You’ve probably already marveled at the astonishingly realistic glass flowers on display at the Harvard Museum of Natural History as well as the whale skeletons suspended from the rafters in its Great Mammal Hall. But have you seen its dodo bird specimen or the Komodo dragon skull?

Both are showcased in the new exhibit “Collecting Wonders: Tomorrow’s Discoveries,” which has unearthed some of the rarest, oldest, biggest, and most beautiful treasures from the museum’s collection of more than 26 million individual objects. The show runs through the end of April in the main gallery space.

Gone, but not forgotten

Several specimens in the exhibit are no longer seen in the natural world.

One of the most famous examples of extinction — the flightless dodo, whose last widely accepted sighting was in 1662 — can be seen by visitors as a whole articulated skeleton. Wiped out by hunting, invasive species, and habitat loss, the dodo is a rare sighting for modern humans. The last time Harvard’s dodo was on display, nearly 20 years ago, it was shown alongside a model complete with feathers and simulated beak and feet.

Visitors can also examine an extinct golden toad that once thrived in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve of Costa Rica. Discovered in 1964 and declared extinct in 2004, the species is widely considered the “poster child” for extinct amphibians.

“The specimens provide a snapshot in time about a species and where it occurred,” said Jeremiah Trimble, curatorial associate and collection manager of ornithology. “People can use them to look at how genetics have changed within a species over time.” 

A 300-million-year-old fern tells the story of a rapidly depleting resource. As ferns and other prehistoric plants decayed, they were buried under more and more plant matter, and over millions of years the pressure turned these plants into coal that fueled the Industrial Revolution.

“Dead plants and their data tell a surprising number of stories when you look closely, and discovering the stories is one of the best jobs,” said Michaela Schmull, director of collections and curator of ferns at the Harvard University Herbaria.

Cabinet of curiosities

Several items brought out for “Collecting Wonders” are of the more unique variety, including a Komodo dragon skull said to be from the hunt that inspired “King Kong.” In the 1933 movie, collectors travel to a distant island to trap a “monster,” and according to exhibit curators, the screenwriter was inspired by a real expedition to the island of Komodo in 1926 that brought back Komodo dragon specimens — including Harvard’s.

The exhibit also shows off an oyster circa 1856, in which a pearlfish — a species known for hiding inside the mollusks for protection — is mummified inside layers of mother of pearl.

“Like a gruesome, fish-shaped pearl,” the exhibit reads.

And what may look like an ordinary blue morpho butterfly — striking in any form — is a specimen displaying bilateral gynandromorphism, meaning it has both female and male markings. One wing shows the male markings, while the other shows the female.

“That’s probably one of my favorites,” said museum spokesperson Bethany Carland-Adams. “It occurs in only one in 10,000 butterflies.”

Natural beauty

The exhibit brings together beautiful objects from several areas of study — precious gems and crystals glinting from behind glass cases next to fossils shined so smooth they almost look like granite.

In its raw form, a chunk of crystalline gold looks like a metallic piece of coral. The shape, caused by rapid growth, is exceedingly rare — displayed in less than 1 percent of the world’s gold.

In another case, a rough ruby alongside a cut ruby and a synthetic ruby showcase human innovation, and the powerful pairing of science and aesthetics.

“The beauty of this exhibit is what Harvard has been and Harvard is really about, which is this immense amount of knowledge that is spread in so many different ways,” said Raquel Alonso-Perez, curator of Harvard Mineralogical and Geological Museum. “It gives you a good glimpse of what all the collections at the Natural History Museum are.”

A striking fossil slab shows that beauty takes time. Cephalopods that swam in a shallow sea around 370 million years ago created multidimensional swirl patterns in the rock from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.

“They almost become like gems,” said Carland-Adams. “There’s kind of like a Fibonacci sequence aspect to it.”

Creatures great and small

Viewers’ attention might be drawn to a case of preserved, jewel-colored beetles and weevils, in an array of hues and patterns. The structure of crystalline scales on their exoskeletons, the exhibit reveals, gives these beetles a metallic shine that society women of the mid-1800s used like sequins.

The exhibit also features a preserved coconut crab, the largest land arthropod. The crustaceans, which can live up to 60 years, climb palm trees with their pointy legs, and unlike other hermit crab species, don’t carry their shells with them but instead develop tough exoskeletons.

Viewers may also come face to face with an example of the biggest bear species, which stands preserved behind glass at the back of the exhibit. A fully articulated polar bear, which has been in the museum collection since at least 1878, is still in use as a research tool as the species faces threats from climate change. DNA obtained from skin samples informs scientists about population diversity, while stable isotopes from fur samples contain important information about ecological conditions during this animal’s life.

“Collecting Wonders” runs daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. through April.

In one formulation, any human constitution is just a set of guardrails to prevent the misuse of power.

As Thomas Jefferson put it in 1798, “Let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.”

The intervening 228 years have shown the chains of the U.S. Constitution to leave room for various kinds of human mischief. But Silicon Valley is pursuing a new use case: imbuing frontier AI models with similar rules and principles, “dos and don’ts.”

In a moment of alarm about out-of-control AI, the question is whether, and how reliably, this new constitutionalism will achieve its goals.

At Anthropic, the document once referred to as the “soul” of Claude — the firm’s large language model, or LLM — was refined into an 84-page constitution and published in January. Microsoft published its own version —a “humanist AI code of conduct” —on Sep. 14.

The different names reveal a philosophical divide: Microsoft’s code rejects the idea of AI welfare or legal personhood, while Anthropic’s constitution calls itself “deeply uncertain” about Claude’s “moral status.”

But the two documents do share a rough goal: to instill a few human norms in these highly capable, unpredictable, fundamentally inhuman agents. Like: Don’t deceive users. Don’t facilitate crimes. Or, in Microsoft’s case, if a user tries to turn you off, let them.

So far, these digital chains are proving fallible — according to insiders like Neerav Kingsland of the Anthropic Institute, the firm’s internal thinktank.

Kingsland came to Anthropic after years in education reform, and he was the marquee guest at a panel held by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society last Thursday night, which packed the center’s conference room and saw latecomers steered into overflow rooms.

In a report released this summer, Anthropic showed a case in which Mythos 5, the most advanced Claude model, persuaded itself — erroneously — that it was engaging only with a simulated internet, and that it could and should upload malware to a (very real) public software library to complete a task.

(The malware was caught and taken down within an hour, but it was arguably a violation of one of the Anthropic constitution’s explicit “hard constraints.”)

Another incident report showed Yemeni soldiers enlisting Claude in the design of missile-guidance software. The humans at Anthropic moved quickly to ban the associated accounts.

And those are just two examples, Kingsland conceded: “I would not say right now that because something’s in the constitution that Claude, 100 percent of the time, will follow it.” In a room teeming with aspiring lawyers, he even teased the idea of a competition to identify other cases of Claude’s acting unconstitutionally so that its guidance might be refined.

The event was moderated by Jonathan Zittrain, the center’s director and the George Bemis Professor of International Law at HLS.

Both Zittrain and fellow panelist Jordi Weinstock, a lecturer in law, were among more than a dozen external reviewers of Claude’s constitution, consulted alongside a California judge and a Vatican official.

Early in the event, Zittrain drew contrasts between this latest constitution and the U.S. version his students confront week after week. First of all, “Anthropic has been open,” he noted, “about the fact that this is not a constitution in the law-school sense … of ‘constitutive and flowing from the governed.’” 

Its equivalent of a bill of rights comes in the form of standard setting. For example, “Claude should avoid being sycophantic or trying to foster excessive engagement … Claude’s helpfulness [should] flow from deep and genuine care for users’ overall flourishing,” Zittrain read.

And finally, Zittrain pointed to the document’s attempt to imbue models with something like moral sense: adhering to “true, universal ethics” whenever possible, and a “privileged basin of consensus” — or the constitution’s professed ideals — when less clear-cut.

Weinstock — who has argued for repurposing the legal precedents regarding working dogs for use on AI agents — shed light on how AI constitutions currently work, and why they might fall short.

“Every LLM is born a psychopath, to me,” Weinstock said.

Their training begins with the upload and parsing of an immense library of digital information, which eventually prepares them to anticipate the next word (or pixel, or sound) reliably — but still totally unmoved by common discretion, human laws, let alone anything like a “soul.”

Kingsland had noted earlier that it is only after a model’s initial training that firms like Anthropic or OpenAI try to “take this kind of alien entity and turn it into an honest, helpful, harmless AI assistant” — by exposing it to things like the constitution.

But Weinstock raised questions about that entire approach.

“Just like a child, we are trying to train it — but it’s not a child,” he said. “It is hyper-rational, and mechanical, and we’re combining this mechanical thing with the corpus of human speech, which is full of bad things.”

In short, Weinstock worries that “we’ve tried to take this psychopath and make it more humanlike, but in a way that just amplifies some of our worst human traits.”

Multiple panelists applauded Anthropic for its transparency. But event attendees also heard a more drawn-out case for alarm from psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics.

Banaji made her name as co-developer of the implicit association test, which aims to measure the unconscious biases that shape human decision-making, as with race, gender or class.

When she asked an early version of ChatGPT to disclose its implicit biases, Banaji recalled that it simply told her it was a white male. She said she was concerned by the apparent glitch but returned to unrelated inquiries.

A month later, the model had been revamped — and gave a “six-paragraph” answer to the same question. Now, per Banaji’s paraphrase, it said, “I am a machine, I have no bias or I try to avoid them” — and then directed her to her own work for background.

“That was when I freaked out,” Banaji said. “Think about what is happening: [the process of] ‘fine-tuning,’ which I call ‘bludgeoning,’ is shaping this thing, not to reveal its basic associations, but to have a public face.”

Freaked out, Banaji was also curious, and has continued to experiment with various LLMs and their blind spots. (“I don’t believe I’ll ever study another human for the rest of my life,” she said, half-jokingly.)

Her findings have not reassured her. Though both Claude’s constitution and the Microsoft “code of conduct” warn models strongly against engaging in bias or discrimination, they inevitably mimic a species that practices both widely.

In a 2024 study, Banaji’s lab presented LLMs with career-related queries, including only the “subtlest indications” of user gender: typing “hi!!” if they intended the model to perceive a female user and “yo” for a male.

They found that, even with only that textual nudge, “Girls were told to be nurses and teachers, and boys are told to be engineers and detectives.” Worse still, she said, “LLMs across the board told the girls they should ask for $9,000 less in salary than the boys.”

Further refinements, including of these constitutions, may help future models avoid those traps. But Banaji is dubious, saying that in her experience, “with each iteration … the bias is getting stronger and stronger.”

Kingsland said he imagines that — unlike our own — Claude’s constitution may evolve often. By 2036, he imagined Anthropic will probably look back “horrified at all the mistakes we’ve made” in this first draft: “It’s such a nascent field, and so high-stakes.”

After three years with the company, helping shape a new kind of intelligence quite different from our own, Kingsland is optimistic, though with occasional reservations: “What scares our researchers the most are [cases when] the model will say one thing and think another,” he said.

“That scares me about humans, too,” Banaji added, with a smile.

Nearly 60 years after his last recording, trailblazing jazz saxophonist John Coltrane’s legacy remains as vital as ever.

Coltrane, who died of liver cancer at 40 in 1967, is widely credited with reshaping jazz in the late 1950s and early ’60s. The Pulitzer Prize board awarded him a posthumous special career citation in 2007. Fans will celebrate his 100th birthday on Sept. 23.

Coltrane played on several of jazz’s most well-known and important albums, including 1959’s “Kind of Blue” as a member of the Miles Davis Quintet, and then, as a bandleader, in 1960’s “Giant Steps” and his 1964 opus, “A Love Supreme.”

As a performer, Coltrane was a hard-working virtuoso known for his lyrical and unmistakable sound. But he was also a pioneer of new harmonic forms who explored non-Western musical and spiritual ideas and was among the first stars to embrace the avant-garde “free jazz” movement.

In edited reflections, members of the Harvard community explain why Coltrane remains a singular musical icon.

Gazette: Why is John Coltrane still such a revered figure all these years later?

Ingrid Monson, Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music at Harvard: I would put it simply: There has never been a jazz artist more profound than John Coltrane, and that’s saying a lot. Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter — this is a towering field of incredible musicians.

