Faculty

Insights into groundbreaking faculty research, innovative projects, and academic thought leadership across Harvard’s schools and institutes.

Five Questions with Michèle Duguay

A Harvard scholar of music theory on how streaming services have changed the experience of music

by Olivia Farrar

Dead or Alive? Seems Like a Simple Question, But...

The "Ideas" section in this week's Boston Sunday Globe had an article exploring how the advances of modern medicine have made "death" a subjective term...

The Talking Cure

For decades, insurers and risk-management departments have told doctors that if they make a mistake, the last thing they should do is admit it...

Inevitable Mistakes, Avoidable Harm

The culture of medicine has long tried to keep doctors from making mistakes by indoctrinating them to believe that they shouldn’t make...

Born Digital

Forty years ago they were “Born Free,” 20 years ago they were “Born in the U.S.A.,” but today kids are born digital, and...

by Paul Gleason

Life's Speed Limit

Mutation is the engine of evolution: organisms would not be able to evolve new characteristics if their DNA did not randomly acquire small...

by Courtney Humphries

When Minnie Turns Mickey

If males are from Mars and females from Venus, as self-help author John Gray memorably suggested, sex hormones usually get the blame for placing...

by Erin O’Donnell

"Tyrant Fever's" Trigger

When an infection assails the body, the response is predictable. Fever, loss of appetite, fatigue, that achy feeling—we never get just one...

by Elizabeth Gudrais

Saving Money, Oil, and the Climate

The United States is in urgent need of a comprehensive, rational, and—above all—honest policy to guide its energy future, a policy...

Trails of Tears, and Hope

The hamlet of Alkali Lake, about 100 miles north of Vancouver, is home to one of a handful of surviving Shuswap bands of Native Americans in...

by Craig Lambert

Interest Rate Insight

Wondering what in the world is going on with the economy lately? Let Sebastian Mallaby explain.