FEBRUARY 2022
MIT SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES, ARTS, AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
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KUDOS
ECONOMICS
Susan Collins PhD'84 named President/CEO of Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
Dr. Collins is currently provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Michigan, and the Gramlich Collegiate Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics.
Federal Reserve Bank story | Boston Globe story | New York Times story
Dr. Susan Collins; photo by Peter Davis, courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
"Dr. Collins brings the technical expertise and insight to contribute to policymaking and the leadership ability to head the organization. She is deeply committed to serving the public, engaging with constituents, and advancing economic stability, opportunity, and prosperity for the region and nation."
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Marc Aidinoff; photo by Maria Iacobo
MIT HASTS DOCTORAL PROGRAM
Marc Aidinoff PhD'22 named Chief of Staff for White House OSTP
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced that Aidinoff, a science policy expert, will coordinate the work of the Director and the divisions of Climate and Environment, Energy, Health and Life Sciences, Science and Society, Technology, and Policy.
White House announcement | Related Profile | MIT HASTS Doctoral Program
Nilma Dominique, lecturer in Portuguese, in the MIT Global Languages section
GLOBAL LANGUAGES
Nilma Dominique honored with 2022 MLK Jr. Leadership Award
Dominique, a lecturer in Portuguese in Global Languages, received the award, given to members of the MIT community who embody Dr. King’s commitment to community service, integrity, leadership, and creativity.
Story | MLK Awards page
Pierra-Olivier Gourinchas, PhD'96
ECONOMICS
Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, PhD'96, appointed Chief Economist of IMF
Gourinchas will succeed Gita Gopinath as chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. His main research interests are in international macroeconomics and finance.
Story at Bloomberg
Kate Brown, Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science; photo by Jon Sachs
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY
Kate Brown receives grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities
Brown, the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science, has been awarded an NEH grant for a project is titled "Little Gardens Everywhere: The Self-Provisioning City in the Long 20th Century."
NEH Announcement | List of Grants | Kate Brown webpage
HISTORY
Harriet Ritvo named a Fellow of the Linnean Society
Ritvo, the Arthur J. Connor Professor of History Emeritus works in the fields of environmental and natural history, the history of human-animal relations, and British and British empire history. She is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Harriet Ritvo webpage
Four of Harriet Ritvo's acclaimed books
ECONOMICS
Simon Jäger receives 2022 Research Fellowship from Alfred Sloan Foundation
Awarded to 118 of the brightest young scientists across the U.S. and Canada, the Sloan Research Fellowships are among the most competitive awards available to early-career researchers. Jager holds the Silverman Family Career Development Chair in the MIT Department of Economics.
Press Release | Simon Jäger
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY
Sherry Turkle named 2021 National Jewish Book Award winner
Turkle was awarded the 2021 Krauss Family Award in Memory of Simon & Shulamith (Sofi) Goldberg for her memoir The Empathy Diaries.
Award announcement | About the book
SCIENCE WRITING
The Memory Thief named a finalist for PEN Science Writing Award | Lauren Aguirre '86
Aguirre's book is a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, which exemplifies literary excellence on the subject of the physical or biological sciences and communicates complex scientific concepts to a lay audience.
PEN Awards | Aguirre's website | About the book
MEDIA DIGEST
DEMOCRACY MATTERS
A police flash-bang grenade illuminates the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol Buidling; Photo: Leah Millis/Reuters
GLOBE AND MAIL
The American polity might collapse. Canada must prepare | Tad Homer Dixon PhD '89
"Today, as I watch the unfolding crisis in the United States, I see a political and social landscape flashing with warning signals." SSP alum Dixon thinkd a right-wing dictatorship is possible in the U.S. by 2030.
Story in the Globe and Mail
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Why millions think it is Trump who cannot tell a lie | Charles Stewart III cited
Stewart, a political scientist at MIT, was blunt in his analysis: "Whereas Reagan spoke of the 11th Commandment, Trump destroyed it, along with many of the first 10."
Story at The New York Times
THE NEW YORK TIMES
We need to think the unthinkable about our country | MIT Fellow Steven Simon
Simon writes, "A year after the January 6 storming of the Capitol...the right has sustained its support for Donald Trump and continued its assault on American democratic norms."