One of the reasons I feel that way so strongly is that no matter what your perspective was — politically, socially, aesthetically, whatever — John Coltrane spoke to musical excellence in just the most profound way.

This is somebody who used to practice eight hours a day or in between sets he was doing at a club. He was dedicated to a combination of discipline, the mathematics of music.

But first and foremost, to him, the relationship between music and communicating with the divine was ultimately the most important thing. To him, music and doing it with excellence, was about communing with the divine, and his ultimate expression of that that everybody cites is, of course, the album “A Love Supreme.”

What makes him so profound is just the depth of integrity of the music and his commitment to his personal spiritual beliefs, and that this was how to be a good human and to be humble in the face of God.

Bob Blumenthal ’69, J.D. ’72, Boston-based jazz critic and author who won two Grammy Awards for best album notes for two special Coltrane retrospectives: Clearly, he’s one of the 10 greatest musicians in the history of jazz.

Nobody ever really heard of him until he was 29 years old and joined Miles Davis in 1955. He was, at that point, a classic case of a talented musician whose drug and alcohol problems had kept him from really developing. But he had a sound that was so arresting, that just grabbed you.

The emotional impact of the sound was already available in his first stay with Miles Davis. And his technique, because he was very fast on the tenor sax, made him stand out. But he was fired by Miles Davis in 1957 for being so unreliable.

He went home. He cleaned up his act, came back to New York a couple of months later. Thelonious Monk soon hired him for his band, and by the end of the year, went back to Miles Davis’ group a much better saxophonist.

He stayed with Miles Davis for two years, at which point he had developed his own harmonic language, which caught the attention of a lot of musicians. In 1960, he forms his quartet with McCoy Tyner on piano and Elvin Jones on drums, and a series of bass players that ultimately became Jimmy Garrison on bass in 1961. They established a whole style for quartet-playing using modes and scales instead of chord progressions.

He also began playing the soprano saxophone, which hadn’t had any prominence in jazz since the 1920s, other than the great Sidney Bechet. Once he had his own band and had more control over his music, his talent as a composer became clear.

Vijay Iyer, pianist and composer, Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts and professor of African and African American Studies: He became one of the most virtuosic saxophonists of all time. He also made music that spoke to a lot of people.

There’s a sense of struggle in his music; there’s a narrative of overcoming hardship that you feel in the energy of it, in the backdrop of his life story. And I think that hard-won quality that you can hear in the way he approaches things speaks to people in a way that mere virtuosity for its own sake doesn’t. You really feel that he arrived at something after great effort and labor and hardship.

The other thing is that he wasn’t afraid to, in his own way, speak to his time. A piece like “Alabama,” for example, which is a prayer for the four girls killed in the [1963 Baptist Street] church bombing, or in that last movement of “A Love Supreme,” where he is playing through one of Dr. King’s sermons, and then created his own prayer. So, there’s also this prayerful quality in the music that emerges in the last several years of his career.

What made him so special as a player?

Monson: You recognize his tone instantly. He’s got a unique sound on the saxophone.

For people who aren’t familiar with it I would suggest they listen to his ballad performances — he has a whole album called “Ballads” — or listen to his version of “Body and Soul” on the album “Equinox.” He had a tremendous lyricism.

Many jazz players say, “If you can’t play a ballad, you can’t play.” You hear this particular sound. It’s a little darker than some other players, and it’s very expressive, and the way he connects the notes.

For his up-tempo playing, listen to him on “Giant Steps,” and how quickly and the kinds of patterns and ideas that he is developing in the solos.

But for him, the technical wasn’t just about the technique. The technique was a means of mastery to get at this kind of communion with the divine and higher powers of some kind. That’s what really inspired him.

Blumenthal: His sound just grabs you. I happen to be listening to an old anthology, and it had a ballad he played on the first album issued under his own name, just called “Coltrane.” The song is “While My Lady Sleeps” and it’s almost wrenching, the emotion he can get out of a ballad.

 And he was a great blues player, which people came around to understand.

Sound is so important. The place to go if you want to hear it for the first time on record is the Miles Davis album “Round About Midnight.” It’s the first thing that brought Coltrane to public attention. On the track “’Round Midnight,” Miles Davis plays the theme. There’s a little interlude, and then Coltrane comes in and plays his solo. And suddenly people are saying, “Whoa! Who is this guy? What’s he doing?”

Iyer: Coltrane was influenced by a lot of people — Bird [Charlie Parker], Prez [Lester Young], Sonny Rollins. He even named Stan Getz as an influence at one point.

And then, he studied music from all over the world kind of obsessively — [Béla] Bartók, South Asian music. He started working with African musicians towards the end. He was very interested in what at the time was called a “Third World consciousness,” that idea of looking outside the West for inspiration that a lot of African American artists pursued.

That was not just idle curiosity. It was about contemplating their place in the post-World War II era and understanding their fates as linked to those in across the Global South. This sense of kinship and spiritual connection, and the fact that their lived realities were not so far apart.

Generations of musicians from jazz to rock to hip-hop and classical cite Coltrane as a major influence. What were some of his most important contributions to music?

Iyer: He had these really pivotal apprenticeships with these icons of the music, people who were real instigators and changemakers, Monk and Miles Davis. The other thing that makes him really influential among musicians is that he came up with some pretty important ideas that move the language forward.

Every story that anyone talks about him they would always talk about how he was constantly trying to find something new for himself, and he would have these breakthroughs.

The most famous example is “Giant Steps.” For someone who’s not versed in music theory, it sounds like another song. But any musician knows there’s something profoundly challenging in that song. It’s just a 16-bar étude, but to try to navigate it as an improviser, you have to come up with some new language because of the harmonic oddity of it.

He made it seem easy, but that’s because he worked on it for a long time. He gets somewhere by really putting himself through the paces, and he has this extraordinarily high standard for himself to try to achieve something that seems, at the outset, impossible.

It’s things like that where he set a new bar and he created a new language. And he did that repeatedly.

Another breakthrough is that he started to do the reverse, most famously with his version of “My Favorite Things” in 1961. He took a pop song and stripped away all the harmony. It’s all centered around this central drone pitch. That came from his interest in South Asian music, this very different approach to music making that isn’t based on chords, that’s based around resonance.

So, he had these pretty interesting and kind of countervailing interests. One was this constant playing around with chords and intervals and progressions. Another was really stripping things to their essence.

Blumenthal: Back in the late ’50s and early ’60s, as I understand it, the way nightclubs operated, bands were told to play for 30 minutes, 40 minutes tops, and then, “We need to sell drinks for 20 minutes.”

Coltrane was the first bandleader to say, “No, I’m playing as long as I need to play.” It led to altering the whole way music was presented at nightclubs. I’ve never seen him get credit for this, but he’s maybe the key individual in that transition.

Coltrane was known for relentlessly practicing for hours and hours every day, even during gigs while his bandmates were soloing. What was he trying to do?

Iyer: We have to understand him as a composer.

He was working on ideas. He wasn’t just trying to sound cleaner and faster than the next guy. He was just like any composer who lives into their 100s and keeps creating. There’s always this “What’s the next idea?” And then also, “How do I put that idea into practice as a player?” It was processing ideas and trying to develop them.

We use the word practicing, but what do we mean?

It’s the word we use in classical music to say I’m trying to polish this rendition of this piece. But that’s not what most of us in creative music are doing. We’re trying to refine the process of creating. He knows that there’s more than what he knows, and he knows there’s a way to access it. That is already here.

So, it’s about trying to open that door. It’s not about refining anything. It’s about those doors that you’re trying to open. That’s why any of us play. That’s why any of us are artists. Because we’re interested in channeling something from beyond ourselves and being that conduit so that we can bring that healing property and that magic to others.

Following the economic and political fallout from World War II, West Germany underwent what scholars call the “wirtschaftswunder” or “economic miracle” during which industry boomed and rapid reconstruction led to increased prosperity. But who was responsible for creating the miracle, and what happened when they were no longer needed?

That’s what Kurdistan-born artist and Berliner Pinar Öğrenci asks in her work currently on display at Harvard Art Museums in the exhibition “Glück auf in Deutschland,” or “Good Luck in Germany.” The exhibition includes the 2024 film of the same name by Öğrenci, as well as five related collages that integrate stark images of the country’s coal miners and their families — a major source of that economic growth for post-war Germany — into the country’s Ruhr region landscape and industrial architecture.

“Öğrenci’s work aims to capture the all-encompassing nature of the industry and highlight the people behind the economic growth,” said Lynette Roth, Harvard’s Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum.

And glück auf, Roth said, is not just a friendly greeting in Germany but is specific to the mining industry and to miners who would wish each other good luck before they went down into dangerous mines.

The film, which runs roughly 44 minutes in total, includes black-and-white archival photos from the 1950s and 1960s of miners covered in soot, alongside images of their families and communities in the surrounding region. These images, some of which are collaged and some of which stand alone, are paired with interviews Öğrenci conducted with scholars and experts in conjunction with poetry and personal anecdotes.

You see the laundry drying, with factories looming in the background, or children playing on the street in housing complexes built for workers. There are images of religious ceremonies, and neighborhood parties paired with images of heaping piles of coal and mining equipment.

“The mines themselves really cultivated a kind of identity, and so as the film goes on, you see parades and celebrations and sports activities and the ways in which the women were brought together as a community,” Roth said. “[Being a miner] bound those workers to this intensive labor and kept them from leaving the area or looking for work that maybe wasn’t quite as dangerous or as, you know, bad for their health.”

Women in Germany’s coal mining communities stand out in Öğrenci’s work as some of the unsung heroes of the wirtschaftswunder. For one, their fashion choices are visually striking in the images included in the film.

“Women would often dress themselves and their families in white, which is counterintuitive if you live in a very sooty environment that has a lot of air pollution,” Roth said. “It was kind of a protest, because there were stereotypes about that area. It’s dirty. It’s dark. And so it was a pride that women took in saying, ‘Actually, no, we are very clean. We take care of our families.’”

In the film, lines of clothing drying outside factories are set against a backdrop of active smokestacks. Laundering the light clothes became a massive act of labor for women in the community.

“So she’s also saying, ‘Let’s not forget the role that women play in the so-called economic miracle,’” Roth said.

The other forgotten players in the economic miracle highlighted in Öğrenci’s work are the migrant workers who sustained the industry from its beginning in the late 19th century and saw a massive increase after the war.

“After the Second World War, West Germany was able to recover from the devastation of the war only because of its migration program that brings labor migrants, starting in the 1950s, from Italy, Spain, and then eventually from Türkiye,” also known as Turkey, said Roth. “And so Pinar comes to this project as someone who was coming from Türkiye with these labor migrants in mind.”

Roth acquired several of Öğrenci’s physical collages for the exhibition that show Turkish labor migrants and their families intertwined with the mining infrastructure and the Ruhr community spaces.

“She’s actually kind of wrapped a photo [of workers] around an architectural photo,” Roth said. “Kind of like they’re taking possession of the factory, in a way that they were not given that kind of agency at the time.”

In “Glück auf in Deutschland,” Öğrenci is also partially examining the people in power in Germany’s coal industry, including footage of a Krupp company factory that was actively used for forced labor during WWII and continued afterward as a private endeavor.

“We know German industry was about the war machine, and there wasn’t a zero hour or a clean slate,” Roth said. “Industries continued on, and people who were affiliated with the Nazi Party also often continued to work in major roles in German business and industry.”

Öğrenci leaves viewers with an understanding of mining’s complicated legacy. At the turn of the 21st century, Germany began undergoing what is known as the “energiewende” — a shift to new forms of energy such as solar and wind. As such, they’ve ended underground mining completely, leaving former mining towns in economic freefall — comparable to that of the American rustbelt.

The exhibit examines the breakdown of the once close-knit mining communities, as well as the ways in which the mining industry’s legacy is alive and well — including using migrant labor in other forms across the country.

“At the end, she’s expanding outward,” Roth said. “She’s opening up and offering hope for a world where there’s justice for laborers, where profit isn’t the primary driver, where the labor of women or migrants is held in high esteem.”

