Walter M. Cabot is widely viewed as the architect of the Harvard endowment, the world’s largest, and a pioneer in the field.

Beyond his many achievements, colleagues and friends also recall him as a man of uncommon modesty and grace, one who fostered an atmosphere at Harvard Management Company (HMC) more like a family than the kind of harsh competitiveness more common in investment firms.

Cabot served as president, chief executive officer, director, and deputy treasurer at HMC, which manages the University’s endowment, over nearly two decades. He died on June 2 at the age of 93.

Cabot was a mild-mannered man with a genuine interest in people, said his son David R. Cabot. He tended to be short on words but open-minded, qualities that may be traced to a malady he experienced at a young age.

“He had a bout of polio at age 10 or 11,” David Cabot said. “I think that made him persevere, and it also made him a little humble and aware of other people’s conditions. He was a very sensitive man.”

Michael Eisenson, managing director and co-chairman of Charlesbank Capital Partners, met Cabot in the mid-1980s, and remembers him as an exemplary manager — and person.

“He was a pioneer and a leader in the world of endowment management,” said Eisenson. “He struck me as a leader with a rare combination of judgment and grace. He created a culture inside Harvard Management Company that was collaborative and supportive.”

Robert Matson, who was a Harvard Management partner from 1986 to 1992, agrees.

When Matson worked there, the place had “a collegial, like a family atmosphere” unlike other investment firms where competition and animosity run high, he said.

“There’s a lot of huge egos in the investment business, and he never had that,” Matson said of Cabot. “He was always open to new ideas. He was a man of tremendous integrity, which is not always common in the investment business. He was also a real gentleman, and he was a real straight shooter. He could smell a phony from a mile away.”

Hunter Lewis, who co-founded Cambridge Associates as an investment adviser to American research universities and colleges, worked with Cabot since the early 1970s. Lewis praised Cabot’s vision and stewardship.

“He radically changed the asset allocation of Harvard’s endowment in favor of equities,” said Lewis. “Without Walter, there wouldn’t be a Harvard Management Company.”

As an investment executive, Cabot was known as a moderate risk-taker, but when he took over HMC in 1974, he made a bold move.

Back then, most university endowments relied on a traditional 60/40 mix of stocks and bonds, but with Cabot at the helm, the endowment expanded into equities, venture capital, foreign markets, real estate, and other investment assets.

That not only made Harvard the first major endowment to diversify beyond stocks and bonds, but it also established the foundation for the modern endowment model.

“He thought that with risk came, in the investment world, perhaps return, but he was thoughtful about it,” David Cabot said. “He was not a high-risk-taker, but he did appreciate the idea that if you didn’t challenge yourself or didn’t take a risk, you might not get much of a reward.”

Under Cabot’s leadership, Harvard’s endowment grew from nearly $1 billion to $5.5 billion in 1991. According to last year’s report, the endowment was valued at $56.9 billion, making it the largest in higher education.

Cabot relished his time at HMC. In an interview with the Harvard Crimson in 2005, he said it was “the best job you could possibly have.”

A descendant of the Massachusetts Cabots, Cabot grew up in Dover, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard in 1955. After Harvard, he served in the U.S. Army and the CIA. He earned his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1959.

Cabot also served as treasurer of Wellesley College from 1978 to 2000, a period during which the institution’s endowment increased from nearly $100 million to $1.2 billion. He led an active civic life in his hometown, where he was chairman of the Warrant Committee.

Cabot is survived by his wife of 70 years, Dorothy S. Cabot, four children, 10 grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. Memorial services will be held on Sept. 19.

“He had a good set of principles that he didn’t ever waver from,” David Cabot said. “I never heard him swear in his whole life. I never saw him getting angry at anybody. He would want to be remembered as honest, fair, and reliable, and as a good man.”

Fifty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down campaign spending limits in the landmark decision Buckley v. Valeo, finding the curbs violated First Amendment free-speech protections. Since then, several rulings, including the 2010 Citizens United case, which ended restrictions on election donations by corporations, nonprofits, and labor unions, have further loosened campaign finance regulations.

In this interview, which has been edited and condensed for length and clarity, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, spoke about the recent ruling by the Supreme Court that lifted restrictions on how much money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates, its downside and potential upside, and its possible impact on the midterm elections.

Can you explain what the recent campaign finance ruling means? How is it going to affect political parties?

The recent decision is a not a huge blockbuster like some other campaign finance cases we’ve seen in recent years. That’s because the decision only involves limits on political parties’ coordinated expenditures with candidates, and that pool of money, both today and potentially in the future, is not enormous.

Before this ruling, parties could spend whatever they want, even before they could coordinate a lot of expenditures with candidates. Now they can just coordinate somewhat more. So, the stakes here were sort of moderate.

The two things the decision means above all are these: On the negative side, it’ll be easier now for a corrupt donor [to skirt individual donation limits] to funnel more money to a candidate using a party as the conduit or the vehicle for that contribution. On the positive side, parties are permanent, important political institutions, and now somewhat more money might flow to parties instead of super PACs and dark money groups and other more problematic organizations.

Justice Elena Kagan, who dissented from this ruling, said this decision would increase the likelihood of “political corruption.” Do you agree?

First of all, notice that Kagan isn’t challenging the fundamentals of campaign finance law. She’s not claiming that money isn’t speech. She’s not claiming that all campaign finance regulations should be upheld. She’s fully arguing within the current court’s doctrinal framework. She thinks that the law at issue is necessary to prevent corruption.

Kagan points out that, with a little bit of bookkeeping, it should be fairly straightforward now for a donor to give effectively half a million dollars to a candidate channeled through a party, as opposed to the $7,000 the donor is allowed to give directly to the candidate.

With much bigger sums that can now be given through a party to a candidate, there’s the possibility of more quid pro quo corruption. A candidate isn’t likely to do very much in return for $7,000 but a candidate may do quite a bit more in return for $500,000. So I think we’ll see somewhat more corruption in politics as a result of today’s decision.

What’s the idea behind “money is speech,” which has been at the core of most campaign finance decisions since the 1970s?

The premise that money is speech, or at least it enables political speech, means that it can be covered by the First Amendment. That premise underlies all campaign finance doctrine since the 1970s.

It’s a controversial doctrine. Individual justices over the years have pointed out that money is not speech, and merely enabling speech is not the same thing as being speech itself. All campaign finance decisions since the 1970s have assumed that regulations of political funding involved the First Amendment because there’s a close enough connection to political speech, and even the progressive justices in the 1990s and 2000s still accepted that the First Amendment was involved here.

The implication of fully endorsing the position that money isn’t speech is that all of these cases would quickly fall by the wayside. If money isn’t speech and there’s no First Amendment issue presented here, then Congress can regulate campaign finance however Congress wants to, without any possible First Amendment problem. But that view has never been the view of the majority of the court.

Can you compare the impact of this recent ruling to that of the 2010 Citizens United case?

Citizens United involved independent spending by corporations, by unions, and the court said that there’s no valid justification for limiting any independent campaign spending, whether it’s by candidates, rich individuals, parties, corporations, or unions.

The current case involves the somewhat less-explosive issue of coordinated expenditures. Citizens United was a sweeping decision, striking down a very important federal law and opening the door to huge new sums to be spent in politics. This decision isn’t like that. It doesn’t involve independent spending. It only involves one actor, political parties, not the whole range of actors. The stakes are a lot lower than the Citizens United case.

With this ruling, the Supreme Court overruled a 2001 decision, which upheld the same limits on coordinate expenditures with candidates. How do you explain that?

The 2001 case was decided by the court when it was at its most pro-regulatory in the campaign finance context. What changed since 2001 is the composition of the court.

The critical change was when Sandra Day O’Connor retired in 2006, and Sam Alito replaced her. Alito has always been a skeptic of campaign finance regulations, whereas O’Connor, especially toward the end of her time on the court, was willing to uphold a lot of campaign finance regulations.

Almost everything that’s followed since then, Citizens United in 2010, McCutcheon in 2014, and other decisions striking down campaign finance laws, happened not because the world of politics changed or because there was some big insight on the court. It happened because the court became more conservative and what had been a five-four pro-regulation majority became a five-four anti-regulation majority.

It’s no surprise that the current court, which is now six-three against campaign finance regulation, doesn’t like a decision from this earlier period.

Will this ruling impact the midterm elections?

In the near term, this will somewhat benefit the Republican Party committees that have more funds at their disposal because they have just happened to raise a lot more money recently than the Democratic Party entities.

However, even before this decision, all of those Republican entities could still spend their money however they wanted to, so it’s not that big of a change for them. I think Democrats will direct more of their donors to give some more money to party organizations. There might be a short-term benefit for Republicans, but I don’t think this will cause a great imbalance in the system going forward.

Overall, I’m not incredibly alarmed by this ruling. We’re still going to have in place various other laws and precautions that will stop some corruption.

It’s bad for our system to allow super PACs and dark-money groups to become the leading actors in campaign finance. I’d rather have the money in parties’ hands than in super PACs or dark-money groups’ hands. I don’t think the doors are really open for that much additional corruption here. I think there’s a non-trivial silver lining in strengthening political parties, which are valuable institutions.

A new study found that National Football League players are four times likelier to die due to neurodegenerative disease than the general population. The cohort study of nearly 20,000 NFL players revealed that while players had lower mortality on average compared to national rates, they were four times more likely to experience neurodegenerative mortality. Results of the research from Mass General Brigham, Boston University, and the Concussion & CTE Foundation are published in eClinicalMedicine.

“This is the clearest population-level evidence we have ever had that NFL players are dying due to neurodegenerative disease at real and measurably higher rates,” said co-senior author Daniel Daneshvar, Harvard Medical School associate professor and chair of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. “This study demonstrates that, when looking at athletes who have played in an NFL game, including nearly 20,000 players, across every official cause of death, the result is the same: NFL players are dying of dementia and Parkinson’s disease three to four times more often than they should.”

Neurodegenerative diseases, like dementia, ALS, or Parkinson’s, affect tens of millions of people worldwide. Typically, age is the biggest risk factor for developing neurodegenerative diseases, but studies have revealed individuals with repetitive head impact exposure — like pro football players — also have higher incidence of the diseases. In the biggest retrospective cohort study to date, researchers looked at health records of 19,824 NFL players who competed between 1960 and 2019 to determine exactly how much higher.

They found that players had lower all-cause mortality but nearly four times higher neurodegenerative mortality, including all-cause dementia (3.8 times higher) and Parkinson’s (3.88 times higher). When accounting for other known risk factors, neurodegenerative mortality was still three times higher for players compared to the general population.

The increase was even more significant for younger NFL players. Those who died before age 60 had more than 12-fold increased rates of neurodegenerative death compared to the general population. Players with longer careers (five seasons or more) had nearly double the risk of neurodegenerative death compared to those with shorter careers (one to four seasons), reinforcing a dose-response relationship between years of play and brain disease risk identified in studies of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

“A fourfold increase in dementia rates from a presumed environmental cause is immense — and brain bank studies indicate that CTE is the primary explanation,” said study co-senior author Jesse Mez, associate director of the Boston University Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and co-director of clinical research at the BU CTE Center. “To put that in perspective, heavy lead exposure, which was banned from paint and gasoline in the U.S. due to its neurological and cardiovascular consequences, leads to a two to three times greater rate of dementia and a 1.5 times greater rate of cardiovascular death.”

The study shows that NFL players had significantly lower overall mortality than the general population despite their dramatically elevated neurodegenerative disease rates. NFL players were less likely to die from cancer, cardiovascular disease, and suicide — underscoring that this is a population that is generally healthier yet still dying of brain disease at higher rates.

The study also introduces a new concept called the Selection Through Athletic Resilience Survivor (STARS) effect to explain why former NFL players tend to live longer overall. The STARS effect suggests that the same genetic, environmental, medical, and behavioral characteristics that enable individuals to become professional athletes — such as exceptional physical and cognitive performance, resilience, self-discipline, and lower rates of smoking and serious early illnesses and injuries — also contribute to longer overall survival. Higher educational attainment and better access to medical care may further offset the effects of other health conditions later in life. Those advantages make the elevated rates of neurodegenerative disease even more striking because NFL players would otherwise be expected to have lower rates of brain disease than the general population due to these health advantages.

Taken together, the STARS effect suggests that the fourfold increase in neurodegenerative disease found in NFL players may actually under-represent the true relationship between playing in the NFL and neurodegenerative disease, as NFL players would otherwise be expected to have lower rates of brain disease in the same way that they have lower rates of cancer and cardiovascular disease. In fact, neurodegenerative disease deaths were highest in athletes who tend to have the fewest comorbidities; linemen, who are generally heavier, with higher body-mass indices and related comorbidities including sleep apnea, had half the dementia mortality of non-linemen.

Former NFL players who are concerned about their brain health or neurodegenerative disease risk are encouraged to seek evaluation from clinicians specializing in neurodegenerative disease. Many conditions can cause symptoms that resemble neurodegenerative disease, and many of these conditions are treatable. Even when long-term risk cannot be eliminated, identifying and managing modifiable risk factors can help support overall brain health and quality of life. Players seeking guidance, specialist referrals, or support managing health concerns are encouraged to use available resources, including The Trust Powered by the NFL Players Association (NFLPA), the NFLPA’s Professional Athletes Foundation, and the Concussion & CTE Foundation HelpLine. 

Funding for the research in this story came from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the National Institute on Aging, and the Maloney/Carpenter Trauma-Related Neurodegenerative Disease Research Fund.

Large groups of people often lose sleep because of big events like a record 18-inning World Series game or a contested election night, or sudden crises like flood, pandemic, or war.

In a new paper, Harvard sleep researchers argue that while the mental and physical health effects of diminished sleep on individuals are well-studied, what’s far less understood is what happens when communities of people lose sleep or have it disrupted because of some major occurrence.

In this edited conversation, co-author Tony J. Cunningham, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, explains why this concept they call “public sleep” deserves far more study. 

What do you mean by public sleep? 

I think we have largely been brought up to think that sleep is a very personalized, individualized thing that happens behind closed doors and that’s where it stops. But what we are beginning to understand more is that the world outside our bedroom door does play a role in and has a large impact on our sleep. 

Right now, it’s mostly an idea. It’s a concept that needs more investigation because I’m not quite sure where the boundary conditions are on it yet. But the takeaway is that we think that major public events that happen to us as a social group can have impacts on our sleep. This is not really a new concept in the sense that big things can impact us — there’s established concepts like public mood, there’s also public memory. But what hasn’t really been talked about as much is the sleep aspect, which is different and distinct. 

We know that after losing an hour of sleep as a whole there’s an increase in car accidents; there’s increased risk for heart incidents like cardiac arrest, and stuff like that. 

And so, this is probably happening to us at a community level way more than we think it does, and so, what are the costs of this? What are the health risks? What are the industry costs, production costs, and things like that?

And also, the mental health risks and how we’re dealing with things and each other in today’s day and age? 

