Episodes
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“The future is female.” That was the slogan printed on tee shirts in the early 1970s at the first women’s bookstore in New York City. Fifty years ago, it seemed to be true. The Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution had passed the House of Representatives and the Senate by wide margins and gone to the states for ratification. Fifty years later, there has certainly been progress in gender equality, but the ERA is long dead and Roe has been overturned. We speak with Jane Mansbridge, PhD '71, Harvard's Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values and the author of the award-winning book, Why We Lost the ERA, about whether the story of the 2024 election will be the way women voters reclaimed their lost rights and the promise of decades past.
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Just after Labor Day, American University Professor and Harvard Griffin GSAS alumnus, Allan Lichtman predicted a victory for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. It was a source of some encouragement for Harris's supporters, given that Lichtman had correctly predicted the winner of 9 of the last 10 elections based on his historical analysis of campaign trends since 1860.
Despite his track record, Lichtman has been scorned by election forecasters like Nate Silver, who build probabilistic models based on weighted averages from scores of national and state-level polls. But are these quantitative models really any more reliable than ones that leverage historical fundamentals, like Lichtman's, or, for that matter, a random guess?
The Stanford University political scientist Justin Grimmer, PhD ’10, and his colleagues, Dean Knox of the University of Pennsylvania and Sean Westwood of Dartmouth, published research last August evaluating US presidential election forecasts like Silver's. Their verdict? Scientists and voters are decades to millennia away from assessing whether probabilistic forecasting provides reliable insights into election outcomes. In the meantime, they see growing evidence of harm in the centrality of these forecasts and the horse race campaign coverage they facilitate.
This month on Colloquy: Justin Grimmer on the reliability of probabilistic election forecasts.
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Missing episodes?
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Fail fast, fail frequently, and learn from it. That's the mantra adopted by many Silicon Valley firms in recent years. Fine. But would you tell that to your emergency room doctor for someone who's managing your retirement funds or the pilot of your next flight?
Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson says that the key to squaring this circle is failure-proofing critical areas where best practices are well-known while encouraging experimentation in new fields where useful and productive knowledge can be gathered. That means building a sense of psychological safety among colleagues and coworkers that fosters trust, open communication, and new ideas.
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Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent, they’re everywhere, and they're probably bad for you. PFAS are probably bad for you. Some of the detrimental health effects associated with the chemical compounds include liver disease, decreased fertility and hypertension in pregnant women, immune and developmental effects in children including decreased antibody response to vaccines, and certain organ cancers. In this talk, delivered in April 2024 at the annual Harvard Horizons Symposium, scientist Heidi Pickard, PhD '24, uncovers the prevalence of PFAS, as well as their impact on the environment and health.
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You’re being tested. You don’t know the criteria used to determine your score—or even your results. The test is being administered not by a human teacher or moderator, but by machines. And it’s going on 24 hours a day, every day of your life. Harvard Griffin GSAS historian Juhee Kang traces the emergence of the obsession with mass-data collection in the early 20th century.
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As a member of the "people operations" (human resources) staff at Google in the mid-2010s, Harvard Griffin GSAS historian of science Tina Wei was struck by how many perks employees received in the office: door-to-door shuttle service to work, fitness classes, massages, and pantries stocked with snacks, to name just a few. The company even offered a meditation program—with its own branding worked in. In this talk delivered in April 2024 at the annual Harvard Horizons Symposium, Wei argues that, while physiological research on bodily fatigue was originally used to support calls for better protection of US laborers’ safety, over time views of fatigue as a mental issue gave employers an excuse to avoid investing in improvements to working conditions.
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Claire Lamman is part of a team of astrophysicists using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument to map as many as 50 million galaxies. In this talk, delivered in April 2024 at the annual Harvard Horizons Symposium, Lamman describes her distinctive contribution to this effort—gauging the “intrinsic alignment” of galaxies to better understand the universe and how it evolves.
