Colloquy

2025 Harvard Horizons Scholar Katherine Venturo-Conerly is on a mission to revolutionize access to effective mental health care—particularly for young people. Her research project, "Tackling the Global Youth Mental Health Challenge: Lessons from Psychotherapy Research in Kenya," focuses on creating and implementing effective, accessible mental health interventions for children and adolescents in multiple countries, with a particular focus on Kenya. As co-founder of Kenya's Shamiri Institute with her Harvard College classmate Tom Osborn, Venturo-Conerly is developing a collaborative and sustainable approach to bridge the mental health care gap around the world. In this talk delivered in April 2025 at the annual Harvard Horizons Symposium, Venturo-Conerly talks about creating, testing, and implementing effective, accessible mental health interventions for children and adolescents across multiple contexts.

The US Supreme Court's 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard made it illegal for colleges and universities to use race as a factor in choosing their incoming classes. As a result, schools are working harder than ever to recruit and admit first-generation and lower-income applicants to preserve the diversity of their student bodies. But the Boston University sociologist Anthony Abraham Jack says American higher education wasn't ready for the diversity they were recruiting before the Court's ruling—and they're still not ready now. His research shows how schools often fail to acknowledge the inequities of class and race that students bring to campus from home. The solution? Pop the campus bubble and begin looking at the ways that place impacts the challenges low-income and first-generation students face. Anthony Abraham Jack is the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Newbury Center at Boston University, where he is an associate professor of higher education leadership at the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. He has earned awards from the American Educational Studies Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Association for the Study of Higher Education, among others. His first book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, earned awards from the Association for the Study of Higher Education and the Eastern Sociological Association and was named one of National Public Radio's Best Books of 2019. His second book, Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality, and Students Pay the Price, won the PROSE Award in Education Theory and Practice from the Association of American Publishers. Anthony Abraham Jack received his PhD in sociology from Harvard Griffin GSAS in 2016.

Imagine your doctor could precisely predict your personal risk of disease, diagnose the cause of illness with pinpoint accuracy when it did occur, and develop an effective treatment plan with low side effects the first time, rather than through trial and error. That's the promise of personalized medicine. And it would be a revolution in healthcare. At the heart of this vision is the notion that our genetic differences have a big impact on how each of us responds to disease and treatment. To realize a future of personalized medicine then, we need to understand and investigate just how genetic variations, including mutations, contribute to illness and respond to doctors' attempts to address it. But how can scientists do that efficiently with a human genome that spans about three billion base pairs of DNA across tens of thousands of genes? That's where the work of PhD student Dawn Chen comes in. A student in Harvard's Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and the Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology Program, Chen was named a recipient of the 2025 Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award for Outstanding Achievement and Exceptional Research in the Biological Sciences, presented by Seattle's Fred Hutch Cancer Center. With her colleagues in the lab of Harvard professor Fei Chen, Dawn Chen is developing an innovative gene-editing tool known as helicase-assisted continuous editing, or HACE. A breakthrough in genetic engineering, supported in part by funds from the National Institutes of Health, HACE makes edits to specific genes, allowing researchers to investigate how genetic variations contribute to disease. The technique could lead to the identification of specific mutations that influence the effectiveness of drugs and therapies for illnesses like cancer. 

The cost of prescription drugs is high—particularly in the US where consumers pay nearly three times more than those in 33 other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. One factor in prices is fluorination, which plays a crucial role in the production of many widely-used pharmaceuticals. Driven by the high cost of reagents needed for the trifluoromethyl (CF₃) group, the process is expensive—and hard on the natural environment. If there was a way to make fluorination more accessible, sustainable, and affordable—it could reshape how we approach drug synthesis—and much else in chemistry.Chemist and Harvard Griffin GSAS PhD candidate Brandon Campbell has developed an innovative method of fluorination that could do just that. Using silver and visible light, Campbell's pioneering approach promises a cost-effective and eco-friendly alternative to traditional synthetic methods.

The history of slavery in the United States, including at the country's colleges and universities, is deeply disturbing and painful. But Professor Sara Bleich, PhD '07, says it's critical that our society continue to do so—and that universities have a responsibility to lead the way. Harvard's inaugural vice provost for special projects and a former member of the Obama and Biden administrations, Bleich leads the effort to implement the seven recommendations of the 2022 report on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery. Her goal is to help the University—and, by extension, the country — move forward into a future where Black Americans can succeed and thrive.