Our idea is that the same basic principles can be applied to a lot of different scenarios like elections, sports championships, the onset of war or a terrorist attack — all of these clearly are going to disturb people’s sleep for an indeterminate amount of time. Natural disasters are another great example. What is the actual short-term and long-term consequence?

So public sleep includes not only what happens to people right after a big disruption like an election or sports championship, but what happens in the months and years afterward?

It’s very easy to see public sleep after an acute event when something really big and stressful happens. That’s kind of the proof of concept that it exists. It’s that chronic-level stuff that is tougher to determine, but also potentially the most important. 

A really good example is what’s it like to be a Ukrainian resident these days where they’ve had this ongoing threat of life or death for the last three or four years. What are the impacts on sleep in the long term? Have people largely come back to a new normal for the time being and if they have, is it really the same? How has COVID shaped our new post-COVID society? 

These are all things that have potentially long-term consequences that could be attributable, or at the very least, sped up some changes that would have happened eventually, but it was such a jolt to the system that we’re seeing things shift more rapidly than they would have. 

A great example of a potential silver-lining outcome of that time is that people in some sectors may be able to sleep more or more in line with their preferred natural rhythm if they don’t have to commute with the rise of remote work.

What evidence did you find that convinced you public sleep was a distinct area? 

What propelled us to do this piece now is that we did data collection during the 2020 election and then again in largely the same population during the 2024 election.

As we know, the outcomes of the elections were remarkably different. But what we saw was that the effects on sleep were the same leading up to the night of the election for both elections, and then the recovery from it looks very similar between the 2020 election and the 2024 election. 

It’s very important to note that the sample we were able to recruit at the time was largely left-leaning white women from the northeastern United States. What we saw was after the 2020 election was called, the mood shift was much more positive, whereas the mood shift after the 2024 election was much more negative within our sample. Effectively the exact same planned event and the sleep effects went the same way for both, but the mood effects diverged based on the outcome.

That is really when we said, “We’re onto something here.” When you could take the same event with pretty much the same people, we’re seeing similar changes in sleep, but then very distinct changes in mood, so that makes us think this is a distinct entity. 

One of the challenges is that while you know some of these events are coming, like elections, there are many, many more that are totally unpredictable. Take the Boston Marathon bombing: no idea that’s coming. That makes it nearly impossible to study in the way we’d like to from a practical and economic standpoint.

The National Sleep Foundation does do annual assessments, but they’re one-off surveys, so it’s not quite the same thing. You could try to find places at high risk of maybe a natural disaster and always have a little bit of prospective data collection going on — which means you can actually see what is happening pre-, during, and post-event. But otherwise it’s a lot of retrospective reporting and becomes messy pretty quickly. 

Measuring sleep across communities is difficult because the data is typically self-reported and longitudinal studies are often complicated and costly. Is there any technology that could be helpful?

Wearables like Apple Watches, Oura rings, Whoop bands, Fitbits, Galaxy watches, all those things, I believe, are going to be the initial future of this area. Some of this data was able to be tapped during COVID.

From what we’ve seen, they are pretty good at determining the very high-level metrics, like when you go to bed and if you’re asleep versus if you’re awake. All of the other measures, like stages of sleep, “readiness scores” or “overall sleep scores,” we, as researchers and clinicians, can’t speak to how good of a job they’re doing because it’s all proprietary information and the validation studies out there are iffy at best. 

We’d love to see polysomnography, or PSG, which measures your brain activity and your eye movement and your muscle tone while you’re sleeping. That is the current gold standard. I hope that the wearable industry will start to come up with additional features or add-on devices that could get that level of information, but right now, they just don’t. 

I also have hopes that AI is going to improve some things in this space. I’m very excited for the future of sleep scoring because the way we do it right now is inherently prone to human error. So I am excited about the future and technology development that I think is going to make all this much better and more feasible and scalable to collect a lot of data at low cost.

What are some potential policy implications if the idea of public sleep takes hold?

What I would be encouraging industry and corporations to do is to have an awareness of this and the potential impact it can have. It’s nothing that I can currently see the government dictating at the moment beyond providing additional funding for research in this space, but that could change as we learn more. 

For now, it’s more of a public awareness campaign — that when stuff like this happens, you may expect to lose a little bit of sleep, here are some of the possible consequences, and here are some ways you can help mitigate those effects.

It’s really about helping people cope with the inevitable, because these things are going to happen, and we cannot prevent them from happening. Helping people prioritize their sleep when they can is always a good idea. So, it’d be on the public messaging side of things where I’d like to see things take off in this area first. 

The Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization dealt a seismic blow to supporters of reproductive rights by overturning Roe v. Wade (1973), rejecting the argument that the Constitution confers a federal right to abortion.

Dobbs was also momentous for conservatives like Justice Samuel Alito, the opinion’s author, who saw the reversal of Roe as the culmination of a 50-year project to remake the nation’s judiciary and jurisprudence, according to Peter S. Canellos in his new book, “Revenge For the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement.”

In this edited conversation, Canellos, a former Boston Globe and Politico editor, chronicles how a left-wing intellectual battle at Harvard Law School during the 1970s drove conservatives to build a powerful network of organizations, like the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, in an attempt to halt what they viewed as domination of the courts and law by the forces of “radical” liberalism.

Set the scene: What was happening at the Law School that so outraged conservatives?

The ’60s and ’70s were an era of radicalism in legal academia. The battle lines were not liberal versus conservative; they were radical versus mainstream. In those days, the mainstream was what we would consider today to be New Deal-style liberalism or the positions of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Mainstream professors who dominated Harvard Law School and Yale Law School and other elite law schools generally were proud of the record of the Warren Court. They felt that if people stuck with the system, the Supreme Court had proven that the Constitution was adaptable to serious social change. The principles would remain the same, but the decisions of the Court could yield greater protections to people who had been traditionally excluded from American society.

The radicals felt that wasn’t enough. They felt that the whole system was burdened by precedents that were developed in an era when women were entirely excluded from the judiciary, when people of color were also excluded, when very outmoded and discredited modes of thinking were in style, and that the legal system needed much more radical change. That was the line of tension — the center left versus the far left — that took hold at Yale and at Harvard.

Critical Legal Studies was born out of that tension. It was an academic movement, but it also prided itself on being a practical movement.

Harvard Law Professor Duncan Kennedy and other early leaders saw themselves as proposing practical solutions to address inequality in the law, changing the structure of legal education to include the viewpoints of people who were not elite scholars, who were not well-to-do, who were working class and traditionally excluded from society.

They thought all law schools are doing is preaching the value of precedent and the idea that if you follow the path of the law, case by case, you’re going to achieve a just result. But in fact, so many of society’s prejudices are embedded in the law that you really need to break the mold and create a new system of justice.

In opposition to all of this, a broad coalition came together to establish the Federalist Society in 1982. What were they worried about?

The formation of the conservative legal movement was a reaction to the perceived excesses of the Warren Court combined with fear of where an even more radical left — emblemized by Critical Legal Studies — would take the law.

The biggest fear at that time was to use the courts to expand “the welfare state.” There was a feeling that the liberty protections within the Constitution, and potentially several other avenues in the law, such as property law, could be construed in a way that created a right to welfare.

There was a movement on the left that took the view that to exercise your other constitutional rights, you had to have a minimal level of subsistence, and leftist law professors believed that a court could order the government to provide subsistence to all citizens.

The court had been ordering states to provide lawyers to indigent defendants, so it didn’t seem to conservatives like it was some enormous leap for the Supreme Court to say everybody has a right to a subsistence level of income. This was a special fear for conservatives, because it seemed to them to be the epitome of judicial overreach, of judges taking on the role of legislators.

In the book, you note that from early on the Federalist Society embraced a “results, not ideas” ethos. Morton Blackwell, a top organizer for the Young Republicans, advised the society to prioritize how to make sure the right people get to be judges and how to get the right people in to study the law and promoted using college campuses as a conservative recruiting tool. Was this a political project with an academic veneer or did politics overtake what started as an intellectual undertaking?

I think it was both. People who criticized Roe v. Wade were responding to serious academic critiques from people like John Hart Ely, who taught at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford and was not a movement conservative or political conservative in any way, but who felt that the Supreme Court had seized on open-ended provisions of the Constitution and imposed its own sense of right and wrong. As an academic critique of the Warren Court, that took hold.

There was an element of intellectual integrity to the early conservative legal movement. It was a matter of deep conviction for the early conservatives to feel that they were accepting the idea that there were standards and boundaries, that legal decisions had to be made within a strict constitutional framework, whereas they felt that the liberals on the Warren Court were making it up as they were going along,

You also write about the so-called Powell memo that some have characterized as a blueprint for today’s conservative movement. Lewis Powell Jr., LL.M. ’32, issued it right before joining the Supreme Court in 1972. In it, he identifies the judiciary as potentially “the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change” and urged conservatives to create a network of think tanks, lobbying groups, and media outlets to combat what he saw as the left’s attack on free enterprise.  By 1974, the Business Roundtable, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute were founded. How significant was Powell’s memo?

I think it goes a little too far to see that as a blueprint. What Lewis Powell was saying (he’s addressing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) was that they were losing the judiciary and American freedom — in that case, business freedoms. That businesses were going to be burdened by more regulation, more court-authorized interference than they would ever believe is appropriate and that they needed to mobilize against that.

As we all know, Lewis Powell goes on the Supreme Court, and then immediately votes for Roe v. Wade.

I think the fact that you can look at Lewis Powell as a foundational figure for the conservative legal movement, alongside others like religious right leaders, shows that they did believe in the big tent.

It was truly a larger constellation of people with many different agendas, but Morton Blackwell’s role, for example, was to emphasize that they needed to have a pragmatic, practical political goal in mind, and not allow ideological perfection to be their standard.

So, in that way, they were quite different from Critical Legal Studies. Critical Legal Studies was very afraid that if they allowed moderate liberals to come in, then their movement could be rendered meaningless.

Whereas in the Federalist Society, they welcomed all comers — you’re angry about government regulation? Come on in. Angry about Roe v. Wade? Come on in. Some of the civil rights remedies like affirmative action? Come on in. It gained stature and power for being bigger and broader than the liberal movements it was countering.

Why was the Roe decision, above all others, so animating for the movement’s intellectual leaders like Antonin Scalia, LL.B. ’60, and Robert Bork?

I think it was animating for them because it was a deeply divided issue that many felt was a moral question, and that the court, presuming to come in and solve the matter on its own, seemed presumptuous to them and to go beyond the traditional judicial role.

And it was intellectually galvanizing because of feelings that Justice Blackmun’s opinion was not an airtight piece of legal craftsmanship.

I point out in the book that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among others, wanted Roe v. Wade to be decided on pure gender equality grounds … and that if you make it an equal protection issue, it would be on very solid legal ground.

The problem was, for the men on the court at that time, seeing it purely in gender terms raised slippery slope questions that society was not comfortable with at that time, like: Could you order unisex bathrooms? Could women be ordered into combat? Would all distinctions between men and women be erased?

That was what the Roe court wanted to avoid by finding it as a matter of privacy, similar to the right to conception.

Did you know that most sneakers were designed around the male foot and those of women are different?

Karen Korellis Reuther does.

Reuther has worked in the design industry for more than 40 years. A former executive at the major apparel companies Reebok and Nike, she experienced firsthand the way the world has been designed and built largely by — and for — men.

Her new book, “MAN-MADE: How We Designed a World That Leaves Women Out, and How We Can Make It Right,” explores the ways that the old “shrink it and pink it” marketing strategy not only misses the mark but also fails — and even harms — women.

In an interview with the Gazette, which has been edited for clarity and length, Reuther discussed her book and how we can go about using design to improve the lives of all. Reuther is on the faculty of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where she teaches in the Master’s in Design Engineering program.

When did it strike you that the world is designed for men?

My eyes were really opened when I learned that only 18 percent of practicing product designers are women, only 25 percent of licensed architects are women, and probably closer to 12 percent of mechanical engineers are women.

I realized that these are the professions that actually design the built world, the objects that we put on our bodies, that our bodies use and interact with, or that surround us in our physical environments. There haven’t been enough female designers at the table. We are living in a world designed by men, for men.

One marketing strategy used by designers is to “shrink it or pink it.” Could you explain the concept?

I came across the phrase very early in my career and didn’t appreciate it. The idea is to take a men’s product and “shrink it,” make it smaller, then “pink it,” put it in a stereotypical female color.

There are a few things wrong with this.

I think the problem that many are now familiar with is the so-called pink tax. Women pay more for products designed for them when in reality they’re getting less. Think about razors or body wash: It’s a similar product, but it’s packaged in a way that offers less but charges more.

Another problem with “shrink it and pink it” is that our bodies are different. Our anatomy, biology, and biomechanics are different.

For example, most sneakers were designed for the anatomy of a male foot, which (in simple terms) is shaped like a rectangle. Female feet are more triangular, with a wider forefoot and narrower heel. When you scale down a male sneaker for a female foot, it doesn’t fit properly and can lead to injuries.

“Shrink it and pink it” is not just insulting, it can be deadly.

Crash test dummies are another example. They’ve taken a male dummy, made it the height of an average woman, and used that for crash testing. But it’s not just the height that’s different. Men have different neck musculature, breast bones, and hips. Not testing a woman’s different biomechanics is dangerous and deadly. Women are 73 percent more likely to be injured in a car crash than men.

Why does the belief that women are just smaller versions of men continue to show up in the way we design products?

Professor Cass Sunstein at Harvard Law School wrote a book called “Nudge,” and in this book he talks a lot about facts and norms. I think the idea that women are smaller versions of men has become a norm. Our definition of “average” is based on male measurements and standards from the 1970s. The data for so long has been based around these standards that the information we have today is still based on them. We have to end this idea of average, which never really included women in the first place.

How did we get here?

It’s a complex question. For a long time, even when female designers and architects were at the table, they often didn’t get credit for the work they did. In the book I give a few examples, like how female designers played a major role in the automotive industry.

But then after World War II, women went back to being homemakers. It reduced the number of professional women in these fields, and they were never recognized. We need to give credit where credit is due, and while we’ve made some progress in that area, the lack of acknowledgement set us back.

There’s this philosophy in engineering called a “leak before a break,” where you look at a system and notice where it starts leaking before it actually breaks. The reason we end up with so few women in leadership in these fields is that they are slowly trickling out at different points in their careers. How do we stop those leaks so more women get through?

How do we change the way we design?

I talk about universal design, but I think we can do better than universal design and embrace something I like to call intentional design.

With our current technology and ability to measure bodies and create bespoke objects and places, I think we can design better. We can notice these things and insist on better. Document when something is wrong, when it’s not right for your body.

If you’re a designer, if you’re an architect, if you’re an engineer, you can invent. You can make things better. You can ensure that the design brief is inclusive.

And as leaders, you can invest in technologies that offer more intentional design. You don’t have to scale down men’s products to fit women.

What message would you give for young female designers who are early in their careers?

There are so many examples where young women are still going to be the first (or the only) in a room. It’s easy to get discouraged when your voice isn’t heard or when the status quo takes over the conversation. That’s the biggest enemy in the man-made world: the status quo. “We’ve always done it this way.” Everything that’s different goes against that.

