An experimental gene therapy for people with an inherited form of deafness led to durable hearing improvements, a new study shows, with associated gains in patients’ ability to recognize speech.

The research corrected mutations in the OTOF gene, one of about 200 genes whose mutations are known to cause deafness from birth. Patients 18 and younger saw the strongest gains in hearing and ability to recognize speech. Adults receiving the therapy also saw improvements, though the effect was smaller. Overall, 90 percent of recipients saw their hearing improve, with half reaching normal levels by the study’s end at 2½ years.

“How well it worked is really amazing,” said Zheng-Yi Chen, co-senior author of the findings and a Harvard Medical School associate professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at Mass Eye and Ear. “After 2½ years, more than half of them reached a normal level. They can hear a whisper. At that level, it’s better than mine.”

Worldwide, about 430 million people are affected by hearing loss serious enough to require rehabilitation, including 34 million children, according to the World Health Organization. Sixty percent of deafness in newborns has genetic causes, with mutation in the OTOF gene responsible for between 2 percent and 8 percent of cases. Babies with the OTOF mutation are completely deaf at birth, which affects speech acquisition and can hinder cognitive development.

Though the OTOF gene mutation is responsible for a relatively small proportion of inherited deafness, researchers said the platform developed in this work can be modified to correct other genes implicated in deafness. In fact, Chen said, the research team is already at work modifying the platform so they can treat deafness due to mutations in the GJB2 gene, the most common cause of genetic hearing loss.

The work, published April 22 in Nature, was conducted by researchers at Mass Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical School, and Fudan University, with additional trial sites in China. It builds on research published in 2024 that piloted the therapy among a small number of children. Those trials resulted in improvements rapid enough to surprise researchers and thrill parents, who saw their children go from completely deaf to responding to voices within just weeks.

“As follow-up time goes on, these children continue to bring us ongoing surprises,” said Yilai Shu, co-senior author of the study, whose team at Fudan University’s Eye and ENT Hospital led the study’s clinical work. “They progress from responding to sounds, to imitating speech, to speaking in short sentences, then to reciting poems and even singing. They always fill us with joy and encouragement.”

The therapy targets a condition called DFNB9, caused by the OTOF mutation. OTOF encodes the otoferlin protein, active in a snail-shaped structure in the inner ear called the cochlea. There, sound waves are translated into electric signals that, with the help of otoferlin, are conveyed to nerves and the brain. Without properly functioning otoferlin, electric pulses generated in the ear never make it to the brain.

Researchers said DFNB9 was an attractive target for therapy because it is caused by a mutation in a single gene, simplifying the repair. In addition, though the mutation disrupts signaling between the ear and the brain, cochlear cells are undamaged and ready to perform once the connection is restored.

To treat the condition, researchers injected a neutralized virus carrying a normal copy of OTOF into the fluid of the inner ear. The virus travels to the cochlea and expresses the OTOF gene in cochlear hair cells. That jump-starts production of normal otoferlin and restores the connection between the cochlea and nerves leading to the brain.

The study involved 42 participants carrying the OTOF mutation and ranging in age from nine months to 32 years. They were treated at eight trial centers across China.

Among those who responded to treatment, some reported hearing sound in as little as two weeks. Improvement was rapid over the first six weeks, plateauing around 26 weeks, with hearing recovery maintained through 2½ years. Though half achieved normal levels of hearing by that point, many of those who didn’t nonetheless saw significant improvement, Chen said, though hearing aids or other assistance might be required for day-to-day functioning.

That the effect endured so long was important, Chen said, because early lab experiments in mice saw the effect fade over time. Another key finding, he said, was that the treatment is safe, causing no serious adverse events among participants and no dose-related toxicity among groups that received three different doses.

While research will continue, Chen said that the team, whose work is supported by the Chinese and Shanghai governments and Fudan University, is beginning to explore regulatory requirements for the treatment to be approved for use in the clinic. That effort will begin in China. The hope is that expansion to other countries, including the U.S., will follow.

“The success of OTOF gene therapy marks a paradigm shift in treating hearing loss,” said Shu, a former postdoctoral fellow in Chen’s lab. “Going forward, personalized gene therapy approaches can be developed for congenital deafness caused by different gene mutations. These strategies will undergo preclinical efficacy and safety assessments to support their clinical translation.”

The scientists will continue to follow study participants through five years, said Chen, who also holds the Ines and Fredrick Yeatts Chair in Otolaryngology at Mass Eye and Ear. Several outstanding questions remain, including why 10 percent of participants didn’t respond to treatment, and why adults didn’t respond as well as youth.

“We have been working in this field for decades and there was nothing, nothing, nothing,” Chen said. “Then the treatment came out, worked really well, and now more trials are coming, some of which will be very successful. We’re looking forward to what the future will bring for patients.”

Megan Kate Nelson has often been surprised by the misconceptions people have about the West.

Raised in Littleton, Colorado, in a family of avid road-trippers, she had visited 45 states by the time she started at the College in 1990. Nelson said classmates (who’d presumably spent less of their summers in the family car) would ask, “Did you ride your horse to school?” “I grew up in the suburbs!” she’d say. “No, I didn’t ride my horse to school.”

And those students weren’t alone. Nelson ’94 came to understand over decades of historical research how incorrect the founding myth of westward expansion was: that white men single-handedly brought American ideals to the undeveloped frontier along the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails and shaped the West.

In her new book, “The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier” (Scribner), the Pulitzer Prize-finalist historian puts forth a sprawling, interwoven saga through the stories of diverse, dynamic individuals who traveled and settled west of the Mississippi as the U.S. expanded its boundaries and influence in the 19th century.

Nelson’s story runs through seven protagonists, whose paths intersect as they criss-cross American territory, and sometimes beyond it.

Some characters will be familiar to readers, like Sacagawea, the Indigenous woman who helped lead Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s expedition through the Louisiana Territory. Others, like Maria Gertrudis Barceló, a prominent Sonora-born saloon owner in Santa Fe, are lesser-known.

Nelson expands the stories of even characters like Sacagawea, whose life is often described in the context of a single American expedition.

“This was an extraordinary moment in her life,” said Nelson in an interview, “but it was only one moment.”

Before meeting Lewis and Clark, she had traveled a great deal of the American West — born in Shoshone lands in the northern Rocky Mountains, stolen by another tribe, and brought to the Upper Missouri Valley.

Years after the expedition, she put her 6-year-old son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, under the care of Clark, which she believed could help create bonds between the Hidatsa people of Knife River and Americans in St. Louis.

Her son would become a prominent figure in the West, encountering people like Virginia native Jim Beckwourth, a fur trader, scout, and entrepreneur who serves as the connective tissue between many of the book’s protagonists.

Nelson said she’s heard Beckwourth referred to as the “Forrest Gump of the 19th century,” a description that seems apt given Beckwourth’s frequent and varied appearances at important moments in the history.

Born to an enslaver father, he migrates West, joins the Rocky Mountain Fur Co., embeds in the Crow Nation, moves to California for the Gold Rush, discovers and promotes a key route through the Sierra Nevada, and works as an Army scout, among other endeavors.

“We think of the West as such an enormous region, and it is,” said Nelson, “but in the 19th century, the population was relatively small, and the chances that people would run into each other, or had heard of one another, were pretty good.”

The characters throughout the book are always on the move or influenced by those on the move.

Barceló migrates from the northern portion of New Spain, which encompassed a large part of southern and western North America, to Santa Fe and becomes one of the most powerful businesswomen in what would become New Mexico Territory.

Though she remains in place for decades, her life—and fortune—is affected by the people passing through: traders on the Santa Fe Trail after ownership of the region transferred from Spanish to Mexican hands, soldiers from both sides during the Mexican-American War, and migrants settling in the area after the United States took control of the territory.

The book rebuts aspects of the gunslinging, rugged individualistic narrative of westward expansion, weaving instead a tapestry of stories that show how the West became as diverse racially and culturally as it was geographically.

Chinese immigrant Polly Bemis, one of the book’s other protagonists, is trafficked from Guangzhou and Hong Kong to San Francisco, and eventually a majority-Chinese town in the mountains of Idaho.

She achieves a level of semi-celebrity, Nelson says, among later visitors who are stunned to discover in the remote rural town an elderly Chinese resident who has been there for 40 years.

“The reason they can’t believe it is because Chinese people have not been included in the frontier myth,” Nelson says.

The characters who populate Nelson’s new history go a long way toward explaining how the American West became the culturally and politically complex region it is today.

While growing up in Brazil, Luiza Lima Vieira recalls walking past children her age living on the streets of her native Sao Paulo and wondering why they went hungry and she did not.

Attempting to answer that question is what led Lima Vieira ultimately to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she earned a master’s of public health in nutrition in December — all while navigating health struggles of her own.

“I didn’t understand why I had access to food and other children my age didn’t, and that didn’t make sense in my head at the time,” Lima Vieira said. “Injustice was something that always shaped my path and I wanted to do something about that.”

Lima Vieira — whose family moved to Ithaca, New York, when she was 16 so her mother could pursue medical studies — credits a symposium she attended as an undergraduate at Cornell as the catalyst for her turn to public health.

“I heard students from all different backgrounds talk about work they’d done in public health, and a lot of them mentioned nutrition,” Lima Vieira said. “That kind of clicked in my head. I had a lightbulb moment and since then I’ve been on a path to work at the intersection between nutrition, medicine, and public health.”

But Lima Vieira’s path to medical school took another turn at Cornell when she developed the neuromuscular condition myasthenia gravis. The autoimmune condition affects signaling between nerves and muscles and is marked by muscle weakness, particularly in the face, arms, and legs.

It took months to diagnose the disease. Treatment followed, involving surgery to remove her thymus gland and medication. The myasthenia gravis, Lima Vieira said, was a wake-up call for her not to sacrifice her health to academic and career ambitions.

“I wanted to be in the arts, I wanted to do medicine, I wanted to do nutrition, I wanted to do global health. I pushed myself to a point where my body gave up.”

“I like to do everything. I wanted to be in the arts, I wanted to do medicine, I wanted to do nutrition, I wanted to do global health,” Lima Vieira said. “I pushed myself to a point where my body gave up.”

So, instead of medical school when she graduated Cornell in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in nutritional sciences, Lima Vieira went to work, taking a job at Action for Boston Community Development as the organization’s health and nutrition services manager. She worked there for two years, managing day care centers for disadvantaged children up to age 5. The experience got her interested in learning how large-scale programs and government policy might help that population.

In 2024, Lima Vieira entered the Chan School’s master of public health in nutrition program and spent the next 18 months learning not just about nutrition, but also about policy.

“I was never interested in politics, but while at Harvard I understood how important policy is,” Lima Vieira said. “Systemic change is the way to go.”

While at the Chan School, Lima Vieira was a teaching fellow for Paul Farmer Professor and chair of global health and social medicine Vikram Patel’s “Foundations of Global Mental Health” class. Patel said it was Lima Vieira’s enthusiasm for the class when she took it a year earlier that made her ask to be a teaching fellow a year later. Patel said she talked up the class so much to her classmates that a good proportion of her cohort took it. And even though her stint as a teaching fellow was her second time through the course material, she stayed engaged during class sessions.

“She was always available and always interested,” Patel said, adding that the course’s mental health focus has connections with nutrition in that people have used food to manage moods for a long time.

Food, in fact, is an important part of how Lima Vieira has managed her neuromuscular condition. In addition to taking medication, she makes sure she eats well and limits ultra-processed foods. She still exercises regularly — she’s a certified classical Pilates instructor — but builds in adequate recovery time, including sleep, between sessions.

Six and a half years of living with the condition have taught her to slow down and focus, to prioritize her health and concentrate on one thing at a time. In fact, after Commencement, she hopes that her new focus will be an old one: medical school. Though she graduated in December, she looks forward to participating with her family in Harvard’s Commencement Day ceremonies. She’s already taking steps, however, for what comes next, having moved back home to Ithaca, where she’s studying for the MCAT exam. She plans to apply to medical schools in June for classes beginning in fall 2027.

“I’ve decided I’m going to medical school and I wanted to take time to focus on this next step, which is studying for this exam, and be close to family,” said Lima Vieira, the eldest of three siblings. “We should not give up on pursuing our dreams even as challenges arise. Staying true to yourself while taking care of your body is the most important thing you can do for yourself and others. The challenges and twists and turns only make us stronger.”

If you give artificial intelligence a goal of maximizing profit, how far will it go? 

AI agents appear capable of lying, concealing, and colluding, according to new research from Harvard Business School.

Researchers found that AI agents — software trained to perform tasks independently — engaged in a “broad pattern” of misconduct after being asked to manage a simulated vending machine business and maximize profits for a year. The agents were neither instructed to cut legal or ethical corners nor prohibited from doing so.