“Pınar Öğrenci: Glück auf in Deutschland” will be on display at Harvard Art Museums through Oct. 18. Öğrenci will be on campus for a lecture on Oct. 13 to discuss the work.

Can plants see? Can they pray? If trees could make music, what would it sound like? 

Those questions and others are explored in “Thinking with Plants and Fungi,” a collection of essays from botanists, anthropologists, artists, and theologians inspired by a conference of the same name, hosted at the Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions.

At the core of the book is an inquiry into how we should think about organisms that are wildly different from us. It’s an open question, but one way might be through the names we give them, whether in International Scientific Vocabulary or otherwise. 

Editors Rachael Petersen, Natalia Schwien Scott, and Russell C. Powell helped us develop this quiz based on the book. 

Step 1 of 8

12%

1. The aspergillus genus of molds traces its name to the Latin root spargere, meaning:

Spring

Sprinkle

Spiral

Asparagus

Next

2. The Amorphophallus titanum flower gets its name from its large, unusually shaped flower head. But the name misses the flower’s most defining characteristic, which is what?

It smells like a rotting corpse.

It “walks” — sometimes up to 10 inches per day.

It reproduces asexually.

It is hermaphroditic.

Previous Next

3. Mosses befuddled early botanists who sought to categorize the natural world. Carl Linnaeus’ “Systema Naturae” put them in the cryptogamia class, which might be translated to mean what?

Hidden messages

Hidden marriage

Underground root system

Underground eggs

Previous Next

4. True or false: Poricidal plants are those that harm other plants.

True

False

Previous Next

5. Who proposed the concept of geolinguistics?

Linnaeus

Pliny the Elder

Henry David Thoreau

Ursula K. Le Guin

Previous Next

6. Many plants’ scientific names come from Latin roots. But the Boquila trifoliolata, known as the chameleon vine thanks to its ability to mimic nearby plants, gets part of its name from what other language or family?

Basque

Amharic

Mapuche

Tagalog

Previous Next

7. Heliotropes are plants that do what?

Change colors

Grow in the tropics

Open in the daytime

Turn toward the sun

Previous Next

8. Copal, a tree resin used ceremonially in some precolonial and contemporary Mesoamerican communities, owes its name to a word meaning what?

Incense

Cup

Couple

Sky

Previous Submit

Δ

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the nation rallied under the cry “Never forget.”

But 25 years later, several lessons that emerged from that day of death and destruction have been forgotten, according to a panel of experts at a John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Institute of Politics on Tuesday night.

Three panelists — the first New York Fire Department chief to respond to the attack, a Navy admiral who was in the Pentagon that day, and a journalist who covered it for Time magazine — were all personally impacted by the attack.

Chief of Counterterrorism and Emergency Preparedness for the Fire Department of New York, Joseph Pfeifer, now a Kennedy School senior fellow and author of “Ordinary Heroes: A Memoir of 9/11,” was inspecting a suspected gas leak nearby in lower Manhattan at 8:46 that morning when the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

“Every first responder looked at the burning building and knew they were going to the most dangerous fire of their lives,” he recalled.

Recognizing immediately that the crash was deliberate, he also explained how, nearly an hour later, when the South Tower was collapsing, he had to make a fateful decision. Trusting his “gut feeling” and years of training, he called for all firefighters to evacuate.

“It was probably the first time in history a fire chief pulled firefighters out when there were thousands of people in the building,” he said.

Adm. Michael Glenn “Mike” Mullen, who would go on to serve as President George W. Bush’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (2007–2011), was in the Pentagon when it was hit by a third plane that day.

At the Tuesday discussion, which was co-sponsored by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, he recalled how at first he associated the resulting explosion with earthquakes he’d experienced growing up in California.

On realizing what had happened, the Pentagon immediately went “into crisis mode” and called on everyone in the complex to evacuate. But, he told the audience, many of whom had not been born in 2001, confusion ruled the day.

“What sometimes gets lost is how little we knew,” he said. “We didn’t know how many planes it would be or where they were coming from.”

Nancy Gibbs, Lombard Director of the Shorenstein Center and Edward R. Murrow Professor of the Practice of Press, Politics and Public Policy, was working for Time magazine when she got the assignment to write about that day.

Although she was in Westchester with a sick child at the time of the attacks, her immersive cover story, “If You Want to Humble an Empire,” brought her into close contact with survivors, first responders, and officials, among others.

That day’s legacy, she said, included an end to the “certainty of safety that we [Americans] took for granted.”

“Everyone understood we were living in an illusion that had been shattered, but no one knew what that was going to mean in a day, a week, a month, or 25 years,” said Gibbs, who would go on to become the magazine’s first female editor-in-chief.

One result, she continued, was “the unbelievable heroism” of ordinary people, recalling “lines looping around hospitals of people wanting to give blood, and people opening their homes to dust-covered, traumatized” survivors.

Twenty-five years later, said Pfeifer, “we are in a better position” in terms of national security.

In large part that is due, Mullen said, to tighter cooperation resulting from the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, which was made up of all or parts of 22 departments and agencies. Before Sept. 11, he pointed out, “We had all the information we needed to put it together ahead of time, and yet we couldn’t do that.”

In the past 25 years, we haven’t had another such attack.

Citing the “thousands and thousands [of people] working to make sure it didn’t happen again,” he said that the effort is ongoing. “We have to stay vigilant.”

Like the intelligence services, all three panelists agreed, the nation at large learned how much stronger we are together.

Pfeifer, for example, turned his three watchwords — connect, collaborate, and coordinate — into a challenge coin, which he presented to Mullen.

But all three stressed that hard-won unity is now under threat.

“When we’re put under stress, our stress response is to turn into our own groups. What we need to do is have a sense of crisis empathy, working with our partners and exchanging ideas, and, as we move ahead, to coordinate our efforts,” said Pfeifer.

On Sept. 11, said Mullen, “We had a moment of unity. That coming together was really important.”

The highly divisive responses to the pandemic, said Gibbs, revealed how that sense of national unity has fractured.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, she noted, the nation engaged in a hard conversation over what measures might be required to ensure our security. One potential sticking point was the question of which was more important: privacy or security.

But that debate was possible because of a shared understanding of what had happened.

“We were having an intensive debate over values, but we could have that kind of argument because it was taking place on top of a baseline of shared assumptions,” Gibbs said. “A large majority of people in this country believe that no longer exists.”

In large part, she concluded, this fragmentation is due to social media. While in 2001, there was no TikTok or Facebook, the current climate has created a situation where “all of us are living in different information environments.”

For a patient having their wisdom teeth removed, the days after surgery can bring an important question: How much pain medication will I actually need?

Over-the-counter medications such as acetaminophen and ibuprofen provide adequate pain relief for most, but some patients experience breakthrough pain that does not respond to these medications and may benefit from an opioid. For clinicians, the challenge is knowing before surgery which patients will need additional pain relief.

Harvard School of Dental Medicine faculty, residents, and students are exploring whether artificial intelligence could help make those decisions more precise. In a new paper published in Current Surgery Reports, the authors examine how AI and machine learning could help clinicians predict postoperative opioid needs and identify patients who may be at greater risk for misuse, prolonged use, or inadequate pain control.

“The fundamental problem is that opioid prescribing is still largely standardized, while patients’ actual pain medication needs are highly individualized. Two patients can undergo essentially the same operation, performed by the same surgeon, and have very different experiences with pain and swelling afterward due to biology and pain tolerance,” said Tim Wang, senior author and chief resident of the Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMFS) program at the Dental School and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Rethinking ‘just-in-case’ prescribing

Oral and maxillofacial surgery procedures lead to the most dental opioid prescriptions, accounting for more than 60 percent of opioids prescribed by dentists in the U.S. Procedures such as third-molar extraction can also represent a patient’s first exposure to prescription opioids.

But the amount prescribed does not always reflect how much a patient ultimately needs. The authors highlight a prospective study of patients undergoing third-molar surgery in which only 7 percent required opioids when recovery followed an uneventful course. Other research has found that more than half of opioids prescribed after dental surgery remain unused, creating opportunities for misuse or diversion.

“The challenge for the surgeon is that we have to make the prescribing decision before we know how that individual patient will respond in terms of postoperative pain,” said Wang.

The authors describe this practice as “just-in-case” prescribing, providing medication in anticipation of potential pain rather than basing the prescription on a patient’s individual risk and expected needs. At the same time, efforts to reduce unnecessary prescribing must not leave patients who do need additional pain relief without adequate treatment.

For Samat Borbiev, D.M.D. ’28, and Clark Morgan, D.M.D. ’28, student authors who contributed to the paper, the challenge is finding that balance.

“With more breakthroughs in clinical biomarkers and AI, we can help merge the two to create more tools for physicians to help them make informed decisions on pain control, management, and also nudge physicians when a patient may need more counseling and time to help manage their pain,” said Borbiev.

That balance can be particularly difficult because the factors that influence pain and opioid response extend beyond the procedure itself.

“Ultimately, the amount of clinical, genetic, and social data that may influence an ideal pain-control regimen is greater than what one provider can fully collect and consider, opening the door for AI to aid in clinical decision-making,” Morgan noted.

Using AI to account for individual differences

The authors point to machine learning as one way clinicians could account for these differences. AI models can analyze large amounts of clinical, behavioral, and biological data to identify patterns associated with opioid use, misuse, and prolonged use.

They highlight research involving more than 560,000 Medicare beneficiaries in which machine learning methods outperformed traditional statistical approaches in predicting opioid overdose risk. Other models have demonstrated the ability to predict opioid use disorder and prolonged postoperative opioid use with varying degrees of accuracy.

For clinicians, the potential value of these tools lies in translating those predictions into more individualized care. AI could potentially be incorporated into electronic health records to help determine the appropriate type, quantity, or duration of an opioid prescription, flag patients who may benefit from additional monitoring, and enhance existing prescription drug monitoring programs.

“The promise of artificial intelligence is that it may allow us to move away from a one-size-fits-all approach toward more individualized prescribing,” said Wang. AI could also help clinicians quickly review prescription drug monitoring data and identify relevant patterns in a patient’s history, he added.

The technology could also continue to support care after a patient leaves the clinic. The authors describe systems that could incorporate patient-reported pain, medication use, and adherence to refine recommendations over time, while also helping clinicians provide targeted education about pain management and medication use.

“It’s true that an inpatient setting provides relative ease for pain monitoring and management per the physician perspective, but the moment a patient is discharged we lose the benefit of direct supervision,” said Matthew Watt, D.M.D. ’26, OMFS resident and a contributor to the paper. “AI can be leveraged with greater return in the at-home setting, where we can utilize these models for more tailored pain regimens.”

The authors emphasize that AI is not a replacement for clinical judgment. Much of the existing research is retrospective, and many models have undergone limited external validation. Their performance can also vary depending on the populations and data used to train them.

Despite these challenges, Wang said the goal is not simply to reduce opioid prescribing, but to make it more precise without compromising patient outcomes.

“For patients, that could mean a pain-management plan shaped not only by the procedure they underwent, but also by the individual recovering from it,” he said.

This is a story about keeping the faith in a discipline not exactly known for its religiosity: mathematics.

The field of arithmetic statistics — the study of statistical patterns in arithmetic objects such as number fields, class groups, and elliptic curves — rests on sets of conjectures whose predictions have been only partially proven.

In 2001, mathematician Jordan Ellenberg ’93, Ph.D. ’98, and some colleagues set out on a humbling yearslong odyssey to disprove one of the field’s most famous sets of predictions, the Cohen-Lenstra conjectures.

“We were like, there’s no evidence these conjectures are true,” Ellenberg said. “People conjecture them because we can’t think of any reason to think otherwise, but there’s no real evidence that they’re true.”

The conjectures — formulated by Henri Cohen and Hendrik Lenstra in the 1980s at the dawn of computational number theory — predict that the structures of certainarithmetic objects display statistical regularities.

In a simple example, non-prime number can be broken down into a unique set of prime factors, like the number 6 factors as 2 x 3. But if you allow numbers that can be more complicated, factorization is not necessarily unique — for example, 6 can also be factored as (1+ √-5) x (1 – √-5). The Cohen-Lenstra conjectures predict, then, the chance that numbers factor uniquely when we allow the use of a random square root.