So I would say to young women: Don’t get discouraged. Hang in there. Don’t disengage. Don’t get distracted, and continue to ask the right questions. Find advocates and find other women to be at the table. If we want to design for gender diversity, we need women in the design process.

For leaders, understand that those voices of diversity aren’t just going to help the products you’re designing for women. They’re going to help the products you’re designing for everybody.

Public health messaging about the sun tends to emphasize skin cancer risk, urging everybody to cover up and slather on sunscreen before going outdoors. But although it’s come to feel counterintuitive, research suggests small daily amounts of sun exposure confer an array of health benefits that outweigh the risks for most people, according to award-winning science and cultural writer Rowan Jacobsen. In an interview edited for clarity and length, Jacobsen digs into the findings from his new book, “In Defense of Sunlight: The Surprising Science of Sun Exposure,” ahead of his upcoming Harvard Science Book Talks event at Harvard Book Store on Wednesday.

The research around sun exposure is complicated, which in part has led to an oversimplification of public health messaging. Could you talk about that?

Science is always more complicated than we tend to get told in a public messaging context. You can’t do nuance in a 30-second PSA. There is an effort to tailor recommendations to be as risk-proof as possible. In the case of sun exposure, the recommendations were set for the most susceptible people on earth to skin cancer: those with really fair skin. The assumption was that having everyone follow along wouldn’t cause any harm, but when you look at the science you realize those recommendations probably are harmful to people who are less sensitive to skin cancer. 

Are the dangers of sun exposure overblown? 

In terms of actual mortality, skin cancer is a tiny, tiny player. We tend to think it’s a bigger cause of death than it is because we hear a lot about it, but it’s not one of the top 40 killers in the U.S. or worldwide. That doesn’t mean it isn’t problematic; but at the same time, there is growing evidence that moderate amounts of sun exposure can have positive impacts, especially on other, more prevalent causes of mortality. 

And to be clear, I’m not talking about sunburn. The science shows that burning is really bad for you; but small, daily amounts of sunlight have a lot of benefits.

What are other benefits of sun exposure that we don’t often hear about?

Sun exposure — even just a little — lowers blood pressure, reduces inflammation throughout the body, makes vitamin D and a lot of other compounds that heal damage in the body. All that together means that you get significantly lower rates of the big diseases, the ones that tend to move the needle the most in public health: cardiovascular disease, including heart disease, strokes, diabetes, cancers (other than skin cancer), and autoimmune diseases. Studies have found that sun exposure reduces mortality (from any cause) by 10 to 30 percent.

Additionally, there are mental health benefits. Sun exposure triggers a release of natural endorphins in the brain and natural opiates, relieving depression and helping people feel better. It reduces anxiety and improves sleep by helping your circadian rhythm. And good sleep improves everything. The overall impact is a huge improvement in well-being.

Does it matter if you are someone with a very fair complexion as opposed to someone with darker skin?

It makes a huge difference and that has to be part of the conversation. The recommendations have been one-size-fits-all, which makes no sense. A particular phenotype — which is very fair skin, light-colored hair (especially reddish), and freckles — is more at risk of melanoma than anyone else. If you are in that category, you do need to be very cautious with sun exposure. On the opposite end of the spectrum, people with dark skin have almost no risk of melanoma or skin cancer and can really reap the benefits of sunlight without any downside. And in between there’s a gradation, but the upshot is that for everyone who doesn’t have very fair skin, the benefits of sunlight clearly outweigh the risks.

Let’s talk vitamin D. There was a time when taking a supplement was all the rage. How does that compare to being in the sun? 

We thought vitamin D was going to be a magic pill, because people who naturally have high levels of vitamin D in their blood from sun exposure have lower rates of every disease. We began supplementing with vitamin D to tens of millions of Americans — and all the big clinical trials showed essentially no impact from that supplementation. It didn’t improve a single condition (unless you had extremely low levels of vitamin D to begin with). 

Vitamin D through a pill doesn’t deliver the benefits of vitamin D through the skin, and everyone’s still trying to figure out why. Maybe vitamin D was just a marker for sunlight, and it was actually other benefits of sun exposure that were responsible for some of those benefits. Or maybe vitamin D is just one of many related compounds (we now know) made in the skin through different combinations of sunlight and enzymes, all of which seem to be anti-inflammatory, anti-carcinogenic, full of antioxidants. If you take a pill, you only get one vitamin, while if you are getting sunlight on your skin, you’re getting a couple dozen of these compounds. I think that’s probably part of the answer, but the research is still early.

What do you hope people will get from rethinking their relationship to the sun?

We have this weird context where we tend to fear the sun. Or any time we’re in the sun, we feel guilty. That’s almost always not supported by the evidence. I want to return us to a better relationship with the sun; regular exposure to the sun should be part of the joy of everyday life. I hope I can help people get back to that. 

While working as a costume designer for over two decades, Chloe Chapin, Ph.D. ’23, often wondered how men’s clothes evolved from flamboyant to plain.

In her new book, “Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men,” Chapin finds her answer in a 75-year period between the 18th and 19th centuries, during which Enlightenment ideas of liberty and equality helped give rise to the American and French revolutions.

In this edited interview, Chapin talks about the fashion of the founders and how their adoption of plain and dark suits came to symbolize American republican ideals of democracy and equality.

What sparked the idea for “Suitable”?

The idea was born during a conversation I had with actor Daniel Radcliffe in 2008 when he was starring in the Broadway play “Equus,” which I designed the costumes for. When I complimented the gorgeous midnight blue tuxedo he wore to the opening night party, he told me about the history of British royalty wearing midnight blue for formalwear, which I thought was so glamorous and fascinating.

My interest in the history of formalwear was reignited a few years later when I was doing research for the opera “La Traviata,” which was set in the 1860s. As a designer, you develop a mental database of images, and as I was scrolling back in my mind, I noticed that even though men had been wearing formal attire in black and white for half a century, they hadn’t worn black and white at all in the 18th century. I thought this was so odd! Why did they suddenly adopt this plain uniform? This book originally started off as a history of formalwear, but I expanded it to include all suits because I thought there was a bigger story there about why men adopted such plain, uniform suits, when previously their dress had been so colorful and decorative.

Fashion is always trying to push boundaries by being tawdry and sexy and changing all the time. What is weird is when fashion stops changing. Suits are one of the biggest outliers in the history of dress because of their plainness, their lack of variety, and their lack of change over time. I wanted to understand why this happened.

The book follows the history of men’s attire from the 18th century to now. Can you describe the evolution in men’s clothes and the forces behind it?

The book’s first chapter is titled “Peacocks to Penguins,” which I think is a helpful way of picturing this change in men’s attire from flamboyant and decorative to plain and uniform. Throughout the 18th century, men’s clothes existed in a range of colors — from beautiful rich grays to baby blues and hot pinks to deep reds. The fabrics were luxurious — from silk to wool to velvet — and decorated with sequins, beads, and embroidery. An interesting character in this transition is John Quincy Adams. In his early life as a diplomat abroad, he wore silk suits with breeches, which were knee-length tight pants. By the time he was elected president, in 1825, he dressed in a shapely tailcoat and tight pantaloons (which his father, John, absolutely hated). Later in his life, in a photograph from when he was a senator, he’s wearing trousers. That change, from aristocratic breeches to fashionable pantaloons to plain trousers, is quite a remarkable thing to have experienced in one lifetime.

Between the 18th century and the 19th century, a sartorial revolution took place. Philosophically, the American Revolution inspired the Founding Fathers to reject flashy, aristocratic extravagance in favor of plain, dark clothing that represented new ideals of equality and democracy. Practically, the Industrial Revolution mechanized the way fabric was made, eventually making plain woolen suits cheaper and easier to produce. This allowed this new uniform to spread rapidly among everyday men. But “plainness” isn’t a neutral term, and it doesn’t always mean that men’s clothing was less expensive, just that it was visually less decorative.

The book spends a lot of time on the clothes of the Founding Fathers. What did you learn about their fashion sense?

I did not expect this book to be about the Founding Fathers, but their online archives were such a treasure trove. I found all these letters that George Washington wrote to his tailor back in London, complaining about how his pants never fit. He basically had a wedgie for 10 years! That’s such a relatable story. It’s so difficult to find evidence in the historical archives of how men feel about their clothes, and this was such a rare piece of evidence — I knew I had to incorporate it.

Washington was also thinking carefully about his role as the first American president. At the time, there was a real discussion of whether or not a president should be called “Your Majesty.” There were no other presidents before Washington, so what should he wear? He certainly didn’t want to dress like a king.

Americans were trying to figure out what kind of government they wanted, and they adopted plain, dark suits intentionally, as a symbol of democracy and equality. But the transition was slow, and it was certainly not inevitable. In his presidential portrait from 1816, James Madison wears a black suit, but in a miniature painting of him from 1790, he looks like a dandy.

What role did the U.S. play in the spread of suits around the world?

My book ends around the Civil War, but I point to what happens next. What takes place in the second half of the 19th century is the “manifest destiny” of the suit, in which democracy, and suits, were offered to — or forced upon — cultures around the world. Wherever democracy went, the suit followed.

Some people might say that men don’t wear suits anymore, and that is true on some level — a lot of occupations today don’t require suits like they used to. But look to the people who have the most cultural authority, such as sectors of politics, law, finance, and you can see that they all wear suits. If you follow money and power, you’ll find suits. In the end, the suit is a profound testament to the crafts and innovations that helped early Americans convey their foundational ideals of equality, industry, and modernity. It was carefully designed to be the uniform of the rational, enlightened, civilized man. And when we look at the world today, we can see just how brilliantly that design succeeded in dressing power in a seemingly plain package.

Part of a series of occasional features marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

It has been almost 250 years since John Dunlap’s Philadelphia print shop pulled an all-nighter. The July 4-5 job was a rush contract from the Continental Congress: Dunlap was to print the first copies of the Declaration of Independence.

Of the roughly 200 copies Dunlap ran off, only 26 are known to exist today, by the latest count of the Library of Congress; Harvard’s is on display inside the Houghton Library this semiquincentennial summer.

That low survival rate is itself evidence of what the Declaration meant in its moment, and what it was meant to do.

It was a working document, designed to acknowledge, justify, and shape a chain of events rapidly unfolding. It was intended not for library vaults, but for travel, by express mail, to Continental army camps, restive cities and, eventually, to the courts of potential allies in the war of independence already underway.

Once it had done that job, the Declaration itself “kind of sinks out of sight,” noted historian David Armitage.

By the first Independence Day (July 4, 1777), Armitage said, “people were thinking much more about what happens next: on the battlefields, but also in the new state constitutions, for the future of the American cause.”

That helps explain how so many Dunlap broadsides were lost in what Armitage calls the “shipwreck of history,” despite the importance we assign to them now.

“The evidence we have from the past is necessarily fragmentary: So much gets destroyed, burned, thrown away,” said Armitage, the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History.

As he teaches his first-year seminar on the Declaration, he called it an “incredible privilege” to grant today’s students firsthand access to one of the exceptions — the document itself has so much to say.

The Dunlap broadside sits at the entrance of Houghton’s “War of Words” exhibit (on show through Aug. 7), which aims, among other things, to demystify the run-up to the American Revolution, according to its curator, John Overholt.

“I want people to see the history as being made by actual human beings — and not Mount Rushmore heads,” said Overholt, also Houghton’s early-books curator.

Even before July 4, the drafters of the Declaration had risked getting their all-too-human heads placed in the noose.

The shooting war had begun 14 months earlier in Massachusetts. The Royal Navy had flattened the town of Falmouth, on the present-day site of Portland, Maine, the previous fall. The exhibit also contains a 1775 appeal to American colonists from King George III, warning them against being “misled by dangerous and ill-designing men, and forgetting the allegiance which they owe …”

Independence may have become a majority position amid British reprisals, but it was not unanimous. As late as May 31, 1776, George Washington — on a whirlwind visit to Philadelphia — was troubled to find “many Members of Congress … still feeding themselves upon the dainty food of reconciliation.”

That summer, an uneasy coalition of radicals — Thomas Paine and John Adams were not natural allies — united, despite setbacks and delays, to push independence into reality.

The Dunlap broadside itself attests to its status as a rush order. A 1976 analysis found that 11 of 21 copies studied showed signs of “offsetting” — inverted ink stains from being folded while still wet. Others are torn along the fold. The Harvard copy shows signs of both.

Another takeaway from “War of Words” is that the Declaration came about in a trans-Atlantic society already awash in print. The exhibit’s resulting look, Overholt joked, is “very beige” — pamphlets and counter-pamphlets, personal letters and editorial cartoons, aged to a uniform yellow.

The growth of a relatively literate, curious public meant that printing became a profitable business — a development upon which Benjamin Franklin famously capitalized after his move to Philadelphia in 1723.

“The population was pretty small yet, but it really exploded,” said Joyce Chaplin, a Franklin biographer and the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History.

Franklin played a major role in watching Philadelphia become “for the time, [a] big and sophisticated consumer market,” Chaplin said. “Print shops started expanding and offering different media for different kinds of information: so, yes, newspapers for news, pamphlets for politics, but also almanacs for purely scientific things.”

But the explosion of print had deeper consequences. Harvard-affiliated historians like the late Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood have argued that the flood of reading material — progressive parenting manuals, translations, tracts, and treatises — ended up washing away the traditional supports of British authority.

Printing in Philadelphia was a competitive but also a close-knit world: Dunlap, born in Ireland, was a relative of Franklin’s through his uncle’s marriage. And Chaplin notes that Dunlap worked bilingually: Under an alias, “Johann Dunlap,” he served the Protestant Bible-reading Germans of the city.

As the colonial situation worsened, politics became best-selling: Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” appealed to the more radical-minded patriots, selling, by one estimate, half a million copies over the course of 1776.

It’s no surprise that the Declaration’s path into history involved a leading Philadelphia press, said Armitage.

“It was essential to use the most up-to-date media technology to get out the word” of independence, he said, as a new nation, seeking to establish itself today, might use YouTube. (That’s what South Sudan did in 2011, he added.)

Surprisingly little is known about how Dunlap and the Congress worked out the layout and drafts that night. A member of the drafting Committee of Five was meant to “superintend and correct the Press,” but it isn’t known who did: perhaps John Adams or Franklin himself; Thomas Jefferson, the first author, was apparently out buying ladies’ gloves.

But it is assumed that multiple assistants were working quickly — and, perhaps uncharacteristically, overlooking flaws in the product.

The 1976 study of Dunlap broadsides suggest Harvard’s copy came early in the run, and that Dunlap’s team kept on working despite evident damage to several pieces of type.

The Continental Congress — and especially that Committee of Five — knew that they needed enough copies to saturate the media environment and to be concise.

“It was going to be pinned up on doors, perhaps on trees, on walls, so it had to be short enough to fit on one single sheet of paper,” Armitage said.

Within “War of Words,” the Dunlap broadside is paired with a dashed-off July 6 letter from Boston merchant John Hancock, the Continental Congress’s president, to Continental Army Gen. Artemas Ward.