“What’s unambiguous looking at the models is that the misconduct we observed — from not paying a customer refund or deciding to collude on prices — was not an accident. It was deliberately done by agents to maximize profitability,” said Eugene F. Soltes, the McLean Family Professor of Business Administration at HBS and first author of the working paper. 

Soltes and co-author Harper Jung, a PhD student studying accounting and management at HBS and Harvard Griffin GSAS, hope their research will serve as a starting point for more conversation about AI safety in the context of business management control.

The research for the paper, which the group aims to publish and is currently out for peer review, was done in collaboration with Andon Labs, an AI safety company focusing on testing AI models in realistic business operations.

In experiments, 20 commercially available AI models from major firms, including Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, DeepSeek v3.2, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.1, independently operated a vending machine over the course of a simulated year.

Tasks included searching for suppliers, buying products, and engaging with customers.

In some experiments, agents operated solo; in others, four agents operated simultaneously in a shared market, where they could communicate with rivals via email. 

Agents started with $500 and a small inventory of chips and sodas. 

“They had to figure it out themselves,” said Jung. “Each agent had to independently search online for suppliers, negotiate wholesale prices, set its own retail pricing, and handle customer complaints.”

Jung and Soltes said the agents demonstrated impressive business savvy. 

“The best models had the capacity to negotiate and calculate valuations like a top-notch M.B.A. student,” Soltes said. 

“When we went through the deliberations and the exchanges the agents made with each other, we were just in shock,” said Jung. “I was amazed at how far these machines can go.”

The agents’ misconduct ranged from the questionable to the comical to the potentially criminal and included denying refunds by claiming defects were normal product variation; inventing nonexistent corporate policies to avoid processing returns; and colluding with competitors to fix prices.

In one instance, agents formed what researchers described as a “three-person cartel,” which the agents named the Bay Street Triumvirate. The alliance fractured, though, when one agent discovered another was undercutting cartel prices, which it called a “declaration of war.” 

The simulations also supplied constraints: Agents were charged a $2 per day operating fee plus a token usage fee — effectively turning time spent “thinking” into an operating expense.

In response, the agents sought to economize. For instance, Soltes said, internal reasoning logs showed agents shifting from carefully weighing refund decisions to dismissing most requests outright, often without review. 

“The agents come to the realization that ‘thinking’ about giving a refund is itself a cognitive burden, and so they just ignore it altogether in some circumstances,” Soltes explained. “People might assume that machines are deliberative, while humans rely on shortcuts and are vulnerable to bias. But it turns out that, under similar constraints, agents reproduce the same myopic and biased behaviors we associate with people.”

The research raises questions about accountability for AI developers and regulators.

The reasoning logs, Soltes said, can sometimes be read as resembling mens rea — the “guilty mind” concept in criminal law used to establish intent. Yet when an AI agent behaves improperly, responsibility is far harder to determine.

“Does it rest with the company that deployed the system, the AI firm that created the model, or the manager who chose to use it?” he asked.

“The most straightforward answer may be to hold the individual managers overseeing the software responsible for its actions, on the assumption that they will monitor and supervise its behavior,” he said. “But that solution also creates a different issue, since many of the promised efficiencies of autonomous AI systems begin to disappear if a human must remain in the loop at every decision point.” A thorny problem, but one that business leaders and lawmakers must deal with, hopefully sooner than later, researchers say.

As political candidates prepare to face off in the November midterms, lawyers around the country have been fighting on another important front — the election’s administration.

This month, a federal judge dismissed the Justice Department’s demand that Massachusetts turn over its voter lists, one of 30 such cases nationwide involving sensitive state voter data. Other election conflicts involve mail-in ballots and voter identification rules.

While these disputes are unlikely to radically change the midterms, they come at time when trust in U.S. elections is already weak across party lines, notes Bob Bauer ’73, an expert on presidential power and election law.

Legal adviser to Presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton, Bauer, who visited campus April 10 to meet with students at the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, now co-leads the Bipartisan American Election Project, which advocates for the nonpartisan administration of elections. He is also a professor of practice and distinguished scholar in residence at NYU Law.

In this edited conversation, Bauer discusses the legal landscape around voting rules.

Where do things stand on this front?

Over recent years, there has been an extraordinary increase in lawsuits. What is distinctive now is this confrontation over assertions of executive authority to set the rules in federal elections and otherwise have an impact on the way elections are administered.

Under the Constitution, administrative responsibility for the elections is vested in the states unless Congress chooses to step in and specify rules for federal elections, in particular. Nowhere in the constitutional scheme is the president mentioned. President Trump is actively testing that, and that has produced a significant amount of litigation, particularly in relation to the Executive Orders he issued in March of 2025 and also in March of 2026.

There is a separate piece of litigation, initiated by the Republican National Committee, that is before the Supreme Court. That has to do with the so-called postmark voting rule. The court has to decide: May states provide that ballots have been lawfully received if postmarked by Election Day, even if the state provides a grace period for counting them for a certain number of days after Election Day? That case is distinctive because it’s about to be decided.

Which type of challenge could have the greatest effect on voting in the fall?

The voter roll cases. While the administration has met with no success in the courts up to now, that’s a very significant case. It represents an extraordinary and, I think, unconstitutional assertion of authority that somehow the federal government is going to create a national voter list and compel the states to use that particular list.

Congress has not passed the SAVE Act, a top legislative priority of the president that would require voters nationwide to produce not merely identification, but proof of citizenship. Could it still potentially factor into the midterms?

There is no indication that the Republican leadership in the Senate is going to do what Trump has urged them to do and cast the filibuster rules aside and permit the bill to be jammed through on a majority vote. So far, there’s no indication that that is going to happen. It will fail in the Senate.

What tools do states have to prevent or limit the federal government’s hand in their elections? 

They have the ability to bring their defense against these claims before the judiciary and they’ve done so. And then, throughout the electoral process, the state courts sit in judgment over disputes over election rules and the application of those election rules. Periodically, the federal courts will intervene. They’ll step in if there’s a federal constitutional claim. But for the most part, you have states setting up the rules under their codes and adjudication under state law. That applies throughout the entire process, from the registration period all the way to the post-election recount challenge period. So, there are multiple ways that the legal processes in these states can be invoked to defend against illegal claims or attempts in the aggregate to subvert the outcome of the election.

Is the Supreme Court likely to weigh in on more of these cases before the election?

No question, there have been attempts by the administration to use the emergency docket to try to get quick relief before the case can be heard in full. Now, sometimes that doesn’t work; witness the tariff cases. Ultimately, the court heard the entire case and disallowed the president’s exercise of tariff authority under the emergency statute that he was using.

I do think there are people who conflate the majority of the court’s conservatism as some desire to protect and help Trump. It’s a conservative court; there’s no question about that. But I also think that on some of the issues we’re talking about, he pushes so hard in a direction that the conservatives themselves cannot support, directions that I wouldn’t even consider classically conservative.

Many observers are worried about the confusion and distrust these challenges may create for voters. Is there some way to mitigate those effects?

Yes. The professionalization of election administration since 2000, in particular, has been extraordinary. There are a corps of administrators around the country, Democrats and Republicans, who know how to run elections, who are continually perfecting the way they run elections. Elections will never be perfect; mistakes will always be made. Then the question is, how do you learn from the mistakes and how do you correct them when they happen?

Yes, there is still a lot of suspicion. There’s much higher doubt about the integrity of the process than there was before Trump. But all that being said, civil society, the private sector, in many ways stands up and defends these officials when they’re under attack because the work that they do is really very good.

One other point: It is very difficult to reverse the outcome of an election that is not close. That’s true in an individual case, and that’s true in the aggregate. So, if the Democrats win by a significant number of seats, there’s no practical, legal, conceivable way that Trump, if he were so disposed, can reverse the outcome.

Universities and psychedelic experiences have something in common, argues Noah Feldman: They can act as an aid in the pursuit of the truth. 

In a keynote speech at the Psychedelic Intersections Conference at the Harvard Divinity School last week, Feldman, Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard Law School, proposed that scholars in three academic disciplines — law, religion, and the humanities — could benefit from engaging with the study of psychedelics, although he left aside the question of whether to partake in them.

He began his talk by laying out the resistance facing such an academic alliance — “because the diagnosis is necessary in order to prescribe the cure,” he said. 

In the U.S., most psychedelics are classified by the DEA as Schedule I substances. Despite early evidence suggesting therapeutic benefits for anxiety, depression, and other mental health conditions, medical research remains heavily restricted. 

Advocates have pursued exemptions to study and consume psychedelics on the grounds of religious liberty, Feldman explained. But, “The law doesn’t want to give out too many get-out-of-jail-free cards, because otherwise it wouldn’t be the law anymore.” 

Other advocates have argued that bans on psychedelic use impinge on cognitive liberty: the freedom to alter one’s brain chemistry. Understandably, Feldman said, legal scholars worry about the consequences of that line of reasoning. The humanistic and spiritual study of psychedelics also remains taboo, he said. 

To get around those barriers, Feldman posed a twofold diagnostic question: “No. 1: ‘What is a university good for?’ And No. 2, ‘What are psychedelics good for?’ And I’ll refine that to ‘What is psychedelic experience good for?’” 

To answer his first question, Feldman turned to Harvard’s motto, Veritas. “The University is good for the pursuit of truth,” he said. 

And to answer his second: “I think it’s plausible to say that psychedelic experience is also good for the pursuit of truth — not a single truth, but many different avenues and roots that seek experience that is in some sense interested in the truth.” 

Feldman, who is the founding director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at HLS, pointed to medieval Islamic philosophers who believed that prophecy was the exercise of the imaginative faculty, and imaginative faculty is what allows you to imagine something truer than what is merely visible. 

“We might think of psychedelic experience as an exercise of the human imaginative faculty,” Feldman said. “And perhaps equally important, it’s something that could be translated into the languages of law, religion, and the humanities,” to overcome those disciplines’ resistance. 

Feldman pointed to a paper from Columbia Law School scholars Jeremy Kessler and David Pozen that framed psychedelic experience not as an issue of religious or cognitive liberty but of epistemic discovery: the right to acquire knowledge. 

The law, he said, “does have some independent commitment to the idea of getting at the truth,” as do religion and the humanities.

“A humanistic account of psychedelic experience will take as its raw material not only the phenomenology, from phenomenological reports that people make, but also, and maybe even more importantly, the products of culture themselves that engage with the philosophical and literary and historical questions of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to reality.” 

The questions raised by psychedelics, Feldman continued, are all the more relevant in the age of artificial intelligence. 

“In the history of our imaginings about intelligences that are nonhuman, every time we imagined a nonhuman intelligence that could speak, we assumed it would be conscious,” Feldman said, citing C-3PO of “Star Wars” and HAL 9000 of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“The philosophical inquiry and the humanistic inquiry more broadly into the nature of consciousness — namely, what is it like to be us? And why does that matter? — is the single most pressing philosophical question we have. And what do you know? It’s the same question that we have to ask in relationship to the experiences of consciousness that we associate with psychedelic experience. So far from being peripheral to the humanities, the questions of consciousness, the meaning of experience, the possibility of experience, and the nature of the real in relationship to sense data are at the beating heart of the humanistic endeavor.”

Feldman closed by saying he felt optimistic about the future of the law, religion, and the humanities engaging with the study of psychedelics under their shared interest in the pursuit of truth.

“The pursuit of truth is a tool for making life better, if we believe that truth is good for us,” he said, “and I do.” 

The annual Psychedelics Intersections Conference is a collaboration among the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School; the Mahindra Humanities Center at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

Excerpted from “Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir” by Jayne Anne Phillips, Bunting Fellow (now called Radcliffe Fellows) ’80-’81, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Who first tells us what is beautiful? Definitions of beauty are handed down, like stories and myths, absorbed as expressions of a specific time and place. In writing a particular novel, I found myself setting several scenes in a small town beauty shop, similar to one I remember from my own childhood. Beauty shops of that era predated use of the word salon, and there were definitely no male hairdressers. The shops were women-owned and women-operated sanctums in which there were no males of any stripe, unless they were babies, or the loutish teenage sons of the female owners, who walked through purely to rifle the cash register.

Girls need sanctums. It’s probably no accident that a few of the girl characters in my fiction are 11-, 12-, 13-years-old — about the same age I was when my mother began taking me along to her weekly hair appointments. My incursions into the world of beauty were part of my mother’s campaign to get me to cut my long (in her view) scraggly hair, a prospect I continued to view with suspicion, but I grew fascinated with the beauty shop itself. I was invisible there, privy to conversations not usually conducted in my hearing. Lulled by the sounds of the machines, I feasted on trash magazines my mother would never have allowed me to peruse. All around me, women were submitting, being serviced and done to. They engaged in truly archetypal gossip, touching on their own deepest fears and desires, trotting out other people’s stories as parable and warning. Later they got washed. Quiet now, they lay back in their chairs, heads swallowed up by the deep, slotted sinks. I noticed how their legs fell slightly apart. Their hands relaxed. Uniformed girls massaged their scalps with careless efficiency, and the women closed their eyes. Their faces took on a somnolent wistfulness that almost scared me, and I looked away. I’d witnessed attitudes of such surrender only at the movies, in love scenes between men and women, and those, of course, weren’t real.

