Colloquy
Episodes
A Breakthrough in Studying Diseases of the Brain
05 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, is a neurodegenerative disease linked to repeated head injuries. It has been found in professional athletes,...
“Was the American Revolution a Civil War?” and Other Thorny Questions about the Nation’s Founding
07 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Us against the redcoats. That's how we often think of the American Revolution. In Ken Burns’ latest film, scheduled to drop later this month on PBS,...
In the Snare of the Devil: What Really Caused the Salem Witch Crisis
03 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“How long have you been in the snare of the devil?” That was the lose‑lose question asked of those—mostly women—accused of witchcraft in Ess...
What Happens When Your Brain Goes to the Supermarket and Other Stories of Human Adaptability
05 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We all want to live as long and as well as possible. Diet and exercise are crucial, but how can we make sense of the flood of information, which somet...
Living Tombs: Toward a Fluid Understanding of Architectural Space
29 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
2025 Harvard Horizons Scholar Sergio Alarcón Robledo explores ancient Egyptian architecture through an interdisciplinary approach that sits at the cr...
Empire of String: Unraveling the Enigma of Inka Khipus
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Inka Empire, the largest in the pre-Columbian Americas, is renowned for its impressive engineering feats, including an extensive road network and ...
Embracing Twilight: Older Women Poets of the Slavic World and the Unfurling of Their Voices
30 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The figure of the young, tragic male poet has long dominated cultural narratives about artistic brilliance and early death. But what if poetic genius ...
Pitfalls of Anthropomorphism: Misunderstanding AI’s Potential
21 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Raphaël Raux's 2025 Harvard Horizon project, "Human Learning about AI," conducted in collaboration with fellow PhD student Bnaya Dreyfuss, explores h...
Law versus Democracy: Why Courts Defend or Undermine Democracy in Israel, Turkey, and Beyond
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As a PhD candidate in government at Harvard's Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2025 Harvard Horizons Scholar Andrew O'Donohue ...
Sappho Lost and Found: Reading Sappho in the Renaissance
20 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
2025 Harvard Horizons Scholar Katherine Horgan explores the legacy of the ancient Greek poet Sappho in her project, "Living Sappho: Imitation, Imagina...
How Your Neighbors Shape Your Politics
06 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We hate each other more than we used to, at least where politics is concerned. Measures of effective polarization, the animosity that Democrats have f...
Tackling the Global Youth Mental Health Challenge: Lessons from Psychotherapy Research in Kenya
23 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
2025 Harvard Horizons Scholar Katherine Venturo-Conerly is on a mission to revolutionize access to effective mental health care—particularly for you...
How the Problems of Home Pierce the College Bubble
02 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
A Step Closer to Personalized Medicine
04 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine your doctor could precisely predict your personal risk of disease, diagnose the cause of illness with pinpoint accuracy when it did occur, and...
A Cheaper Way to Make Drugs?
07 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 Org...
How Elite Universities Grapple with the Legacy of Slavery—and Why It Matters
07 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The history of slavery in the United States, including at the country's colleges and universities, is deeply disturbing and painful. But Professor Sar...
Is AI Coming for Your Job?
03 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Technological disruption of human occupations is nothing new. In recent decades, blue-collar occupations have borne the brunt of the upheavals—think...
Bob Dylan: From "A Complete Unknown" to "A Prophet Without God"
06 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
With filmgoers buzzing about the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, University of Pennsylvania Professor Jeffrey Edward Green, PhD ’07, says that...
Beyond 2024—Feminism and the Future of US Politics
01 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“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 yea...
How Reliable Are Election Forecasts?
04 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Just after Labor Day, American University Professor and Harvard Griffin GSAS alumnus, Allan Lichtman predicted a victory for Democratic candidate Kama...
How to Succeed in Business by Failing—Intelligently
06 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
The ‘Invisible Threat’ Contaminating Our Water
30 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent, they’re everywhere, and they're probably bad for you. PFAS are probably bad for you. Some...
Testing and the Origins of Big Data
23 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 huma...
Weary at Work
16 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 stru...
A More Accurate Map of the Universe
09 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Punished in Utero
26 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
A Faster, Greener Way to Meet the World’s Demand for Data
19 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Speaking of the Rightless, Envisioning New Rights
05 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Like the poetry of his fellow Latin Americans, the scholarship of Mauro Lazarovich, PhD '24, is not only humanist but also humanitarian. “I wanted t...
African American Encounters with Property and the Long Shadow of Slavery
07 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In advance of Juneteenth 2024, we speak with University of Texas Professor Shirley Thompson, PhD '01, author of the forthcoming book No More Auction B...