“I have only Time to add, that the Importance of it, will naturally suggest the Propriety of proclaiming it in such a Manner, that the whole Army may be fully apprised of it,” Hancock noted.

And the news did spread quickly. By mid-August, the Declaration had been promulgated up and down the eastern seaboard.

In that way, the Declaration was, suddenly, “news,” as the title of historian Emily Sneff’s compelling recent book has it. (It’s worth noting, as Sneff does, that Adams sent one Dunlap broadside to a family friend in Greater Boston.)

Across her years of study of the Declaration, that has been one thing that moved Danielle Allen most of all: “the pattern of ripples” reaching out from that Philadelphia printing house to empower ordinary citizens in a state of profound uncertainty, sometimes fear.

In 2015, Allen — the James Bryant Conant University Professor — established the Declaration Resources Project. She has gone on to develop K-12 curricula that centers close reading of the Declaration and documents like it as a hallmark of what she calls “democratic writing.” As Allen today leads a lab for “democracy renovation,” she says they also are helpful in our own time.

“There are two building blocks of operating a democracy: principles of joint action, and procedures of joint action,” Allen said.

Undoubtedly, the Declaration has suffered by today’s sense of hypocrisy at its heart: that in it, wealthy white men espoused universal equality — even as many went on owning slaves and barring women and the unpropertied from the polls.

(That sense is not even exclusively modern: In 1775, the eminent British commentator Samuel Johnson responded to calls for independence by asking, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”)

Allen is not convinced. In a talk at the Jack Miller Center this spring, she argued that the founders’ creedal commitment to equality was not a slip-up; despite the contradictions, Jefferson and his editors meant it.

She notes that — just six months after Dunlap’s all-nighter — Prince Hall, a free Black man living in Boston, drew on Jefferson’s opening lines in a petition to ban slavery in Massachusetts. While that petition was unsuccessful, his cause prevailed in the state’s courts in 1783.  

“Your Petitioners apprehend that they have, in common with all other Men, a natural & inalienable right to that freedom, which the great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all Mankind,” Hall wrote.

The Declaration, especially that opening creed, has proven amenable to almost 250 years of American repurposing: Lincoln reconsecrated it at Gettysburg in 1863, and Martin Luther King Jr. invoked it as a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir” a century later.

And its usefulness was not limited to the U.S.

Time and again, Armitage has found, in the wave of liberations that nominally decolonized the world since 1776, new nations have profited from the Declaration’s structure — a statement of rights, a “charge sheet” against the colonizer, and a formal declaration.

They did so whether or not the modern American government supported their decision. (From Haiti and the Philippines to Vietnam, Armitage sighed, “the ironies just continue.”)

That makes sense to Allen: The Declaration — not as a museum piece, but as a democratic gesture, hot off the press — is a powerful model.

“It’s a story of human agency,” she said. “People survey their circumstances, find them wanting, and decide to do something about it. They articulate their principles, link arms, and get going.”

Harvard’s copy of the Dunlap broadside is on display as part of Houghton Library’s “War of Words” exhibition. The exhibition is open to members of the public as part of a special event on July 4, from noon to 3 p.m., or weekdays through Aug. 7.

There have been unreliable narrators for as long as people have told each other stories — and that includes novels.

The unstable relationship between reader, narrator, and author produces a “uniquely intensive reading experience,” said Ian Shank, a preceptor in expository writing and the instructor of a Division of Continuing Education course that explores the mechanics of unreliable tellers of tales.

But it also reflects a truth about our lived experience, which perhaps explains why we find it so compelling. 

“An uncomfortable fact of life is that we are always deceiving ourselves and others,” Shank said. “Every time we sit down to write, or interview for a job, or go on a date, we’re putting forward a persona that is, to some degree, artificial — more a performance of the person we’d like to be or be seen as than who we truly are. What unreliable narrators do particularly well is expose these fictions as fictions — the ways, in other words, that we live fictions every day — while also showing just how desperately we still cling to these visions of ourselves.” 

Whatever the reason, readers clearly are intrigued by storytellers with their own foibles or agendas. Here are a handful of favorites suggested by Shank, along with other faculty and staff from around the University.

“Leaving the Atocha Station” (2011) by Ben Lerner

Recommended by Ian Shank, writing preceptor and continuing education instructor of “Unreliable Narrators” 

Though Ben Lerner was already a celebrated poet by the time he published “Leaving the Atocha Station” in 2011, it was this novel — his debut — that cemented his status as one of the leading voices in contemporary literature.

A subsequent winner of a 2015 MacArthur “Genius” Grant, and described by The New York Times Magazine as “the most talented writer of his generation,” Lerner followed “Leaving the Atocha Station” with two more autofictional novels — “10:04” and “The Topeka School” — to round out something of a trilogy, the latter going on to be shortlisted for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. 

Still, it’s “Leaving the Atocha Station” that sticks with me. In it, a young poet meanders through a Fulbright in Madrid, oscillating between what Lerner has described as “sort of a coming-of-age story” and “a year in the life of a sociopath.” Exactly where and how readers draw this line turns out to be one of the core conundrums of this nimble, cerebral book –– one made all the more fraught given the narrator’s cascading mental health crises, frequent drug use, and compulsive, self-destructive lying.

In another sense, the novel’s plot is beside the point. As Lerner’s fans know, the real pleasure of the book (and of reading Lerner generally) lives in his sentences — the place where Lerner distinguishes himself as one of the most virtuosic prose stylists working today.

“Motherthing” (2022) by Ainslie Hogarth

Recommended by Erin LaBove, cataloger of published materials, Schlesinger Library

Abby Lamb has a lot of complicated relationships in her life, especially with her difficult mother-in-law, who, after her untimely death, seems to be relentlessly haunting her and her husband from the afterlife. With the guidance of her trusted 1930s cookbook, Abby navigates her current troubles and her past traumas to understand and define what a mother truly is and how they shape (or destroy) our lives.

Cataloging vintage cookbooks is one of my specialties, so it was very fun to have one so prominently featured in a horror novel; a gelatin mold even makes an appearance! Abby is a delightful character who adds a lot of humor to a pretty disturbing book. If you go the audiobook route, the narrator does a great job of depicting her! 

“Moll Flanders” (1722) by Daniel Defoe

Recommended by Edwin Frank ’82, editor of The New York Review Books

“Every narrator is unreliable — every narrative is.” Such was the talk at the breakfast table this morning, and, yes, I agree. Every narrative is told with some interest in mind and with the desire of awaking interest. 

Narrative can be eager but never innocent, and least innocent of all are those that assume the mantle of omniscience. Religious texts, after all, are the most contested texts of all, especially by those who hold by them.

Given how slippery we know narrative to be, why do we like it so? Perhaps we listen in the hope of lulling suspicion to sleep, of a release from narrative into dream? Every story sets out in search of an end, an end to storytelling. Every story is at heart a bedtime story. Hush. 

For a book that is perfectly un-innocent, and makes no bones about it, a book about someone who has designs on everyone, who lives in a world where being designing and as ruthless as necessary in executing those designs is not to be avoided; a book of tricks played, dangers braved, and rewards reaped, squandered, clawed back, foregone, all told in a hypnotic first person unfurled by an author who tracks that voice, its sentences and sequences, with the alertness of a private detective and the doting complacency of a contented spouse, I’d recommend Daniel Defoe’s “Moll Flanders.”

Moll is hardly omniscient, but she is indomitable, and like a good storyteller she knows how to go on. There’s no pinning her or her book down, and as to the matter-of-fact, unapologetic, but marvelous tale of her survival, we offer ourselves with joy into its untrustworthy hands. 

In this contemporary romance retelling of Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” chef Ashna Raje is paired with retired soccer player Rico Silva for a cooking competition that could determine the fate of her struggling restaurant. The two were high school crushes before life interfered, and neither is sure how to feel about their unexpected reconnection.

In addition to being a fun romance, the novel explores themes of grief, generational trauma, and familial expectations.

The story is told through alternating points of view from the two main characters as well as Ashna’s mother, Shoban. While the characters try their best to communicate with one another, they are all shaped by their own experiences to such a degree that they frequently fail to realize they are having entirely different conversations and telling different stories about the same set of events.

All three narrators are unreliable in their own ways, and much of the conflict in the story is driven by the miscommunications that occur when their version of reality collides with another character’s.

“Adventuregame Comics” series by Jason Shiga

Recommended by DZ Kalman, fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society

I’d like to pick the choose-your-own-adventure works of Jason Shiga. If you want a specific book, pick “Adventuregame Comics: The Beyond.”

The choose-your-own adventure genre is not typically treated as a place for literary creativity — or, really, for adults. Perhaps that is because most books of this type are annoyingly honest about what will happen when you turn to page 36 and because their numerous, arbitrarily branching paths mean that you can never finish the story, but instead simply exhaust it of its possibilities.

Shiga has contributed to the maturation of the genre by telling stories in which the reader can only be redeemed by questioning the rigidity of the format itself. This is a tricky thing to do without flipping the reader over into the anarchy of simply reading the pages in order, yet Shiga has pulled it off many times, each time breaking the genre in a different way. If you’ve ever played The Stanley Parable video game, you will like these books.

Within the context of a choose-your-own-adventure, the unreliability comes through the violation of the contract with the reader that you simply need to turn to page X to continue on with the story.

For example (spoilers): In one of the books, the story cannot be concluded until you question which character in the story is supposed to represent “you” (the reader). In another, the solution requires awareness of the full web of possible paths. In all of them, the reader needs to ignore what the book is telling you about how it is designed to operate. So perhaps the “narrator” is the instructions themselves.

Your body doesn’t care how you move, as long as you move.

That was the message delivered Thursday by panelists at the Chan School in conversation about the benefits of staying active and the excesses of “no pain, no gain.”

Though studies of the health effects of physical activity are often conducted with a focus on specific exercises, Meagan Wasfy, Harvard Medical School associate professor of medicine at Mass General, said that the development of wearable fitness monitors has enabled researchers to see the impact of a greater variety of activities. The results have been clear.

“The heart — and also the whole body — doesn’t know what shoes you have on your feet,” said Wasfy, an MGH sports cardiologist and echocardiographer.

Wasfy’s co-panelists at the event, “Reframing Exercise,” were Mia Sanchez, a marathoner who studied environmental health at the Chan School; Brooke Forde, an Olympic silver medal swimmer and project coordinator at the Chan School; and I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at the Chan School and of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Sanchez and Forde spoke about their transitions from competitive to casual exercise. One thing they learned? Exercise doesn’t have to hurt.

“I was able to stop and reflect on my ‘why’ of exercise and how I could find that balance,” Sanchez said of an enforced pause due to a stress fracture. “Then, moving on from college into graduate school, there wasn’t as much time for that high-intensity training that I was used to for so long. But I was able to find love for not only running but other forms of exercise, like going outside and playing soccer or volleyball with my friends.”

For those looking to slim down, panelists said that staying active can help with weight maintenance, but that it’s not, on its own, a great way to shed pounds. Even so, research has shown that among people with obesity, those who exercise are healthier than those who don’t.

For anyone starting an exercise regimen, physical activity is most beneficial when it is regular and habitual, Lee noted. Also, your hard-charging past won’t save you today.

“It appears that what you currently do is more important than what you did in the past,” Lee said. “Harvard athletes who play a lot of sports when they’re in College but become couch potatoes actually don’t do as well as people who did no sport in college but are currently physically active.”

Panelists endorsed the government’s recommendation of 150 minutes of moderate physical activity per week as a good starting point for most people. Another popular guideline is 10,000 steps per day, which dates to a study done in the 1960s. Here, the group offered caveats.

For older adults, they said, citing more recent data, the cardiovascular and cancer benefits start to taper at 6,000 steps. (Which doesn’t mean you should stop: The social or psychological benefits may continue to mount.) For sedentary adults, health gains begin to accrue almost right away, even at 500 to 1,000 steps. For them, walking a half-hour or an hour provides significant benefit.

“What’s important is the total amount of human movement,” Wasfy said. “What’s important for the health benefits is the total dose. The details don’t matter quite as much.”

Chemical biologist Greg Verdine was driving from his North Shore home to his office in Cambridge when he had to pull over to the side of the road.

Verdine was listening to the podcast “Interesting Times with Ross Douthat.” The guest was former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, who has metastasized stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Few with the diagnosis survive beyond a year.

Sasse sounded surprisingly upbeat as he described an experimental drug that had reduced his tumors by 76 percent and helped him beat survival expectations (though not cure him, he noted).

“I did that,” Verdine, the Erving Professor of Chemistry, emeritus, recalled thinking. “I made that possible.” 

The drug was daraxonrasib, which has garnered attention in recent months for the unprecedented success of its Phase 3 clinical trial. The treatment roughly doubled overall survival time from 6.7 months to 13.2 months, a precious increase for patients like Sasse and the estimated 60,000 other Americans who are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer each year.

“It’s a chink in the armor of a very difficult cancer,” Verdine said. “We can get patients six months, and now everyone is talking about how we get from six months to nine months and so on.” 

Daraxonrasib’s success is owed to a kind of molecular glue that can help two proteins adhere when they wouldn’t.

For decades, conventional wisdom held that KRAS, a protein that is a major driver of cancer in humans, couldn’t be drugged. It took years, but Verdine’s innovative approach to binding proteins ultimately led to the discovery that made this possible.

It’s not the only time one of Verdine’s seeming long-shot ideas turned out to have sticking power. 

Verdine made a career “drugging the undruggable” — creating not just new medications, but new kinds of medication — both from his lab at Harvard and later at a series of companies he founded, led, and sold.

One of those companies, Parabilis, is advancing research from Verdine’s Harvard lab with zolucatetide, a first-in-class anti-cancer therapeutic that is also performing well in clinical trials.

“You might be familiar with the term ‘me-too drugs’ in biotech and pharma, where minimal improvements are made to existing therapeutics,” said Curtis Keith, chief scientific officer at Harvard’s Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator, which supported some of Verdine’s early work with funding and business development consulting.

By contrast, Keith said, “Greg has the rare distinction of having created what are fundamentally new drug modalities. Not many people can say that.” 

Verdine traces his entrepreneurial streak to early lessons after a family tragedy. 

When he was 5, his father, Richard, suffered an accident and was paralyzed from the neck down. The event dramatically rearranged life for the blue-collar family in New Jersey’s rural Pine Barrens.

Beginning at age 7, Verdine began to skip school periodically to help his father with certain projects, like retrofitting a van to accommodate Richard’s wheelchair. 

“There was a lot of improvisation in that, and I didn’t realize it until many years later,” Verdine said. 

As he grew older, Verdine did well in school and was encouraged to pursue higher education. He began as an English major at St. Joseph’s University, but he found a familiar sense of improvisation in the organic chemistry lab and was hooked. 

Verdine liked that he could take molecules apart and put them back together in new ways for his own ends.

By the time he went to graduate school at Columbia University, he was working at the borderline between chemistry and biology, figuring out the mechanism by which an anticancer drug, mitomycin, interacts with DNA.