Technological disruption of human occupations is nothing new. In recent decades, blue-collar occupations have borne the brunt of the upheavals—think of all the factory workers now working at Wal-Mart thanks to the integration of robots on assembly lines. But all that may be changing now. Given artificial intelligence's ability to do thought work—from crafting feature stories in seconds to writing and editing computer code—disruptive innovation is now coming to a college-educated profession near you. Feeling concerned? Take heart. Harvard's Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy David Deming says AI is here to make us more productive, not take our jobs—at least not yet. The co-author of the recent paper, "Technological Disruption in the US Labor Market," Deming says that thanks to technology, every small businessperson or professional can now have an indefatigable digital assistant, one with a flawless memory, encyclopedic knowledge, and lightning-fast response time—and one who will never ask for a raise or even a wage.Deming, who received his PhD from the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 2010, spoke recently about artificial intelligence and its impact on the labor market during an event for the School's alumni at the Harvard Club of San Francisco. He was interviewed by Harvard Griffin GSAS Dean Emma Dench, whose questions were sometimes submitted by audience members.

With filmgoers buzzing about the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, University of Pennsylvania Professor Jeffrey Edward Green, PhD '07, says that the legendary singer and songwriter is more than a musician; he's the conflicted prophet of a fallen world. In his new book, Bob Dylan, Prophet Without God, Green writes that Dylan models, "how to practice self-reliance in a world of permanent injustice and suffering, without appeal to divinity and providence, and without the self-satisfaction of believing he is also adequately fulfilling his social responsibility, or abiding by an individualism that everyone is equally free to practice if they wish." In that sense, Green contends, Dylan “has bestowed a message uniquely suited to a time such as ours." 

“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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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

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

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

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

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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? 

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. 

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.

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. )

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.

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

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

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.

Every technology is accompanied by a cultural technique says the artist and media scholar Emilio Vavarella, a PhD candidate in film and visual studies and critical media practice at the Harvard Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “You have the calculator, but you also have the number," he says. "Everything we do from speaking to being able to write an imaginary story—all of these are specific techniques that we have developed. It's what makes us human.” Vavarella calls these frameworks media models: abstract models that mirror specific technologies. Media models are the paradigms through which humans try to understand the world and themselves. Their development is slow and not necessarily linear or progressive, but it embraces all sectors of human life. In this episode of the Colloquy podcast, Vavarella gives a short history--from pre-historic hydrology to modern computation--of the ways in which technology and culture have interacted to shape the ways human beings think.

The global average temperature for July 2023 was the highest on record—and maybe the highest for the last 120 years according to the United Nations' weather agency. In the United States, temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona reached a record 118 degrees Fahrenheit and hit highs of at least 110 degrees for 31 consecutive days—also a record. And yet the populations of Arizona, Texas, and Florida, the states hardest hit by the warming trends, continue to expand. All of those people need air conditioning and refrigeration to make life bearable--but current cooling technologies just make the planet warmer. That's why Jinyoung Seo, PhD '23, wants to reinvent the air conditioner. In this episode of Colloquy, Seo talks about how he uses solid refrigerants to eliminate cooling systems' direct greenhouse gas emissions—all while making them smaller and vastly more efficient.

In the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, thousands enlisted in the US military, were deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and became embroiled in conflicts that were often fought not on the battlefield but in rural villages and in cities. To prepare for that type of warfare, American troops often trained at bases in the southwestern United States, where the military constructed replicas of Afghan and Iraqi towns. The US military hired people of Arabic descent to portray civilians working in markets, driving their cars--and being insurgents and terrorists.In this episode of Colloquy, the scholar Adam Longenbach discusses the normalization of military violence in civilian spaces and the role that architecture plays in that process. Longenbach traces the trend back to its beginnings in World War II to show how the built environment, augmented by Hollywood stagecraft, has been used to turn city streets and urban neighborhoods into battle zones. (This talk was originally given during the Harvard Horizons Symposium in 2023.)

Starting July 4, 2021, and lasting past the holiday, members of the LGBTQ community converged on Provincetown, Massachusetts, for a holiday that was supposed to be a celebration of the end of the long COVID-19 lockdown. When the weather turned rainy, they confidently took the party indoors, packing the little seaside town's restaurants, bars, and clubs. Why not? They were vaccinated and mask mandates had been lifted.What happened next shocked both the revelers and the country, shutting down what had been hyped as a “hot vax summer,” and signaling that there was a long way to go before the pandemic was over. PhD student Lydia Krasilnikova—who co-led an 80-person, multi-organization collaboration examining the July 2021 superspreader event in Provincetown—talks about what happened and how the outbreak contributed to the US Center for Disease Control's decision to resume its recommendation of indoor masking later that year.

