says that the legendary singer and songwriter is more than a musician; he’s the conflicted prophet of a fallen world. In his new book, Bob Dylan, Prophet Without God , Green writes that Dylan models, "how to practice self-reliance in a world of permanent injus...

“The future is female.” That was the slogan  printed on tee shirts in the early 1970s at the first women’s bookstore in New York City . Fifty years ago, it seemed to be true. The Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution had passed the House of Representatives and the Senate by wide margins and gone to the states for ratification. Fifty years later, there has certainly been progress in gender equ...

Just after Labor Day, American University Professor and Harvard Griffin GSAS alumnus, Allan Lichtman predicted a victory for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. It was a source of some encouragement for Harris's supporters, given that Lichtman had correctly predicted the winner of 9 of the last 10 elections based on his historical analysis of campaign trends since...

Fail fast, fail frequently, and learn from it. That's the mantra adopted by many Silicon Valley firms in recent years. Fine. But would you tell that to your emergency room doctor for someone who's managing your retirement funds or the pilot of your next flight?  Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson says that the key to squaring this circle is failure-proofing critical areas where best p...

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent, they’re everywhere, and they're probably bad for you. PFAS are probably bad for you. Some of the detrimental health effects associated with the chemical compounds include liver disease, decreased fertility and hypertension in pregnant women, immune and developmental effects in children including decreased antibody response to vaccines, and...

You’re being tested. You don’t know the criteria used to determine your score—or even your results. The test is being administered not by a human teacher or moderator, but by machines. And it’s going on 24 hours a day, every day of your life. Harvard Griffin GSAS historian Juhee Kang traces the emergence of the obsession with mass-data collection in the early 20th century.

As a member of the "people operations" (human resources) staff at Google in the mid-2010s, Harvard Griffin GSAS historian of science Tina Wei was struck by how many perks employees received in the office: door-to-door shuttle service to work, fitness classes, massages, and pantries stocked with snacks, to name just a few. The company even offered a meditation program—with its own branding worked i...

Claire Lamman is part of a team of astrophysicists using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument to map as many as 50 million galaxies. In this talk, delivered in April 2024 at the annual Harvard Horizons Symposium, Lamman describes her distinctive contribution to this effort—gauging the “intrinsic alignment” of galaxies to better understand the universe and how it evolves. 

Who cares for babies while their mothers are incarcerated? How stable are these households? And how does being exposed to a mother's incarceration in utero impact child development? These are the questions Harvard Griffin GSAS social scientist Bethany Kotlar set out to answer in her research. Combining her experience working with these families and high-quality social science research methods, Kot...

Humanity generated over one septillion bits of data this past year alone. All that information takes energy to transmit. Lots of energy. In fact, data-associated technology could account for up to 20 percent of global energy production by 2030. Using light at the nanoscale level, physicist Dylan Renaud thinks he may have a way to meet the almost limitless need for information while meeting the pla...

Like the poetry of his fellow Latin Americans, the scholarship of Mauro Lazarovich, PhD '24, is not only humanist but also humanitarian. “I wanted to make a contribution to the humanities by saying that literature and art have something to bring to the table when we are talking about refugees,” he says. “And not only literature in general but specifically Latin American literature.” In this talk,...

In advance of Juneteenth 2024, we speak with University of Texas Professor Shirley Thompson, PhD '01, author of the forthcoming book No More Auction Block for Me , about how the experience of being treated as property has shaped the way that African Americans understand and relate to property themselves. Acknowledging the trauma of racism and white supremacy, Professor Thompson looks at the ways t...

If you're one of the 32 percent of US adults who experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression last year, your doctor or mental health care provider may have recommended you learn meditation to help manage your stress. But how exactly does this age-old practice change the brain? This month on Colloquy , Richard Davidson, PhD '76, the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry a...

We're in the midst of the Muslim holy days of Ramadan, just past Western Christians' celebration of Easter, and looking forward to the Jewish Passover holidays in late April. We often refer to these traditions as the Abrahamic faiths—a reference to the childless man chosen by God in the Jewish Bible to be the father of a great nation, and who's an important figure in Judaism, Christianity, and Isl...

Tufts University Professor James Intriligator , PhD ’97, a human factors engineer, says that GPT is not a search engine, although many of us use it that way. It's more like a glider. It can take us to great knowledge and help us explore new territory. But we need to steer it smartly to get where we want to go. In these journeys, our own curiosity is the wind beneath ChatGPT's wings, the force that...

In 2022, white residents of the Greater Boston area had about 19 times as much wealth as Black residents, $214,000 to $11,000, according to the Urban Institute . While the gap is particularly large in this part of the country, it's an issue across the US. In 2019, Black Americans held just $0.17 on average for every white dollar of wealth .  Much has been written about the racial wealth gap, but h...

According to the 2023 Democracy Report of the VDEM Institute based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, the advances and global levels of democracy made over the past 35 years have been wiped out. Seventy-two percent of the world's population now live in autocracies. Freedom of expression is deteriorating in 35 countries. Government censorship of the media is worsening in 47 countries. Gover...

Obesity in the United States has reached epidemic proportions, affecting millions of Americans and costing the healthcare system billions of dollars each year. As is so often the case with disease in this country, communities of color suffer disproportionately. Public health expert Sara Bleich, PhD ’07, says it’s time to deal with obesity as the urgent crisis that it is. A professor of public heal...

This month on Colloquy , we speak with PhD student Grant Jones about Healing Attempt, his collaboration with Grammy Award-winning artist Esperanza Spaulding and Buddhist leader Lama Rod Owens that combines mindfulness and music to improve the wellbeing of people of color.

The US economy is strong. Unemployment is close to a 50-year low, real wages are rising for those at the bottom of the income ladder, and inflation is down though still not entirely in the rearview mirror. You’d never know it from the press coverage, though, which tends to focus on how people feel about the economy, namely that it’s bad and getting worse.  In this episode of Colloquy , we take a s...

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July 2023 was actually the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. The heat wave caused hundreds of deaths, thousands of hospitalizations, and billions of dollars in damages. It also exacerbated droughts, wildfires, and power outages.  The culprit behind this unprecedented heat is climate change, driven by the accumulation of greenhou...

Every technology is accompanied by a cultural technique says the artist and media scholar Emilio Vavarella, a PhD candidate in film and visual studies and critical media practice at the Harvard Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “You have the calculator, but you also have the number," he says. "Everything we do from speaking to being able to write an imaginary story—all of these are spe...

The global average temperature for July 2023 was the highest on record —and maybe the highest for the last 120 years according to the United Nations’ weather agency. In the United States, temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona reached a record 118 degrees Fahrenheit and hit highs of at least 110 degrees for 31 consecutive days—also a record. And yet the populations of Arizona, Texas, and Florida, the st...