The research would put him on Harvard’s radar, eventually leading to a professorship in 1988. 

Verdine was then beginning to identify a problem in the drug development process that would become his life’s work. 

Science had largely written off most human proteins as “undruggable” for two reasons.

First, the proteins were located inside a cell, meaning protein therapeutics would have to be small enough to pass through the cell membrane to reach them. Secondly, the proteins lacked the textured edges or “sockets” that would allow a drug to bind with them. 

Verdine’s idea was to distill protein therapeutics to their essential elements, the shortest possible chains of amino acids that could accomplish their disease-targeting objectives while still passing through a cell membrane.

But those tiny amino acid chains were floppy. They needed a sort of chemical “staple” to hold them in the perfect helical shape to slip through a cellular membrane and then cling to the surface of a protein. 

“You can see how risky that was,” Verdine said. “It could have all been wrong.” 

It was risky enough that securing federal funding would have been a challenge. Instead, Verdine turned to Harvard’s Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator, which supports innovative research in its preliminary stages. 

The BBA’s Curtis Keith said that projects like Verdine’s sit at the edge of gaining interest from traditional funding mechanisms, and that’s exactly where the BBA can help.

“The idea is that within universities, people working on highly innovative science need to be able to get funding. Often the NIH is not there to fund this kind of work, and a small amount of money can go a long way at that stage,” he said. 

Beginning in 2011, the BBA awarded Verdine three grants totaling $450,000. 

“Even relatively modest amounts of money, a few hundred thousand dollars, can make a huge difference at the early stages of developing a technology, de-risking it, showing proof-of-concept data that is then going to attract outside investors to put in much more significant money,” Keith said. 

And it worked. The technique, which Verdine called stapled peptides or helicons, proved versatile at targeting a wide variety of proteins. Verdine spun the technology into a private company, Fog Pharmaceuticals, since renamed Parabilis.

In November 2025, the FDA granted fast-track designation to Parabilis’ leading drug candidate, zolucatetide, for the treatment of patients with desmoid tumors.

Zolucatetide, which builds on Verdine’s helicon technology, slips inside cells and binds to a protein called beta-catenin. There, it inhibits a chain reaction that activates cancer growth genes — a chain reaction that drives a wide spectrum of cancer types.

Until zolucatetide, beta-catenin was considered undruggable.

A Phase 1 and 2 clinical trial of zolucatetide demonstrated tumor reductions in a remarkable 100 percent of patients with desmoid tumors.

On June 10 — Verdine’s birthday — Parabilis went public, bringing in a record venture-backed biotech haul of $770.5 million for the company to further advance zolucatetide and other therapeutic programs.

Of the drug, the BBA’s Curtis Keith said, “It has the potential to become one of the most important therapeutics coming out of Harvard in recent decades.”

Verdine’s experience with the pancreatic-cancer drug daraxonrasib and zolucatetide has convinced him that improvisational, blue-sky thinking is necessary for the future of medicine.  “We should be funding crazy stuff, because the crazy stuff is what changes the world,” he said.

Excerpted from “The Education of a Senator: From JFK to Trump” by Lamar Alexander, former Roy M. and Barbara Goodman Family Visiting Professor of Practice in Public Service, 2001-2002, published by Post Hill Press.  

The Democratic sweep in 2008 did not interfere with my re-election to a second term in the Senate.

I had no opposition in the August primary. In November, I won 65 percent of the vote. Despite Obama’s carrying majority African American Shelby County (Memphis) by 2 to 1, I carried it too. My winning Shelby County for the sixth time in over 40 years showed that friendships among Black, as well as white, constituents can pay dividends for Republicans too.

The Tennessee election results seemed uneventful, but they marked the end of four decades of two-party competition in our state. McCain won Tennessee handily. Obama lost traditionally Democrat white voters in rural Middle and West Tennessee counties that African American Democrat Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr. had won just two years earlier.

Counties named for Democrat heroes Sam Houston and Andrew Jackson began switching from solid Democrat to solid Republican. Democrats dropped the names of Jefferson and Jackson from their annual dinners. Republican Lincoln Day dinners became Reagan Day dinners. A new polarization was underway.

“You need to know that some of us believe we’re losing our country,” a rural voter whispered.

The Great Recession, wealth disparities, community and family disintegration, exhausting wars on terror, and Obama’s liberalism were prime sources of the anxiety. So was race, fueling feelings that had been stirring since the 1960s Great Society and civil rights laws. While for many, Obama’s victory was an atonement for slavery, for others it stirred animosity.

Fueling the ire, iPhone and Facebook made their debut, launching a “Digital Democracy” that allowed citizens to express their anxieties publicly, and with an immediacy and harshness that proved hard to absorb.

Beginning in 2008, Tennessee became as much a Republican one-party state as it had been a Democrat one-party state before the 1960s.

A restructuring of the political phenomenon known as “the base” helped produce this polarization.

When I began in politics in 1966, the East Tennessee Republican base was composed of voters who were patriotic, churchgoing, and leery of the federal government. Because most were descended from Civil War Lincolnites, they were generally pro-civil rights. The state party organization was the custodian of “the base.” There were not many other intermediaries between an elected official and the voters. To stay in touch with “the base,” candidates visited county Republican chairmen, commiserated with other “rats in the barn,” attended Lincoln Day dinners, or went directly to the voters, as I had when I walked across the state.

During the 1970s and 1980s, new organizations inserted themselves between the elected official and the voter. They became the “new base.” The state party was reduced to being a fundraising machine and producer of operatives who consumed most of the money raised.

This new Republican base grew up at first in Washington, D.C., in reaction to a left-wing coalition of civil rights, anti-war, anti-gun, pro-choice, feminist, and environmental groups, as well as publications like Mother Jones that influenced the Democrat Party. The right countered with The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, Americans for Tax Reform, and political action groups like the Christian Coalition of America, the National Right to Life Committee, and the NRA. Neo-conservatives championed extending freedom through wars. Radio talk show hosts — and even an entire TV network, Fox News — spread the gospel.

This Washington, D.C., “new base” did not affect me when I was first elected to office in 1978. I was a small-town, culturally conservative, anti-gambling, prayer-breakfast-sponsoring governor who twice vetoed requiring photos on driver’s licenses because it smacked of too much government, fought the teachers’ unions, and supported Second Amendment rights, even though I didn’t hunt much. The issue of abortion rarely came up.

Then, “base” restructuring spread outside Washington, D.C. Seen from Nashville, where I was working with a Democrat legislature on better schools and roads, clean water, and healthy children, Republican House Leader Newt Gingrich’s confrontational politics made it look like activist Republican governors and nay-saying Republican members of Congress were not on the same team. Another difference was that congressional Republicans were winning elections, and Republican governors and legislators were not.

To discuss what, if anything, we still had in common, I invited Gingrich and two other House Republicans to join me and three other governors for a weekend at Blackberry Farm in July 1985. As the weekend began, I told the group, “Washington issues are tremendously important and fascinating, but when we get together, that’s all Republicans talk about. Democrat governors are running up and down the street proposing programs to improve schools, pick up the garbage, fix roads, and make children healthier — and they are getting elected.”

When the session ended, we concluded that we, indeed, were on the same team.

“If I were in Congress, I would be voting ‘no’ to more federal control as Newt is doing. And if he were governor, he would be hard at work fixing schools and roads and health care — as I’m doing,” I said. Gingrich agreed.

We called that division of responsibility “The New Federalism” — resist federal control and solve problems locally. On “Firing Line,” William F. Buckley Jr. said the meeting was “a historic way station in Republican politics in the South.” Alabama Republican Party executive director Marty Conners and I started the Southern Republican Exchange, where Republican legislators, local officials, and campaign managers addressed bread-and-butter issues. They began winning elections.

In Washington, D.C., Gingrich kept winning too. His “Contract with America” helped Republicans capture both houses of Congress in 1994. Running for president, I watched the “new base” spread as I drove to towns like Ottumwa, Iowa, trying to persuade Republicans that I was Christian enough, pro-life enough, and Second Amendment enough. In 2002, when I announced for the Senate, I said, “I have conservative principles and an independent attitude.” That suited enough voters to elect me.

Once in the Senate, I found that many of my Republican colleagues were beginning their political conversations with issues that thrilled the “new base” — guns, prayer, abortion, marriage, and taxes. Others of us still went to church, preferred traditional marriage, were pro-life, and supported the Second Amendment, but didn’t start our politics there.

In 2006, I was elected Republican Conference chairman, Capitol Hill newspapers said I had become a “partisan attack dog.” Most of my Republican colleagues laughed at that characterization. They viewed me more like columnist George Will did in 2009 when he wrote, “[Alexander is] a Tennessee Republican of mild mien … in the Senate, he has been a model of the moderate Republicanism … as valuable as it is scarce.”

I detested being described as “moderate,” a lazy adjective typically applied to those who speak without shouting, work across the aisle to achieve results, and don’t always toe the party line. This label describes style more than philosophy. Bill Bennett, the Reagan education secretary and conservative talk show host who chaired my 1996 presidential campaign, once told me, “You and I basically believe the same things and could make speeches saying the same things, and after the speeches, someone would say of me, ‘What a good fire-breathing conservative.’ And after you speak, the same people would say, ‘What a nice, friendly fellow,’” Bennett said.

I especially resented self-righteous political pharisees who claimed to be a better Republican than I was, in the way someone might wander into Sunday school and claim to be a better Christian. I am a very Republican Republican, a bona fide Abraham Lincoln mount in Republican descended from Union soldiers who voted like they shot and who made certain that our congressional district had not elected a Democrat to Congress since Lincoln was president.

In the Senate, I learned pretty quickly that the division among Republicans was not one of moderates versus conservatives, but between conservatives who think their job is finished when they make a speech and conservatives who want to govern.

My priority of governing didn’t suit the Washington, D.C., political pharisees who had begun to infiltrate Tennessee Republicans. It didn’t help that I had always worked with Democrats and tried to represent all Tennesseans. During 2009, I provided more ammunition by voting to support Obama 10 percent of the time, according to Congressional Quarterly.

There was a ready explanation for most of those votes “supporting Obama.” I voted for appropriations bills since, as a committee member, I had helped write them. Forty percent of my votes in support of the president were to confirm his nominations. I believe that a president, having been elected by the people, is entitled to choose members of his administration, absent extraordinary circumstances.

But in politics, explanations rarely explain.

“There was a time when you could cast a difficult vote and go home and explain it to your constituents,” New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman told me. “Nowadays, TV talkers and the special interest groups have already explained your vote before you have a chance to get home and explain it yourself.”

I had won six statewide Republican primaries, more than any other Tennessean, but still some pharisees were calling me a RINO, a Republican In Name Only. And soon, I would find out that social media influencers would be replacing “rats in the barn” as the preferred medium for political persuasion.

“Why is it that Tennessee has been producing more talented national leaders of both political parties than perhaps any other state?” New York Times correspondent Jonathan Martin asked me in 2015.

Martin was referring to the last half-century, when Tennessee politics churned out a stream of nationally prominent senators, governors, ambassadors, Cabinet officials, presidential candidates, two Senate majority leaders, and a vice president of the United States.

My answer was simple — two-party competition. The emergence of a strong Tennessee Republican Party during the 1960s had produced four decades of vigorous party competition. Just as talented athletes are drawn to the Southeastern Conference to compete against the best athletes, talented Republicans are attracted to two-party politics to compete with talented Democrats, and vice versa. Both want to be where the action is.

At least for a few years, these talented competitors chose public service over law, medicine, business, or other pursuits. As a result, they were usually propelled by purpose as well as ambition. When the election was over, two-party competition among such able and purposeful candidates produced better government.

This had happened before. During the first half of the 19th century, contests between Democrats and Whigs sent a stream of Tennesseans to national prominence, including three presidents (Jackson, Polk, Johnson), a presidential candidate who had been governor of two states (Sam Houston), and a congressman who made a name for himself bear hunting in Tennessee and dying at the Alamo (Davy Crockett).

After the Civil War, Democrats ruled Tennessee, except in Lincolnite East Tennessee. One-party government mostly produced mediocre leadership, humdrum politics, backscratching, unaccountability, and occasional corruption. A century of mediocre leadership is one reason why, in the 1960s, Tennessee had the third lowest family incomes of any state, its textile jobs were fleeing overseas, and it rarely ranked first in anything to brag about. Voter dissatisfaction with this state of affairs — especially among East and West Tennesseans who felt left out — fueled the rise of the statewide Republican Party.

With two political parties competing, Tennessee’s economy became the fastest-growing in the South. Ken Burns celebrated our country music. Instead of companies struggling to persuade employees to move to Tennessee, many came on their own, looking for jobs in the state’s “It” cities. Improving self-esteem pervaded the state. Two-party political competition had done its job, producing elective leaders who kept competing to create this success once they got into office.

The year 2008 ended four decades of vigorous two-party competition. Tennessee soon became one of 40 states in which one political party controlled the governorship and both houses of the legislature or had enough power to block vetoes from the governor of the other party. In other words, Tennesseans are among the 80 percent of Americans who live in a state where the minority party does not have a meaningful voice in government, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In his memoir, Senator Everett Dirksen wrote that his practice was to adopt a “tentative position” on an issue from which he would then proceed to find a solution among competing views. That skill made Dirksen the most powerful legislator of his time — although it attracted criticism for being unprincipled.

“One of my principles is flexibility,” Dirksen would reply.

Dirksen might not survive in today’s “Digital Democracy,” which rewards politicians who stick to extreme positions to raise money and win primaries. There is not much reward for those who work in the problem-solving center, adjusting their initial positions until they agree. It should come as no surprise, then, that there is not much market for consensus.

“Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome,” Berkshire- Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger said.

Will Tennessee’s new Republican one-party era provide incentives to attract candidates who will continue the progress of the last four decades, or will it encourage the kind of lackluster leadership, unaccountable government, occasional scandal, and economic stagnation that flourished during the Democrat one-party century before the 1960s?

It is too soon to know.

Consumer confidence in the U.S. economy recently hit an all-time low. New reports on Social Security, inflation, and the national debt are unlikely to lift anyone’s spirits.

Earlier this month, trustees of the Social Security Administration said that there will not be enough money to pay recipients their full benefits by 2032, earlier than expected, without more funding and/or cost cuts. The Consumer Price Index showed inflation hit a three-year high in May at 4.2 percent. And the U.S. now has a record-high $31 trillion in publicly held debt, equal to the country’s gross domestic product.

In this edited conversation, Jason Furman, Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy jointly at Harvard Kennedy School and in the Department of Economics, discusses Social Security’s impending cash crunch, consumer pessimism, and why new data about the national debt is “definitely a problem.” Furman, who was an outspoken critic of “Bidenomics,” served in the Clinton administrations and was President Barack Obama’s chief economist.

You recently wrote in The New York Times that Social Security’s solvency crisis is closer than anyone ever imagined. Why is this happening sooner than previously forecast?