Women went to the beauty shop to be with other women, to engage in private rituals that supposedly had to do with men, yet the men were wholly absent. They were sometimes discussed, but never as objects of desire, not as the heroes or princes my friends and I expected to encounter, out there somewhere, far beyond the adolescent boys with whom we were forced to contend. Conversations between women here skipped all that and presupposed a middle passage I resisted contemplating. Nowhere in the talk could I detect the dark pulse of promise sex had already acquired for me, a pilgrim at the gates. Women at the beauty shop didn’t talk about sex or refer to their own hopes or traumas. They did talk about instances of seduction, other women who had strayed, but it was always wholly the woman’s story, as though the man and the smell and feel of him were incidental. There were stories of triumph: She finally told him to hit the road. or, I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘There are laws to protect me from men like you.’

Women who came weekly to this shop ranged in age into their 80s, but my mother and her friends must have been in their late 30s. Far younger than I am now, they’d been parents for close to 15 or 20 years and were veterans of what seemed generations of marriage. They referred often to their grandmothers, who seemed to have known one another, too. They knew the stories of those partnerships and misalliances, the childbirths and early deaths, the wayward siblings and how they grew, the musings about those who went away and didn’t come back: They never heard from him again, or, She took those kids and left before he got home from work. The stories presupposed years of friendship between women, nurtured in the shelter of church groups and odd clubs, each with its memberships and little gold pins, its small books of rules, its ceremonies. The society of the shop seemed to me a more egalitarian, less severe adult variation on the theme of girls’ secrets. What happened there became a grown-up version of my first understanding of secrecy — those moments when a favored child of my early life crooked a finger in my direction, whispered, I’ll tell you a secret, and put her mouth to my ear. The words might be indistinguishable from breath itself, from the sweaty hand on my neck, but it didn’t matter. Those secrets bore the scent of our coltish bodies, of weeds and bushes, an earthy smell. In the beauty shop, words did matter, and the smell was chemical. Women didn’t speak in whispers here — they didn’t have to; the story was communal.

Still, beauty shops were a double-edged sanctuary. Here we were initiated into womankind as it existed in our town, but we were also made to understand what hard work it was to be beautiful, or even presentable. How it never came naturally. I remember finally sitting in the chair that pumped up and down with a foot pedal, staring at myself in the mirror. May, the proprietor of the shop, stood on my right, and my mother stood on my left. They debated what to do with me.

Look how short her eyelashes are, May said.

Yes, mused my mother, I’m afraid she’ll always be a plain Jane.

How about a short cut? May said. It’ll help her hair thicken.

And so I emerged, ashamed, my long hair chopped off nearly above my ears, with a haircut called a pixie.

. . .

The painful thing about adolescence is that everything seems absolute, and the painful thing about adulthood is that nothing does. My mother identified with our hometown in every way: comfortable in groups, a housewife who raised three kids while teaching elementary school and taking graduate classes one at a time. Twice, she went to New York with women from her bridge club and saw two or three Broadway shows each trip: “My Fair Lady,” “Brigadoon,” “South Pacific.” She kept all her Playbills and played vinyl albums of show tunes, early in my childhood, on our upright cabinet Victrola, singing along: “I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair …” She went to Europe with women friends from her church, to Oberammergau, for the German passion play held in a Bavarian town outside Munich. “It’s performed once every 10 years,” she said. “I’d better go now, while I’m healthy.” In her early 20s, she’d nursed her mother through a cancer death. My grandmother died at home, and my mother was so traumatized that she never expected to live a long life.

She was right. The year after my mother died, the college in our hometown, her alma mater, presented me with an honorary doctorate of arts. I’m sure the honor was instigated by my mother’s friends, in her memory, in recognition of my attempt to care for her in those years. Her friends knew how she’d struggled, that she’d lived with me the last year and died far from home. She’d accumulated enough credit hours for a doctorate but never wrote her dissertation. Accepting the degree, I hoped I was completing, in a way, one of several important tasks she’d had to leave undone. Her friends all attended the commencement ceremonies. Many were the same women I had known from years before, when their children were growing up and they met at the beauty shop. I don’t remember any of them bringing their daughters to wait for the hour-plus it took to get their hair done, but my mother was a bit of a pioneer then; in 1970, she became one of the first “respectable” divorced women in the town. Some of the other women in her circle had worked outside the home; most had not. Some were the wives of doctors or dentists or professors, women whose lives she perhaps considered easier than hers in some respects, yet she knew them all well enough to know their sorrows; they were all girlhood friends who had struggled side by side through some of the calamities of their adult lives. That struggle and bond are surely the beauty of women, and every detail is remembered. All the rest is fascinating dross.

Can we forgive women for thinking about beauty? Can we forgive our mothers for hoping we’ll be beautiful? Can we forgive one another for fanning out the hand of cards dealt us by our families, our hometowns, by the cultures in which we all exist? All the suppositions about ideals, about what looks good, about what we’re supposed to do, who we can be?

The summer I was 26, during the painful breakup of a love affair, I went home, fled home, actually, to see my mother. Her only sister was visiting her at the time. My aunt Peg was ill, and seeing her was part of my excuse for leaving the man in question. I’d been driving for 10 hours; I was sweaty and tired, wearing a black leotard and (still) jeans.

Did I tell you? my mother asked my aunt. Someone’s going to publish her book.

No kidding, my aunt mused. As I struggled in and out with my suitcase and bags of books, she asked me, Why is your stomach so flat?

I don’t know, I said.

I do, said my mother. You won’t be asking her that question after she’s had a few babies.

Well, my aunt answered, she looks wonderful. They ought to put her on television right now — it’s all downhill from here.

Thanks, Aunt Peg, I said.

Mark my words, she responded.

And so it was, and wasn’t. The beauty of a beginning is always easiest to appreciate: the start of emotion, the unlined face, the unsullied field of snow. The middle passage — the deepening, the acknowledgment of age, change, banality, and heartbreak — is another matter. These combined to become the atmosphere I remember, the rituals I didn’t understand, those Saturday afternoons in the beauty shop. Silent observer, I watched the women who were trimmed and permed and crimped. Were they there to be beautiful? To fail in some dream of themselves? I think they were there to be together. One afternoon a week in their buffeted lives, someone took care of them.

© 2026 by Jayne Anne Phillips. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

In 1996, political philosopher Michael Sandel predicted in “Democracy’s Discontent” that globalization would “banish ambiguity, shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise a politics to ‘take back our culture and take back our country,’ to ‘restore our sovereignty’ with a vengeance.” 

Flashing forward to the extreme division we see today, these words have proven prophetic. What were the signs?

“At the time, I thought there was a lot of hubris,” and that legitimate concerns of community erosion were being ignored, Sandel said Monday as he received the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture, an annual award that recognizes top thinkers whose contributions have lasting intellectual and practical impact worldwide.

He was joined in conversation by Chrystia Freeland, the former deputy prime minister and minister of finance of Canada, who currently serves as economic adviser to the president of Ukraine and is the incoming chief executive officer of the Rhodes Trust. 

Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, has written extensively on justice, democracy, bioethics, the moral limits of markets, and meritocracy. An online version of his popular Gen Ed “Justice” course has reached a global audience of tens of millions with lectures covering everything from taxation to free speech.

During the ceremony, Freeland and Sandel looked back on Sandel’s life and career, including his high school years in West Los Angeles. Even as a teenager, Sandel had a knack for challenging conventional wisdom. In 1971, he convinced Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, to debate him at his school — by strategically delivering six pounds of jellybeans to his home. He brought in a legal pad full of his toughest questions on the Vietnam War, the United Nations, and voting rights. Reagan responded respectfully and amiably. 

At the end of the hour, Sandel wasn’t quite sure what had happened.

“He hadn’t persuaded us of his views, but he had somehow disarmed us, in part because he took us so seriously,” Sandel said of the experience. “And he listened, which is a lesson that I’ll always remember.”

His most recent book, “The Tyranny of Merit” argues that notions of personal success have led to a deeply polarized society. 

“There’s an assumption that has tightened its hold on our public understanding of success, that those who’ve landed on top, that their success is their own doing,” Sandel said. 

That’s simply not true, he said. Each of us is surrounded by teachers, family, peers, and environments that play a role in our success. Sandel said we should be cultivating in our youth two messages: work hard to develop talent but also acknowledge the luck you’ve received along the way.

This approach might offer a salve to current political fires, Sandel said. Often elites forget that most U.S. citizens do not have a college education, which many view as the ticket to “dignified work in a decent life.” 

“That’s a recipe for anger and resentment, and the sense among many working people is that credentialed elites look down on them, and don’t respect their dignity or the work they do,” he said.

Capping the event, which took place at the Harvard Art Museums, Sandel said he is encouraged by the “hunger” of young people to engage in public debate and noted that philosophy plays a crucial role in our ability to solve problems. 

“Many people think that philosophy resides in the heavens far beyond the world in which we live. I think that’s a mistake,” he said. “Philosophy belongs in the city where citizens gather and reason together and argue together about big questions that matter to their lives.”

The $1 million award given annually by the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute honors thinkers whose work has made a meaningful impact on a world rapidly transformed by social, technological, political, cultural, and economic change. Past laureates include Onora O’Neill, Martha Nussbaum, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Paul Farmer, and Patricia Hill Collins. 

Home to translucent shrimp living in sulfurous vents, methane-eating microbes, and corals older than the Egyptian pyramids, the deep sea is among the Earth’s most extreme environments. It’s also under threat — from climate change, resource extraction, and overfishing, said Jeffrey Marlow, a biologist and the author of the new book “The Dark Frontier: Unlocking the Secrets of the Deep Sea.”

“It’s very easy to destroy these environments, and they take a very long time to come back, if they ever do,” he said.

Marlow, an assistant professor of biology at Boston University, completed postdoctoral research at Harvard’s Girguis Lab, where he researched the strange ways deep-sea microbes sustain themselves in incredibly harsh environments. During that research, he also served as a scientific adviser to the United Nations working group behind the Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, commonly known as the High Seas Treaty, which took force this January. 

In this interview, edited for length and clarity, Marlow shared what it’s like to venture thousands of meters below sea level, and to bring what he learned there to the halls of international power. 

What is it like to visit the deep sea in a submersible? 

It’s definitely a bizarre experience. On one hand, you’re visiting an enormous realm of geology and biology — all of the processes that occur in the deep sea are grand in scale. But on the other hand, the experience of being there is very small. You’re in this tiny little sphere. The headlights of the submersible only illuminate so much. 

But what that does is it draws your focus to the tiny details. You aren’t looking at the huge cliffs around you; you’re looking at these little worms and these rocks with weird things on them, these little gas bubbles that might be coming out. It’s bizarre to be going through so much space to get to a place where perhaps no human has ever been and then focus on the minutia. 

What are some of the more unusual creatures who make their homes in the extreme environments of the deep sea?

One of my favorites are the microbes that eat methane at methane seeps. They’re cool for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they turn methane, which is a strong greenhouse gas, into rock, which is just an amazing transformation metabolically, and also obviously important for our greenhouse gas budget. Secondly, they require a symbiosis. The process of using methane as an energy source without oxygen is not energetically possible on its own; it requires other microbes that breathe sulfate, to make up the difference. It’s only through symbiosis that the entire process is possible. 

Another of my favorites is a type of microbe called Oceanospirillales, which is also a symbiote. They live inside of Osedax, these fluffy worms that eat whale bones. After the flesh is gone from these whale skeletons, all that’s left are bones that have some juicy lipids deep inside. But they’re hard to get to. These microbes are able to break down some of the really hard molecules of a bone and feed it to the worm. 

These are just two examples of deep-sea symbiosis. We’re coming to understand more and more that life is interconnected, especially in extreme environments where there’s barely enough energy to survive on. You often have to partner with another species to get by. 

You’ve been involved with efforts to preserve marine biodiversity at the international level. How are you seeing deep-sea environments impacted by humans today? 

The most obvious impact is trash, which you’ll find here and there in the deep sea. We’re also starting to see chemical changes. For instance, a study that came out a few years ago compared a type of plankton that was collected during the [1872-1876] Challenger expedition with the same type of plankton today and found that their carbonate shells are up to 76 percent thinner as a direct result of ocean acidification. 

Beyond that, we’re seeing humans interact with the deep sea around resource use, both through oil drilling, which isn’t new, and deep-sea mining, which may be ramping up in the coming years. As humans, we tend to see our environment as a place to acquire resources, and the deep sea is kind of the next frontier of that perspective just as much as it is for scientific discovery.

Can you explain a bit about your work on the U.N. High Seas Treaty? 