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Who cares for babies while their mothers are incarcerated? How stable are these households? And how does being exposed to a mother's incarceration in utero impact child development? These are the questions Harvard Griffin GSAS social scientist Bethany Kotlar set out to answer in her research. Combining her experience working with these families and high-quality social science research methods, Kotlar goes beyond the mother-infant dyad to assess the mother-infant-caregiver triad unique to this population.
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Humanity generated over one septillion bits of data this past year alone. All that information takes energy to transmit. Lots of energy. In fact, data-associated technology could account for up to 20 percent of global energy production by 2030. Using light at the nanoscale level, physicist Dylan Renaud thinks he may have a way to meet the almost limitless need for information while meeting the planet’s need for sustainable practices.
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Like the poetry of his fellow Latin Americans, the scholarship of Mauro Lazarovich, PhD '24, is not only humanist but also humanitarian. “I wanted to make a contribution to the humanities by saying that literature and art have something to bring to the table when we are talking about refugees,” he says. “And not only literature in general but specifically Latin American literature.” In this talk, delivered at the 2024 Harvard Horizons Symposium, Lazarovich shines a light on the experience of the stateless—and the writers and artists who brought those “erased” by governments and bureaucracies back into view through their creative work.
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In advance of Juneteenth 2024, we speak with University of Texas Professor Shirley Thompson, PhD '01, author of the forthcoming book No More Auction Block for Me, about how the experience of being treated as property has shaped the way that African Americans understand and relate to property themselves. Acknowledging the trauma of racism and white supremacy, Professor Thompson looks at the ways that community, creativity, and resilience enabled Black folk to assert their humanity in the face of objectification.
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If you're one of the 32 percent of US adults who experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression last year, your doctor or mental health care provider may have recommended you learn meditation to help manage your stress. But how exactly does this age-old practice change the brain? This month on Colloquy, Richard Davidson, PhD '76, the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, discusses his decades of research on meditation and dispels myths about how it works—and when, where, and how it can be done.
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We're in the midst of the Muslim holy days of Ramadan, just past Western Christians' celebration of Easter, and looking forward to the Jewish Passover holidays in late April. We often refer to these traditions as the Abrahamic faiths—a reference to the childless man chosen by God in the Jewish Bible to be the father of a great nation, and who's an important figure in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Today, many who work for religious understanding use Abraham as a point of commonality between those in the three different religious traditions.
Not so fast, says Harvard University Jewish studies scholar, Jon Levenson, PhD ’75. He says that, a bit like the old joke about the United States, Great Britain, and the English language, Abraham is the common figure that separates Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. "It is surely the case that Jews, Christians, and Muslims have more in common than their adherents believe," he writes in his 2012 book, Inheriting Abraham, "but the patriarch is less useful to the end of inter-religious concord than many think."
So how does Abraham and his story play out differently in the three traditions? Why is it important to understand those differences? And if Abraham is not the fulcrum on which efforts for religious conciliation can revolve, what are the areas of commonality that can foster peaceful coexistence, particularly today, when it's needed most?
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Tufts University Professor James Intriligator, PhD ’97, a human factors engineer, says that GPT is not a search engine, although many of us use it that way. It's more like a glider. It can take us to great knowledge and help us explore new territory. But we need to steer it smartly to get where we want to go. In these journeys, our own curiosity is the wind beneath ChatGPT's wings, the force that unlocks AI's almost limitless potential. In this episode of Colloquy, James Intriligator maps out a flight plan for GPT glider pilots. He says the questions we ask the large language model can take us through transversal spaces that cross many different areas of knowledge. And he's got some important advice for steering it through these domains to get better answers.
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In 2022, white residents of the Greater Boston area had about 19 times as much wealth as Black residents, $214,000 to $11,000, according to the Urban Institute. While the gap is particularly large in this part of the country, it's an issue across the US. In 2019, Black Americans held just $0.17 on average for every white dollar of wealth.
Much has been written about the racial wealth gap, but how has it evolved since emancipation? Why has it been so stubbornly persistent over the past 160 years? And what role does this country's original sin of slavery continue to play in its perpetuation?