Growing up in Ferguson, Missouri, Harvard Griffin GSAS PhD student Steven Kasparek witnessed violence. He experienced it himself. He was left with some burning questions about which children go on to thrive and which struggle in the wake of exposure to violence. In this episode of Colloquy, Kasparek presents his research on the ways that childhood violence can shape bias—and bias can shape mental health throughout our lives. He also suggests new strategies to help protect violence-exposed youth from developing mental health problems that may ultimately undermine their success and well-being. (Note: This talk was originally given during the Harvard Horizons Symposium in 2023.)

In 2014, Boko Haram terrorists kidnapped 276 female students from their dormitory at the Government Girls Secondary School in the Nigerian town of Chibok. The act inspired international outrage and a worldwide campaign to #BringBackOurGirls. Far less attention has been paid, however, to the plight of those who escape Boko Haram's violence and become displaced within their own country. Now, anthropologist Gbemisola Abiola, PhD '23, is exploring different sites—camps, informal settlements, and host communities—where internally displaced persons (IDP) resettle. In this episode of Colloquy, Abiola discusses protracted displacement, the new structures of social and economic life that emerge from it, and the different survival strategies and tools IDP use to rebuild their lives.

It's important to understand how massive stars live and die because of their role in the formation of some of the fundamental elements of the universe. That kind of science requires the development of computer simulations that model the universe from the Big Bang to today—an unimaginably complex task that is rife with uncertainties, computationally expensive, and can take years to complete. But data scientist and astrophysicist Floor Broekgaarden, PhD '23, has developed an algorithm that speeds up these simulations by more than a factor of 100, dramatically decreasing their cost as well. In this episode of Colloquy, Broekgaarden explains her work and why she has high hopes for its impact on our understanding of how the universe evolved. (Note: This talk was originally given during the Harvard Horizons Symposium in 2023.) 

Ben Bellet, is a Harvard Griffin GSAS PhD student in clinical psychology who studies PTSD. A graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, Bellet served as an officer in the army for five years. During his deployments in Afghanistan and Kuwait, he found himself less and less interested in logistics and operations and more interested in the Dostoevskian question of human suffering, particularly among the soldiers he led. Today, at Harvard, Bellet researches the ways that those living with PTSD can compulsively seek reminders of trauma. One of the gold standard treatments, exposure therapy, encourages survivors to approach reminders of the traumatic event. But Bellet's studies indicate that some survivors might expose themselves to these reminders in ways that confirm toxic beliefs about themselves. His data suggests that clinicians need to be flexible in their approach to treating the condition, always keeping in mind their patients need to find meaning in their distress. 

For this special Poetry Month bonus episode of Colloquy, a conversation with Harvard Professor Helen Vendler, PhD '60—once called “the best poetry critic in America” by The New Republic's Alfred Kazin—about the art of verse and why both the poetic form and its great works have enduring value in the era of the social media-induced seven-second attention span.

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”Is this saying from a Zen Buddhist Text? The Hindu Bhagavad Gita? Actually, these are the words of Jesus . . . according to the 2,000-year-old Gospel of Thomas. The Princeton University scholar Elaine Pagels, PhD '70, says that this text—discovered in Egypt in 1945 along with the Gospel of Philip—contains Christ's “secret teachings,” in contrast to those meant for public worship and included in the four canonical gospels of the New Testament. So why were the gospels of Thomas and Philip banned by the church as illegitimate and heretical over 1600 years ago? And how do they change the way we understand the Christian tradition today?This month on Colloquy: The “Gnostic Gospels” and their place in the history of early Christianity with Elaine Pagels.

As politicians and pundits wring their hands over the debt ceiling, the economist and Boston University professor Laurence Kotlikoff, PhD '77, says the United States is already bankrupt. He calculates the health care and pension obligations to the country's rapidly aging population in the many trillions of dollars, far outpacing tax revenue in the coming decades. And he says economic growth won't save us. But he claims to have a few proposals that may, as well as some advice about personal investing, saving, and spending in uncertain times. 