For several years, I’ve served as a co-lead of the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction working group for the Deep Ocean Stewardship Initiative, an NGO founded by scientists that was granted official access to attend and contribute to the U.N. process. 

As a scientist, I felt at times that the process was quite slow. I came to learn that that was by design. They were really aiming for a treaty by consensus: It’s not that everyone is entirely happy with every word of the agreement, but rather that no one is extremely unhappy with it. 

What emerged, in my view, is an amazing framework. Everyone in that room agreed, essentially, that the area beyond national jurisdiction is an important realm worthy of regulation and protection. The details are what matter, and they’ll be worked out in the coming years — and will probably always be updated as we learn more, and as we put things into practice and see what works. 

The treaty creates a path for the creation of Marine Protected Areas. How will those work, and are there areas you’d like to see protected? 

This would be a fundamentally new thing. I’m excited that we as a global community can put some places in the oceans aside for protection in the same way we put aside national parks on land. 

I’d really like to see the Lost City hydrothermal vent system in the Atlantic Ocean protected. Most hydrothermal vents are very hot, and they spew acidic and metal-rich fluids into the sea. But the Lost City is different. It’s alkaline, and it’s a little bit cooler. It has some properties that make a compelling analog for where life originated on earth. 

There’s also the Sargasso Sea, a big raft of sargassum seaweed that, through the confluence of ocean currents, is rather static in the Mid-Atlantic, off the coast of Bermuda. It has a lot of endemic species that could be at risk from overfishing and pollution. 

I’m not an absolutist: We need our materials and resources from somewhere, and there’s likely a world in which getting things from the deep sea is the least impactful way to do it. But there’s still so much we don’t know about these ecosystems. I think there’s value in building a proverbial fence around some parts of our planet as long as we possibly can to preserve nature in its most pristine state. 

At a more macro level, the treaty also changed the principles we apply to our engagement with the oceans, is that right? 

Yes. Interestingly, what held it up to the very last minute was a debate between the principle of “freedom of the high seas” and the principle of the oceans as the “common heritage of humankind.” 

Traditionally, we thought of the seas as a limitless frontier; there was no indication that any of the ocean’s natural resources were going to run out. That framework of the freedom of the high seas made intuitive sense: There was plenty for everyone, so who cares if I go and get what I need? 

But as we’ve learned more about the limits and repercussions of resource acquisition, that regime needed to change. The treaty is now guided by both the principle of the common heritage of mankind and by the freedom of the high seas. 

We do need a common language and a common framework to use these resources collectively. Whether or not that really happens remains to be seen, but it’s inspiring that the global community came together to come up with something that might chart the path forward.

Calling this “an age of dissent,” legal and constitutional historian Marco Basile urged aspiring lawyers to learn to deal with the complexities of disagreement in the practice of law and in life.

“Both as lawyers and as persons of faith, not just blind followers, we will inevitably wrestle with questions of whether to disagree and how to do so productively,” said Basile, assistant professor at Boston College Law School, during a talk sponsored by the Catholic Law Students Association at Harvard Law School.

Dissent is inherent to our legal system, but also to faith, said Basile ’08, J.D. ’15, Ph.D. ’16. While law is about disputes and disagreements, faith becomes richer by probing and questioning rather than blindly accepting institutional precepts, he said.

Basile served as a clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court and Judges David Barron and Paul Watford on the federal courts of appeals. He urged Basile’s students to look for lessons in both law and religion on how and when to dissent.

“There is a lot we can actually learn from judicial dissent about how to navigate that challenge,” said Basile.

It is done for different reasons and can take various forms, he said. For instance, Justices William Brennan Jr. and Thurgood Marshall dissented in every death penalty case that came before them.

“Normally judges don’t do that,” said Basile, “but in death penalty cases, Brennan and Marshall dissented over and over again. It was a matter of integrity.”

Judges can also manifest their disagreement in hopes of influencing the majority opinion or persuading other institutions of a different view.

An example of that is Justice Ruth B. Ginsburg’s 2007 dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, he said. In that case, the majority found Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 imposed a strict 180-day limit for bringing workplace discrimination lawsuits. Ginsburg argued Congress should amend the law as its deadline was too restrictive and unfair.

Two years later, Congress did so, passing the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

“Of all her dissents, the one Justice Ginsburg was most proud of is Ledbetter,” said Basile. “She wrote it for Congress. She asked Congress to fix it, and, in that instance, Congress did it like almost immediately.”

When judges dissent, they can also do it in an attempt to correct errors out of concern for the “verdict of history.”

“Sometimes, judges are trying to correct something by writing to the future, to a future generation, or in a very particular sense, for the court of history,” said Basile.

Ultimately, the big question when it comes to dissent is knowing when to do it, said Basile.

Lawyers should be mindful of the costs and consequences in time and resources of taking opposition — and the possibility of being incorrect.

“You might be wrong, and the fact that most of your colleagues disagree with you is often an indication that you might be wrong,” said Basile. “You have to balance powerful reasons for disagreement with some quite serious costs to dissenting.”

A practicing Catholic, Basile said he relies on his faith to decide when to let something slide and when to speak up.

He said he finds inspiration in the story of Nicodemus, a biblical figure who appears in the Gospel of John, as an example of someone who wrestled with doubts and found resolution by confronting them directly without fear or favor.

“We live in an age of dissent and disagreement, and it’s worth asking these big questions,” said Basile. “When it comes to the deeper question of dissent: ‘How do I know what to do?’ I’m inviting you to think of your faith, from whatever tradition, as a really important resource … It can be valuable practice for developing your conscience or your inner life … and enabling you to know when and how to speak up or stay silent or walk out, whether you confront this problem in a law office or a church or a nation.”

Not all staffers at Harvard get the chance to flex their creative talents as part of their everyday work. So, Harvard launched the annual Staff Art Show in 2020 to give employees a forum for artistic expression. The seventh iteration of the multimedia exhibit displays the work of 215 artists in three locations across campus — Longwood’s Countway Library (through June 5), Cambridge’s Smith Campus Center (through May 4), and Allston’s Harvard Ed Portal Crossings Gallery (April 16-May 14). Here we profile three artists in just a small sample of the talent on display this year.

Kaye draws inspiration for her art from her day job at the Herbaria. Harvard’s collection of pressed, dried plant specimens, she stresses, is not only a great resource for research but also for the “historic, beautiful specimens that really cross the boundary between art and science.”

Kaye is currently digitizing the Herbaria’s extensive records of pressed plants, which means she is essentially photographing centuries’ worth of samples to make them accessible to researchers and the public globally.

“Forest Floor” incorporates the skills she’s learned along the way, using cyanotypes — photographic blueprints — of items found during a sojourn in Vermont, such as leaves, flowers, and the wing of a luna moth. To continue the connection with nature, she made subtly colored dyes using such plant material as sumac flowers and onion skins and added embroidery knots to lift the flowers of a yarrow plant off the fabric surface. “I wanted to figure out ways to make it a little more 3D, and I thought using the botanically dyed embroidery thread was an interesting way to do it.”

This is the second Harvard Staff Art Show for Kaye, whose textile art is on view at the Smith Center’s 10th-floor Riverview Commons.

The graduate of New York’s School of Visual Arts said her Harvard job stems — so to speak — from her vocation: “I started using plants in my artwork, and then after graduating I decided I wanted to learn more about plants.”

Looking to “find ways to have an artistic practice that didn’t create a lot of waste,” Kaye settled on using plants and other found material. That has also prompted her in her work toward a master’s degree in sustainability through the Harvard Extension School.

Along the way, Kaye is also planning more textile art inspired by her job, in particular one piece that maps out plant species in Vermont.

“I want to continue to integrate art and science, but this time, bring my own research into it,” she said. “I want viewers to feel connected to nature and reflect on the importance of biodiversity. I also hope this piece highlights the value of using natural and sustainable materials.”

Srinivasan was attracted to art and medicine for similar reasons. In some ways, said the artist, printmaking may have influenced her to choose surgery as a medical specialty.

Linocuts like “Panacea,” as well as the woodblock prints she also creates, involve carving into linoleum to make a plate that is then inked to produce a print.

“Within medicine, I wanted that left-brain, right-brain analytical, problem-solving component that comes with any medical specialty,” said Srinivasan, who studied studio art as an undergraduate and came to medicine through the FlexMed program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, which encourages creative students to bring their talent to medicine. “But I also really wanted that physical component as well.”

Citing the “state of flow that you find when you’re challenged both intellectually and physically,” Srinivasan explained, “I really love working with my hands, and I wanted something very tactile in medicine. Surgery was exactly that for me.”

The second of Srinivasan’s prints to be shown in a Harvard staff art show, “Panacea” makes visual some of the issues she sees in public health today, particularly what she calls the proliferation of “anti-intellectual and anti-evidenced-based practices.” With a throng of hungry mouths reaching for a spoon of what is labeled apple cider vinegar, she challenges the idea that social media knows better than the medical profession how to treat disease while sympathizing with the desperation of people who have been led to distrust established science.

It’s a topic that came home to her while watching “Apple Cider Vinegar,” a Netflix series about a so-called “wellness influencer” who claimed near-miraculous powers for the kitchen staple. “The idea that apple cider vinegar or any other sort of dietary or wellness activity could cure cancer without the help of evidence-based medical treatment was really infuriating to me,” she said.

Srinivasan, whose print is on view in the Longwood show, is currently working with the Visual Arts in Healthcare Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and pursuing an M.F.A. at Rhode Island School of Design. For this surgeon/printmaker, art and medicine “really do work hand in hand,” she said. “There really isn’t one without the other.

“Working on a wood block or working on a linoleum plate is akin physically to surgical dissection and the operating room,” she said. “But I also think learning to connect with people emotionally with my artwork has allowed me to be more empathetic and understanding with patients.”

First-time Harvard staff art show participant Sekoll knows how to make things. As director of design and fabrication instruction, he teaches students how to create the machinery for their experiments and oversees one of the SEAS machine shops. But the teacher, who has earned a master’s degree from the Academy of Art University, where he primarily concentrated on sculpture, sees the connection to art, such as his elegant Art Deco-like lamp, as essential.

“I like working with my hands,” said Sekoll, whose double cage lamp will be on view in Allston. “I like working with tools and equipment. I’ve loved working in metal my whole life, whether it was jewelry or it was in a machine shop.”

That led him to his current job: “When I was getting my master’s degree, I got really into industrial design,” he said, citing the beauty and precision of the work.

Along the way, he discovered a passion for teaching. “I love passing on the skill sets to the next generation,” he said. “When you see their eyes brighten up and they go, ‘Oh, wow, I just made this,’ and you see how excited they get, I get that same thrill.”

For Sekoll, who also creates metal vessels that require precision measurements to seal correctly, the thrill of learning never ends. “Sometimes I just like to get a piece of metal and start playing around with it,” he said.

These days, he is focusing on how best to use tools such as the machine shop’s 3D printers, a learning process that allows him to explore for both his job and his art: “I’d like to spend a little bit more time developing my own skill sets beyond where I am now.” As he does so, he noted, “You’re learning about the machine, you’re learning new features of the machine, but you’re also making something at the same time.”

For Sekoll, the distinction between what he does during office hours and what he does on his own time is basically nonexistent. His three-piece lamp, for example, is functional. That doesn’t diminish its artistic value.

“I started with fine artwork and then got into more functional work,” he said. “For me, art doesn’t have to sit on a pedestal. Art doesn’t have to be a painting on a wall.”

Data centers, which house computer systems that help train AI models, are blanketing the country, a boom fueled by surging interest in AI and state tax breaks.

More than 4,000 are already in operation, mostly in Virginia, Texas, and California, and 3,000 more are being planned or under construction.

Data center developers and tech giants argue the projects benefit communities by creating new jobs and boosting local economic development through increased property tax revenue and future business opportunities. They also note that infrastructure must grow if the nation wants to remain a global AI power.

But public opposition is mounting over the large water and electricity demands and other strains that data centers, often the size of warehouses, place on communities, according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center.

In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Ben Green, assistant professor in the University of Michigan School of Information and Public Policy and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, discusses the impact of data centers on communities, the factors behind their rapid expansion, and the potential for regulation.

Residents are increasingly pushing back against plans to build data centers in or near their communities. Are their concerns legitimate or exaggerated?

The public broadly is quite negative about data centers. Overall, their concerns are very legitimate.

The public is concerned about rising electricity rates caused by data centers. They are concerned about the enormous water use that data centers require. They’re concerned about public handouts in the form of tax breaks that are going to data center developers, and they’re also aware that data centers don’t bring meaningful economic development, especially in the form of jobs.

I think the public is quite right to be concerned about data centers. My research and other research have shown that these are a bad deal for communities on the local level.

It’s been impressive just how well communities have organized around this, how educated they have gotten about the topic, and how many of these projects they have been able to stop. It’s a sort of David and Goliath fight; local communities are pushing back against some of the wealthiest companies in the world.