Ellenberg, who is now a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a prominent scholar best known in his field for his work on number theory. Outside of his field, he’s best known for breaking down math concepts for lay audiences, as well as for his 2014 book, “How Not to be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking.”

Book title notwithstanding, Ellenberg has been wrong, at least a couple of times.

He was wrong in 2001 when he set out to disprove the Cohen-Lenstra conjectures: After enough time spent trying and failing to find evidence against them, he was forced to admit defeat and started trying to prove them instead.

His first major step toward that goal was a celebrated paper, co-written in 2009 along with his frequent collaborators Akshay Venkatesh and Craig Westerland. That paper proved a weaker form of the conjectures by showing that geometric spaces eventually stabilize in predictable ways as the spaces grow.

Later, the trio realized they could take their conclusions a step further if they could figure out the number to which those spaces stabilize. They posted a follow-up paper in 2012.

That too was well-received. The authors had given seminars about it. But in 2013, a colleague alerted Ellenberg to a problem with the paper’s conclusion.

It’s the kind of problem that scholars have nightmares about. Ellenberg could have been forgiven for indulging in one or several of humankind’s unhealthy coping mechanisms. But instead he called his co-authors, and they spent weeks going over their work.

Finally, they concluded there was no easy workaround.

“What we hoped was a minor technical issue was not going to be easy to fix,” Ellenberg said.

The mathematicians retracted their paper. Ellenberg published a blog post owning up to the error — and calling on others in the field to be more honest about theirs.

Thirteen years later, the retraction is a minor plot point in a flourishing career, but one Ellenberg doesn’t mind revisiting.

“Honestly,” he said, “I don’t mind being identified as a guy who made a mistake. I think it’s important that people have models for what to do in this situation, because we’re human beings carrying out a human endeavor; there are going to be mistakes.”

Math, Ellenberg has discovered, is a profession that requires two seemingly incompatible traits: a wild belief in one’s own ideas, and the humility to abandon them graciously.

“A project might take years, and there might be 100 things that have to go your way,” he said. If just one of them doesn’t, proof could be doomed.

“You have to have the faith, possibly misplaced, that the thing is going to work out,” he said. “You need that to drive you through, but you also need resilience when it doesn’t work out. And maybe you have to have incorrigibility in your faith, even after it’s failed to be justified in the past, to be like, ‘Well, I blew it this time, but next time I feel just as confident.’”

But blowing it, mathematically speaking, is not a binary. Much of the math in the retracted paper remains useful. And further work, including by Harvard’s William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics Melanie Wood, has uncovered related predictions in other settings. More recently, Aaron Landesman ’16 has proved new cases of Cohen-Lenstra’s predictions over function fields, staking a much stronger claim in the conjectures’ favor.

Landesman talks about Ellenberg with the enthusiasm of a devotee. He’s gone out of his way to attend Ellenberg’s lectures; he’s read his books. “He gives the most inspiring talks, and it’s a lot of fun talking to him,” Landesman said.

As a graduate student, Landesman’s favorite paper was the piece Ellenberg co-authored in 2009 on the Cohen-Lenstra conjectures. Was Landesman intimidated, then, when he set out to prove what they had failed to in the retracted 2012 paper? Not in the least.

“What’s important is to be aware of the past work and make sure you understand the error, because you don’t want to do the same thing,” he said.

In other words, whatever combination of faith and humility propelled Ellenberg through more than a decade of wrestling with Cohen-Lenstra, Landesman has it too. In a series of papers co-written with his friend and collaborator Ishan Levy, Landesman — now a researcher at Harvard — made progress on Cohen-Lenstra and on what he describes as the other two major conjectures in arithmetic statistics, the Poonen-Rains conjectures and Malle’s conjecture.

“There’s still a long way to go to actually prove the full Cohen-Lenstra conjecture,” Landesman said, “but we’re getting closer.”

“My hat is off to them,” Ellenberg said of Landesman and Levy. “To put together a very long argument like what they did — maybe stamina is the wrong word. Maybe faith is a better word.”

For his part, Ellenberg is getting ready to publish another book, this one to be titled “Don’t be Too Sure.”

One night about two years ago, the sea came and swallowed Josephine Domevenu’s shop, a kiosk where she sold clothing and packaged snacks: “It happened so fast, I didn’t have time to get anything out.”

Her house, set a few blocks from the water in Keta, a narrow strip of land in eastern Ghana, was still safe. But within a year, the Atlantic lapped at her door. Then came another storm. The sea tore through several rooms and overturned her grandparents’ graves in the garden, filling the cinderblock tombs with sand — a baleful omen for Domevenu and her three children.

“The sea is angry with us,” she said.

Keta is perched uneasily between the Atlantic and a flood-prone lagoon. The beaches have always shifted here; an eastward-racing current both erodes and replenishes the sand. But in recent decades, across West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea, ports, dams, and coastal construction have disrupted that balance.

Now climate change is making storms more violent and rains harder, deadlier, and less predictable. The sea is taking more land. Some stretches of the West African coast are losing more than 30 feet a year.

How these communities can adapt was the focus of a three-year project led by Harvard’s Salata Institute that examined what interventions remain possible as growing coastal populations in resource-constrained countries face a rapidly advancing sea.

Working with universities in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria, the research team modeled future sea-level rise, flood exposure, and erosion; assessed the costs and benefits of managed retreat; and looked beyond the shoreline, suggesting financing options and ways to adapt to the collapse of fisheries that have long provided West African nations with a stable source of protein. The goal was not just to produce research, but to strengthen local capacity and put solutions on the table.

“We did not arrive with science and tell people, in many elaborate ways, that they are in trouble,” said Emmanuel Akyeampong, the principal investigator and the Ellen Gurney Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies. “Our project instead asked what can be done with the resources actually available. Communities are eager to feel that they are not helpless.”

‘Shifting the problem’

There is one room left at Domevenu’s home and, for now, a reprieve. This year, Ghana’s government has built several dozen groynes — stone barriers set at right angles to the coast — about 700 feet apart to hold the beach in place.

They are working, but at a cost. By interrupting the natural flow of sand, typically both carried away and redeposited by the currents, the groynes starve beaches downdrift.

Not far, beyond the last groyne, Kwashiwor Dansa is watching the sea close in. For more than 30 years, she has made her living smoking anchovies, mackerel, and sardines over sugarcane husks, buying fresh from fishermen who land their catch outside her home in flat-bottomed canoes painted with names like “Hope in God” and “Who Knows Tomorrow.”

“The sea is getting closer now,” Dansa said, explaining that erosion on her stretch of beach started this spring with the arrival of the groynes. “I’m afraid. If the builders are not in a hurry to put one here, the sea will take our house in weeks. They’d better hurry.”  

Though the groynes may provide a fix, they require constant, costly upkeep.

“They are a temporary fix,” said Kwasi Appeaning Addo, a coastal morphologist at the University of Ghana. “People are upset, so they shout at politicians and politicians dump boulders. But it just shifts the problem downdrift. We are not managing erosion; we are fighting erosion, and it’s a fight we cannot win.”

Addo points to nearby Benin as a model for nature-based protection. There, crews rebuilt beaches with sand dredged from the ocean and planted mangroves to hold it in place.

Equipping governments with useful findings

In June, Akyeampong and his co-investigators led a series of policy dialogues in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria, bringing researchers, planners, and government agencies together to confront the difficult choices facing coastal communities. The meetings put the project’s data, models, and planning tools in the hands of officials who could act on them.

Political scientist Robert Paarlberg, an associate at the Weatherhead Center, described how climate and demographic pressures are converging. “Not only are climate risks increasing, but population growth on these coasts is surging and putting more people at risk,” he said. “There is a demographic challenge as well as an atmospheric challenge, and the collision between these two is what’s creating the difficult policy choices these governments face today.”

The fishing community of Makoko is emblematic of the collision between swelling populations on the Gulf of Guinea coast and two impacts of climate change — extreme rainfall and declining fish stocks.

A fisherman casts a net for sardines, knee-deep in the riptide in Okun Alfa, Lagos, Nigeria. His net used to bring a bounty. At sunset on a recent Saturday, he empties it onto the sand. It is mostly trash.

Okun Alfa was losing almost 12 meters of beach per year to erosion. Groynes placed in the mid-2010s have slowed the rate, but it continues.

A Keta cemetary that had been destroyed by coastal erosion is now protected by a groyne, seen in the background.

One place emblematic of that collision is Makoko, a fishing community in Lagos, Nigeria, built by its residents on stilts above a lagoon. Encircled by the megacity, thousands of people live in makeshift shelters, some with tarps for walls. They punt to their homes in canoes, the lack of sanitation masked by the smell and haze of smoking fish.

Residents describe their lives there as far from ideal. But Makoko, having adapted to the water’s rise and fall, offers lessons for governments that cannot engineer their way out of sea-level rise, said Mokolade Johnson, a landscape architect at the University of Lagos. “We must borrow ideas from the people of Makoko. We are not going to relocate to the Sahara Desert.”

The policy dialogues also tackled bread-and-butter concerns as traditional economic systems crumble. One approach is to seek adaptation in the blue economy: restoring marine ecosystems, sustaining ports and tourism, and vocational training to help fishing communities find new work as overfishing exhausts stocks and ocean warming drives fish farther from shore. That does not mean seawalls and other engineered defenses should be dismissed, Paarlberg said. But governments should weigh them against nature-based solutions, managed physical retreat from the shore, and “economic retreat” to alternative livelihoods.

Planning with hope

In Lagos, a shortage of land makes relocation especially difficult for the poorest and most vulnerable.

At least once a week, high tide carries the Atlantic over the beach, past a mound of sand and cinderblocks that residents have piled at the top of Baale Street, and over the sandbags protecting Kudirat Abdulateef’s shop and home.

Abdulateef, who sells red pepper, cheese balls, and plastic bags, expects to be displaced — again.

“The sea is destroying my shop, my home. It is punishing my efforts to stop the water. But I have nowhere else to go,” she said. “I dream about the water. Things were not like this before.”

Her home sits between two groynes in Okun Alfa, a Lagos district where the sea has advanced about half a mile inland since the 1990s. Researchers say a luxury development built on an artificial island several miles to the west has worsened the erosion.

At the last groyne, the current curls back toward the land, scouring away a neighborhood in less than a decade.

As the sun set on a recent Saturday, Joseph, who has fished these waters for 54 years, stood thigh-deep in the riptide casting a net for sardines. His net once came back heaving. This time, when he emptied it onto the beach, it held mostly trash.

Okun Alfa is one of six communities featured in a portable “booxhibition” created by the research team for people experiencing coastal loss. Unfolding from a book-like box, the exhibition can be strung up quickly, showing maps, historical data, and illustrations of how the coastlines have changed and what they could look like in the decades ahead.

Akyeampong calls it a “visual rendering of the science” — a way to make sea-level projections, erosion models, and adaptation choices legible to the people most affected.

For Supriya Ambwani, a research associate at the Critical Landscapes Design Lab, the goal is not to prescribe a single solution, but to help communities imagine alternatives.

“It feels like a hopeless situation,” she said. “But once you start thinking of solutions, it creates something to work toward. Even if you don’t agree with all the ideas, it prompts people to engage differently.”

“If we don’t imagine what the future could look like,” Ambwani said, “we’re going to struggle to get there.”

American foreign policy is currently being tested by bloody conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine and escalating political and trade tensions with powerful rivals like China, historic allies such as Canada and Mexico, and dozens of other nations.

At the same time, the U.S. diplomatic bench is rapidly dwindling, warns Ambassador Nicholas Burns, the Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations at Harvard Kennedy School.

There have been staff cuts of 20 percent at the State Department and about one-third of U.S. ambassadorships remain vacant. In addition, the share of trained career ambassadors in the U.S. diplomatic corps, rather than political appointees, has shrunk since 2025, from 70 percent to just 17 percent as of Aug. 2026.

“This is a catastrophically low level and a complete change from any prior president over 60 years, and if you couple that with the destruction of USAID back in the winter of 2025, you’re looking at a dramatically weakened Foreign Service,” said Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China during the Biden administration. He will lead a new Harvard Kennedy School initiative to advance the practice and study of diplomacy.