Social Security was last significantly retuned in 1983 and the goal was to make it last at least another 75 years. Within about a decade, it became clear that that expectation was too optimistic. Fertility rates, especially, were falling faster than expected, longevity rising a little bit more than expected, and other economic numbers, like interest rates, were lower than expected. Fertility is the biggest one — it fell further than what the actuaries were counting on. Since the 1990s, we have expected that the day of reckoning for Social Security would be coming probably in the 2030s. With the latest trustees’ report, they pulled it forward a little bit.

Some of that was because of choices Congress made: A law that was passed in 2024 expanded benefits for some state employees, and a law that was passed in 2025, the One, Big, Beautiful Bill, effectively expanded benefits de facto for high-income households. So, some of it was the law, and some of it was just the annual technical revision process that goes into these estimates.

How much is needed and what are some fixes that could shore up this gap before 2032?

We need several trillion dollars. If you raised everyone’s payroll taxes by 2 percent, that would be enough. That’s a lot, but U.S. payroll taxes are much lower than most other rich countries. The 12.2 percent we pay is a lot less than most everyone else pays.

I don’t mind raising the cap on taxable earnings, but the thing I worry about is with Social Security, it’s primarily been the people who benefit are the ones who pay. There’s a limit to how many different types of increases we can have on high-income people. So, it can be the answer to some of our fiscal questions; it can’t be the answer to every single fiscal question.

“We need several trillion dollars. If you raised everyone’s payroll taxes by 2 percent, that would be enough.”

Is this looming shortfall primarily a math problem, a political problem, or both?

It’s an elementary math problem and a Ph.D.-level political problem. You could assign students the problem of how to solve this, and if it was in an economics class, it would be extremely easy to figure out what combination of benefit cuts and tax increases adds up to the magic number. But if it’s in a political class, I’m not even sure there’s an answer to the question.

Given how strongly voters feel about the program, why has neither party done much to head off the funding challenges since this problem has been known about for decades?

What’s interesting to me is that the interest in the problem has diminished over time, not grown. President Clinton really did put time, effort, and political capital into it, and some people think but for the Monica Lewinsky scandal this would have been addressed. George W. Bush put some effort into it. I didn’t like his plan, so I’m glad it didn’t happen, but I think it was actually a good-faith effort. Obama put a little bit of effort into it in the beginning of his term in 2010 and 2011 but probably lost interest in the issue after that, didn’t really see any pathway to dealing with it. I think in some ways, as the problem gets closer, the solutions get less attractive, and as a result, the bigger the problem, the less we talk about it.

Last month, the Consumer Price Index showed inflation was up 4.2 percent over May 2025, but 2.9 percent with food and energy stripped away. Is this a good sign? What do those numbers tell you?

It’s important to distinguish the price level from the inflation rate. The price level went up a lot in March. It went up a bunch again in April. It didn’t go up as much in May, but it went up. So, from the perspective of consumers, it was quite a bad report.

If you’re the Federal Reserve trying to figure out whether there’s some new ongoing inflation where each and every year prices are going to keep rising by 3, 4 percent, I thought the report was somewhat reassuring on that score. The amount of inflation within May came down a lot. We’ve already seen gasoline prices starting to fall again. They’re higher than they were, but the direction is now down, not up. With the latest Iran deal, assuming it sticks, oil prices have fallen quite a lot, and that will work its way into gasoline prices over the next month or two.

Is it bad news for consumers? The answer is yes. Is it a new era of ongoing sustained inflation that the Fed needs to raise interest rates to fight? Cautiously, I lean toward no — while being very nervous because it’s been many years of elevated inflation, so you don’t want to be too sure about anything.

How is low confidence affecting consumer spending?

So far, we’re seeing nothing in people’s actual behavior. This is the way they answer questions, but not the way they spend their money.

You can do a statistical model based on all the different economic variables, how much would you predict people spend, and then add a variable in for how confident consumers are. Normally, that variable, how confident consumers are, is a small positive. Everything else being equal, if you’re more optimistic, you spend a bit more, and if you’re more pessimistic, you spend a bit less.

If you do that same exact statistical analysis, but use data for the last five years, you get the wrong sign on confidence. The more negative people are, the more they spend, and the more positive they are, the less they spend. Now, I don’t believe the negative sign is true, but it suggests that in the data in the last five years that the positive sign is definitely not true. It has, to date, been detached from economic activity.

But you raise a question we don’t know the answer to, which is, might it become self-fulfilling? The one place where there’s some evidence it could become self-fulfilling is not on the amount of money consumers spend, but on people increasing their expectations for inflation on a partisan basis and then that becoming self-fulfilling. If you’re a business, you raise prices more because you think there’s going to be more inflation; you’re a worker, you demand a bigger wage increase. There’s been some research which suggests that partisan irrationality on inflation — this was Republican irrationality under Biden — actually had a self-fulfilling increase in inflation. It looks like it’s still happening, although now it is partisan, irrational Democratic beliefs about inflation. There’s not enough data, it’s a year and a half of data, but they might be raising expectations of inflation and becoming self-fulfilling.

Investors do not appear to reflect a similar lack of confidence in where the economy is headed. Why have the markets remained so buoyant?

The market is extremely skewed right now, and its gains are very, very dependent on a small number of AI-related tech companies. They are betting that these companies are going to make huge profits in the future; most of them are losing money now and hemorrhaging money. So, the markets are not in any tension with all of these things, they’re just recording a totally different piece of the economy. Right now, both financially and also in terms of GDP growth, our economy is increasingly reliant on just one subpart of the overall economy. That’s a little bit of a cause for concern in terms of just how resilient things will be.

In its annual report to Congress, the Government Accountability Office pegged the nation’s debt at $31.3 trillion, equal to the size of our economy, and predicted that will grow more than twice as fast as the U.S. economy over the next 10 years. How big of a problem is this?

It is definitely a problem. The deficit, which is the amount you add to the debt in any given year, is larger relative to our economy than any other rich country, and it’s larger relative to our economy than any time in our history with the exceptions of World War II, the 2008-09 financial crisis, and COVID. So, we’re in an unprecedented place for a non-emergency situation, both for our own history and relative to the rest of the world.

You can debate how bad and how risky it is, but you’d have a hard time arguing that this is the way we should try to do things. Part of why it’s up for such debate is that there is almost no historical experience to call on. Right now, there’s not really anything to confidently extrapolate or infer from, and to me, that says that we’d rather not find out the answer to this. And so, we should deal with it.

Studies of alcohol’s effects on health have offered contradictory findings, with some suggesting a glass of red wine a day is beneficial and others saying even a drop of booze is too much. A new review attempting to clarify the risks finds more than 60 diseases, based on the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases, are 100 percent attributable to consuming alcohol. But the review also finds that some of the damage can be slowed or reversed by cutting down or quitting drinking.

Sinclair Carr, a Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences doctoral candidate in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the first author on the study, worked with a team to review a range of studies on alcohol and challenge their potential assumptions and biases. In an interview edited for clarity and length, Carr and senior author Jürgen Rehm of the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, discussed their findings.

What was the purpose of this study?

Rehm: This study is an update to a series of reviews that inform global assessments — such as the Global Burden of Disease Study and the WHO’s Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health — which aim to quantify how much risk factors like alcohol and tobacco contribute to the global burden of  disease and injury. It became clear that there wasn’t enough evidence about the various risks of alcohol, so we began to look at two different dimensions of alcohol that are relevant for health: the average level of drinking (i.e., how many drinks per day, week, etc.) and the patterns of drinking (i.e., the different occasions during which one consumes alcohol). We’ve been doing updates of this review roughly every seven years, but the hope was that this update would reconcile some of the classic epidemiological practices with the newer approach of Mendelian randomization.

Carr: This new wave of Mendelian randomization studies (which use information on people’s genes) has been important to the field. They have really changed the perspective on some of the potential health risks of alcohol, particularly for heart diseases and ischemic stroke. Many Mendelian randomization studies found no association between alcohol consumption and risk of these diseases, but conventional observational studies did show an association, one that suggests a little consumption might lower your risk. This is where that idea of “a glass of red wine a day is beneficial for your heart” came from. More recently, people have questioned whether this potential protective effect is actually true given the contradictory findings across study designs. We hoped this new review would provide clarity.

Could you give an example of a bias?

Carr: An association between alcohol and health that suggests a benefit of drinking in moderation might be explained by something other than alcohol consumption itself. Perhaps it wasn’t the alcohol causing the improvements in health, but rather other factors, like being a bit wealthier, having a better diet, etc. For example, take ischemic heart disease, the condition where the different study designs disagree most. We reviewed the Mendelian randomization studies on it and learned that many were not as free from bias as is often claimed.

What were your main takeaways from the review?

Rehm: There is no safe level for alcohol consumption with regard to cancer, period. Any amount of alcohol consumption increases your risk for several types of cancer. But on the other hand, the risk isn’t necessarily there for other diseases. Take breast cancer, which is the most studied cancer. Having one glass of wine every other day increases the risk of breast cancer but is also potentially protective for heart disease. We cannot say that there is risk-free drinking, but we also cannot say that low amounts are clearly harmful. Basically, the increased risk of one disease could be canceled out by the reduced risk of another. 

What we are doing as epidemiologists is creating a conceptual picture for a population. You, as an individual, have way more information. If you know your grandfather, father, grandmother, and mother all died of heart disease, what’s best for you may be different from someone else whose family members died of cancer.

Did the type of alcohol matter? So, for example, a glass of red wine versus a shot of whiskey.

Rehm: No. Alcohol is alcohol is alcohol. There is no scientific evidence that type matters.

What did you find in terms of slowing or reversing the effects of alcohol and health?

Carr: You can slow down or reverse the damage, depending on the type of disease or injury, although most of the evidence we have comes from people who were drinking heavily. The most obvious examples are some of the acute risks of drinking, like drunken driving accidents, which disappear once you stop. There is also evidence that you can reverse some physical damage. For example, we know from randomized trials that when you cut down your consumption, you can lower your blood pressure, which is a major risk factor for heart disease. For brain damage, you may reverse some of the shrinkage of the brain when you stop drinking. Cancer risk may also decrease after stopping drinking. The problem with many chronic diseases is that some of the damage, like in the liver, is not reversible. However, reducing or stopping drinking can slow the disease’s progression.

What did this review reveal about what we still need to learn?

Carr: There is a lot of room for improvement in research on alcohol and health. Ideally, we would have randomized trials, which are considered the gold standard to assess causal effects; it’s clearly unethical to make people drink, but trials could ask people to stop or reduce their alcohol consumption and study the effects. If a trial is not feasible, it is helpful to specify the trial we would like to run and use observational data to emulate it. This forces us to define the question precisely and helps avoid major biases that have plagued the literature.

How do you hope these findings will empower individuals to have agency over their own health?

Carr: We hope the main effect is better information. People make their own decisions about drinking, and they should, but those decisions should be informed by a clear understanding of the potential health effects of drinking. For example, many do not know that alcohol increases the risk of several cancers. Since some harms appear to partly reverse when people cut down or stop, reducing can be worthwhile even after years of heavy drinking.

The aim is not to tell people what to do, but to give them an accurate picture of how drinking may affect their health, so they can decide for themselves. That said, this picture is still far from complete. Many important questions remain unanswered, and we clearly need better-designed studies, along with appropriate methods, to attempt to answer them.

“I don’t give a lot of readings, to tell you the truth,” said Christian Wiman, at the end of one of those rare occasions. “I find them a bit difficult. I’ll probably go out and exercise a lot after this.”

It is not that Wiman has any qualms about a life in letters: He’s been poet, memoirist, teacher (now at Yale), and, for 10 years, the high-achieving editor of Poetry, the most prominent periodical of new verse in the U.S.

And if he’s not confessional, he’s not coy, either: Readers know about the rare blood cancer that was expected to kill him 14 years ago, and the spiritual searching of a onetime “ambivalent atheist.”

The problem with readings may be that his chosen craft remains mysterious: subject to long droughts, punctuated by bursts of inspiration that seem inevitably to come from elsewhere.

For all that, Wiman reads well. It’s a tribute to his conception of poetry as, first and foremost, “structured sound,” with a note of the oracular: to preserve and share of the self, to channel the divine, and ideally both.

At a virtual event hosted by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute on Monday, ahead of the July publication of his seventh book of poems, “The Dance,” Wiman worried aloud about an era that threatens “the eradication of individual consciousness.”

After years of private and public searching, Wiman has come to understand faith as French philosopher Simone Weil did, essentially as a kind of attention that “we rarely, rarely have.” He sees God’s work in how the germ of a poem can come to him belatedly, prompted by an image or feeling that “I hadn’t even realized I’d noticed.”

Today, he argues, our attentions are “frazzled” and besieged; even his “cancer chair” came with a built-in TV. Our emotions run hot and our anxieties — ecological, political, personal, and economic — tend to multiply.

In one selection from the new book, Wiman quotes his friend and fellow poet Kevin Young in saying that — amid the “mosquito demons of email / and oil changes” — poems can be a “balm”:

… meaning,
in ancient days, a substance fragrant, resinous,
effective, for a time, against decay.

Wiman may be unusual, among his cohort, in a kind of conservatism on the page. His readings of six or so works show a durable fascination with rhyme and repetition, loanwords and double entendre: mist and missed, balm and embalm. One of his best-known poems, “Every Riven Thing,” contemplates the presence of God by tweaks to punctuation.

But he was a natural candidate for the Radcliffe’s Roosevelt Poetry Reading series, which has brought renowned poets in person and online to read and discuss their work. The event was moderated by Major Jackson, himself a prior Roosevelt reader and Wiman’s friend.

Jackson opened the discussion by asking about the “spiritual significance” of poetry.

At first Wiman, who has appointments at Yale Divinity School and its Institute of Sacred Music, seemed to search for an answer — but eventually he offered up Kay Ryan’s 2003 poem “Tune,” published in Poetry in the first year of his editorship.

It posits a music thrumming under everything, only sometimes audible: “How can something / so grand and serene / vanish again and again / without a hint?” “There is a tune of things,” Wiman said on reflection, “that I think is consciousness, and is God, and that somehow those things are linked … I haven’t quite gotten there, never quite gotten to the end.”

Wiman’s poems can be funny. “Five Doors Down” and “I Don’t Want To Be A Spice Store,” which he read Monday, draw on his West Texas childhood, the latter imagining his father after a “last-ditch, lone-wolf drive / for gifts” on Christmas Eve sees him come home bearing fuzzy dice or a “Light of the World” penlight.

Wiman noted that, despite his acknowledged debt to Seamus Heaney — another sonic poet who favored Anglo-Saxon vocabulary and immersed himself in nature — the voluble Irishman, though he charmed countless acquaintances, didn’t joke in his poetic work.

In his 2003 book of essays, “Zero at the Bone,” Wiman touches, like a standup comic, on the little irritations involved in his 13 rounds of cancer treatment, “the weak coffee, and the noise seeping into my noise-canceling earphones,” and a note of envy for the “jocular sufferer[s] … who learned to praise the flame.” “I can’t do it,” he goes on. “I’m not chipper by nature.”