The Princeton University Economist Ellora Derenoncourt takes these questions on in "The Wealth of Two Nations," a paper published last year in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Beginning with the Civil War, Derenoncourt and her coauthors chart the way the racial wealth gap narrowed, stalled, and started to widen again in recent years. She writes, "While policies that address racial gaps in savings and capital gains can be a complement, only the redistribution of large stocks of wealth, like reparations, can immediately reduce the racial wealth gap."
This month on Colloquy: the history of the racial wealth gap.
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According to the 2023 Democracy Report of the VDEM Institute based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, the advances and global levels of democracy made over the past 35 years have been wiped out. Seventy-two percent of the world's population now live in autocracies. Freedom of expression is deteriorating in 35 countries. Government censorship of the media is worsening in 47 countries. Government repression of civil society organizations is worsening in 37 countries. And the quality of elections is worsening in 30 countries.
Dame Louise Richardson, PhD ’89, believes that universities have a key role to play in addressing this crisis. Formerly the head of the universities of Oxford and St. Andrews in the United Kingdom, and now president of the Carnegie Corporation, Richardson says institutions of higher learning can forge a path to more sustainable democracy by modeling a fairer and more representative society, generating and sharing deep knowledge, and advocating for democratic systems. (Dame Richardson’s talk was delivered on November 8 at the 2023 Samuel and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture of Harvard’s Weatherhead Center of International Affairs. )
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Obesity in the United States has reached epidemic proportions, affecting millions of Americans and costing the healthcare system billions of dollars each year. As is so often the case with disease in this country, communities of color suffer disproportionately.
Public health expert Sara Bleich, PhD ’07, says it’s time to deal with obesity as the urgent crisis that it is. A professor of public health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and former director of nutrition security for the Biden administration, Bleich says the disease is largely preventable but to make progress, the country must deal with persistent inequities in the healthcare system—and the structural racism that underlies them. Join us this time for a conversation about obesity, public health, and race.
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This month on Colloquy, we speak with PhD student Grant Jones about Healing Attempt, his collaboration with Grammy Award-winning artist Esperanza Spaulding and Buddhist leader Lama Rod Owens that combines mindfulness and music to improve the wellbeing of people of color.
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The US economy is strong. Unemployment is close to a 50-year low, real wages are rising for those at the bottom of the income ladder, and inflation is down though still not entirely in the rearview mirror. You’d never know it from the press coverage, though, which tends to focus on how people feel about the economy, namely that it’s bad and getting worse.
In this episode of Colloquy, we take a step back from perception to look at where we were, where we are, and how we got here. What did the pandemic shocks teach us about government intervention in the economy? What did they show us about inflation and unemployment? And what have economists learned that can help policymakers cope with the next big crisis?
With us to parse these questions is Karen Dynan, a professor of the practice at the Harvard University Department of Economics and the Harvard Kennedy School. A senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Professor Dynan is the chair of the American Economic Association Committee on Economic Statistics. She previously served as assistant secretary for economic policy and chief economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury from 2014 to 2017. She received her PhD in economics from Harvard Griffin GSAS in 1992.
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According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July 2023 was actually the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. The heat wave caused hundreds of deaths, thousands of hospitalizations, and billions of dollars in damages. It also exacerbated droughts, wildfires, and power outages.
The culprit behind this unprecedented heat is climate change, driven by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The most well-known greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide, which comes from burning fossil fuels. Often overlooked is methane, which accounts for about 16 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and has more than doubled since pre-industrial times.
Robert Stavins, PhD ’88, says that reducing the amount of methane in the atmosphere is a critical and cost-effective way to slow climate change and its impacts. To get there, the AJ Meyer professor of Energy and Economic Development at the Harvard Kennedy School is leading a new initiative at the University’s Salata Institute which aims to reduce methane emissions from different sectors using innovative approaches and collaborations. If successful, he says the world can “bend the curve” on climate change, giving humanity desperately needed time to address the larger, long-term problem of carbon dioxide.
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