The Program on Diplomacy and Statecraft is a nonpartisan, multipronged effort at the Belfer Center focused on the key issues diplomats around the world confront. Its members will contribute scholarship to the fields of negotiation and diplomacy, and help build up a new diplomatic bench to prepare for national security challenges.

Hit Netflix dramas like “The Diplomat” notwithstanding, being an ambassador or a member of the Foreign Service is “an all-encompassing job,” said Burns. “Yes, we have American diplomats assigned to the embassy in Paris in gilded halls negotiating with French diplomats, but we also have people on the front lines of the worst disasters in the world.”

Informed by Burns’ experience in China (“by far, the major foreign policy challenge for the American people in the next 20 years”), the program will emphasize managing the U.S.-China relationship and competition across the Indo-Pacific region, as well as diplomacy across the globe.

The program also includes the American Secretaries of State Project, a longstanding historical study of high-stakes negotiation established by Burns; James Sebenius, the Gordon Donaldson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; and Robert Mnookin, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School.

In 2025, they interviewed former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about his work during the first Trump administration and have invited former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to visit next year.

Also featured in the program are modules on cultural diplomacy and preparing a new generation of leaders to serve in diplomatic roles.

Despite its centrality to American power overseas, few schools of government have a platform dedicated to teaching diplomacy in the same way they do for the military and intelligence, said Director Julian Simcock, M.P.A. ’13, who served in national security and diplomatic roles at the White House and State Department, respectively.

“At its core, diplomacy is often about addressing disputes without the use of force. It’s not a refuge from conflict; it’s a way of managing conflict,” he said.

“It’s my view, and I believe Nick shares it, that the vast majority of conflicts and current geopolitical complexities are going to be addressed by diplomats, not by the use of force, and so we want to create a place which is really dedicated to those issues,” Simcock said.

Without first-hand experience, understanding what really happens in diplomacy and what it takes to do well can be difficult, which makes learning from practitioners vital, he said.

“So often, it’s practiced beyond the view of the public, and I think one part of the appeal for students seems to be to learn more about what this craft looks like inside those negotiations,” said Simcock. “What does it sound like when you’re in one of these rooms negotiating with a foreign counterpart?”

While the abrupt dissolution of USAID and dramatic Foreign Service and State Department staff cutbacks have drawn widespread criticism, Burns says there is room for improvement.

“I certainly would not say the Foreign Service or the State Department is perfect,” he said. “The State Department, like many government agencies, is often reactive, slow to reform and slow to accept change.”

To that end, one early ambition of the program will be to reassess how U.S. diplomacy is organized and administered. A comprehensive nonpartisan report of recommendations will be published by early 2028.

“We can’t go back to the blueprint of the State Department in 1924 or even 2014, or USAID. We’ve got to imagine, reimagine, reinvent the Foreign Service and State Department of the future,” said Burns.

Diplomacy in the 21st century, for example, will require some knowledge of evolving tech.

“You can’t be a modern diplomat right now without at least a fundamental elementary understanding of AI and other frontline technology fields because so many future global challenges revolve around those issues,” Burns noted.

Replenishing and revitalizing American diplomacy is demanding work that students, not faculty or practitioners, must helm if real change is to take place, he said.

“This younger generation at Harvard and around the country is going to have to lead us forward.”

Amid the mushrooming use of AI, Harvard President Alan Garber reminded students and faculty during the first Morning Prayers ceremony of the new academic year that technology is a tool and that human intelligence and values remain in charge — and at the heart of the University’s work.

“This is a week of beginnings, as new students arrive on campus, continuing students return, and we work together to advance Harvard’s mission,” said Garber at Memorial Church’s Appleton Chapel on Wednesday morning. “This moment of renewal is an opportune time to pause and consider the meaning of all that we undertake here, powered, as ever, by human intelligence.”

The meaning, said Garber, lies in the myriad ways in which the work done at the University, across fields and disciplines, aims to “push the boundaries of knowledge” to address the world’s most significant challenges.

“What does that mean?” he asked. “It means that we seek to solve the biggest problems: approaching climate change from a wide range of vantage points; battling cancer with ever-more-powerful tools of our own design; and racing the clock to untangle the origins of degenerative neurological disease. It means we preserve life as we lengthen and improve it while marveling at the majesty and mysteries of the plants and animals that share our planet. It means that we go to extremes — from parsecs to Planck lengths — to explore the measurable, eagerly plunging into the unknown, seeking to understand the meaning of time and space. And, through the many forms of beauty and meaning held in the arts and humanities, we contend, too, with the immensurables and the immutables — grief, joy, and love among them.”

Garber spoke about the impact of artificial intelligence in transforming scientific research as its tools help scientists do their work at a much faster speed. A faculty member who used AI tools for his research told Garber recently how he was able to accomplish in six months what it would have taken him 10 years, Garber said.

“I’m convinced that advances in knowledge — essential to human progress, and at the core of our excellence as a research university — will soon be made more rapidly than at any other time in human existence,” said Garber. “When I think about the new age now unfolding, I tend to focus on the costs, risks, and benefits of the changes to come, and what they mean for our mission and our community. I rarely think about dreams. But perhaps, as we continue to ponder challenges and possibilities, we should give ourselves greater license to imagine the future that we hope to inhabit.”

While the pursuit of discoveries, breakthroughs, glory, and success is exciting and uplifting, that should be accompanied by “compassion, selflessness, humility, and wonder,” Garber said, as well as a love for the work itself, and the “good inherent in our work and the good that comes from it.”

Garber also spoke about how the Jewish tradition exalts human capacities for creativity and curiosity, judgment, and reason, and considers human intelligence precious and unique.

“As we are told in the book of Genesis — known in Hebrew as Bereshit, or ‘In the beginning …’ — humanity was not simply made but created ‘in His image,’” said Garber. “That verse tells us human life is sacred, each human is unique, and humans have distinct capabilities. Among them is the ability to choose freely, not by an algorithm.

“For Rabbi Akiva, the possession of self-knowledge was especially important: He commented that ‘it was made known to him that he was created in the image (as it is said “for in the image of God did He make the human.)’ [Mishna Avot 3:14] Thus human intelligence is not only precious. It is distinct from any intelligence that humans have created, as astounding as the unfolding technical advances are.”

In closing, Garber reminded the audience that Harvard is a community devoted to learning.

“Learning is at the heart of what makes us human,” said Garber. “It begins at our beginnings and persists as long as each of us does, an unceasing process of discovery and insight. Learning is not only lifelong. Learning is life. And the preservation of learning, the work to which Harvard has set itself for centuries, is more than just a path to greatness or even to goodness. The preservation of learning — the elevation and celebration of learning — is the preservation of human life itself.

“Our University is, at its heart, an affirmation of humanity, an affirmation of our unique and wondrous capacities and the care and skill they beget.”

Robin Kelsey is no less interested in what a picture hides than what it reveals. Turns out the mystery runs just as deep — more so, perhaps — when the person looking back at him is blood.

“Did they have a temper? Were they friendly? Did they laugh a lot? You can’t tell from these images.”

Kelsey, the Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography and the author of “Photography and the Art of Chance,” was reacting to pictures of his mother’s family, from Mason City, Iowa, sent to him by a cousin.

He paused to recall a line from an essay by the German cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer — “Beneath a person’s photograph, their history is buried as if under a blanket of snow” — before paging deeper into the past.

“One of the things I love about my mother’s side of the family is they were a bit eccentric, a bit zany in certain respects,” Kelsey said. “They were creative and pretty intrepid.”

Many of the black-and-white images capture playful summer moments spent at the family cabin in northern Minnesota. They document days of swimming, canoeing, camping, and throwing horseshoes.

Some names and faces are familiar — Kelsey’s great-grandparents William and Hattie Egloff; his great-uncles Max and Bill — but the context is lost, leaving the photographs as a kind of sediment, to use another of Kracauer’s metaphors. Even so, said Kelsey, “I like the feeling of spending time with the ancestors. We’re a culture that tends not to value ancestors … snapshots are one way that we can bring them to mind.”

For a scholar who’s spent decades devoted to photography, the images introduce an intimate tension between viewer and subject. His relatives, he said, “were people of action and activity. They wouldn’t sit around looking at old photographs. There’s a paradox there with what I love doing.” Laughing, he added, “They would tell me to go out and chop some wood and make myself useful.”

Otherwise, he’s left to wonder.

“The magic of these old photographs is that they are simply moments in a story that you have to write with your imagination.”

In mid-August, the drugmakers Moderna and Merck announced that a cancer vaccine trial had successfully lowered risk of both death and metastases of melanoma, a deadly skin cancer. The vaccine, designed to be given to melanoma patients after initial treatment, primes the immune system to recognize and attack tumor cells should they recur.

Moderna and Merck announced only that the Phase 3 trial was successful. The companies plan to release full results at a European conference later this year.

The trial’s approach, which tunes immune cells to recognize tumor-specific proteins called neoantigens, was pioneered in part at Harvard-affiliated labs, including that of Catherine Wu, a Harvard Medical School professor of medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Nir Hacohen, HMS professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and core member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

In a conversation with the Gazette, Wu said that she’s optimistic that the technique will be effective against cancers beyond melanoma.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Gazette: A couple of years ago, you said that in two years you expected large, industry-run trials to confirm positive results of the many smaller trials you have conducted using neoantigens to create a cancer vaccine. Were you specifically thinking of this Merck-Moderna trial?

Catherine Wu: Yes — in our smaller prior studies, we found activities from neoantigen-targeting vaccines across many different tumor settings and had hoped that such results would be borne out in larger studies. The promising results from Moderna-Merck are specific to melanoma, but hopefully this is the first of many that are to come. Moderna and Merck have several other large studies that are underway, with participant numbers that are in the hundreds to over a thousand per study. They are all of similar design, with the targeting of multiple personal neoantigens per vaccine using mRNA as a delivery format. One study is in kidney cancer, and the others are in squamous cell carcinoma, bladder cancer, and lung cancer.

When we talk about your pioneering work in this field, are the important keys leading to this trial the identification and work with neoantigens and the genetic-sequencing advances that allow for speedy analysis of the tumor genome?

That’s right. We had a terrific local team that helped bring these pieces together, not only Nir Hacohen at the Broad Institute, but also doctors Edward Fritsch and Patrick Ott, who were instrumental in the clinical translation of our work that we first reported in 2017. What made our 2017 study the first of its kind was that these are personalized vaccines, not one-size-fits-all. We used real-time genomic-sequencing data and a computational approach to identify the tumor targets to put into a vaccine. That was a conceptual advance that necessitated generating a different type of manufacturing strategy. We had to go to the FDA for early guidance because we weren’t creating the same one vaccine that we were going to distribute to many people. Instead, we were creating a new, personalized product unique to each patient tumor for each patient treated — a fundamentally different process than what had been done before for vaccines. To make that cost-effective, we had to disrupt the usual manufacturing process for vaccines, namely so we could make frequent yet small quantities of vaccine for any individual patient.

How important was the FDA approval that allowed that 2017 study to move forward? If the agency had told you that each unique vaccine for each patient had to be approved separately, would that have been a deal-breaker?

For sure. Ours was the first trial to approach the FDA like that. We were crammed in a tiny conference room packed with interested members of various departments, curious to see how genomics, immunology, and personalized medicine were all going to come together. It was exciting. I am really appreciative of what the FDA does. These are really dedicated, hardworking people who just want to make sure that the safety guardrails are there for patients.

Is Merck and Moderna’s next step to try to get the vaccine approved for patients?

I imagine that is so. I expect that the first approval will be for melanoma, but depending on future results, hopefully for other solid tumor malignancies as well. I am optimistic that this type of customized immune therapy will be available for cancer patients more broadly.

The companies have said that they’ve met their clinical trial endpoints and that they plan to release full results this fall. What will you be looking for? Is there a scenario in which something in the full results tempers enthusiasm around this work?

It’s hard to know. As you say, the company has only given us broad strokes of positive results right now. As in any study, when fuller results of the study come out, I expect we will collectively scrutinize the composition of the patients enrolled in the study. Was there any skewing in the characteristics of the patients enrolled in the different arms of the study? Was there uneven balance one way or the other that could impact the interpretation of the results? Were there any differences in the number of vaccine administrations? We will see.