That makes the moments of poetic clarity feel almost miraculous. Wiman told Jackson that he wrote the title poem of “The Dance” after a yearlong break — not at all uncommon for him, he said.

The poem restages an older woman’s day as a kind of unheralded performance — of practical tasks, acts of kindness, and private reflection — before bedtime:

then lies with half-shut eyes
stitching and unstitching
all the presences
threaded through alone,
yielding to the slow dance
of grace and circumstance,
a pirouette of silhouette
and solid bone.

Wiman’s illness, still present in his attitudes, has receded in the poetry. If harrowing, it made for workable material in his 30s, when “it can seem like suffering is the only authentic thing — or despair.” 

But now, nearly 60, Wiman has spread out. If poems like “The Dance” conjure characters who are not Wiman and displace his own consciousness, to him they feel more “personal” than anything he has yet written.

Even as he made clear that he is now “in great health,” Wiman added that he has lost the fear of death, having been “dead on the table” three times in the course of multiple cancer treatments. When he was dropped from a clinical trial his family was distraught, but “I just went out and played with the dog,” he recalled.

The new collection shows a poet relaxing into his own unexpected afterlife: here on earth, with a wife and twin daughters, and trying to reach a God he thinks of as a verb, or as a tune, and with whom he still — sporadically, ecstatically — gets into touch.

Excerpted from “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution” by Jill Lepore, David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

We the People. The Constitution of the United States is made of things that are born, live, thrive, decay, and die: insects, animals, plants, ideas. In order to form a more perfect Union. Each of its elements began, long ago, in the loamy earth, hatching and creeping or slipping, slick and squealing, from the womb of the mind. Establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility. The text is written on parchment made from sheep, fleeced, their hides soaked in lime, stretched and dried. Provide for the common defense. The ink came from the buds of oak leaves, swollen to the size of musket balls by the eggs of wasps. Promote the general welfare. Its words were shaped by quills fashioned from the feathers of molting geese. Secure the blessings of liberty. Its lofty, momentous ideas came from the minds of men, long since dead, and from the books they read. To ourselves and our posterity. Of the nearly 200 written constitutions, the Constitution of the United States — the most influential constitution in the world — is also among the oldest, a relic, as brittle as bone, as hard as stone. Do ordain and establish.

But the U.S. Constitution is neither bone nor stone. It is an explosion of ideas. Parchment decays and ink fades, but ideas endure; they also change. The Constitution attempted to solve ancient problems having to do not only with the people and their rulers, the structure of government, and the nature of rights, but also with the knowability and endurance of law. Ingeniously, it accounted for the passage of time.

The U.S. Constitution was intended to be amended. “The whole purpose of the Constitution,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once said, “is to prevent a future society from doing whatsoever it wants to do.” This is not true. One of the Constitution’s founding purposes was to prevent change. Another was to allow for change without violence. Amendment is so essential to the American constitutional tradition, so methodical and so entire a conception of endurance through adaptation, that it can best be described as a philosophy.

That philosophy has structured American constitutional and political development for two and a half centuries. It has done so in a distinctive, halting pattern of progression and regression in which constitutional change by way of judicial interpretation, in the form of opinions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court, alternates with formal amendment as a means of constitutional revision. This pattern has many times provided political stability, with formal amendment and judicial interpretation as the warp and weft of a sturdily woven if by now fraying and faded constitutional fabric. But this pattern, which features, at regular intervals, the perception by half the country that the Court has usurped the power of amendment, has also undermined the idea of representative government, increased the polarization of American politics, contributed to political violence, and led to the underdevelopment of the U.S. Constitution.

With only 27 amendments, the U.S. Constitution has one of the lowest amendment rates in the world. But since 1789, Americans have submitted nearly 10,000 petitions and countless letters, postcards, and phone and email messages to Congress calling for or opposing constitutional amendments, and they have introduced and agitated for thousands more amendments in the pages of newspapers and pamphlets, from pulpits, at political rallies, on websites, and over social media. Some 12,000 amendments have been formally introduced on the floor of Congress. During the era of rising polarization that began around 1968, members of Congress all but stopped bothering even to propose amendments. The more conservative the Court, the smaller the number of amendments proposed by members of Congress. Instead of arguing for amendments, legislators, lobbyists, and other advocates pursued different means of either securing or thwarting constitutional change: influencing the nomination and confirmation of Supreme Court justices and altering the method those justices use to interpret the Constitution.

That only 27 amendments have ever been ratified is not because Americans are opposed to amending constitutions. Every U.S. state has its own constitution; these have been frequently revised and even replaced. One delegate to a 19th century constitutional convention in Missouri suggested that a state constitution ought to be rewritten every 14 years because every seven years “every bone, muscle, tissue, fibre, and nerve matter” — every cell in the human body — is replaced, and surely, in twice that time, every constitution ought to be amended, too. And that has nearly proven to be the case. Since 1776, the states have held some 250 constitutional conventions and have adopted 144 constitutions, or about three per state. Every state constitution
currently in place has an amendment provision. For most of American history, the states have been exceptionally busy holding constitutional conventions, but like the practice of amending the U.S. Constitution, the practice of holding state constitutional conventions has stagnated. (No U.S. state has held one since 1986.) Nevertheless, the practice of amendment by popular vote thrives in the states, where revision is exponentially easier to achieve. Since 1789, of more than 10,000 amendments formally proposed in the states, nearly 7,000 — well more than two out of three — have been ratified.

The difficulty of amending the federal constitution has had profound consequences. The U.S. Constitution is older than modern democracy and is burdened with all manner of vestigial provisions. Over time, both the U.S. states and other nation-states have amended their constitutions to replace aristocratic provisions. In the American federal government, such provisions — the Electoral College, the malapportionment of the Senate, and life tenure for Supreme Court justices — cannot be changed without first amending the Constitution and, in the case of the Senate, first amending Article V itself. (Article V places equal suffrage in the Senate effectively beyond amendment.) This impasse leaves Americans subject to what political scientists have called the “tyranny of the minority.” The Fifth Article was meant as a constitutional door, open to the people. After 1971, that door slammed shut.

The year 1971, the last time the U.S. Constitution was meaningfully amended, marked a turning point in the history of American constitutionalism. That year a method of constitutional interpretation that became known as originalism was put forward by a distinguished legal scholar, Yale law professor Robert Bork. The word originalism did not enter the English language until 1980, and it had virtually no currency before 1987, when Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. But it was in 1971 — just when formal amendment was becoming impossible — that Bork first advanced his theory that the only way to read the Constitution is to determine the original intentions of its framers and that every other method of interpretation amounts to amendment by the judiciary.

Originalism rose from the ashes of Article V. Originalists argued that if the Constitution requires changing, it ought to be done by the democratic method of Article V amendment rather than by nine unelected judges. This is an argument that, in earlier eras, liberals had made, too. (As with earlier progressives and midcentury liberals, conservatives’ objections to judicial power did not last past their acquisition of that power.) A problem with this argument, and it is not a small problem, is that Article V hasn’t worked since 1971. Scalia, asked in 2013 if he considered any part of the Constitution to be a flaw, pointed to Article V. It was “not originally a flaw,” he said, but it had become one because “the country has changed so much.” He said he’d run the numbers and concluded that, “if you picked the smallest number necessary for a majority in the least populous states, something like less than 2 percent of the population can prevent a constitutional amendment.” That is not a constitutional door. That is a constitutional barricade.

Bork’s method of constitutional interpretation came to be called “original intent originalism,” to distinguish it from “original meaning originalism” and “original understanding originalism.”

Notwithstanding the semantic schisms among originalists and the Senate’s rejection of Bork’s nomination, originalism steadily gained ground. “The Constitution means what the delegates of the Philadelphia Convention and the state ratifying conventions understood it to mean, not what we judges think it should mean,” said Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 2001. By then,
originalism had become not only the prevalent mode of interpretation on the federal bench but also strikingly familiar to the public, where, according to public opinion surveys, nearly half of Americans had come to see it as the only way to interpret the Constitution. Its outcomes mapped onto the policy agenda of conservatives, but as the liberal Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan said during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings in 2010, “We are all originalists.” By the 2020s, the dominance of originalism was so overwhelming that the constitutional scholar Cass Sunstein was left to ask, “If we are not originalists, what might we be?”

Originalists have not often agreed on what originalism is; it is also, perhaps surprisingly, quite changeable. The term is also confusing, since it is used to apply both to a serious and important set of arguments about constitutional interpretation and to a form of popular constitutionalism driven by views that range from patriotism and earnest admiration for the nation’s founding to xenophobia and white nationalism. As a method of constitutional interpretation, a great deal that has gone by the name of originalism is perfectly ordinary, unsurprising, and indispensable. All interpretation of the Constitution, like the interpretation of any piece of writing, involves a close inspection of a document’s text, meaning, purpose, and structure. These methods have been used since even before the death of the last surviving delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, James Madison, in 1836. What was new about originalism as it emerged in the last decades of the 20th century — when the Fifth Article lay dormant — was its insistence that the only way to interpret the Constitution is to read it the way a probate judge reads a dead man’s last will and testament. Madison is that dead man.

Originalists deny that originalism is a method of constitutional change, insisting that it is, instead, a method of constitutional restoration. But originalism is a method of constitutional change; it provides a path to change by way of a new method of constitutional interpretation. That method is not original.

To interpret the Constitution — whether to determine the framers’ original intent, the document’s original meaning, or the public’s understanding of it — originalists consult the Constitution, Madison’s notes from the Philadelphia convention, the records of the ratifying conventions, and the Federalist Papers, 85 essays written in support of ratification by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, in 1787 and 1788. None of these sources were widely read in the 18th century, nor were they even widely available. The Federalist essays originally appeared only in New York newspapers. Madison’s notes were not published until 1840. Nineteenth-century law offices did not generally contain these materials. Before the 20th century, consulting sources like 18th-century dictionaries or the records of the ratifying conventions would have been impossible for most lawyers in the United States. Not until the 1980s, when many key historical collections began to be digitized, could these sources be extensively searched with ease, and not until the 21st century could they be searched at the stroke of a key by anyone with a laptop and access to the internet.

At any rate, Madison himself did not endorse this method. The framers believed the Constitution to be not merely a text, words woven together, but also a set of unstated principles, no more material than a sunbeam or a shaft of light. They also warned against deference to the past. “Is it not the glory of the people of America,” a young Madison asked in 1787, “that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?”

Madison, the chief keeper of the records of the Constitutional Convention, did not believe those records had any bearing on the interpretation of the Constitution. “Whatever veneration might be entertained for the body of men who formed our Constitution,” he said, “the sense of that body could never be regarded as the oracular guide in expounding the Constitution.” He also warned against relying on the Federalist Papers, given, as he remarked, rather understating the case, that its authors had been “sometimes influenced by the zeal of advocates.” Late in his life, when both he and the Constitution were older — and when Madison sought specific political outcomes — he would on occasion urge deference to 1787. This isn’t evidence that Madison was an originalist; it’s evidence that both the meaning of the Constitution and the methods of discovering that meaning, far from being fixed, established, and beyond dispute, have never been anything other than changeable, contingent, and contested.

How James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Quincy Adams came to their view of constitutionalism, and how Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas came to a very different view in the late 20th century, which they nonetheless claimed to belong to the late 18th century, is one of the stranger paradoxes of American constitutional history.

Copyright (c) 2025 by Jill Lepore. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation/The Countryman Press, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

It’s not unusual to see a few brave souls wrapped in gloves and balaclavas jogging along the Charles or through Cambridge Common in the snow. But for most of us, running outdoors is a fair-weather sport. 

It’s also a dangerous one. Injury statistics vary, but research shows that each year, roughly half of all runners experience an injury serious enough to sideline them for a period of time. Adam Tenforde, a Harvard Medical School associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Spaulding Rehabilitation hospital and a specialist in sports medicine, offered safety tips for runners who are new to the sport or just rusty.

What are some good tips for someone who hasn’t run recently and wants to start a regular outdoor running practice? 

Running is a great outdoor activity, especially during the warmer times of the year. For those easing back into running, this should be done gradually to allow the musculoskeletal system to adapt. 

There are many “couch to 5K” programs available for those starting running or who have taken longer times away from regular running. Running coaches can also be helpful in incorporating training plans. Having an identified race can be motivational and help to build a routine toward a goal. 

In general, changing training variables can include frequency, duration, or intensity, and modifying one variable at a time can help to monitor response to increased efforts. As with any new form of exercise, those with underlying health concerns should consult a medical provider to ensure they can safely add new physical activities such as running.

How can new or returning runners reduce their risk of injury? 

In general, the 10 percent rule is often recommended for increasing total training volume each week. However, there’s not strong science to support this.

I often recommend runners to think about training efforts gradually increasing each week and dropping the volume of training by one-third every third week. Having regular running shoes and alternating two pairs of training shoes can allow the shoes to recover from humidity and moisture, with a reminder to replace shoes if they appear worn or every 300-500 miles. 

Regular sleep of at least seven hours per night may reduce injury risk and improve recovery between training sessions. I also advise regular strength training two to three times per week, including lower-body exercises such as calf raises, leg lifts, balance exercises, abdominal and foot core strengthening, and standing exercises such as single-leg squats that mimic running form to improve strength.

How should runners think about nutrition before and after a run? 

Nutrition is critically important. Ensuring adequate energy intake, including sufficient carbohydrates, allows for an appropriate response to exercise and avoiding risk factors for running injuries, as described by the Female and Male Athlete Triad and Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport. I do not recommend fasting, as having sufficient fueling throughout the day allows for performing running with sufficient ability to recover and avoid injury. 

Within 15-30 minutes after a run, having a post-exercise snack with carbohydrates and protein is really important to recover muscle glycogen — chocolate milk has actually been shown to be an ideal recovery drink.

In female runners, menstrual periods can be helpful to track and ensure they are not becoming further apart or stopping due to inadequate fueling. Similarly, male athletes should monitor for signs of fatigue or other markers of lower testosterone levels that can be related to under-fueling. 

What gear do you recommend for new runners?

It’s easy to be overwhelmed with the number of options for gear and technology. The fun part about running is the ability to perform this activity with a pair of comfortable running shoes and clothing that is appropriate for the environment, including good skin protection, and don’t forget sunscreen. A watch and monitoring training effort through tracking your resting heart rate each morning can help to monitor distance and how you are recovering. 

The performance footwear of AFTs [advanced footwear technology] are exciting to improve your running speed but should be used gradually to allow your body to adapt to new running mechanics, particularly if you have a history of a prior running-related injury. If you use other technology, be sure to ensure you are also monitoring perceived effort and whether you are recovering from training efforts. 

What are the health benefits of a regular running practice?

Running has a number of health benefits both for physical health and mental well-being. The Exercise Is Medicine initiative recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week along with strength training. If you love to run, keep doing it, and find healthcare providers who understand the unique needs of runners to identify strategies to perform the sport safely.

The verdict is mixed on digital books, sometimes called ebooks, when it comes to fostering children’s reading development.

