School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences

In an opinion piece for The Boston Globe, Prof. Stephanie Seed advocates for Massachusetts to commission new roadside historic markers to include indigenous history, “working with the indigenous nations whose homelands they describe.” “Those markers need not pretend that a single plaque can contain the history of a place,” writes Seed. “But they can name the people who lived there, acknowledge what happened to them, and recognize that their histories did not end when Europeans arrived.”  

Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins NPR’s Scott Simon to discuss Congress tackling affordability in the age of AI by increasing wages. Paying higher prices for goods “is much less of a burden when you see your own salary increase at the same rate or at a higher rate,” says Acemoglu. “When we need to create more jobs for people, create more wage growth opportunities for people, technology is going to make that harder. We have to create an agenda of steering AI in a more pro-worker direction so that rather than automate work, we get AI to actually help employers to find ways of using workers more productively, and that will be a pathway for encouraging firms to create more jobs.” 

Prof. Daron Acemoglu shares his insights on artificial intelligence and the future of work and education during “Ask an Economist,” a virtual event hosted by NPR’s “The Indicator from Planet Money.” “I think there are a lot of pro-teacher AI opportunities where you give better tools to teachers, but teachers still remain central to the learning experience of students,” says Acemoglu. AI “can individualize the teaching experience much more effectively and at low cost in a way that wasn't possible before. And that expands teacher expertise, expands teacher capabilities, enables them to perform new tasks, doesn't replace them, doesn't sideline them.” 

Prof. Matthias Michel speaks to Nature’s Amanda Heidt about our understanding of human consciousness. “People are often troubled by the fact that our understanding [of consciousness] remains somewhat vague,” says Michel. “However, it’s very important to note that definitions in the history of science come at the end of the scientific process, not at the beginning. I’d argue we’re now in the thick of it, which is an exciting place to be.” 

Forbes’ Amy Feldman spotlights Ossium, a startup that retrieves and cryopreserves bone marrow for use in life-saving procedures, co-founded by CEO Kevin Caldwell ‘08. “Ossium’s bone marrow has been used to treat blood cancer and, in one case, severe aplastic anemia, a rare and serious condition where the bone marrow stops making enough new red blood cells,” writes Feldman. “We want to make these blood and immune diseases a thing of the past,” says Caldwell.  

Writing for The Atlantic, Prof. Joshua Bennett shares his vision for a “Great Books” program for students that “centers the history, poetics, and philosophy of science.” Bennett explains: “In my view, we need a renewed emphasis not just on the arts and humanities as such, but on making meaningful connections between humanistic thinking and technological development. We need to clarify, often and in public, why the pursuit of scientific knowledge matters in the first place, as well as what we actually want pathbreaking new technologies to offer us.” 

Alumna Thapanee Techajareonvikul, CEO and president of Berli Jucker, is honored as one of Forbes Asia’s Power Businesswomen 2026, writes reporter Rana Wehbe Watson. Techajareonvikul is “keen to promote gender equality at the company [Berli Jucker], where today more than half the 61,000 workforce is female,” notes Wehbe Watson. “In the top management positions women make up 53%,” says Techajareonvikul.  

William D. Nordhaus PhD ’67, a “Yale economist and Nobel laureate who tabulated the economic wreckage of carbon emissions and influenced climate policy across several presidential administrations,” has died at 85, reports The New York Times’ Lydia DePillis. Nordhaus developed a model over decades, “to balance climate change’s long-term damage with the costs required to contain it,” that has “underpinned dozens of regulations around the world aimed at limiting fossil fuels and seeded the ground for a new field of research that bridges the gap between economics and earth science,” writes DePillis.  

CNN reporter Hadas Gold meets with Prof. Adam Berinsky and Prof. Chara Podimata to learn more about their new tool that tracks how popular AI chatbots source their information and respond to questions related to the midterm elections. “Even if people do not necessarily say that they trust AI, they like what AI gives them, which is a single answer,” says Berinsky. “What worries me is that the average voter, someone who might know a little about politics, but doesn’t know the details, is going to get this definitive answer [from an AI chatbot] that might be based on a different stew of information.”

Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins Bloomberg’s “Mishal Husain Show” to discuss his latest book, “What Happened to Liberal Democracy: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity,” as it relates to democracy in the age of AI and social media. “The thing that gives me hope is that humans are very adaptable,” says Acemoglu. “People, even in this polarized world, have a deep sense of fairness, around [which] we can come together. There are so many shared moral values between the different sides of the aisle in the U.K., [and] the U.S. Polarization, bad leadership [and] social media have obscured them.” 

Mike Beigel ‘70, who invented Mu-Tron III, considered to be “the first commercial envelope filter pedal [that] allowed guitar players to achieve a synthesizer-like sound” used in popular 1970s music, has died at 79, reports Alex Williams for The New York Times. “The Mu-Tron III was the most renowned of several effects pedals that Mr. Beigel invented for Musitronics, a New Jersey-based company that he co-founded in 1972,” writes Williams. Musitronics, “produced a variety of sought-after pedals, including the Mu-Tron Octave Divider, Phasor, Flanger and Bi-Phase, which have been adopted by notables like Neil Young, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins and John Frusciante, the Chili Peppers guitarist.” 

CodeSignal, co-founded by alumnus and CEO Tigran Sloyan, has developed Agentic Skills Intelligence, a new product that “uses AI agents to evaluate the skills people use in their work and links the findings to personalized practice,” writes Forbes’ Ray Ravaglia. CodeSignal has built an AI agent “for each domain in its job taxonomy, such as engineering and sales, along with agents for capabilities that cut across jobs, among them communication and AI literacy,” notes Ravaglia. “The agents draw on systems including Gong, Salesforce, and GitHub, and they score what they find against rubrics the company says are grounded in industrial-organizational psychology.” 

In a conversation with Slate’s Shirin Ali, Prof. Charles Stewart III, director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, discusses a framework to help voters “see important red flags in the hours immediately following Election Day,” detailed in his new paper “The Day After: Threats and Guardrails in the 2026 Election.” “After Election Day, that’s where we’re thinking about getting the final count in,” says Stewart. “We shift into the formal process of canvassing the vote, certifying it, and making sure that we’ve named the winners.”  

An analysis by Prof. Charles Stewart III, director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, found that requests for mail-in ballots were down in Georgia, Maine, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin earlier this month, reports Patrick Marley, Leslie Shapiro and Laura Meckler for The Washington Post. “Those five states can be more fully analyzed than others because they provide data showing how voting patterns compare with the same stage of the election cycle in 2022,” note Marley, Shapiro and Meckler. “In data collected four weeks before Election Day, requests were down most sharply in Georgia — by 50 percent compared with the same point in 2022.” 

Live on GBH’s “The Curiosity Desk,” hosted by Edgar B. Herwick III, Prof. Adam Berinsky joins Boston Globe reporter Aaron Pressman and Kate Gage from the Cooperative Lab Project for a conversation about the impact of AI on the 2026 midterm elections. Berinsky notes that in the runup to the midterms, voters “need to be careful about what they are paying attention to. I think we want to separate out what is new to AI and what is just communication in general,” says Berinsky. “In elections where margins are tens of thousands of votes in states that can determine the presidency, even really small effects matter.”