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Jay Scheib receives Obie award for best director
Economist Amy Finkelstein wins the Clark Medal
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Commencement
on June 8
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Lepage workshop:
a master shares his creative methods with MIT students
Electronic tolls ease congestion on roadways but distance voters from the act of paying taxes. Economist Amy Finkelstein has found that drivers who use E-ZPass and similar technologies rarely even know how much they are paying in tolls. The result? Higher tolls without the political consequences usually associated with a rise in taxes.
Fox Harrell brings together 55 thought leaders to advance using technology to better understand society—and using the humanities and arts to build creative computational systems.
Visit the juncture of science, arts, and humanities
Political scientist Jens Hainmueller ties together qualitative and quantitative ways of thinking about politics and society. His goal is to cut through opinion and hyperbole with evidence that can meaningfully guide social and economic policies.
In Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision, historian David Kaiser examines a series of turning points — crucial decisions that helped define the MIT we know today.
Taking on one of the most significant questions in scholarship, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson of Harvard assert that above all else, political institutions—not culture or natural resources—determine the wealth of nations.
In 1787-88, Americans debated whether to adopt the Constitution—the most consequential debate in U.S. history. In Ratification, historian Pauline Maier delivers the first comprehensive account of a national drama that continues to shape the country today. The New York Times calls Ratification an "ur-text" of American politics.
Form a more perfect understanding
The history of natural philosophy, experimentalism, theater, politics, and religion all converge in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes,” a play that emerged from a class in the School’s Theater Arts section. The play, which opened in London, explores the link between the rise of experimental science and the closing of England’s theaters.
Victorian novels, released as weekly or monthly serials, could take more than a year to read. They were savored, shared and discussed publicly. HyperStudio and the Literature Section have teamed up to offer a glimpse into this engaged, social world of reading through the Serial Experience Project.
Japan relies heavily on nuclear power because of a lack of resources for other energy forms. CNN.com speaks with Richard J. Samuels, Ford International Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for International Studies, about Japan's nuclear power history.
CNN interview with Richard Samuels
Questions of morality have challenged humanity from time immemorial. Within the Philosophy Department, Professor Judy Thomson's "trolley problem," first posed 30 years ago, continues to stir debate about moral decision-making. Today, her work forms the basis for a wealth of research in the rapidly growing field of moral psychology.
Peter Diamond PhD '63, Institute Professor and professor of economics at MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, has won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for 2010. Diamond received the award along with Dale Mortensen of Northwestern University and Christopher Pissarides of the London School of Economics, for his formative work in "search theory."
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The roots of modern environmental consciousness go back to 19th century England, when opponents of a Lake District dam were among the first to argue that everyone has a stake in the landscape. In a recent book, History Professor Harriet Ritvo explores why nature's advocates did not prevail then—and often still don't.
"History is both what happens, and how we think about what happens. The big questions I am asking have to do with how history—in both senses—is changing in this age of human empire.”
— Rosalind Williams
Mainstream media focuses mostly on clichés—from swamis to scientists. To create a more meaningful portrait of the South Asian American experience, documentary filmmaker Vivek Bald explores a rich, nuanced, and nearly unknown story of identity in his current project, “In Search of Bengali Harlem.”
Data show that between 4 million and 6 million votes were lost in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Ever since, the School’s political scientists have been working to create a better electoral system.
Globalization isn’t just about wider markets. It’s also a grassroots cultural movement, evident in the flow of trends and fan cultures from east to west and back again. Through a MISTI Global Seed Fund, MIT students are exploring these forces in a “live action animé" performance—giant robots and all—in Japan.
Text searches have gotten more and more sophisticated, yet no similar tools exist for examining music. Now an advanced computer framework being developed in the School's Music Section promises to revolutionize the field, providing researchers with the tools they need to address previously intractable problems in musicology.
Ruth Perry, Professor in the School's Women and Gender Studies program, is discovering that folk ballads played a key role in the Scottish Enlightenment. A significant repertoire of these ballads—the earliest known poetry in the English language—came to light thanks to one woman: Anna Gordon Brown.
Can today's middle schoolers, collaborating with classmates online, learn to help solve global challenges? The scientific process is a mystery to too many children. Comparative Media Studies is developing online games that re-engage kids with science.
The U.S. government forbids the sale of raw milk cheeses aged under 60 days. Artisan cheesemakers say this rule is arbitrary and may compromise the integrity of their products. Anthropologist Heather Paxson explores the issues of safety and quality in our food.
Based in the School's Literature section, the MIT Shakespeare Project harnesses web technology to give scholars unprecedented access to Shakespeare's many forms—from the First Folio of 1623 to Richard Burton's Hamlet of 1964 to a modern King Lear performed in Mandarin.
China has the largest standing army in the world—2.3 million strong—and has been pouring money into its military budget for years. But that doesn’t mean it’s planning to flex those muscles abroad, says M. Taylor Fravel of the Security Studies Program.
Evelyn Fox Keller, professor emerita in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, is a leading historian of biology whose 2010 book, The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture, argues that it is a mistake to think that heredity and the environment (nature and nurture) can be separated when “the entanglement” of these two factors “is not only immensely intricate, but is there from the start.”
Writing the history of any conflict presents the challenge of bias. So what would happen if both sides could agree on what happened? HyperStudio is helping bring policymakers together—with access to a wealth of original documents—to reexamine the U.S.-Iran relationship. History may never be the same.
Keeping children healthy is a good first step. Researchers from the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) have found that in some areas of the world, simply keeping children free of worms can cut absenteeism by a quarter.
Some of the subtleties of language can be challenging to explain using traditional linguistic analysis. For example, is “most” the same as “more than half"? Associate Professor Martin Hackl’s experimental approach to answering this question is expanding the field of linguistics.
In a word: Everybody. Science and technology so permeate contemporary society—from medicine to climate change to food—that we need an understanding of science simply to make informed decisions about everyday life. Science journalists play a major role in the public understanding of science, and in the School’s Knight Science Journalism Fellowships program, outstanding journalists from around the globe hone their skills and perspectives for this work.
Undoubtedly, and the millions of visual artifacts lying unseen in museum storage vaults amount to lost knowledge. "Visualizing Cultures," an initiative of the School's Foreign Languages and Literatures section, remedies this situation—bringing powerful historical images to light online, along with scholarly commentary to help researchers understand what they are seeing.
When the engineer describes her first Legos, the chef his rolling pin—neither is just talking about objects. Individually evocative, objects carry different meanings for each of us. Professor Sherry Turkle of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, researches the relationships we build with the things in our lives, with a focus on why and how things matter.
"Soon after arriving at MIT, I came to realize that more than teaching subjects, I have really been teaching students.... I hope that I've taught them to take flight, to soar above and beyond the usual and the expected."
— Edward Baron Turk
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At a Starr Forum, three MIT experts discuss Japan's nuclear past, present, and future from a political and engineering perspective. The presentation includes an eyewitness account of the crisis and the Japanese government's response. Speakers are Professors Richard Samuels, Kenneth Oye, and Michael Golay.
Iran wants to stand tall in the world—providing its own nuclear power. The United States opposes any uranium enrichment in Iran—to forestall nuclear armament. Jim Walsh, a research associate in the Center for International Studies, proposes a solution to this standoff—and policymakers are listening.
Award-winning science writer Robert Kanigel has spent his career exploring the evolution of society through a series of unique lenses that reveal what we have gained from modernity—and what we’ve lost. In his latest book, On An Irish Island, Kanigel examines the path not taken.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology