Faculty

Writing for The Conversation, Prof. Heather Hendershot explores the growth of politically-biased news coverage, comparing Ted Baxter of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” - a fictional news anchor more interested in personal fame than journalistic standards - to today’s pundits. “Ted Baxter thus embodied the ego of the pundit, but without the opinions that often make such a person dangerous,” writes Hendershot. “For all his incompetence, it never occurred to him to air his own political views.”

New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall spotlights a new study by Prof. Charles Stewart III that makes the case that “among Republicans, conspiracism has a potent effect on embracing election denialism, followed by racial resentment.”

Prof. Kieran Setiya reviews “And Finally: Matters of Life and Death” by Henry Marsh for The New York Times. “Many years ago, Marsh read philosophy at Oxford University, but he left for the more practical world of medicine after a year,” writes Setiya. “He finds himself returning in this book to philosophical questions about consciousness and fear of death, though he does so through narrative, not argument, his skills honed by years of storytelling as a clinician recounting case histories.”

A review led Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi has found that a major issue in health-related machine learning models “is the relative scarcity of publicly available data sets in medicine,” reports Emily Sohn for Nature.

Prof. Alan Lightman hosts a new, three-part series titled “Searching, Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science,” reports Jane Levere for Forbes. Lightman “explores timeless and deep questions about man and the universe with ethicists, philosophers, faith leaders and Nobel Prize-winning scientists,” writes Levere.

Wall Street Journal reporter David Wainer spotlights a 2021 study conducted Prof. Andrew Lo and his colleagues that investigated “what happened to innovation when drug companies were no longer able to resort to one of their favorite tactics: paying generic makers to stay off the market.” 

Asimov - an MIT spinout co-founded by Prof. Christopher Voigt, Alec Nielsen PhD ’16, Raja Srinivas PhD ’16, and Boston University Prof. Douglas Densmore - is a biotechnology company developing tools to design living systems, reports John Cumbers for Forbes. “Every cell is capable of computing. Perceiving environmental signals, information processing, turning genes on and off,” says Nielsen. “The ability to engineer this gift of evolution is, in my view, going to be the most meaningful and impactful technology that humans have ever developed.”

New research by Prof. David Autor finds that in the U.S. the fast wage growth underway likely reflects a more competitive labor market for workers, writes Martin Sandbu for the Financial Times. “If more workers than before are shifting from worse-paid to better-paid jobs, then wage acceleration is a welcome indicator of an equally welcome reallocation of labor towards more productive activities,” Sandbu writes.

Writing for The Los Angeles Times, Prof. Simon Johnson predicts that Russia has entered a period of secular decline, noting that the “direct economic impact will be reflected in the world energy market.” Johnson writes: “In 2023 and beyond, the West needs to focus more intently on reducing demand for fossil fuels, particularly oil, and increasing the supply of alternative energy sources outside the control of Russia and OPEC.”

Steve Hartman of CBS News visits Prof. Anette “Peko” Hosoi to explore the science behind whether a single act of kindness can spread around the world. “I think if people understand you don’t have to do a heavy lift, you have to do a little bit of a lift, but if everyone does it [an act of kindness], it’s a small lift for everyone,” explains Hosoi.

Writing for Scientific American, John Fialka spotlights Form Energy, an MIT spinout designing an iron-air battery that “could help decarbonize the nation’s power sector more cheaply than lithium-ion storage systems.” Fialka explains that “unlike current lithium-ion batteries that require expensive materials mostly from other countries such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite, the proposed battery stores electricity using widely available iron metal.” 

Sally Kornbluth, the 18^th president of MIT, speaks with Boston Magazine reporter Jonathan Soroff about why she is excited to lead MIT, Smoots, Boston weather and sports, and how to encourage more girls and women to pursue STEM careers.

CNN reporter Oscar Holland spotlights the late Prof. Harold Eugene Edgerton ’31 and his work in pioneering flash technology. Edgerton “is considered the father of high-speed photography,” writes Holland. “Camera shutter speeds were too slow to capture a bullet flying at 2,800 feet per second, but his stroboscopic flashes – a precursor to modern-day strobe lights – created bursts of light so short that a well-timed photograph, taken in an otherwise dark room, made it appear as if time had stood still.”

President L. Rafael Reif, who will return to the faculty following a Sabbatical, reflects on his tenure and how his upbringing shaped his outlook on education. “For many, MIT’s reputation is one that is defined by innovative research – a technology hub built on drive and hustle,” writes Nour Saudi. “But when Rafael Reif first visited the school in the spring of 1979, he found a campus full of down-to-earth people who wanted to make the world better, something he could get behind.”   

Financial Times reporter Jonathan Derbyshire spotlights “Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way” by Prof. Kieran Setiya. “But that doesn’t mean either that ‘Life Is Hard’ is a self-help book, and it’s all the better and more interesting for it,” writes Derbyshire. “Setiya warns readers at the outset that they are not going to find in it ‘five tips for overcoming grief’ or ‘how to succeed without even trying.’”