“You have to be twice as good to go half as far.” It's a maxim that Black and Brown Americans know well, particularly in their experience of the educational system. In recent decades, college preparatory school programs have sprouted up to give middle school students of color a better chance to compete and gain admission to elite private institutions like Exeter, Andover, Choate, and many others. From there, the thinking goes Black and Brown kids can make it to colleges like Harvard and then to successful and lucrative careers, addressing systemic inequalities in wealth and income. Garry Mitchell wants to trouble the notion of this path as an unqualified good for students of color. An educator and GSAS PhD student who studies college prep school programs, Mitchell says that these initiatives often don't dispel the racist paradigm of twice as good, they institutionalize it. The cost to participants can be a loss of community and sense of themselves as they exist outside of majority white spaces. The cost to society, he says, is the perpetuation of systemic inequality. 

Does objectivity exist? Is it possible for news organizations to cut through the noise of the digital age and get citizens the information they need to be responsible participants in democracy? How can journalists build trust with disenchanted readers on both the right and the left of the political spectrum? Speaking to these questions are New York Times executive editor, Joe Kahn, AB '87, AM '90, and Danielle Allen, PhD '01, Harvard's James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics. Their conversation, which took place at the Harvard Club of New York City last November, is moderated by Columbia University School of Journalism Professor Michael Schudson, AM '70, PhD '76. 

For many, the holiday season's combination of festivities, family, and food makes this time of year joyous. If you're one of the nearly 29 million Americans who deal with an eating disorder at some point in your lifetime, though, the holidays can be hell—much like the rest of the year. In this episode of the Colloquy podcast, Harvard Medical School Professor Anne Becker, PhD '90, one of the country's leading experts on eating disorders, talks about why the illnesses are so deadly, why they so often go undiagnosed, and what we can do to help friends or family members who may be suffering. 

As the 2022 midterm elections approach, many citizens are worried about the state of our democracy. And with good reason. Our electoral system increasingly produces leaders who do not represent the will of the majority. The national popular vote was lost, for instance, by two of the last four presidents. In the evenly divided United States Senate, the 578,000 citizens of Wyoming have as much representation as the 39 million of California. And Gerrymandering? Aided by complex computer algorithms, it's easier than ever for political parties to choose their Congressional voters—and harder for majorities to dislodge them.This month, we discuss the history and state of our democracy with Harvard Kennedy School Professor Alex Keyssar. Professor Keyssar's books include The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, which was named the best book in U.S. history for the year 2001 by both the American Historical Association and the Historical Society and was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. In 2004 and 2005, Keyssar chaired the Social Science Research Council's National Research Commission on Voting and Elections. Keyssar's latest book, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? looks at that institution's persistence despite several attempts throughout history to reform it. Alex Keyssar got his PhD from GSAS in 1977.

In this episode of Colloquy, part two of our discussion of guns and public health in America. In part one, we got a sense of the scope of the problem: nearly 400 million guns owned by US civilians, over 45,000 gun deaths in 2020, dramatically elevated risk of suicide among people who own handguns, and much more. So, can anything be done about the problem in a society as politically polarized as ours? David Hemenway, one of the country's leading experts on guns and public health, says yes. If we set aside our prejudices and assumptions and focus on areas of common concern, we can work together to improve safety and public health—even in places where gun rights are sacrosanct. But Hemenway says we shouldn't stop there. There's plenty to be done in states like Massachusetts, where guns are more strictly regulated.David Hemenway is a professor of health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. The author of five books, Professor Hemenway, has written widely on injury prevention, including firearms, violence, and suicide. He headed the pilot for the National Violent Death Reporting System, which provides detailed and comparable information on suicide and homicide. In 2012, he was recognized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as one of the 20 most influential injury and violence professionals over the past 20 years. Professor Hemenway got his PhD from GSAS in 1974. 

In this episode of Colloquy, part one of a discussion about guns and public health in America. We'll move past the horrors of Uvalde—and El Paso, and Parkland, and Orlando, and Las Vegas, and Sandy Hook—and talk about the larger issues: too many gun deaths and injuries, too little training, information, and regulation. Leading us in the discussion is David Hemenway, professor of health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.

"A victory for white life." That's how Illinois Congresswoman Mary Miller described the Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to an abortion at a rally with former President Donald Trump last June. Miller, who had quoted Hitler in a previous speech, later said that she had meant to say "right to life." Jamie Marsella, a Harvard PhD candidate in the history of science, says that in historical terms, Miller's distinction doesn't make much difference. Looking back over a century to the Progressive Era, she finds that maternal and reproductive health policies were driven by racial imperatives. President Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, saw declining birth rates among white people as the country's greatest problem and spoke publicly about, quote, "race suicide.” This month on Colloquy, Marsella discusses the American ideal of motherhood, its racial overtones, and its echoes in the renewed wrangling over reproductive freedom epitomized by the recent Supreme Court decision on abortion. 