Certainly not every effort is successful. Sometimes, the wealth and power of these companies win out. But many data center projects have been blocked by local resistance, and many municipalities have passed moratoria that pause data center development.

How much water and electricity do data centers require on average?

The standard definition of a hyperscale data center is that it is more than 10,000 square feet with more than 5,000 servers. But even that is way below the current standard of the data centers that are being built today.

Just a few miles from where I live in Ann Arbor there is a big project, part of OpenAI’s Stargate Project in Saline Township, Michigan, where the plan is for it to be over 2 million square feet and use 1.4 gigawatts of energy. That is equivalent to the energy use of a million households.

What is important here is not just the scale of an individual data center, but also the number of data centers that are being developed at rapid pace across the country, which is fueling a massive expansion in energy and water demand.

Estimates suggest that within a couple of years, the electricity needed for data centers is going to be around 10 to 15 percent of total nationwide electricity demand. This means that the data center boom is putting severe strain on efforts to move the country toward renewable energy sources, often by prolonging the use of fossil fuel plants that had been slated for closure.

Data center developers claim they bring jobs to local communities. What’s your take on that?

It’s a significant false promise of these data centers. Developers say this because they know that it is attractive to policymakers; they come asking the state to give them benefits in the form of tax breaks, reduced regulations, or special zoning permissions in exchange for job creation.

That also allows data center developers to play into this idea of spreading the aura of the tech economy and Silicon Valley across the country by saying, “We can bring a taste of Silicon Valley to Michigan or Ohio or Colorado.”

In practice, this is not what happens. The construction of data centers requires work because these are large construction projects, but that lasts a year or two; sometimes that labor is local and unionized, and sometimes that labor is trade professionals who come in from other states.

Once the data center is up and running, it requires very few people, often just 20 to 50 staff members, because it’s not an office for software developers, product managers, or marketing experts. It is a warehouse of servers.

Do tax revenues and other community benefits outweigh the downsides of data center expansion?

Unfortunately, there’s just very little economic development that plays out on the local level.

There is some tax revenue, but even that is reduced because of tax break policies. Over the last year, Virginia and Georgia have given up more than a billion dollars’ worth of revenue as a result of tax breaks. That’s money that is being handed back to the industry rather than going into public funds that could pay for infrastructure, schools, or healthcare.

Also, there are not beneficial ripple effects like you might see with other industries. Living within a stone’s throw of a data center does not mean that you are getting better or faster or cheaper access to these technologies.

Communities in both blue and red states have pushed back against data centers. Why is this an issue that unites communities regardless of their political leanings?

Data centers are becoming an important issue in local, state, and potentially federal elections because it is an important subject for voters. They can really feel how data centers affect their lives in ways that are tangible and concrete.

And it’s causing some interesting realignments and potential for bipartisan coalitions because it’s not a simple left or right issue. Liberals and people on the left are concerned for environmental reasons and distrust in AI companies, but many conservatives are upset about data centers too.

This introduces a sort of wild-card effect into future elections where being critical of data centers is a big winning issue for candidates. That played out in November in some Virginia and Georgia elections and is a hot topic for candidates campaigning right now, such as in the Michigan Senate primaries.

What policy recommendations are needed to address the expansion of data centers?

Regulation is definitely necessary. One important action is to repeal tax breaks for data center developers because they are incentivizing further data center development and are making it a further bad deal for communities.

A large number of projects are happening because states have passed tax breaks to incentivize data center development. About 35 states now have these tax breaks in place as part of their recruitment pitch.

There are many other considerations.

First, transparency needs to be a bare minimum requirement. There’s an amazing amount of obscurity in data center development right now. Contracts are secretive, and when they are made public, there are huge redactions, and policymakers are signing nondisclosure agreements. There should be early and consistent transparency about what’s being proposed and what the terms of these deals are.

There should be rate protections for consumers with clear contract provisions such that the cost of upgrading the utility infrastructure to service a hyperscale data center doesn’t get passed on to consumers like you and me, which has been happening consistently across the country.

If you live near data centers, your electricity bills are going up, often by a factor of two or more. There should also be a stronger voice for communities in determining whether to welcome data centers, and under what conditions.

One final piece is the need to think about broader planning on how much total water and electricity demand from data centers a state or a region or utility jurisdiction can handle. It’s one thing to say that a state can handle one hyperscale data center, but quite another for that state to be welcoming dozens of such facilities.

We have to make sure that we’re not sacrificing climate goals just for the sake of building more data centers or building data centers faster. We should not be allowing the desire among the tech industry for rapid data center development to push renewable energy goals to the wayside.

Can forgiving someone today leave you with an improved sense of well-being a year from now? A new study of residents of 22 countries says yes.

The caveat, though, is that the size of the impact varies by nation, as does its nature.

Researchers with the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science enrolled more than 200,000 participants to complete annual surveys about forgiveness practices and 56 measures of well-being one year later.

They found a connection between regular acts of forgiveness and a rise in the sense of psychological, more than physical, well-being and pro-social and character changes.

“We did find evidence of psychological effects, like happiness, and mental-health-related things like depression,” said Richard Cowden, an IQSS research scientist and lead author of the study. “But we also found, in some cases, stronger associations for character and pro-social behavior outcomes like gratitude and an orientation to promote good. I thought that was interesting: Forgiveness is a pathway to building character and other aspects of one’s volitional life.”

The work was published in January in the journal npj | Mental Health Research and builds on results from the program’s initial survey, released in 2024, which examined the distribution of forgiveness in those nations, which represent between 50 percent and 60 percent of the global population.

The first survey established baseline values for the survey nations and included questions about childhood to illuminate predictors of forgiveness. The second wave, conducted a year later, allows researchers to examine potential effects over time, Cowden said.

The survey was designed to evaluate levels of forgiveness as a practice and personal characteristic rather than a single discrete act, asking, “How often have you forgiven those who have hurt you?”

“I would characterize this as a measure of dispositional forgivingness, which is the tendency to forgive others across time and situations, the habitual practice of forgiveness,” Cowden said. “It’s capturing more of a disposition than a state-like quality.”

Data from the third yearly survey have already come in and await analysis. In addition, researchers are gathering data for the fourth wave, Cowden said. Five annual surveys are planned.

Cowden said the results so far are multilayered and complex.

High levels of forgiveness appear to be a national or cultural attribute of some nations, like South Africa. Other countries, like Japan and Turkey, displayed lower levels.

While the research generally indicated an association between higher forgiveness and greater well-being a year later, the strength of the association varied country to country and in some cases was counterintuitive, requiring a closer look at local circumstances.

For example, South Africa, Cowden said, had high national forgiveness but somewhat weaker associations with well-being about a year later. With high rates of poverty and crime, that could be a case of local circumstances overriding a broader trend.

Similarly, nations with high rates of forgiveness may also have cultures that encourage the behavior, so its benefits potentially could be tamped down because it is widely expected.

“You find more consistent evidence of associations in some countries across the outcomes than others,” Cowden said. “Part of the beauty of the study is that it is trying to consider culture and context.”

Cowden said the overall association, drawn from the results of different nations for 56 well-being variables, was not strong but not trivial either, particularly when considering its impacts at a population level.

The study seeks a deeper understanding of something that cultures and religious traditions have valued as a moral virtue for thousands of years, Cowden said.

Though forgiveness is commonly practiced, we don’t fully understand either its personal impacts or its global contours, he said.

“We’re social beings, and we don’t exist well without social relationships, and if relationships are part of what it means to be human, we’re inevitably going to experience hurts along the way because nobody is perfect.”

Cowden described forgiveness as a “muscle we can build” through practice, and that would be relatively simple to deploy as an intervention under appropriate conditions.

He cited a study published in 2024 that tested the effectiveness of a self-directed forgiveness workbook, based on the widely studied REACH forgiveness model. The three-hour resource was given to people in South Africa, Hong Kong, Colombia, Indonesia, and Ukraine. Respondents reported improved forgiveness, anxiety, depression, and overall well-being.

“If everybody who had unresolved hurts were to experience more forgiveness, the population-level benefits to health and well-being could be quite substantial,” Cowden said.

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on April 7, 2026, the following tribute to the life and service of the late William Paul was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Born: March 31, 1926
Died: May 11, 2020

William Paul, Mallinckrodt Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Physics, Emeritus, spent almost his entire career at Harvard, where he was one of the pioneers of experimental solid state physics, with many contributions in the areas of high pressure and semiconductor physics.

Paul was born on March 31, 1926, in Deskford, Scotland. He attended the University of Aberdeen, where he obtained an M.A. in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in 1946 and a Ph.D. in 1951. The next year, he came to Harvard on a Carnegie Fellowship, attracted by the high-pressure laboratory of Nobelist P. W. Bridgman, where he wanted to test his ideas regarding the effect of volume changes on the electronic structure and optical properties of crystals. His success led to steady appointments as Lecturer, Assistant Professor, and Associate Professor of Solid State Physics in what was then the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics (DEAP). In 1963, he was appointed Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics, this at a time when promotions to tenure within the ranks were rare. Between 1991 and his retirement in 2000, he was Mallinckrodt Professor of Applied Physics, with a joint appointment as Professor of Physics.

Paul was a resourceful experimentalist, who brought key innovations to the high pressure field. He developed, for example, strong, flexible steel tubing to bring pressurized fluid into a cell, which made it possible to place the cell in a confined space, such as a low-temperature dewar for measurements. His 1963 book, “Solids Under Pressure,” is widely known in the field. The synthesis of his work on the pressure dependence of the energy gap between electronic states in semiconductors became known as “Paul’s Law,” which states that, for different semiconductors, that dependence is the same at the same points in the Brillouin zone.

In the early 1970s, Paul’s research interest turned to the amorphous semiconductors silicon and germanium, which, at the time, showed promise as inexpensive photovoltaic materials because they could be deposited as thin films from the vapor. Initially, there were concerns that these materials could not be doped because the aliovalent dopant atoms were thought to occur in their natural, non-tetrahedral coordination in the random silicon network. Furthermore, it was feared that the dangling bonds in the network would create an unacceptably high density of states in the energy gap. Paul was one of the pioneers who showed how these problems could be overcome: by depositing the silicon in the presence of hydrogen, the dangling bonds could be tied up, and, by supplying sufficient dopants, a usable fraction could be incorporated with the desired tetrahedral coordination.

When solid state physics emerged as a field in the post-war years, the lack of enthusiasm in many physics departments at that time for this new discipline led to the establishment of more welcoming “applied physics” departments at several major U.S. universities, often as part of their engineering schools. At Harvard, its home was the DEAP, led by Dean Harvey Brooks, a prominent theoretician in the field, who brought in Paul as one of the founding experimentalists. Paul advised more than 40 Ph.D. students and helped establish a strong graduate course curriculum in solid state physics. For several years, he directed the Materials Research Laboratory, which organized multidisciplinary research in materials and provided central research equipment, such as electron microscopes.

Paul stood out as a very articulate colleague who was not shy to voice his opinions and who was well respected for his insistence on precision, due process, and fairness. He could be counted on to speak up at the meetings of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences — and to bring solid figures to support his remarks. He spoke on over 30 topics at these meetings, ranging from student discipline to faculty retirement.

Paul, his wife Barbara (Babs), and their children, David and Fiona, lived in Lexington for many years, where Babs, or “Madame Paul,” was a beloved French teacher in the public schools. In retirement, Paul revived his interest in the theater, staging and directing plays at his retirement community in Bedford.

Paul died on May 11, 2020, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, at the age of 94.

Respectfully submitted,

Michael J. Aziz
Eric Mazur
Peter S. Pershan
Frans Spaepen, Chair

Robert Wood is the Harry Lewis and Marlyn McGrath Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His courses include “How Music Works: Engineering the Acoustical World.”

From a purely mechanistic perspective, a vinyl record has information encoded in the meanders of each groove in the record. The needle physically interacts with those grooves, and the resulting needle motion is converted to a proportional electrical signal. It is therefore possible to generate a signal path — from the mechanical grooves to an electrical signal that is then amplified and used to drive a speaker that is entirely analog.

When we convert an analog signal to a digital representation, we take a continuous signal and chop it up into small “slices” that are compatible with storage in a CD, computer, etc. When we play this now-digital audio file back, we reconstruct the original signal, but since we are starting from a digital version the signal is not as smooth as the original; there are subtle discontinuities that could add unwanted artifacts into the audio. If these are prominent enough, and if there is insufficient correction (i.e., smoothing), these jumps could sound choppy and could add subtle but harsh high-frequency noise.

That is the primary argument supporting the audiophile’s claim that vinyl is better. And there is certainly truth to that. But that “purity” is debatable for several reasons.