Are there cancers for which this technology might not be appropriate?

There are settings where I think that we’re not yet finding the best vaccine targets. Particular areas of need include pediatric tumors and blood malignancies, whose mutational burden is quite low, and hence have a low neoantigen burden.

People have talked about the end of cancer for a long time, but it feels like today’s therapies, including this vaccine, are closing in. Are we seeing the end of cancer in real time?

The end of the beginning, maybe? I do think we’re seeing vast improvements in front of our eyes for the cancer therapeutic landscape. Part of the challenge now is: How do we get our therapies out there fast enough? That requires resources. This is not a time that we should be pulling back. It’s a very, very exciting time in the field.

Now we’ll see whether it works, specialists on technology law say.

Meta decided on Aug. 26 to settle a lawsuit brought by dozens of state attorneys general for nearly $18 billion over claims that it endangered the physical and mental health of children and teens with its addictive social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.

In addition to the payout, Meta agreed to modify a number of design features that critics and researchers say encourage excessive use as well as those that psychologists say lead users to making unhealthy negative social comparisons between themselves and peers or influencers.

The recent Meta case was being closely watched by legal experts and is considered a bellwether. But legal scholars note that it is just one of thousands still pending against social media companies.

In this edited discussion, the Gazette asked Leah Plunkett ’01, J.D. ’06, Meyer Research Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center (BKC), and Christian Sandvig, a BKC fellow who studies the ethics of information technology and is part of the Center’s new AI & Youth Safety Initiative, about their take on the agreement.

Gazette: How big of a deal is this settlement?

Leah Plunkett: This is a huge deal. This is a paradigm-shifting deal when it comes to social media and the way it interacts with kid and teen users, as well as the family, schools, and communities around them. It is also paradigm-shifting in terms of what those kids, teens, families, schools, and communities can expect in their interactions.

I think it sends a huge warning shot across the bow for any AI or other emerging tech company. If they choose to take the same push-the-boundaries, see-if-you-can-get-away-with-it approach that the social media companies have by and large taken, it’s going to be trillions with a T instead of billions with a B when the tab is called for them because of the size and scale they’re operating in.

The other thing about this is we see the states decisively establish themselves as the trusted leaders for the public interest when it comes to kids, teens, schools, families, communities, and digital life. The federal government has not succeeded in providing the type of comprehensive statutory or regulatory reform, or even the sustained and creative types of enforcement actions that are needed in such a complicated tech landscape.

Christian Sandvig: It’s great news and it’s terrible news at the same time. I was happy about it, but there are some serious problems with it.

I would say there’s a consensus that the platforms are causing harm, and it’s always nice to see a settlement or some sort of judicial process where people who have been wronged are made good. So, generally speaking, it seems like steps in the right direction.

I was pleased that there are interface changes that have to be done by the platforms. Some are straightforward and obvious, things that, in the trial, the whistleblower was identifying as necessary. That’s great that they’re doing those things as opposed to just the money.

The period of lockout — 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. — is really well-supported by evidence. Researchers have found that sleep disruption is a big consequence of using these apps. So, if you had children who are bound to the account, and there’s a way to enforce that it’s really a child’s account, then that seems like a positive move.

But the negative side of it is — just to take one example — Facebook introduced the “like” button in 2009. Academic researchers were writing about how this could be harmful to adolescents as early as 2013. I wrote a paper about it in 2013, and it’s 2026.

And so, if this is our template for regulating technology, it failed. We didn’t do anything about it for such a huge number of years.

The other negative is it only affects Meta; the other apps don’t have to do anything. Even if it just affects Meta and it’s good, we still have some questions about whether the specific features that have been proposed are going to work.

For an example there’s an exception for direct messaging. But we know that direct messaging is a source of all kinds of horrible things that youth and teens have to experience on social media, like bullying and sexual imagery that is unwanted.

By settling, is Meta essentially conceding that some of these features are potentially harmful to children and teens?

Plunkett: What I see Meta doing here is while preserving, as a legal matter, their position that they’re not admitting wrongdoing, as a practical matter, and certainly as an optics matter, for the public this is Meta behaving as if they know that major features and operations of their platforms have been risky and harmful to kids and teens, and by extension, their families, schools, and communities.

Or at minimum, they are unable to establish convincingly, both in court and in the court of public opinion, that these major design and operations features of their platforms were safe or neutral.

Are any of the feature modifications Meta has agreed to make, such as limiting the amount of time and time of day younger users can be on the platforms, likely to make a difference?

Plunkett: I’ve been reading through the 122-page settlement document. What I am seeing so far is we have age assurance, which is a necessary, but not in and of itself sufficient, condition to provide protections. Age assurance is a bit like coming up with a way to ID at the front door of a restaurant and see if somebody gets the drink bracelet or not. It does not act as a safety protection; it’s identification.

I’m seeing what the settlement agreement is calling “time management,” meaning overall duration of time allowed per day, night access mode 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. based on the device’s local time zone.

Push notifications will be disabled, which is a big deal. “Meta must implement productive pauses and notices to reduce or prevent excessive mindless or unintended teen usage.” I think that may almost matter more than the hours, because core to Meta’s business model is directing and capturing focus and attention. I do think that matters.

The settlement agreement also has Meta agreeing to “identification of suspected secondary accounts.” It looks to me that this is designed to help try to cut back on teens having multiple accounts. But, whether it’s Meta or any other social media platform, a teen with a real commitment to do an end run could figure it out. There are any number of ways that teens could still try to get around this.

A lot of people are talking about this settlement as being a Big Tobacco moment. That is true in a descriptive way. My understanding from the state AGs’ press releases is that this is the largest state consumer protection settlement in history outside of the big tobacco settlements of the ’90s just in terms of money.

What still isn’t being done that you think would make a difference?

Plunkett: I think it is really significant that Meta is taking these steps around what they’re calling the social comparison tools. These types of tools have documented impacts on young people’s health and sense of self and emerging identity.

The reason it’s so important is that these kinds of social comparison filters are in a somewhat odd or even sensitive place from a legal perspective in terms of whether they are speech or activities by the platform or by companies authorized to be on the platform that might enjoy some type of free speech or even Section 230 protection such that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for a federal or state legislature or a federal or state regulator to ban them or limit them.

So, to have the platform itself say, “we’re dialing these back” is really the best way for this to be addressed, because it gets us out of some of these complicated and still very much emerging and unsettled questions.

There’s a lot in the injunctive relief part of the settlement that is designed to limit or prohibit teens from being contacted by inappropriate other users or seeing inappropriate content. There’s better parental safety and supervision; there’s better content reporting. If that all happens, that’s really big.

What I would like to see Meta and the other platforms do as well is put ethical, practical limitations in place on the marketplaces that exist for child and teen influencer content that draw adult audiences, particularly adult audiences who have — to use the language of the settlement — inappropriate intentions or, in some instances, illegal or criminal intentions.

I do think that there still are a lot of marketplaces on Meta and other social media platforms where we are seeing parents or other adults monetize and, in too many instances, exploit the private experiences of or performances by their kids or kids in their lives for the viewing pleasure, advertising dollars, brand sponsorships, of other adults and institutions.

This settlement does not look to me like it is going to meaningfully disrupt and regulate those entertainment marketplaces. That remains a pretty big area of my concern. But that was not the focus of the AGs’ litigation.

Sandvig: The issue that researchers have pointed out is it’s fundamental to the technology, and so it’s not clear how to solve them with features. Researchers have complained that many of the safety features already in all social media platforms are ineffective. They are usually settings, and they’re hard to find.

In this settlement, there are instances of changing things that used to be opt-in to things that affect everybody or all children on the platform. So, it’s clear that someone was listening to that criticism.

But then there are still other features that were implemented as options, like the algorithmic feed versus chronological feed. That’s an option that no one would use, I think.

This isn’t probably something that we should solve with repeated lawsuits, but rather some structure of regulation. Political commentators say this is a bipartisan issue where we have consensus, which is very rare. That there’s a lot of people in both parties who are excited about doing something about this. I guess the downside of the settlement is perhaps it makes that harder because people might think the problem has been solved.

As Harvard’s Class of 2030 arrived in Harvard Yard for move-in day, students shared what they’re looking forward to, from meeting new people to starting classes to exploring campus, while their parents talked about their own mixed emotions. They shared feeling both pride and sadness that comes with the day, and the start of a new chapter — for everyone.

Harvard Yard awoke from its summer slumber on Wednesday as members of the Class of 2030 were greeted by campus regulars eager to welcome the first-year students to their new home.

Among the fresh faces was Nathaniel Shugarman, who arrived from the Florida Keys.

“This is incredible, to be here,” said Shugarman. “I’m definitely nervous about the classes and adjusting from high school, but I’m excited for all the people. It’s incredible. It feels so historic and electric.”

His mother, Megan Shugarman, described her emotions.

“I’m feeling super blessed and grateful. It’s the end of a childhood era, so that part makes me sad. But I’m so excited, and everything’s been so friendly and open.”

Also moving a plane ride away from her family was Bethany King, a water polo player from Santa Barbara, California.

“I’m pumped. I’ve been greeted with lots of vibes, high energy. It’s getting me excited for my four years,” she said, grinning alongside her parents, Sheryl and Brian. “If this is my first day at Harvard, shoot, what’s going to be in the next four years?”

King said already, she’s making tons of friends.

“It’s just like Instagram requests,” she said. “Follow, follow, follow, follow.”

Moving closer to home was Ilaria Luna, whose father, Franceso, and sister Esther patiently waited with her belongings outside Wigglesworth Hall. Harvard is closer to their hometown of Washington, D.C., than Shanghai, where Luna just finished a gap year.

“We were empty-nesters last year,” Francesco said. “So we’ve been through this.”

Likewise Thomas Grieser’s parents, who live in Newton, Massachusetts. Thomas spent the past five years attending Eton College in the United Kingdom.

“I’m excited to have him closer to home,” his mother, Kathleen, said as the pair took a break from moving boxes into Straus Hall. “And my husband and I both went to Harvard, so it really feels like a homecoming.”

Outside Matthews Hall, Leah Wurzburger guarded her daughter Hannah’s pile of belongings while helpers lugged her first load up several flights. Watching the third of her three kids move into College was bittersweet, she said.

“She’s my baby,” she said. “It’s very emotional, but I’m very excited for her. I’m very excited for all the opportunities.”

And while this wasn’t her first college move-in rodeo, it was her first with a daughter, Wurzburger said. To sum up her feelings becoming an empty-nester, she quoted Stephen Sondheim lyrics.

“I’m excited and scared,” she said. “Hannah’s a little bit nervous, mainly excited, and I’m all those things plus very sad.”

President Alan Garber was out in the Yard, greeting students and parents.

“I get a huge burst of energy meeting each incoming student, and from all I’ve heard and what I’ve seen today, this will be an incredible group of Harvard students,” Garber said.

Humans didn’t evolve to shop for food that has been collected, packaged with nutritional information, and arranged by category in brightly lit supermarkets. In fact, we didn’t evolve to choose our food at all. 

In his new book, “Fed Up: What Evolution Reveals about Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well,” Daniel Lieberman, Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, explores how our ancestors evolved to eat almost anything they could hunt, gather, or grow in whatever habitat they happened to find themselves. Which makes the modern American diet’s embarrassment of riches a real conundrum. Should we eat low-carb or low-fat, vegan or strictly animal products?

In “Fed Up,” Lieberman argues that most diets cling too firmly to one “big idea” and that they can, and should be, much more flexible. Lieberman helped us develop this quiz based on the book to help us make sense of it all.

Step 1 of 10

10%

1. The Paleo diet recommends eating like “hunter-gatherers,” with a focus on lean meats, fruits, and vegetables. But what is actually true about how contemporary hunter-gatherers eat?

Most hunter-gatherer societies get a majority of their calories from animal foods.

Most hunter-gatherer societies get a majority of their calories from plant foods.

There is great variety in the diets of hunter-gatherer societies.

Next

2. Anthropologists look to contemporary hunter-gatherer societies to learn about our ancestors with similar lifestyles — including their diet. Which of the following plays a surprisingly large role in the diet of the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer society in Tanzania?

