Several years ago, MIT anthropologist Héctor Beltrán ’07 attended an event in Mexico billed as the first all-women’s hackathon in Latin America. But the programmers were not the only women there. When the time came for the hackathon pitches, a large number of family members arrived to watch. “Grandmothers and mothers showed up to cheer […]
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In many respects, minerals are a matter of money and power. Fortunes are won through resource extraction, while mining companies throw their weight around and environmental advocates try to stop them. It is a familiar scenario anywhere. But sometimes this story contains surprising elements. MIT Associate Professor Megan Black has found a rich seam of […]
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Richard Ovenden was dressed appropriately for the start of Banned Books Week. He proudly displayed the American Library Association’s “Free people read freely” T-shirt as he approached the podium at Hayden Library on Oct. 2. Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian at the University of Oxford, spoke about the willful destruction of recorded knowledge for an event titled […]
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Suppose you need to be on today’s only ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, which leaves at 2 p.m. It takes about 30 minutes (on average) to drive from where you are to the terminal. What time should you leave? This is one of many common real-life examples used by Richard “Dick” Larson, a post-tenure professor in […]
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With a new academic year under way in the U.S., imagine you have been named superintendent of your local public school district. What changes would you make? How would you make them? That second question matters greatly. Despite supposedly stark differences among people, data show that most U.S. parents like their local public schools. At […]
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MIT’s French+ Initiative was recently designated as a “Center of Excellence in French Studies” by the Embassy of France, during a 2022 campus visit by Philippe Etienne, then-ambassador of France to the United States. The French+ Initiative gathers scholars working across the humanities and social sciences at MIT whose research and teaching center on the […]
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Ocean waves are easy on the eyes, but hard on the brain. How do they form? How far do they travel? How do they break? Those magnificent waves you see crashing into the shore are complex. “I’ve often asked this question,” the eminent wave scientist Walter Munk told MIT Professor Stefan Helmreich several years ago. […]
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Steven Gonzalez is a PhD candidate in the MIT Doctoral Program in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS), where he researches the environmental impacts of cloud computing and data centers in the United States, Iceland, and Puerto Rico. He is also an author. Writing under the name E.G. Condé, he recently published his first book, […]
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