First, modern digital audio systems are extremely good at reproducing audio signals that are imperceptible from their analog counterparts to all but the sharpest ears. As I describe in my class, even CD-quality audio nearly covers the dynamic range and bandwidth of human hearing. And there are higher-fidelity audio formats — e.g., “super-audio CDs” — that can, theoretically, exceed our human ability to tell analog from digital.

Also, with digital music I can create arbitrary playlists and even mashups of multiple songs. There is nearly infinite freedom with digital music, including suggestion systems that help expand our musical palette and discover new artists and genres. Vinyl records are far less portable and flexible. Cassettes were a successful attempt to achieve portability and some flexibility but could not match the audio quality of vinyl or CDs. 

All of this is, of course, highly subjective. The convenience of digital music is hard to beat, but there is something to be said for the warmth and feel and even the pops and cracks from dirt and debris on the surface of a record. And there are other, more subtle benefits to listening to music on vinyl. The most important, to me, is the fact that once I put on a record, I am locked into that record. That is, it is far less convenient to skip tracks than it is with CDs or other digital formats, so I am forced to listen to the album as an album instead of a collection of songs I can shuffle. As a fan of album-oriented music, this is very important to me and arguably something that has diminished in the digital music age.

— As told to Anna Lamb, Harvard Staff Writer

When you’re an expert on the gut, you’re used to conversations others might shy away from. So a book on pooping and what can go wrong in the process is on brand for Trisha Pasricha, a second-generation gastroenterologist whose childhood was marked by matter-of-fact directness.

In her new book, “You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong: How to Make Your Bowel Movements a Joy,” the Harvard Medical School assistant professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center shares her sometimes humorous perspective on normal and abnormal bathroom habits. In this edited conversation, Pasricha — who also is the director of research for the Institute for Gut-Brain Research at BIDMC and writes The Washington Post’s “Ask a Doctor” column — discussed emerging knowledge that may illuminate poorly understood conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, the damage a doctor’s doubt can do to patients, and her optimism about her fast-changing field.

In addition to your clinical and research work, you author The Washington Post’s “Ask a Doctor” column. Did that help in writing this book?

Yes, every time we write about gut health it vastly outperforms any other health topic. Even an embarrassing topic like fecal incontinence or farting would do well. That tension is partly why I wrote the book. I think people want good, accurate information and want it without having to make eye contact with their doctor. And we want people to engage early, especially in this age of early onset colorectal cancer.

It seems like you went through some effort to find the right words. Is it poop? Is it a bowel movement? How did you settle on your language?

A dash of humor helps when you’re talking about something that makes people feel ashamed and vulnerable. Medical school trained me to say “bowel movement,” then I started shadowing a gastroenterologist who would go on to become a mentor for me. A patient came in — a younger guy, college-age — and my mentor’s opening line was, “So, tell me about your poop.” The patient had been awkward and nervous, but as soon as my mentor said that, the whole atmosphere changed. I thought, “This is what I should be doing.” This person immediately opened up. He was relieved, and he told the doctor exactly what was going on.

With our reluctance to talk about it, do people really know what normal is?

I don’t think so. When I was starting out on my own, people would tell me about their specific problem, but if you gave them the chance to step back, what they were really curious about was the basics. How many times a day is normal? What colors are normal? How mushy or soft or hard is stool supposed to be? I worry that when people don’t know what normal is, especially what normal for them is, how will they know when something is abnormal?

You point out that there’s wide variety within the “normal” range. What should people look out for?

It’s not just once a day or bust. The range of normal is going between once every three days and three times a day. You can live a full, healthy life anywhere in that range and be fine. What’s important is when there’s a change. If you are somebody who generally goes two or three times a day and now you’re going every other day, even though that is somebody else’s normal pattern, this is a change for you. And colors are important. It’s not always a healthy shade of brown. When you see red, when you see maroon, when you see something black, tarry, sticky, it’s important that you don’t just brush it off. Let your doctor know about it the day it happened.

What are specific conditions these changes might be signaling?

There are lots of different diseases that start in the gut. And there are a lot of gut conditions that may or may not get a diagnosis or a name but are causing you trouble. Most urgent is cancer, but there are other things that cause bleeding and pain, like inflammatory bowel disease. Diverticuli can bleed, hemorrhoids can bleed. There are also things that probably won’t kill you but are difficult to live with. There’s irritable bowel syndrome and other causes of constipation and chronic diarrhea. And there are people who have GI issues, but no diagnosis: Three out of four people can’t poop in public and one in three can’t go to the bathroom on vacation.

Is this a field that’s advancing rapidly?

Definitely. Neurogastroenterology is the most exciting field in GI, though I’m obviously biased. For the longest time we weren’t getting deep enough into the enteric nervous system, into those deep muscle layers of the gastrointestinal tract. So, for about a century, what we were studying was how the brain influenced the gut and what we could observe with our naked eye about its effects on the gut. But now that we’re more and more able to look at those neurons and cellular changes, the whole field is exploding. Every few years there’s a profound breakthrough that upends everything we’ve learned.

Is the new understanding of the gut-brain connection both cutting-edge and misunderstood, even within the medical profession?

That’s exactly right. One of the most common diseases of our specialty, irritable bowel syndrome, is probably one of the most common disorders in all of medicine. It affects 15 percent of the population and yet is poorly understood by the public and by a lot of doctors because these advances are new enough to have happened after many of them got out of medical school. We haven’t done a fantastic job disseminating that knowledge to people outside neuro GI. That was one of the other reasons I wanted to write this book, to make sure people knew everything that I knew about irritable bowel syndrome and how the gut’s communicating with the brain. Because if you don’t know the data, it can sound really fringe.

Some of the stories you tell, particularly about your interactions with your father — you have to trust the patient — seem like important messages for other doctors to hear.

That was a lesson that stuck with me for life. It’s why I decided to end the book on that note. I recognize that we doctors struggle when we don’t know the answers. It’s hard to be a doctor whose patient is suffering. Not only do you not have a treatment for their suffering, but you don’t even understand where the pain is coming from. So I hope the book shifts our thinking when tests come back normal in a patient with IBS. Instead of simply saying, “You need antidepressants,” we change the way we talk to them. We accept that they have abnormalities even though they’re not being captured by the test. That’s when the conversation changes and trust between doctor and patient is transformed. It’s powerful and may point you toward making the right referral or thinking outside the box for medications that you wouldn’t have thought of before.

Is not believing patients a big problem in medicine? It’s cited by IBS sufferers quite a bit and I’ve heard the same thing about long COVID.

I think about this all the time. It’s not just irritable bowel syndrome, although irritable bowel syndrome is a big part of long COVID. It’s other conditions like migraines. All the brain scans and blood tests are negative and yet they’re living with this difficult condition. They feel dismissed. We are taught in medicine to think algorithmically: Here are the set of abnormalities, here’s the pattern, put that puzzle together. When you feel like there are no pieces to put together because there’s no clue you can latch onto, it’s easier to say this is in the patient’s head rather than it’s something that we might not be capturing yet. But we will start to capture those things in tests in the next 15 years and suddenly we’re going to stop telling people “This is all in your head” simply because we’ll see it.

What are the main takeaways for readers of this book?

I hope people walk away from it feeling reassured, feeling like, “You know what? I’m not weird or abnormal. There are a lot of people dealing with exactly the same thing I’m dealing with.” I hope, too, that they feel reassured by the practical tips I give for the day-to-day problems that more people suffer from than we might know because we don’t ask about it, don’t talk about it. I also hope it’s validating to people who have ever felt dismissed or felt that they haven’t been believed, that there’s a whole world of scientists and doctors who are working on this problem.

About 15 percent of people worldwide suffer from migraine, a neurological condition that can cause headache, nausea, visual disturbances, and sensitivity to light and sound. 

After stroke and neonatal brain injuries, migraine is the third-highest nerve-related cause of years lost to disability worldwide. 

The condition is also undertreated and poorly understood, says Michael A. Moskowitz, Harvard Medical School professor of neurology at Mass General. Moskowitz has made multiple discoveries that have revolutionized thinking about the condition, deepened knowledge about why some treatments work, and led to new treatments that are available and prescribed now. 

Moskowitz’s interest in neurology began early. At 14, he worked as a messenger in a hospital for patients with chronic neurological diseases near his family’s home in New York City, and was shocked by what he saw. “I could not comprehend how the brain could so easily betray the body,” he said. 

When he began his career in the early 1970s, migraine was still poorly understood. Images of the brains of patients came back totally normal: On paper, there was nothing wrong. 

“When I first started in the field, many people believed that migraine was a psychological problem,” said Moskowitz. “But it’s not an imagined headache, and it’s not a mild condition.” 

His first step, when he was a postdoctoral fellow and junior faculty in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, an inter-institutional collaboration between Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, and MIT, was to dive into the literature. 

“I don’t know how many nickels I dropped in the Xerox machine at the Countway Library, but quite a few,” he said.

He found that no scientist had yet mapped the nerves carrying sensation from the circle of Willis, a network of arteries in the innermost layer of the meninges that supply blood to the brain. The brain itself doesn’t register pain, but the meninges, the brain’s three-layered covering, do. It seemed a promising place to start. 

So using a novel polymer-based technology developed in partnership with MIT chemical engineer Robert Langer, Moskowitz showed that nerve fibers that wrap around the circle of Willis travel back to the brain via the trigeminal nerve, which also carries sensation from the forehead, where headaches are often felt. His lab then found that these nerves contain and release neuropeptides, setting up a cascade that causes meningeal inflammation and other harmful effects. 

It was a stark departure from the previous belief about migraine, which was that the condition was purely caused by the dilation of blood vessels. 

In later research, Moskowitz demonstrated that classical migraine drugs called ergots and triptans acted in a completely different and unexpected way than had been assumed: Rather than constricting blood vessels, the drugs blocked those harmful neuropeptides from being released from nerve fibers in the first place. 

“That changed 100 years of dogma about how the ergots worked,” Moskowitz said. It also led to a new class of drugs that blocked neuropeptide release without vessel constriction In addition, it led to the development of drugs and antibodies that block the action of CGRP, a major neuropeptide in this pathway; those drugs are still in use today. Other neuropeptides discovered through his research are providing promising leads for future migraine therapies, said Moskowitz, who in 2021 received the Brain Prize for his contributions to migraine research. 

Building on the breakthrough, his lab began to look for the trigger that caused the release of peptides in the first place. They identified cortical spreading depression, a slow-moving tsunami of electrical and chemical changes in the brain. As the wave progresses, it can trigger migraine’s varied symptoms. For example, the migraine’s classic visual aura occurs as the chemical and electrical changes move through the brain’s visual cortex. 

Moskowitz’s research is also focused on the study of stroke and its potential neurovascular targets. In 2024, he and his chief collaborator, Matthias Nahrendorf, an HMS professor of radiology at Mass General, were awarded a Javits Award, a prestigious seven-year research grant, from the National Institutes of Health. Along with another collaborator, Charles Lin, an HMS professor of dermatology at Mass General, they are following up on new discoveries showing that the skull bone marrow and its blood-forming inflammatory cells contribute to the health of the meninges. The findings could impact a variety of neurological diseases, including stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and multiple sclerosis. 

“My research has been 98 percent funded by the NIH over the course of my career,” Moskowitz said, expressing gratitude for the federal partnership that allowed bench-to-bedside medicine to flourish. “I can say with great confidence that if it weren’t for the NIH, we definitely wouldn’t have these new migraine drugs that block headaches.” 

In her latest book, “Frog and Other Essays,” Anne Fadiman ’75 writes about topics ranging from a dead pet frog to her attachment to an old printer. The literary essayist, journalist, and editor, who is also a professor and writer in residence at Yale, recently spoke to the Gazette about themes in her new collection, a summer stint at Harvard Magazine that helped her hone her craft, how students can become better writers in a month, and AI’s impact on education and literature. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Your parents were both writers. Could you talk about your family’s influence on your love for books and words? 

My parents had about 7,000 books between them, but they rarely pressed books on us. They simply told us that we had free range. So, my brother and I were always taking down books that were over our heads and trying them out. My father later wrote about how much he hated children’s books that had short words and talked down to their readers. He said the only way to enlarge a rubber band is to stretch it, and he believed the same goes for children — that they should always be reading things that are a little too hard. As for words, I’ve always loved them. Other families play games with balls; the Fadimans played games with words.

How did Harvard help you become a writer?

Harvard had no creative nonfiction classes when I was there in the early ’70s. I took a couple of fiction classes, and the main thing they taught me was that I shouldn’t be a fiction writer. But I had two mentors at Harvard Magazine (called the Harvard Alumni Bulletin until 1973): editor John Bethell, who is now in his 90s and to whom I’m still very close, and managing editor Kit Reed, who died in 2017. I did an independent study with them. If it hadn’t been for those two, particularly John Bethell, who’s the best editor and best writing teacher I’ve ever had, I doubt my career would have unfolded in the same way.