Meditation Changes Your Brain. Here's How.
03 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 m...
What Abraham Means to Jews, Christians, and Muslims
05 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Glide Path: How to Get the Most from ChatGPT
01 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
How Slavery's Legacy Lives on in the Racial Wealth Gap
01 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
How Universities Can Address the Crisis in Democracy
05 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
According to the 2023 Democracy Report of the VDEM Institute based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, the advances and global levels of democr...
Why We're Obese—and What We Can Do about It
24 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Obesity in the United States has reached epidemic proportions, affecting millions of Americans and costing the healthcare system billions of dollars e...
A Healing Attempt for Race-Based Anxiety
03 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This month on Colloquy, we speak with PhD student Grant Jones about Healing Attempt, his collaboration with Grammy Award-winning artist Esperanza Spau...
What We Learned from the COVID Economy
06 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Buying Time in the Fight Against Climate Change
01 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July 2023 was actually the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. The heat wave cause...
A Short History of Technology and Thought
25 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Every technology is accompanied by a cultural technique says the artist and media scholar Emilio Vavarella, a PhD candidate in film and visual studies...
An Air Conditioner That Won’t Warm the Planet
11 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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’...
Laboratories of War
28 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, thousands enlisted in the US military, were deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and ...
How 'Hot Vax Summer' Turned Cold
14 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Starting July 4, 2021, and lasting past the holiday, members of the LGBTQ community converged on Provincetown, Massachusetts, for a holiday that was s...
Suspicious Minds
30 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Growing up in Ferguson, Missouri, Harvard Griffin GSAS PhD student Steven Kasparek witnessed violence. He experienced it himself. He was left with som...
When Home Is the Barrel of a Gun
16 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 2014, Boko Haram terrorists kidnapped 276 female students from their dormitory at the Government Girls Secondary School in the Nigerian town of Chi...
A Cosmic Game of Battleship
02 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 univer...
Vets, Trauma, and the Search for Meaning
05 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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...
The Best Poetry Critic in America
21 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For this special Poetry Month bonus episode of Colloquy, a conversation with Harvard Professor Helen Vendler, PhD ’60—once called “the best poet...
The Secret Teachings of Jesus
07 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“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 fort...
Colloquy Podcast: The Debt Ceiling—and Beyond—with Laurence Kotlikoff
03 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As politicians and pundits wring their hands over the debt ceiling, the economist and Boston University professor Laurence Kotlikoff, PhD ’77, says ...
How Good Do Black Students Have to Be?
03 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“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 e...
New York Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn and Harvard’s Danielle Allen on Journalism and Its Discontents
13 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Eating disorders can be lethal. We don't treat them that way.
10 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 A...
Midterms and Minority Rule
04 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As the 2022 midterm elections approach, many citizens are worried about the state of our democracy. And with good reason. Our electoral system increas...
Beyond the Massacres, Part II: Solutions for Red States and Blue
21 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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:...
Beyond the Massacres Part I: Guns and Public Health
07 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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, an...
Maternal Eugenics: The Dark History Behind the Dobbs Decision
12 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
"A victory for white life." That's how Illinois Congresswoman Mary Miller described the Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to...
Race at the Top
16 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“We are living in an age of anxiety,” writes the Tufts University sociologist Natasha Warikoo, PhD '05, one in which even wealthy families who see...
Graduate Student Mental Health Crisis
12 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 graduat...
“It Was Hell”: The Forgotten Earthquakes that Reshaped America
05 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Torn to pieces.” That's how the American frontiersman Davy Crockett, described the West Tennessee landscape. Nearly 15 years after it was rent as...
Russia, Ukraine, and Avoiding WWIII
11 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 Hil...
The Economics of Life: Why Exercising More May Not Help You Lose Weight
04 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 profes...
The Black Agenda
14 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Black Agenda is a new collection of essays that centers the voices of Black experts—particularly women. Whether the issue is climate change, pub...
Inclusion, Justice, and Love in an Apocalyptic Moment
16 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As the Christmas holiday approaches, Rev. Dr. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, PhD ’13, says that the United States is in the midst of an “apocalyptic mom...
“We have our medicine”: Trauma and Resilience in Indigenous Communities
22 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The sociologist Blythe George, PhD '20, highlights the vibrance of rural indigenous communities amid the trauma that is the legacy of settler colonial...
Who's Afraid of Inflation?
27 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What's behind the price hikes on cars, food, fuel, and many other items? Is there too much money in the economy? Is it a supply chain problem? And is ...
The Incredible Shrinking Vaccine Efficacy
01 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
COVID-19 infections are surging again in the U.S., despite the availability of vaccines that are both safe and effective. In the inaugural episode of ...