“We are living in an age of anxiety,” writes the Tufts University sociologist Natasha Warikoo, PhD '05, one in which even wealthy families who seem to “have it all” are insecure about their status. Her new book, Race at the Top, explores the ways in which educated, well-to-do parents in the prosperous East Coast suburb she calls “Woodcrest” (not its real name), channel their anxieties into their children's schooling. But just what it means to get an excellent education, who decides, and what success looks like are all a matter of contention—often racially tinged—between Woodcrest's white families and those in the growing Asian immigrant community. Meanwhile, Black and Brown families and the poor are on the outside looking in.This month on Colloquy: race and the pursuit of the American dream in suburban schools with Dr. Natasha Warikoo. 

Co-chaired by GSAS Dean Emma Dench, Harvard University's Task Force on Managing Student Mental Health reported in 2020 that nearly one in four graduate students surveyed exhibited symptoms of moderate to severe depression. Nearly one in four exhibited symptoms of moderate to severe generalized anxiety. Underrepresented minority students, first-generation students, low-income students, and students who identified as LGBTQ all were more likely to screen positive for these conditions. This month on Colloquy, we're taking a deep dive into the graduate student mental health crisis with Dr. Emily Bernstein, PhD '20, a clinical psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital's Center for Digital Mental Health. In 2018 while working toward her doctorate, Dr. Bernstein and her cohorts piloted a successful group intervention for GSAS students that's still offered today. Since then, she and her colleagues have published research on ways to address the increasing need for mental health services. She talks about that work, the challenges faced by graduate students, and why she thinks our smartphones could become an important vehicle for delivering mental health care. 

“Torn to pieces.” That's how the American frontiersman Davy Crockett, described the West Tennessee landscape. Nearly 15 years after it was rent asunder by the New Madrid earthquakes from December 1811 to February 1812. The tremors rocked an area that also included the present-day states of Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky and Illinois, reshaping not only the landscape but also the lives of the people who settled there.So why were the quakes all but forgotten by the time of the Civil War? What caused them and could they happen again? Joining us to discuss this long-overlooked disaster in this Earth Month episode of Colloquy is Dr. Conevery Valencius, author of the recent book The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes. Dr. Valencius is a professor of history at Boston College and has taught at Washington University, Saint Louis, Harvard, and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She's been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Debonair Institute for the History of Science and Technology. Dr. Valencius is currently working on a book about earthquakes and the modern energy sector. She received a Ph.D. in the History of Science from GCIS in 1998. 

Today on Colloquy, we bring you a recent conversation with two of the country's leading experts on eastern Europe and national security. Dr. Fiona Hill is a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. She recently served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. From 2006 to 2009, she served as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at The National Intelligence Council. She is author of the 2021 book, There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century and co-author of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. She received her PhD from GSAS in 1998.Engaging Dr. Hill in discussion is Graham Allison,  the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University. Allison is a leading analyst of national security with special interests in nuclear weapons, Russia, China, and decision-making. As Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Clinton Administration, Professor Allison received the Defense Department's highest civilian award, the Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, for "reshaping relations with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to reduce the former Soviet nuclear arsenal." He received his PhD from GSAS in 1968.Next on Colloquy: Russia, Ukraine, and avoiding WWIII.

Wondering why the "COVID 19" you packed on during the pandemic won't go away no matter how hard you workout? Herman Pontzer, PhD '06, associate professor of evolutionary anthropology and global health at Duke University, says that the problem is in our brains, not our biceps—specifically, the way we understand the relationship between weight and exercise. The author of the bestselling 2021 Book, Burn, Pontzer says that human metabolism evolved over millions of years to defend against weight loss. As a result, the calories we burn every day stay within a fairly narrow range whether we're gym rats or couch potatoes. This month on Colloquy, the economics of life with evolutionary anthropologist Herman Pontzer.

The Black Agenda is a new collection of essays that centers the voices of Black experts—particularly women. Whether the issue is climate change, public health, economic inequality, or education, the contributors to The Black Agenda see social and racial justice as integral—not supplemental—to solutions. Along the way, the book interrogates our assumptions about the ways we live and work together in the United States, as well as our notions of where to look for answers. Join us as we discuss The Black Agenda with editor Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, an author, entrepreneur, researcher, and PhD student at GSAS.