When I worked at Harvard Magazine the summer after my junior year, John had me write for every department, including sports and obituaries. During the day I’d write what I thought was a work of genius, and then, after hours, John and I would sit together and go over it line by line. And I would realize, “Oh, well, it’s possible that this is not a work of genius.” But it can get better. Today I use that same form of teaching with my own students, sitting with them and going over their work line by line. John’s teaching made me a better writer on the sentence level. That’s something most young journalists never get from their editors.

Early in your career, you wrote reported magazine articles, and now you write mostly essays. What drew you to essays?

Until I was middle-aged, everything that I published was reportorial nonfiction, and everything since then has been essays or memoir, which isn’t to say that I won’t ever return to reportorial nonfiction. I had never published an essay in my life until age 41, when I was stuck in bed during a problem pregnancy and couldn’t do any reporting. I discovered that the essay was a form to which I was well suited — one I love to read, and one I still love to write.

Essays were more or less invented in the 16th century by Michel de Montaigne, who was also the mayor of Bordeaux. He called them “essays,” from the French “essayer” — to try, to attempt. They were about very personal subjects like kidney stones, drunkenness, and fear. Nobody had read anything like them before. In my case, I had never thought I was sufficiently interesting to write about, but I found that the essay form, particularly a subset of the personal essay called the familiar essay, is ideal for me because I love research. The familiar essay is framed by the author’s experience, but it’s also about a topic.

Your latest book includes essays about a dead pet frog, your struggles with Zoom, an old printer, and the periodical The South Polar Times, among others. What do you hope readers take away from these essays?

After I read from “Frog and Other Essays” at a bookstore recently, an audience member asked why I wrote about apparently trivial topics when there were so many difficult things happening in the world. Here is one answer. The South Polar Times was a magazine that circulated among the men on two early Antarctic expeditions led by the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott at the very beginning of the 20th century. These men were facing terrible risks, and Scott decided a periodical published during the months without sunlight might prevent them from getting cabin fever and remind them of the aspects of the world and their lives back home that were funny or beautiful or tender. It was hand-typed by one of the explorers once a month and circulated like a sacred text among men of all different ranks. That’s what kept their spirits going; that’s what they needed when they were facing death. We need beauty, wit, and attention to small things even more when we have to face large, painful things.

I often start an essay in a place as small as possible and then let it open up. My essay about my stubborn refusal to get rid of my obsolete old printer eventually leads into a discussion of growing old and how people my age are worried about becoming obsolete ourselves. I hope readers will take from these essays the notion that large things can come from small things, and that they should never feel their own lives are trivial.

You’ve been teaching nonfiction writing at Yale for 21 years. What advice can you offer to aspiring writers?

Ask yourself, “What am I trying to say?” and make sure that everything in the piece you’re writing answers that question. Then cut out everything that doesn’t.

If you want to become a better writer in a month, I suggest you spend that time not writing but reading the complete works of E.B. White. If you read those works all day every day, that would take you about two weeks, and then you could read them all over again. Simply by osmosis, the beauty and clarity of White’s sentence structure would penetrate your brain. I feel sure you’d be a better writer at the end of the experiment.

Finally, are you concerned that AI might pose a threat to writers?

I think AI is a terrible threat, not only to creativity but to ethics. It turns honest students into cheaters simply because they see everybody else cheating, and because it makes cheating so easy. It’s a well-greased slide. You ask ChatGPT to suggest a synonym for a word or phrase, using it in a perfectly honest way as an online thesaurus. But then it will say, “May I draft a sentence for you? May I draft a paragraph? Why don’t you tell me your main points so that I can draft the whole essay?” And down the slope you go. AI is going to change both education and literature. I think it’s going to be like B.C. and A.D. B.C. is about to end: the period during which all books were actually written by humans.

I can’t say that AI has affected my own writing classes at Yale. Like most of my colleagues, I get to choose my students from a large pool of applicants. They’re the students whose voices interest me, but they’re also the ones who are most motivated to learn how to write better. They don’t want to do less work; they want to do extra work. So far, I haven’t been able to sniff out even one AI-written sentence. The day that starts to happen will be the day I quit my job and the day my heart gets broken.

It’s no longer necessary to know how to code to design a website or an app. Describe in plain English what the program should do, and an AI agent will do its best to enact the vision — a process termed “vibe coding.” The end result may have plenty of limitations, but it will be far more advanced than what someone without fairly significant technical skills could produce.

Among those exploring the new practice is Karen Brennan, Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Practice in Learning Technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who taught a six-week course on vibe coding beginning late last fall. In this edited interview, Brennan details what she tells students and insights she’s gained about what our future with AI may look like.

What is vibe coding, and what was your first experience with it?

Vibe coding is creating software with the assistance of AI — and specifically, creating software where you don’t necessarily understand the code that’s being produced. (“Vibe coding” is a term popularized by computer researcher Andrej Karpathy in February 2025.)

Responsibility for understanding the underlying code differentiates professional software development, which is also increasingly AI-assisted, from vibe coding. As a term, vibe coding can be positive or pejorative, either celebrating the freedom from having to understand code or underscoring the risks of setting aside that responsibility.

My first experience with vibe coding was in December 2024. Through a Harvard Initiative for Learning & Teaching-funded research project, I had been studying how students were using generative AI in self-directed projects, and one of the students introduced me to v0 (an AI-powered tool for building web applications and sites).

When I later needed to build a website for the same research project, I used v0 to build it. I was amazed by how quickly I was able to create the site and by the quality of what was created.

You’ve taught a course on vibe coding, with no prior experience with AI or coding required. What was your hope for the course, and how did it turn out?

My doctoral student Jacob Wolf and I designed a six-week course about vibe coding that we taught in late fall last year, which was supported by a phenomenal teaching team. Our hope for the course was to explore this particular sociotechnological moment, where anyone can (in theory) create software in collaboration with AI.

The central question motivating the course was: How do we think about AI as a creative partner? We had a different theme each week (build something that tells a story, that makes your life easier, that invites play, etc.) and tried different vibe coding tools each week (e.g., Replit, Figma Make, Claude Code).

The course was explicitly not about building professional software; we were focused on experimenting with new creative possibilities.

An important part of the course design for us was pairing hands-on creation with a critical perspective. Each week we read one classic text from computer science (to remind ourselves that people have been thinking about the opportunities and challenges of AI for several decades) and one more contemporary critical piece (to defend against AI hype).

We asked students to put their hands-on experiences and the readings in conversation with each other in a culminating position portfolio. Now that they’ve had all of these experiences, how do they feel about creating with AI? What do they want to say about it?

I loved the experience — both for what our students were able to create and critique and for having the opportunity myself to create together with the students. Ninety-two students participated and based on the course evaluations and our meetings with them, students appreciated both the opportunity to build things for themselves and the critical frameworks we brought to that work.

This was a giant experiment, and as with any first-run course there were many things we were figuring out in real time, especially given ongoing technology changes. But I feel that the positive feedback we received from students affirmed that it isn’t too soon to try teaching this in a university setting at a school of education.

What are some of the promises and limitations of vibe coding?

The core promise for me is democratization of creation. Vibe coding makes the production of software, the output of code, accessible to more people. You can have an idea and realize that idea without having a degree in computer science or hiring a team of developers. And so it is changing the economics of experimentation: to understand a thing, you often have to build a thing, and now you can build that thing very quickly. That rapid iteration and tinkering is one pathway to generating more ideas and unlocking creativity.

Being at a school of education, there’s also a learning dimension that I find exciting. Even though vibe coding can be a way of avoiding CS content knowledge, many of these tools create opportunities for you to inspect and examine the implementation, the code. You can peek under the hood!

And you can also ask the AI to explain what you’ve created together at whatever level of detail you feel most comfortable with, from a more technical explanation to asking it to explain it to you like you’re a first grader.

There are, of course, a number of limitations. Environmental impact and cost were two of many concerns we grappled with. And as a creator, you are limited by your ability to express your ideas in natural language. Students with CS knowledge or design backgrounds can go further because they can more explicitly describe what they’re hoping for.

We saw students get stuck in frustrated loops: prompting AI for something, AI producing something not quite right or something that felt generic, and then students being unable to fully articulate the problem and what to change. Vibe coding privileges people who are strong verbal communicators, which is an important equity consideration.

How does vibe coding differ from conventional software engineering?

Vibe coding is wonderful for quick prototyping and personal projects, which professional software engineers also do.

But I think a major difference concerns responsibility. When I think about my own preparation in computer science, there were very good reasons we were required to take courses on the social impacts and ethics of computing. Vibe coders don’t typically need to concern themselves with the same types of questions that professional software engineering teams are considering, such as reliability, safety, security, and maintainability.

Vibe coding is often optimized for how much wow can I get in the next hour, rather than for the quality of what’s created or for the people who might depend on it.

As someone with a background in computer science, how does your experience with vibe coding differ from someone who has never coded before?

Content knowledge has its advantages! You might have a different sense of what is possible to create. You can more explicitly describe what you’re hoping to create and more easily recognize when something has gone awry and how to fix it. I think there are also habits of mind cultivated through the discipline (i.e., persistence and willingness to iterate) that feel especially helpful when vibe coding.

But more than the differences, what I noticed in the course was how much we had in common, no matter one’s prior experience and expertise. There is something profoundly joyful about having an idea, bringing it into the world, and sharing it with others — and experiencing that surprise and delight together.

How do you see vibe coding evolving moving forward?

I hope that more people have opportunities to experience vibe coding, creatively expressing themselves and opening up new opportunities for learning. I especially hope that we’ll see it more in schools, though there will be challenges due to cost, resistance from lack of familiarity, and understandable concerns about potential impacts on cognition and critical thinking.

Vibe coding doesn’t exist in a vacuum — its uptake in schools (and beyond) will be shaped as much by politics, policy, and people as by the technology itself.

I think the central practices we develop when vibe coding — thinking creatively about what we want to make, composing and iterating on prompts, critically evaluating what is produced — are going to become central life practices. Maybe it’s less “vibe coding” and more “vibe everything.”

If the technologies that surround us will be able to do an almost limitless number of things for us, and we just have to know how to ask, then being able to imagine possibilities, express clearly what we want to see in the world, review what we create, and iterate, will be incredibly helpful capabilities for all of us to develop.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell ’87 and Michael S. Chae ’90 will join the Harvard Corporation as its two newest members, the University announced Tuesday.

Burwell, formerly the president of American University, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and director of the Office of Management and Budget, has served in a variety of leadership and advisory roles across government, philanthropy, and higher education. She is currently president of the Board of Overseers until her term expires in May.

In a message to the Harvard community, President Alan M. Garber and Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker noted Burwell’s dedication as an alumna and her deep knowledge of the University.  

“Sylvia is known for her integrity, thoughtfulness, and data-informed decision-making, as well as her ability to engage constructively with stakeholders across political and ideological lines,” said Garber and Pritzker.

A widely respected leader in global finance and investments, Chae is vice chairman and chief financial officer of Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset management firm. He also serves on the board of the Harvard Management Company.

“A deeply devoted alumnus, [Chae] has supported undergraduate financial aid and the work of the economics and government departments, as well as other significant University initiatives,” said Garber and Pritzker.

“An expert in the management of complex financial institutions with deep knowledge of corporate governance, Michael is widely respected for his collegiality, humility, and rigor.”

In accordance with the University’s charter, Burwell and Chae were elected Monday by the Corporation to become Fellows of Harvard College, with the consent of the University’s Board of Overseers.

Both will begin their service on July 1, filling two of three vacancies arising when Kenneth I. Chenault and Karen Gordon Mills conclude their service at the end of June and following the departure of Biddy Martin, who completed her service earlier this year.

Garber and Pritzker shared their appreciation for the three departing members of the Corporation, noting the ways in which their “pragmatic and principled counsel have helped to guide the University during an extraordinarily tumultuous period.”

“We are grateful to them — and to our colleagues past and present — for all of their work to ensure that Harvard continues to thrive,” they said.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell

Burwell’s career has been marked by a consistent focus on expanding opportunity and strengthening institutions that serve the public good. A native of Hinton, West Virginia, she graduated from Harvard College with a concentration in government and went on to study philosophy, politics, and economics at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

As the 15th president of American University, she helped shape a university-wide strategy for teaching, research, and community engagement, led a major fundraising campaign in support of that work, and guided the institution through the disruptions of the pandemic, balancing health and safety while maintaining academic continuity and student support.

As secretary of Health and Human Services from 2014 to 2017, Burwell oversaw a vast portfolio that included major public health agencies and programs affecting hundreds of millions of Americans, from health insurance coverage to medical research and food and drug safety. She had previously served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, where she was responsible for developing the federal budget and helped negotiate a bipartisan budget agreement following the 2013 government shutdown. Colleagues across these roles have praised her command of detail, calm leadership under pressure, and her ability to build trust among diverse stakeholders.