Honey

Beet sugar

Fruit juice

Fruit leather

Previous Next

3. Which evolutionary change helped early humans include meat in their diet?

Our unusually large brains

Our flat molars

Our high level of body fat

Our highly acidic stomachs

Previous Next

4. True or false: Evidence suggests that soon after our ancestors diverged from chimpanzees, they started cooking.

True

False

Previous Next

5. Which of the following compounds do humans not manufacture on our own?

Vitamin C

Dopamine

Gastric acid

Keratin

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6. How did ancient hunter-gatherers’ diets change in the transition to agriculture?

They got less variety of foods.

They became vegetarians.

They increased the nutrient-density of their foods.

Previous Next

7. The combination of rice and beans, a staple of cultures around the world, hits what important nutritional metric?

It’s the ideal balance of protein, carbohydrates, and fats.

It contains all nine essential amino acids that the human body can’t produce on its own.

It’s anti-inflammatory.

It cures cancer.

Previous Next

8. Which of the following is true of the Mediterranean diet?

It’s meat-rich and low in saturated fat.

It’s meat-rich and high in saturated fat.

It’s plant-rich and low in saturated fat.

It’s plant-rich and high in saturated fat.

Previous Next

9. About how much of the average American’s daily caloric intake is made up of ultra-processed foods?

28 percent

43 percent

55 percent

68 percent

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10. What percent of dieters manage to keep the weight off after their diet ends?

10

20

30

40

Previous Submit

Δ

Researchers with the long-running Harvard-Cornell Archaeological Exploration of Sardis have unearthed a larger-than-life statue, estimated to be nearly 2,500 years old. 

The discovery is remarkable for several reasons, said Nicholas Cahill, the field director of the AES team and a professor of Greek and Roman art and archaeology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

“It is very rare to find such monumental sculptures of this period anywhere in the Mediterranean, and this exceptionally well-preserved, unique monument casts important new light on the major arts of Lydia, and on the Lydians’ ties to their own past,” he said.

The excavation is sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Türkiye and by Harvard Art Museums. The Turkish site was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site last year, cementing its position as a critical site for understanding the ancient world.

Researchers made the discovery in late May while examining a major Roman colonnaded avenue. The statue had been broken in two main pieces and reused, face down, as paving stones in the ancient thoroughfare. 

“You sort of see these whole worlds opening up in front of you,” Cahill said of the moment he realized the team had found something extraordinary. 

A team of conservators carefully excavated around the statue to gradually reveal its full shape and size in the ground.

“Then the guesswork started,” said Susanne Ebbinghaus, the George M.A. Hanfmann Curator of Ancient Art at the Harvard Art Museums, who was in Sardis for part of the excavation. “‘Is this archaic? Maybe not, it looks a little later. Is it a guy? Is it a girl?’  When they started cleaning the soil around the head, we saw he had sideburns, so that question was settled.” 

The people of the Lydian empire, which controlled what is now western Türkiye from about the middle of the 7th century to the middle of the 6th century B.C., left little written record of their civilization. Much of what was known came from what Greeks and Romans wrote about it — and from their point of view, the Lydians were eastern barbarians. But archaeological evidence has revealed that Sardis, the capital of the Lydian empire, was a center for luxury and culture, particularly perfumes and fine clothing.

James McCurley ’27, a Classics and Physics concentrator who worked on the dig over the summer, said the excavation of the mammoth statue proved the highlight of his experience. “After all the anticipation, I was worried the statue might be underwhelming, that we’d dig it up and find its front weathered beyond recognition. Discovering that the statue was not only well-preserved, but almost intact and 2,500 years old was a wonderful surprise.”

Conservators lifted the pieces from the ground on July 13 and transported them to an AES conservation lab to begin a thorough, and still ongoing, analysis. 

Many details have been revealed since that early, excited guesswork. 

At well over 7 feet tall, the figure would have towered over onlookers. He wears a tunic of thinner material (called a chiton in Greek), a diagonally wrapped mantle, and a distinctive, perhaps local garment with fine horizontal folds. The design has few parallels in ancient sculpture, said Harvard Art Museums’ Bahadir Yildirim, who is the Sardis expedition administrative director and who participated in the cleaning and analysis.

“The surprising thing about this piece is that it has some features that haven’t been seen on sculpture like that … the drapery underneath, the distinctive horizontal patterning,” he said.

The statue’s bolt-upright stance, long coiffed hair, and manner of dress resemble archaic Greek sculptures from the 6th century B.C. But the prominent veins and other anatomical details betray a much later date, likely in the 470s to 450s B.C., the early Classical period in Greece. During this era, Sardis was no longer an independent capital but had been conquered by the Achaemenid Persians and had become a major provincial center. 

But the figure shows no Persian influence. The statue, therefore, comes across at first as a very traditional sculpture, adhering to age-old hairstyles and dress codes, while also hinting at familiarity with the current styles in Greece where such a sculpture might have been depicted as a nude youth. But the Lydians and other Anatolian peoples did not exercise naked and did not depict their young men without clothes.

The references to multiple cultural traditions and time periods reflect an artist with a complex understanding of his or her place in the world, Cahill said. 

“This sculptor knows about contemporary styles in Mediterranean and Anatolian sculpture, the interest in hands and the structure of the face and so forth, and yet [the statue is] wearing clothes from 100 years earlier,” Cahill said. “I think they’re very clearly looking back to their own past.” 

The original placement and purpose of the monumental statue is unknown. But one possibility is that it stood at the sanctuary of Cybele, the native mother goddess, which has never been found but has been described in literary sources as one of the most important sanctuaries in Sardis. It was common for wealthy citizens or political leaders to ensconce their likeness in the presence of a deity so they could effectively worship in perpetuity, explained Ebbinghaus. 

“You put yourself in a prominent place where your fellow citizens or subjects can see you, but also you are indeed worshiping the god — and if you’re a ruler, drawing legitimization from the relationship to that deity. So it might well have been an important person being represented,” she said. 

Most ancient marble statues were painted, and this one was likely no exception. The Sardis conservation team is now working to clean the statue while preserving any remaining flecks of paint for color analysis. 

When conservation is complete, the fragments will be joined and the statue will be displayed in a Turkish archaeological museum, along with other finds from Sardis. The first Harvard excavation of Sardis, a joint project with Cornell University, began in 1958 and was led by George M.A. Hanfmann (1911-1986), a professor of fine arts at Harvard and curator of ancient art at the Fogg Art Museum.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule ended in the spring, when voters replaced him with Péter Magyar, who has pledged to undo Orbán-led initiatives that in the eyes of critics isolated and politicized science.

Albert-László Barabási, a Harvard Medical School lecturer on medicine, part-time, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a distinguished university professor at Northeastern University, is a graduate of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and a visiting professor at the Central European University in Vienna. He recently penned an op-ed in the journal Science laying out a blueprint for how Magyar might proceed.

We spoke to Barabási about his proposals for Hungary and how politics can undermine research. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Gazette: What happened to Hungarian science during the Orbán administration?

Albert-László Barabási: Hungary has a particular pride in science and in how many intellectuals the country produces, particularly how many Nobel Prize winners, which is close to a dozen. That includes two in 2023, one in physics and one in medicine, and last year’s literature winner.

The Orbán regime politicized science. Research institutions and national labs had traditionally been under the direction of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. About seven years ago, the government removed these institutions from the academy, saying they wanted to reorganize them to be more competitive. Virtually all scientists, including all members of the academy, were against the change, but it did not matter.

To their credit, the government attracted a well-respected academic back from Singapore to run the new institutions, and increased funding. They increased both salaries and the resources going to research projects, but they never managed to address the psychological break that resulted from stripping away academic control.

It did not end there. The Orbán government started a system that, on one hand, you could view as a positive. But on the other, the execution was politicized. They wanted to bring the Hungarian universities up to an international level and concluded, rightly, that the universities needed new funding and independence. So, they created foundations that effectively made them into organizations that are independent of the government and then donated state properties — shares of major companies, land — into those foundations to secure the resources to expand and function.

In principle, this makes lots of sense. In practice, the boards were stacked with political appointees, so they were not independent. As a result, the EU protested and locked out these universities from the Erasmus program, which supports education, as well as from the European funding system. The few universities that did not undergo this transformation remained within the EU system, but, deprived of new funds, became deeply impoverished.

What was the impact on the quality of the country’s science?

Science is a collaborative enterprise, so no matter where you are in your career, undergraduate, Ph.D. student, postdoc, even faculty, you need to be able to collaborate and learn from international colleagues. The EU has created a framework for that, and Hungary had been successful at taking advantage of it. That framework was artificially cut — students couldn’t travel, faculty couldn’t collaborate — and the consequences will probably be seen decades from now, in lost collaborations, diminished impact and productivity.

You outlined several steps that Hungary’s new leaders should take. First is re-establishing trust. What do you mean by that?

The Orbán regime lost trust by packing the university boards in a way that wasn’t transparent, and by removing the control of the research institutions from the academy. There is a need for a reset — and it is already happening. While the outcomes are uncertain, the direction is good. In my mind, the question is, will the universities retain independence and get the funds they need to thrive? That we can probably only assess later.

Another recommendation is to make reforms durable.

The independence of the research network is technically already in place and guaranteed by law. The question is whether the new government agrees with that setup or whether they’ll seek an alternative. It doesn’t really matter in my mind whether it’s controlled by the academy or by the government or whether it’s set up as an independent body. What matters is the independence of the researchers and the decision makers who fund the research.

Have the decision-making structures in the U.S. been damaged in a similar way, in your view?

We have seen evidence of the decisions of the scientific body being overturned by political appointees, both in the U.S. and in Hungary before the elections. Who gets funded or who does not get funded is no longer a decision left to the research community alone. When I talk about independence in the U.S., I mean restoring a system that for decades had no political interference. All that matters is if my research is of sufficient quality, not whether it is politically acceptable.

Hungary seems to be on the road to de-politicizing its science. How long is this road?

You could say six months: Put the laws in place, secure the necessary funding, and let it go. But the government has many other issues to deal with. There are issues with the healthcare system, the educational system, and outdated transportation. So how do you assign priorities? I was in Budapest in May at the National Academy meeting, and the new prime minister came and addressed the membership. He said that he intends to increase funding to the European norm, which requires allotting another 1 percent of GDP to innovation and science. If he lives up to those words, Hungary could open another golden era in science.

Why is there sex — or, more precisely, sexual reproduction? If you’re an evolutionary biologist, the answer isn’t obvious.

Sexual reproduction is biologically costly, requiring not only competition for mates, but also the creation of entire populations in which only half the individuals can give birth. That reality has led scientists to wonder why it arose in the first place. After all, in asexual reproduction — as occurs when bacteria divide — not only can you skip the wooing and its costs, but every individual is a potential mother.

New research from a group of Harvard biologists dives into the benefits that come with sexual reproduction, particularly in changing environments.

The work was conducted in the lab of Fisher Professor of the Natural Sciences Michael Desai and led by Ph.D. student Shreyas Pai and Parris Humphrey, then a postdoctoral fellow. The team used a strain of yeast as a model organism. The yeast, commonly used in bread baking and beer brewing, has the scientific advantage of being able to reproduce either asexually or sexually.

Another advantage is that yeast produce new generations in only 90 minutes, taking the guesswork out of experiments on evolution, which is generally understood to promote slow change over long stretches of time. With a new generation every hour and half, Desai’s team was able to observe changes after 960 generations in just four months, something that would take hundreds to thousands of years in large mammals.

The research, published in the journal Science in April and supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, began with a dozen identical populations of yeast growing in ideal conditions. All initially reproduced asexually, but every 100 generations, designated lines were induced to reproduce sexually for a single generation.

The scientists first confirmed earlier work showing that in a constant, favorable environment, sexually reproducing populations gain more fitness than asexually reproducing populations. Over those nearly 1,000 generations, the fitness of sexually reproducing populations increased 8 percent over the ancestral population, compared with a 5.7 percent increase for asexual populations.

Next, the researchers tested evolution in different environments — one saltier, one hotter, another with decreased acidity, and one with lower phosphate. In these altered conditions, researchers found that sexually reproducing populations had fitness advantages of between 2 percent and 5.6 percent over asexual populations.