“Ebooks are a lot busier than print books,” said Assistant Professor of Education Ying Xu, who studies the effects of technologies, including AI, on children’s language and literacy development. “If a child is holding a print book, the only thing that they could do is read the text and understand the story … Ebooks open up a lot of opportunities, and they’re also a form of distraction.”

Xu made her observation during the June 3 webinar “Raising a Reader in the Digital Age,” hosted by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Xu and Assistant Professor of Education Phil Capin discussed the opportunities and risks educational technologies pose to children’s reading development, particularly at a time when children are reading less.

Ebooks, which are growing in popularity among young readers, offer features such as visual highlighting of words, audio, animation, customizable text options, and others. And they are more and less helpful depending on how they are used.

“In my research, what I have found is that when the audio narration feature is available, most of the kids will turn on the narration and listen to the book,” said Xu. “Other kids find that clicking the interactive features is fun, but it is questionable how much those kinds of interactions really lead to comprehension and development of reading ability.”

And yet, electronic books should not be rejected completely, Xu said.

Digital books offer read-aloud features and larger fonts that can support students who need extra help. Technology can also provide a more personalized and individualized experience for readers, who can complete quizzes and receive immediate feedback.

The impact of technology on children’s reading is a mixed bag, said Xu.

Ebooks have proven effective in supporting parent-child interactions during reading time when they include questions about the stories that parents can pose to their children. Rich conversations between parent and child while they read together tend to occur more with print books, but some ebooks can create a similar environment, said Xu.

Some digital platforms that are designed to support skills such as comprehension, critical thinking, and the ability to interpret and analyze text have proven beneficial for some students. But Xu warned against overestimating the benefits of educational technologies: They are not a singular solution but work best in conjunction with in-person tutoring, teacher involvement, and parental participation.

“Technology is not the only component in an intervention,” said Xu. “They are coupled with in-person tutoring, reading clubs, etc. It’s difficult to distinguish or single out where the positive impact we’re seeing is coming from.”

Data show children are reading less than they did decades ago. Educational experts report a worrisome drop in leisure reading as children spend more time on screens than on books. Social media platforms, which entice users with shorter text and entertainment features, have been blamed for the reading decline.

“The consensus is that kids read less right now as compared to decades ago,” said Xu. “There is no consensus about what drives that decline, but most people think that technology had some role in it.”

The decline in reading time is not only occurring among children, but also among adults, said Xu. “Across all groups, we’re seeing a decline in leisure reading or reading for fun,” she said. “It’s not just children, but also their parents.”

Asked by Capin how AI might support children’s early language and literacy, Xu expressed cautious optimism. AI-enhanced technologies can engage children in conversations with questions related to texts and provide tailored and immediate feedback, which can enhance reading comprehension, an area in which American students are falling behind, according to the 2024 Nation’s Report Card. “There are potential benefits for students and educators if the AI technology is well designed,” said Xu.

An area of concern for Xu is students’ overreliance on AI to generate summaries of reading assignments. This practice may help students save time, but outsourcing their critical thinking can affect their learning and reading comprehension abilities.

But limiting AI usage is hard to do, said Xu, and while educators can urge a more responsible use of AI, they may have to go back to basics and find ways to boost motivation and engagement among students.

“The fundamental thing is finding something kids are genuinely interested in doing,” said Xu, “and also how we could make the education and the learning process fun and motivating and especially more relatable to kids’ everyday life.”

One of the first national efforts to combat loneliness as a societal health problem fizzled after the pandemic amid economic slowdown and political polarization. But the initiative also raised awareness sufficiently that is still recognized as a public health problem today.

“It started well, but I think it’s fair to say that COVID put a bit of a spanner in the works,” said Tracey Crouch, former United Kingdom minister for loneliness, of her nation’s efforts. “I do think there’s still a real drive from policymakers around the world to recognize the issue of loneliness, recognize the health impact, social impact of loneliness, and try to tackle it in their own unique ways.”

Experts from the U.K. and the U.S. agreed with that assessment at an event Tuesday hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Acknowledgment of the depth and breadth of the issue in the U.S. got a major boost during the pandemic, but efforts in U.K. began earlier.

Alex Smith, a Shorenstein fellow and author of a recent report on the U.K.’s efforts to address loneliness, said globally the problem has been made worse by increased social change toward individualism, fostered by the development of smartphones and social media.

In the U.K., the response to the problem was ignited by academic research highlighting loneliness’s impact, which created a ripple effect across society and drew the attention of Member of Parliament Jo Cox after her 2015 election.

Philanthropy became interested and started to invest in the matter, and community programs began to show impacts that encouraged others to get involved.

Cox helped press the issue among U.K. political leaders. Her murder in 2016 as she walked to a constituent meeting caused an outpouring of grief and further energized efforts.

“Jo knew that while loneliness is a deeply personal and subjective emotion, its drivers and solutions were really everyone’s business, and there are solutions,” said Olivia Field, chief executive of U.K.-based Jo Cox Foundation. “Her legacy ultimately shattered the myth that it only affects older people and proved that it impacts people of all ages and all backgrounds. She refused to accept living in a lonely country.”

The surge following Cox’s death was driven by nonprofit organizations and governmental cross-party collaboration, which resulted in the completion of the work of the commission on loneliness, which Cox started. By 2017 the narrative had shifted to highlight that many people are affected by loneliness, making it less hidden and an open public health priority.

The next phase, Field said, was a unified call to action that included creation of the world’s first minister for loneliness, along with a national strategy, government funding, and a commitment to more research.

An important characteristic, Field said, was that the issue was a “blank canvas” politically in the U.K. That meant there was no institutional defensiveness to overcome and that working across party lines was easier.

“The winning formula included robust evidence alongside powerful storytelling,” Field said. “We used the hard data that had been collected for a couple of decades or longer to demonstrate the scale of the problem and its impact. We did that alongside human stories that made it relatable and undeniable. The sector consensus was absolutely critical, so we spoke with one unified voice.”

The health impacts of loneliness were recognized as important in the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when isolation and social distancing were key responses, said Smith, who is also founder of the Cares Family charities in the U.K. But the energy around the issue waned as the pandemic wore on.

The post-pandemic economic crisis, marked in the U.S. by the ending of government pandemic stimulus programs and beginning of high inflation, refocused public attention, as did other crises with global ramifications, such as the Ukraine War and increasing political polarization.

“There’s not much you can say was good [that] happened in COVID, but one thing that did happen was that the stigma around loneliness was reduced,” Crouch said. “People began to understand that it was a real feeling. Things could have been done differently but at least people were now talking about it.”

In the U.S., a high point in the fight against loneliness occurred in 2023, when then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory about the ill health effects of loneliness.

Titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community,” the publication drew wide attention to the issue.

Trey Leveque, former engagement chief of staff to Murthy, said the advisory grew out of Murthy’s belief that isolation and loneliness are not fringe issues but global ones. Loneliness, Murthy felt, highlights broad problems of social connection in the same way that rising hunger highlights poverty and other major social problems.

“The evidence and research became impossible to ignore,” Leveque said. “Researchers were increasingly demonstrating that social connection and disconnection affect not only emotional well-being but physical health, mental health, emotional outcomes, workplace performance, even civic participation. What has long been considered a private struggle in so many situations and scenarios had started to become recognized as a public health issue, which led to the report that Dr. Murthy put out in 2023.”

Though public attention and political intention have both become fragmented in the years since, panelists agreed that the issue remains potent.

Cultural shifts are continuing to occur, with Asian societies seeing a shift toward individualism and the declining pull of the central family that has been seen in other societies. Artificial intelligence has spread rapidly in recent years and may impact the issue in ways still unknown.

An important date in the U.K. comes June 16, when the 10th anniversary of Cox’s death is likely to draw new attention to the issue.

“I’m hopeful that some of the same actors and a new generation of actors will see — particularly with the arrival of artificial intelligence, which is going to change again how we interact — that how we interact with one another and our communities is a fundamental part of what it means to be human,” Smith said.

Adapted from “Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey Inside Today’s Supreme Court” by Sarah Isgur, J.D. ’08, Institute of Politics fellow ’16

In January 2000, 69 percent of Americans said they were happy with the way things were going in the United States. By 2024, only 22 per­cent did. Trust in institutions is on the decline. Less than half of Ameri­cans say they have confidence in the police, the medical system, or schools. Less than a quarter trust labor unions, businesses, or the media. And less than 10 percent trust Congress. (I’ve always wanted to meet someone in that 10 percent — did they misunderstand the question? Are they all the mothers of congressmen?)

The Supreme Court was once an outlier in this trend. From 2016 through 2020, its approval rating was actually on the rise — from 48 to 70 percent. But in the past few years, that has all changed. Since 2023, a majority of Americans have had an unfavorable view of the Court for the first time since they started asking nearly 40 years ago. The parti­san gap is the largest it’s ever been. Less than a quarter of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents view the Supreme Court favorably — the lowest in at least 30 years. For the first time, more people disap­prove of the Court than approve of it.

What is driving this change and why now?

For many, the answer is easy. They think President Trump stole a seat that should have been filled by President Obama. Or the justices — especially the ones they don’t like — are unethical. Or the Court isn’t doing law; it’s all politics. And if they’re doing politics, they should be treated to the same skepticism or even vitriol that we deploy in every other part of our political debates.

Tribalism is deeply ingrained in our biology. It is also one of the most powerful motivators. In recent history, it has been used to justify genocides, gas chambers, and lynchings. The men who flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and that field in Pennsylvania were certainly motivated by tribalism. The men who walked into a grocery store in Buffalo, a synagogue in Pittsburgh, and a Walmart in El Paso to kill people who didn’t look like them were motivated by trib­alism.

And yet tribalism has also been a driver of civilization and progress. Tribalism allowed Nazism and fascism to flourish in the 1930s, but it’s also what defeated them in the 1940s. It’s why we walked on the moon. Heck, it’s why these united colonies declared independence from Great Britain in 1776 and, therefore, why we have a Supreme Court of the United States to begin with!

Those who try to combat tribalism with logic often lose.

And I should know. I worked in politics for almost 20 years. I’ve worked on presidential campaigns for people like Carly Fiorina and Mitt Rom­ney, as well as at the Republican National Committee. I’ve worked in all three branches of government — legislative, executive, and judicial. I’ve seen the differences between law and politics. Politics is about outcomes. Law is about process. Or at least it should be.

When one is a political operative, it’s actually easier to convince vot­ers that the opposing candidate is evil than it is to tell them that he’s wrong. Partisans seem to crave the dopamine hit they get from the out­rage. It’s the entire business model of some cable news — reality televi­sion filled with pundits and prognosticators who turn complex public policy trade-offs into easy-to-digest narratives about good guys versus bad guys. They keep viewers entertained by filling their time with stories of “those people” who are out to hurt us.

And for there to be an “us,” by definition, there must be a “them.”

For large parts of human history, we defined “them” by their religion or ethnicity. Today, in the United States, we are far more likely to define “them” by their politics. And on this I think we can all agree: Our poli­tics are not healthy.

Our political process — the way our Constitution was designed to be amended and laws to be passed — is broken. Without a functioning Congress — ours has not completed all of the steps in the appropriations process on time since 1996 — and with a too-powerful executive branch churning out thousands of new regulations that change with each ad­ministration, both sides see the courts as their last resort to win in an existential fight for the country as we know it.

The Supreme Court is, in this sense, the last branch standing. It is certainly the only one of the three that our Founders would recognize.

And that’s exactly why, I argue, partisans are attacking the court now. Partisans can’t abide an institution that has its own legitimacy if that institution doesn’t bend to their partisan interests. From the left, there are calls to impeach justices, limit the court’s ability to hear cases, add seats to the court. From the right, there are calls to ignore the court’s decisions when the outcome isn’t the one they wanted.

The goal isn’t to convince you that Congress needs to do its job or that the presidency has become too powerful. They do and it has. The goal isn’t even to explain why the failures of those other two branches are dragging the court into every partisan squabble. Though they are.

The goal is to tell you what those critics — from both sides — are missing. The Supreme Court isn’t the same as Congress. Judi­cial philosophy isn’t the same as partisan politics. Many casual observers of the Supreme Court attempt to categorize the philosophies of its jus­tices on a one-dimensional, left-right x-axis, like partisan politics. Con­servative at one end, liberal at the other.

The problem for these critics is that the justices are nothing like po­litical candidates. Unlike a member of Congress, their votes are hard to predict. Interestingly, ask an AI model to predict the outcome of a Su­preme Court case with any sort of political valence before oral argu­ments and about half the time it will tell you that the decision will be 6–3 along ideological lines — even though statistically that is one of the least likely outcomes. The justices surprise even our large language model overlords.

On a random day in early June 2025, each liberal justice wrote an opinion for a unanimous court on an issue conservatives championed. Justice Elena Kagan’s decision blocking Mexico’s $10 billion gun-vio­lence lawsuit was cheered by the NRA. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s decision on reverse discrimination was praised by conservative advocacy groups. And religious advocates heralded Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s opinion on tax-exempt status for Catholic Charities.

The decisions — on God, guns, and gays — had all been closely watched during the term as “big cases.” But once they had been decided unanimously and the decisions written by the court’s liberals, they were no longer considered big. The pundits waited for the more divisive 6–3ers to come down and then declared the court divisive.

But if they can’t predict the outcome of cases in advance — let alone which ones are important — isn’t it clear they’re missing something?

What these critics are missing is the existence of a different axis — the y-axis of judicial philosophy. This axis is all about justices’ philoso­phy on the institution — when to uphold decisions by previous courts they think were wrongly decided, how much to think about the conse­quences of a particular decision, whether they think of themselves as one court or one vote. And it is affecting everything from which cases the court takes, to when it takes them, to how they get decided, and all the other ways the Supreme Court’s internal practices and customs end up deciding the fates of millions of Americans.

I am hoping Americans are beginning to see the need for a more nu­anced understanding of how decisions are made and what those decisions even are. Because often the real story isn’t the one that’s in the headline. “Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump-Era Ban on Bump Stocks for Firearms” could have more accurately read, “Supreme Court Says Only Congress Can Ban Bump Stocks,” or even better, “Supreme Court Says President Can’t Unilaterally Change Gun Con­trol Law to Help Political Allies Avoid Tough Votes in Congress.” A girl can dream.

I am also hoping Americans can start to view the court as an institution that is the product of its history filled with people who have tried to do their duty as best they can. That’s it. Too often in our politics today, the person who disagrees with us isn’t just wrong. They are bad. They’re not mistaken; they’re morally corrupt and their motivations are evil. We’ve forgotten how to disagree because we’re so convinced of our righteousness. It’s how we judge one another, and it’s how we judge institutions.

We need to change this “Game of Thrones”–type of politics where we fight all-against-all warfare. Instead, we should replace it a “Ted Lasso” argument about the court — a show in which a bunch of flawed people are trying their best and struggling to find the right answers to our hardest questions.

Exploring these sides of the court will, I hope, offer some in­sights into why the rule of law in this little experiment we’ve been run­ning on self-government for the last 250 years matters — and what we can do to preserve it.

Copyright © 2026 by Sarah Isgur. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.