Commentary at The New York Times
BROOKINGS
Assessing the U.S. right-wing terror threat | Daniel L. Byman
MIT Security Studies Program alum Byman writes, "The good news is that deaths from terrorism and other extreme forms of violence was low; the bad news is that violent rhetoric and threats are becoming normalized."
Story at the Brookings Institution
ECONOMICS | SHAPING THE WORK OF THE FUTURE
HEWLETT FOUNDATION
MIT Economics receives Hewlett Foundation grant to study job quality
The department's new Shaping the Work of the Future Program will advance the research agenda and increase multi-disciplinary cooperation.
Story at SHASS News | New York Times story | Hewlett Press Release
Industrial worker; photo via iStock
"The MIT Economics Department Shaping the Future of Work Program will analyze forces contributing to the erosion of job quality and labor market opportunity for workers without college degrees...and consider institutional, technological, and policy innovations that can change this trajectory."
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Economists look at the role of tech in rising inequality | Daron Acemoglu
Acemoglu has been making the case against what he describes as “excessive automation...We need to redirect technology so it works for people,” Mr. Acemoglu said, “not against them.”
Story at The New York Times
FORBES
Work Of The Future: better jobs in an age of intelligent machines | David Mindell
Mindell writes, "How distant seem the days of 2018, when techno-pundits grew so alarmed at the hype of technology that they worried the end of human work was only a few years away."
Commentary at Forbes
FAST COMPANY
Less than 35% of $800 billion PPP loans went to workers | David Autor and colleagues
A study co-authored by MIT economists estimates that only “somewhere between 23% and 34% of PPP dollars went to workers who would’ve otherwise lost their jobs. The rest...landed in the pockets of either the company’s owners or shareholders.”
Story at Fast Company | Conversation at WBUR
Illustration by Otto Dettmer, The Economist
THE ECONOMIST
Economists are revising their views on robots and jobs
Graduate student Joonas Tuhkuri finds that at Finnish firms “adoption of advanced technologies led to increases in hiring.” Meanwhile a new book by David Autor, David Mindell, and Elisabeth Reynolds concludes that “even if robots do not create widespread joblessness, they may have helped create an environment where the rewards are ‘skewed towards the top.”
Story at The Economist | About the book: The Work of the Future (MIT Press)
FORBES
AI creates job disruption, not job destruction | Task Force on the Work of the Future
It's a level of disruption that is echoed by a report from MIT's Task Force on the Work of the Future, which...reminds us that over 60% of the jobs of today did not exist a generation ago, with technology driving an evolution in the kind of work we do."
Story at Forbes
WIRED
Now you can rent a robot worker—for less than paying a human | Daron Acemoglu
It’s unclear—even to economists—what impact the growing use of robots will have on the supply of jobs. Research from Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, economists at MIT and Boston University, respectively, suggests that the adoption of robots from 1990 to 2020 resulted in fewer jobs and lower wages overall.
Story at Wired
FINANCIAL TIMES
Automation exacts a toll in inequality | Daron Acemoglu
Politicians and policymakers are homing in on the work of MIT professor Acemoglu, who testified at a select committee hearing to the US House of Representatives in November that automation is responsible for 50-70 per cent of the economic disparities experienced between 1980-2016.
Story at The Financial Times
THE ARTS
Collage: MIT SHASS Communications
BISKINIK | NEWSPAPER OF THE CHOCTAW NATION
MIT classical composer Charles Shadle releases suite of Choctaw-inspired piano pieces
Shadle worked with the Choctaw Nation to ensure that the information about the pieces was respectful to the Choctaw people: “We wanted to make sure that we had gotten that right, that it was not only respectful of Choctaw people but helped to put information out in a broad community because the news story was shared all over the world."
Story in Biskinik (pg. 3)
LA TIMES
As a Muslim filmmaker, I want to tell my own story | Assia Boundaoui
Boundaoui, a fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, writes in an op-ed for the LA Times, "At worst, we are condemned as monsters; at best, we are objects of pity in stories that attempt to 'humanize' us. We so rarely get to tell our stories from our own lens."