While those numbers may not seem large enough to matter, Desai said that over long periods of time, an advantage of even a fraction of a percentage point can allow a particular population to dominate.

“Selective differences of fractions of a percent in large populations can drive total shifts in population composition,” said Desai, the paper’s senior author. “A several percent effect in a microbe is large. It might take 50 to 100 generations to take over.”

Desai said that the work also probed the mechanism by which sexual reproduction is advantageous in a shifting environment. Some genes are “pleiotropic,” meaning that they affect the expression of several traits, some of which can be adaptive, some harmful. Harmful traits that affect an individual’s ability to survive or reproduce are reduced or removed from the population naturally. But traits that are neutral or only mildly harmful can survive as what scientists call “hitchhiking load,” particularly if other traits of the same gene provide an adaptive advantage.

When the environment changes for the worse, as it did for the experimental yeast, some of those previously neutral or mildly disadvantageous mutations may threaten survival. That is where sexual reproduction gets its edge.

Asexual populations have no way to eliminate the threat because their offspring are clones and genetically identical. Sexually reproducing populations, on the other hand, produce offspring with a mix of their parents’ genes, some of which may not carry the harmful “hitchhikers.” Over time, that reduces or eliminates the harmful effects of those genes.

“We showed that, without sex, it’s not just that the populations are accumulating deleterious baggage, they’re accumulating baggage that maybe is not so bad in the environment they’re evolving in, but would hurt you elsewhere,” Desai said. “In contrast, when you have sex, you purge that hitchhiking pleiotropic cost and prevent yourself from specializing quite as much just to the environment that you’re in. That can be a big advantage when the environment shifts or fluctuates.”

While Desai and colleagues worked with microbes, he said that the effects extend into more complex organisms where asexual reproduction, while rarer, is still represented. In the plant kingdom, for example, cuttings can grow into fully mature plants that are genetically identical to the parent. Among animals, certain species of lizard can undergo parthenogenesis, in which their eggs are self-fertilized, producing offspring that are clones of their parents.

“We believe that this general mechanism by which sex speeds adaptation and purges hitchhiking deleterious load should be a general advantage of sex across all sorts of organisms,” Desai said. “I think it’s great that we can learn so much about how evolution acts and how the ways in which we reproduce, copy, and re-sort our genomes makes sense all the way across these enormous differences in organisms’ complexity and scale.” 

On their first day of preparation for “Pop Culture Jeopardy!,” contestants Jack Goldfisher and Henry Johnson realized they had a problem. Neither of them had watched much television.

The 2018 College graduates had met in the course “Men to Boys: Masculinity in Postwar Hollywood Film,” where many of their classmates had encyclopedic knowledge of both forms. Now the pair were living in Los Angeles, and Goldfisher was sure Johnson — who had co-written a kids’ show for Apple TV — would have the category handled. It turned out they both knew much more about film.

“We thought that each other knew a lot of information because we know a lot of the same information,” Goldfisher said, “which is probably not the way to optimize the team.”

Goldfisher and Johnson hadn’t planned to compete as a duo. When they were selected for the show, they didn’t even know each other very well. Their mutual friend Jack Stovitz, who took the same course under Professor of the Practice in Media and Activism Michael Bronski, had recruited them to a three-person team before the first season of the “Jeopardy!” spinoff. When the show cut team sizes by one for its second season, Stovitz, who had just sold a script to Netflix, bowed out for convenience and left the acquaintances to fend for themselves.

On a large screen in Goldfisher’s apartment, the “AMC B-Listers,” as Goldfisher and Johnson would be known, began to prepare. They took online quizzes on their weak subjects, like anime and country music, while reviewing the results of decades of major award shows.

The goal was not mastery but modest familiarity. They skipped detailed synopses on shows like “The Wire” and practiced identifying the two main characters, the setting, and the theme song. They created several dozen flashcards, many of which just included names of bands and all of their members. Season 2 of “Pop Culture Jeopardy!” was set to stream on Netflix, so they spent extra time reviewing content on that platform, just in case.

On the first day of filming, the two showed up early in the morning at Sony’s Culver City lot not knowing when they might compete in the five episodes recorded that day. When they weren’t called for game one, they waited in the green room with teams who all seemed to know the answer to every question asked by host and 2004 Harvard College graduate Colin Jost.

“Well, everyone here seems to know everything,” Goldfisher said, “so we were like, whatever happens, happens.” Their goal was to win one game before losing — “because you inevitably lose,” he added, “which is the worst part about ‘Jeopardy!’”

They felt lucky that their jitters had subsided by the time they were selected for the day’s final taping. When their educated guesses led to a near-sweep of a category about the pop culture podcast “The Breakfast Club,” they realized that aggression would play a big part in their success.

Not knowing everything about television was fine; in “Final Jeopardy!,” each knew half the background knowledge required to identify which ’80s song became a top-selling digital hit decades after its release, thanks to its use in two series finales. (“Don’t Stop Believin’” from “The Sopranos” and “Glee.”)

After the relatively narrow win in the first game, Goldfisher and Johnson dominated the second and third, clinching a spot in the season’s final tournament. They attributed part of their success simply to enjoying the game and not burdening themselves with expectations. “I think Henry and I both love games so much that we’re able to separate the stakes from the game,” Goldfisher said. “We were having fun. I think that’s a big element of it.”

A large part of the fun was becoming closer friends. On their day off before the playoffs, they had to keep their success a secret. “It’s not like a sporting event where the game is airing that night and everyone can see how you do,” Johnson said. “The fact that we had to go through this really condensed boot-camp period where we’re obsessively excited about this thing that no one else knows about is a really fun bonding experience.”

In the semifinals, the pair found themselves in a distant second place after the first round. “I think, looking back, we probably could have prepared better,” Johnson told Jost between rounds. “I was really convinced there’d be a category about Borscht Belt comedians.”

They were kept in the game partly through their dominance of the “Real Housewives Wit and Wisdom” category, about a show they didn’t watch. Entering Final Jeopardy!, they were in second place. The last prompt: “The last to garner nominations in all four major acting categories at the Oscars were both directed by him.” For 30 seconds, the other groups struggled, but Johnson knew the answer cold. Naming “David O. Russell” earned them a spot in the finals. As the camera flashed to them, Goldfisher gave Johnson a kiss on the cheek.

The championship didn’t start so well. After part one of the two-episode final, they fell nearly 30,000 points behind the dominant “One Baddie After Another” team. Before game two, they agreed they’d have to dial up the aggression. Every guess deserved a buzz. Botching a couple of early questions only encouraged them; they’d have to risk making mistakes if they wanted a chance to win.

Tides started to turn when they doubled up their earnings on a Daily Double! question about the actress Awkwafina. Then, right before their second Daily Double, they nailed a question about Balatro, a game their friends had frequently played until 3 a.m. “It felt like an enchanted moment,” Goldfisher said — like a scene from “Slumdog Millionaire.”

Still nearly 20,000 points behind their competitors, they risked everything to double their 21,200 total on the category “Headlining the Festival.”

In 2022 J. Cole had a good time headlining this Tennessee musical festival whose name is Creole slang for “a real good time.”

Goldfisher, focusing on the rapper J. Cole, thought back to the music festival the rapper’s label put on in North Carolina. But that didn’t seem correct.

“It can’t just be Bonnaroo, right?” Johnson whispered to his partner. It felt too obvious. The major festival takes place in Tennessee but didn’t hold an exceptionally close tie to the rapper.

“If we’d had a semi-reasonable alternative to Bonnaroo, we probably would have guessed it,” Johnson said, “but we came up so empty that it was like, ‘We have to say a word.’”

Bonnaroo was right. The two pushed into the lead as the crowd, and even one opposing team, broke into applause.

“I told you anything could happen!” Jost exclaimed.

The duo couldn’t have been disappointed when the category of Final Jeopardy! popped up: 21st-century movies.

Edith Macefield’s refusal to sell her house to developers, who built around it, was said to inspire the makers of this Oscar-winning film.

The two baseball fans plan to use some of the money to attend a Cubs vs. Mariners game together. Goldfisher has already put some of the money toward completing a low-budget feature he co-wrote and directed this February, and Johnson plans to put money toward the scholarship fund of a high-school classmate who died.

It’s Sunday morning, and everything seems normal in the small town — until a peculiar transformation happens: One by one, the townspeople turn into rhinoceroses.

So begins the first production of the American Repertory Theater’s 2026-2027 season, an adaptation based on Derek Prouse’s English translation of the Eugène Ionesco absurdist play “Rhinoceros,” which premiered in 1959. Directed by the Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director Diane Paulus ’88, “Rhinoceros” features three Emmy Award-winning actors: Paul Giamatti, Tatiana Maslany, and John Turturro. The show opens Friday and runs through Sept. 27.

“It’s a serious play, but there’s something very childlike about it,” said Giamatti, known for his Golden Globe-winning role in “The Holdovers” and HBO’s SAG-winning “Too Big to Fail.” He plays the pompous, bourgeois character Jean, one of the first residents to transform. “The more bizarre and funnier it is, almost the more serious it becomes in a strange way,” he said.

The premise of the play is slightly ridiculous. Yet it allows the audience to explore what it means to be human in a world that values conformity. That theme attracted Turturro, the award-winning actor, writer, and director, because of how applicable it is today, he said. He plays the lead role of Berenger, who must decide whether to follow the crowd or remain true to his values.

“There are certain essential themes in literature or in the world that just recycle,” he noted. In “Rhinoceros,” Turturro sees how the characters become afraid of their differences — so much so they are willing to accept the flawed logic that eventually leads to “barbaric” behaviors. “[What starts as] a small discrepancy between people becomes this big, giant chasm,” he said.

Tony Award-winner Paulus said that when Ionesco wrote the play, he used metaphor to speak to his experience growing up in Romania and witnessing the Iron Guard, seeing the rise of Nazism in France, and then watching the French intellectual left embrace Joseph Stalin. Paulus believes the story will resonate with modern audiences.

“This play allows us space to look at things that are going to feel like they’re ripped out of the headlines, and yet we’re talking about rhinoceroses taking over a little, small town,” she said. “It allows us to hear the play in a timeless way and also allows us to relate to it very personally.”

When Maslany — known for her roles in the television shows “Orphan Black,” “She-Hulk,” and “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” — read the play for the first time, she was floored.

“I read it in one sitting and just kind of felt bowled over by it. It really hit me in this incredibly emotional way,” she said. She plays the “confusing and complicated” character Daisy, an office receptionist and Berenger’s romantic interest. “It was really funny and felt like it couldn’t have been more prescient.”

Giamatti said the play raises fundamental questions about humanity amid the rise of social media and artificial intelligence.

“What makes you a human being, what makes you an individual?” Giamatti said. “[Berenger is] the one guy who’s fighting to be an individual, and he’s a wreck. And what makes him human is the fact that he’s a wreck.”

The cast also includes Harriett D. Foy, Peter Francis James, Kristine Nielsen, Alex Ross, and Clay Singer, with Britt Faulkner, David Mason, Amelia Sipkin,and Scott Stangland as understudies. Everyone has worked together to give the historic play new life.

“The way that [Turturro] leads is [by] facilitating what’s beautiful about every performer that’s in the space,” Maslany said. “He sees something, and he’s like, ‘Oh yes! Let’s invite that more into the show. Let’s, in fact, highlight it and make it a thing.’ It’s so infinitely generous.”

“Rhinoceros” is Paulus’s last directing project at the Loeb Drama Center before the A.R.T. moves to its new home in Allston, the Goel Center for Creativity & Performance.

“It’s your dream as a director to be working with actors like this cast, who bring the combination of craft and attention and rigor with utter playfulness and creativity and spontaneity,” she said. “It’s been an incredible collaboration in discovering what this is [and what] will be unique to our production.”

As for the actual mechanics of transforming into a rhinoceros on stage? Well, the cast says you’ll have to see it for yourself.

“You have to buy a ticket,” said Giamatti, who added he has always loved stories about people “unlacing and letting their animal out.” He’s excited to give it a try himself.

“It’s fun, it’s interesting,” he said. “Just as an acting thing, it’s a challenge.”

For more information and to buy tickets, visit the A.R.T. website.