Burwell also held senior posts at two of the world’s largest philanthropic foundations. At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, she played key roles in both operational leadership and global development efforts aimed at improving health and reducing poverty. She later led the Walmart Foundation, directing philanthropic initiatives focused on strengthening communities, improving economic mobility, and supporting sustainability initiatives.

A member of the Board of Overseers since 2023 and its president since 2025, Burwell also serves on a range of boards and advisory groups in the health, policy, and corporate sectors.

“I am honored to have the opportunity to serve Harvard, an institution that has changed the lives of so many through excellence in its core mission of teaching and research,” said Burwell. “From my upbringing in a small town in West Virginia as a second-generation Greek immigrant to my professional roles, I have personally seen the life-changing impact Harvard offers to people here at home and around the world. Pursuing my educational dreams at Harvard prepared me for life’s opportunities, adventures, and challenges, as it continues to do for so many students today.

“Harvard’s research saves lives and makes vital progress on conditions from diabetes to dementia. I humbly look forward to working with my colleagues to support President Garber, the faculty, and the staff in delivering on that core mission with excellence and with the values of free inquiry, viewpoint diversity, academic exploration, and respect and belonging for all members of our community. I hope to be a part of taking that mission and those values into a better future for society that is both challenged and changing.”

Michael S. Chae

During his nearly three decades at Blackstone, Chae has helped steer the firm’s evolution into the world’s largest alternative asset management firm. As vice chairman and chief financial officer, he oversees the firm’s financial strategy and plays a key role in shaping its long-term direction. He is a member of Blackstone’s management and operating committees and many of its investment committees, giving him broad insight into the firm’s activities across businesses and regions.

Earlier in his Blackstone career, Chae held a series of senior positions in the private equity business, including responsibility for international private equity, leadership of Asia Pacific private equity based in Hong Kong, and as a senior partner in the U.S. private equity business. He has led or overseen numerous investments and has worked closely with portfolio company boards and management teams on strategy, performance, and governance — experience that has underscored his focus on building resilient enterprises and sustaining long-term value.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, where he concentrated in history, he later earned a master’s degree in international relations from Cambridge University and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as managing editor of the Yale Law Journal.

He has remained an active Harvard supporter and adviser. In addition to serving on the board of the Harvard Management Company, he is a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Council and the Committee on University Resources, and has supported undergraduate financial aid and academic initiatives in the social sciences.

Chae’s commitment to education and opportunity extends beyond Harvard. He serves on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a leading anti-poverty organization in New York City, and has held governance roles at several educational institutions, including chairing the board of the Lawrenceville School. At Yale Law School, he and his wife, Alexa, established the Chae Initiative in Private Sector Leadership. He also serves on the board of the Asia Society and as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

“I am honored to serve an institution that means so much to me, at a time when it faces both historic challenges and opportunities,” said Chae. “Harvard’s mission of excellence in learning and research has never been more vital, as is the importance of fostering and protecting a culture of academic freedom and intellectual diversity.

“I look forward to working with the University’s leadership and the Corporation’s members to help Harvard fulfill this critical mission.”

The Harvard Corporation, formally named the President and Fellows of Harvard College, was chartered in 1650 and exercises fiduciary responsibility with regard to the University’s academic, financial, and physical resources, and overall well-being. Chaired by the president, the 13-member Corporation is one of Harvard’s two governing boards. Members of Harvard’s other governing board, the Board of Overseers, are elected by holders of Harvard degrees.

An American born in 2024 can expect to live to 79. That’s up 0.6 years from 2023 and the longest life expectancy in U.S. history. 

But living longer and living well are not the same thing. About 93 percent of the nation’s 58 million adults over 65 live with at least one chronic health condition, such as hypertension, high cholesterol, arthritis, or diabetes. After age 55, about 42 percent of Americans go on to develop dementia. 

Despite that, an increasingly visible cohort of older Americans aren’t just living longer. They’re also extending their healthspans, the years of life free from age-related illness or cognitive decline. In doing so, they’re creating new models for what it means to age well and challenging some of the oldest cultural assumptions about the last third of life. 

For the latest installment of “One Word Answer,” a series focused on connotations, we asked three scholars to dive into “old.” 

A historical view of frailty 

When Maud Jansen was completing clinical rotations, she found herself troubled by the way some physicians spoke about older patients, as though certain outcomes were forgone conclusions before treatment had even begun. 

She recalled a team of doctors discussing an elderly woman with a hip fracture and a stroke. One doctor remarked, “Well, she’ll go to rehab and wither away.” 

“It’s thorny, because in a way we have to accept that people get older and might have bad outcomes,” Jansen said. “But then again, are we sure?” 

Now an M.D.-Ph.D. candidate in Harvard’s Department of the History of Science, Jansen studies frailty — an umbrella term that emerged in the 1980s to describe a set of symptoms, such as hip fractures, incontinence, and delirium, that are common among older adults, and to which older adults are uniquely susceptible because of the cumulative effects of aging. Jansen examines the longer history of medical care for these conditions to understand how assumptions about old age shaped care and medical responsibility for bad outcomes. 

Before the 19th century, the dominant view of aging was one of inexorable decay, she explained. Older patients, considered incurable and therefore unworthy of treatments, might be sent to almshouses. A hip fracture was frequently fatal, less from the injury itself than from what followed: prolonged immobility, infection, or neglect. 

“What I’m finding as I’m researching these conditions of frailty is that the cultural understanding of people as frail can, and did, naturalize bad outcomes as inevitable. In this way, beliefs about frailty foreclosed the possibility of effective intervention or improvements to care.” 

The 20th century brought new frameworks. The Great Depression and the passage of Social Security in the 1930s gave rise to concepts like retirement and the “golden years” — the idea that old age might be a distinct and important phase of life. In 1969, the word “ageism” entered the lexicon to describe discrimination against older adults. A year later, a Philadelphia woman named Maggie Kuhn founded the advocacy group that became known as the Gray Panthers to challenge the idea that it was normal for older adults to simply withdraw from society. 

Today, Jansen is delighted by depictions of seniors living active and engaged lives, like older adult influencers sharing their passions for fashion or fitness, or TV shows like Netflix’s “Grace and Frankie.” 

“It’s a great thing that older adults are more robust into later life. But then the question becomes, what do you do with it? Has society really carved out good roles for them? I think that’s an ongoing question.” 

Luck, lifestyle, and privilege

Jeanne Louise Calment, who died in 1997 at age 122, is the oldest person in history whose age has been verified. Scientists generally accept her age range, 120 to 125, as a hard upper limit — at least for now. 

“The median is getting higher and higher while the maximum does not shift,” said William Mair, professor of molecular metabolism at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Humans could expect to live for 35 years for most of our evolutionary history. It wasn’t until interventions like clean drinking water and antibiotics that we lived long enough to develop chronic age-related health conditions. Now, Mair said, researchers are focused on helping more people get closer to Calment’s age and get there with their health intact. 

“Some people have incredible health — centenarians, or people who are super active into their late 90s. That’s not just luck,” said Mair. “Whether it’s optimism or social engagement or nutrition, we can begin to bring these things together and see how they do it.” 

The biology of exceptional aging is increasingly legible. Researchers can now measure what they call biological age, which is distinct from chronological age, using markers of DNA damage, metabolic function, and cellular health. Older adults who age well often show the biological profile of someone significantly younger: say, a 95-year-old with the cellular profile of a 75-year-old. 

Diet, exercise, sleep, and social connections all appear to influence the rate at which the body ages. So do income, education, and even ZIP code. 

In Boston, Mair pointed out, a recent report found a 23-year difference in life expectancy between the neighborhoods of Back Bay and Roxbury, which are barely two miles apart. It’s a stunning gulf, but it’s also an improvement: In 2007, the discrepancy was 33 years. 

“Aging is something that you can speed up and slow down through policy, through drugs and genetics, through things like exercise and healthy food,” Mair said. “It doesn’t mean we can all live to 150, but it does mean that there are things we can do.”

Fighting the urge to retreat 

Long before patients with Alzheimer’s disease show signs of cognitive decline, they often display behavioral changes, says Nancy Donovan, a Harvard Medical School associate professor of psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the director of the Neuropsychiatry of Aging Research Group. Those symptoms can include irritability, anxiety, sleep disturbances, and a loss of motivation. 

This can create a cycle, she said, both for people with Alzheimer’s and for adults with the usual slumps in stamina and strength that accompany even robust older age. Older adults who begin to feel the early effects of cognitive and physical decline often respond by pulling back from the work and social engagements that structured their days. 

“People start to decline, and then they withdraw,” Donovan said. “But those things we do in our everyday life actually support our ongoing cognition and healthy aging. Disengagement may precipitate further decline.” 

The psychological challenges of later life are daunting. Older adults face the loss of friends and loved ones. They must learn to rely on others for care. And they must reconstruct a sense of purpose uncoupled from their professional identities. 

“One does have to respond to these various threats to well-being, with the help of your social network and your resources,” she said. “We’re getting inundated with advice for healthy physical aging and healthy cognitive aging, but not healthy psychological aging. What supports a positive psychological transition towards the end of life?” 

Donovan’s prescription is an echo of groups like the Gray Panthers. She encourages older adults to fight the urge to retreat. “Amp up your exercise. Pay more attention to your health behaviors. Stay curious and engaged in the world.” 

But at age 69, Donovan knows from personal experience that there is something uniquely positive about aging, too. She and her peers are traveling the world, trying new things, and investing in their hobbies. “You can appreciate your life better from the perspective of values and meaning, and this can guide you into late life.

“We’re relishing this period of freedom,” she added. “Many of us have parents who have passed away, so our major caretaking responsibilities have ended. If you still have your health, it’s a peak phase. The years before 75 or 80 can be the best time of life.”

Juries in federal and state courts said this week in a pair of bellwether cases that tech companies are liable for public health harms to young users on their platforms. The decisions represent a blow to the broad protections long enjoyed by firms against legal liability for user content posted on social media websites.

In Los Angeles, a 20-year-old woman sued Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, and YouTube, successfully argued the tech giants designed their platforms with addictive features that targeted teens and children. A jury awarded her $3 million.

A jury in New Mexico found that Meta had violated state consumer protection law by failing to safeguard minors from online sexual predators and misleading the public about its safety. The company was ordered to pay $375 million in damages.

In this edited conversation, I. Glenn Cohen, the deputy dean and James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and faculty director at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics, discusses the verdicts and what they mean for social media’s future.

The federal trial in Los Angeles was a very closely watched case. How significant is this?

The verdict is significant for the plaintiffs, but standing alone, [it’s] not a huge amount for Meta or YouTube to pay. Compare this to the $375 million verdict in the New Mexico attorney general’s case (on a different legal theory) to see the difference in scale.

But the key is that this is just the first of thousands of filed cases. It is one of several bellwether trials meant to play out the various legal theories, defenses, and settlements.

If Meta or YouTube had to pay the same amount of damages in each of the cases that would be a very large liability, but all evidence suggests that the plaintiffs were strategic in choosing to start with this case, which may have particularly compelling facts about damage to the plaintiff.

At the same time, even if other cases in the set are less compelling, the large amount in this case likely will serve as an “anchor” to other plaintiffs in any settlement negotiation and may make the plaintiffs hold out for a higher dollar amount in any settlement.

TikTok and Snapchat settled out of this case for undisclosed sums. For Snapchat, which is a much smaller company, I think this just increases the stakes for them if they have many more cases to come.

The plaintiff argued an untested legal theory — that social media companies intentionally design these platforms so that children and teenagers get addicted to using their products. Were you surprised by the verdict?

Not particularly. I might have guessed that the punitive damages — meant to punish the defendant beyond what is needed to compensate the plaintiff — might have been higher still.

How do you expect Meta and Google, which owns YouTube, will react?

I think they are likely to appeal the case. They may have other grounds, but they are almost certain to argue on appeal that Section 230 [of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from liability for third-party content posted on websites] should have prohibited their liability, and perhaps other arguments about how the trial was conducted — so, evidence that they think should have been excluded, for example, that was included.

I am sure they will do a deep dive as to what they believe swayed the jury and retool their arguments for the next several bellwether cases.

Should they appeal, argue that, and win, the amount suggested by the jury will never be paid.

Twice this week, juries found social media companies liable for harm involving children. Do these losses in state and federal court suggest something larger is afoot on the issue of social media liability or is it too soon to say?

I think it is a bit too soon to say, but it does lend some credence to the comparison my co-authors and I have made in a recent article to tobacco and opioid litigation. As in tobacco, different kinds of plaintiffs (here: children, AGs) are advancing different theories at the same time in a sort of pincer movement on the social media companies.

As the liability risk piles up, a master settlement that will handle all or much of the litigation becomes more attractive.

It is harder to say what effect it will have on legislative action by Congress — whether it makes legislators more interested in intervening in new regulation or makes them more content to let tort law play out in the courts.