Commentary at the LA Times
ARS NOVA
John Harbison's opera "The Great Gatsby" produced for Semper Oper Dresden
"Harbison is a master at capturing mood, psychology, and emotion in his characterful orchestral writing…the best thing his opera does is dramatize the subversive nature of the novel, eroding the forced Roaring ‘20s gaiety and emptiness with dark currents." (Los Angeles Times).
More about the opera | View Trailer on YouTube
"Mozart's Don Giovanni and Verdi's Rigoletto. Harbison belongs in that company."
— The San Francisco Chronicle
BEING HUMAN
Detail: Illustration by Nico Krijno, for The Atlantic
THE ATLANTIC
This is no way to be human | Alan Lightman
Lightman, Professor of the Practice in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program, writes that "With all of its success, our technology has greatly diminished our direct experience with nature....We are at war with our ancestral selves."
Essay in The Atlantic
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
The world as an illustion of technology | Kieran Setiya
MIT Philosopher Setiya writes about life in simulated worlds and moral questions in his review of David Chalmer's new book, Reality+: "David Chalmers could be right that virtual life is as good as it gets, not something to regret or fear. But that’s a bet I’d prefer not to make."
Commentary in Times Literary Supplement
© Christopher J. Morris/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Group chats are falling apart | Sherry Turkle
Turkle, an MIT professor who studies the role technology plays in our social lives (see her memoir, The Empathy Diaries), said that many of the cues and clues of face-to-face conversations and phone calls are nowhere to be found in group chats.
Story at The New York Times | About the book
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
A quantum experiment explained why we don’t fall through our chairs | David Kaiser
The results of that experiment are unlikely to quell the philosophical diatribes around the meaning of quantum measurement, says Kaiser, a physicist and historian of science at MIT. But the impact of the Stern-Gerlach...led physicists to realize “that there was some internal characteristic of a quantum particle that really doesn’t map on to analogies to things like planets and stars."
Story at Scientific American
SCIENCE WRITING
A child waits by the family's belongings in the hotel the day they were evicted; photo via Elianel Clinton/Buzzfeed News
BUZZFEED NEWS
“I have nowhere to go”: Evicted from emergency housing | Zahra Hirji, SM '13
Hirji writes, "As the climate crisis triggers more intense and more frequent disasters...post-disaster programs may fall short of what families with low incomes actually need to recover."
Story at BuzzFeed News
CIVIL EATS
Dust is a growing problem. What role does farmland play? | Virginia Gewin, KSJ Fellow
With a growing set of tools, scientists are digging into questions about the links between modern agriculture, drought, and rising incidents of dust storms and respiratory illness.
Story at Civil Eats
THE NEW YORK TIMES
New York deer infected with Omicron, study finds | Emily Anthes, SM '06
Anthes reports that white-tailed deer on Staten Island have been found carrying the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the coronavirus. The results are likely to intensify concerns that deer...could become a reservoir for the virus and a potential source of new variants.
Story at The New York Times
EDUCATION
Third-grade teacher Cara Denison livestreams her class at Rogers International School; photo John Moore/Getty Images
WGBH
COVID-19 surge exposes Mass. educational inequities | Justin Reich
“As much as the pandemic has exacerbated these inequalities, it's also bringing to light very longstanding inequalities,” said Reich, director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab.
Story at WGBH
SECURITY STUDIES
Ukrainian soldiers take part in annual joint military exercises; photo via Yuriy Dyachyshyn/AFP via Getty Images
VOX
How America’s NATO expansion obsession plays into the Ukraine crisis | Barry Posen
"NATO had to find something to do or go out of business, and these people who grew up all their lives alongside it would not let it go out of business,” said Posen, an MIT political scientist.
Story at Vox
THE WASHINGTON POST
Russia and China’s stronger ties are a headache for the U.S. | M. Taylor Fravel
Fravel, director of the MIT Security Studies Program, said Russia shouldn’t count too much on Beijing’s support. China buys a significant amount of military equipment from Ukraine and would be caught in the middle, he said.
Story at The Washington Post
POLITICO
U.N., IOC and sponsors under fire as Beijing Games begin | M. Taylor Fravel
China’s ambassador to the U.S., Qin Gang, issued a blunt warning in an interview with NPR last week that moves toward Taiwan independence “most likely will involve China and the United States … in a military conflict.”
Story at Politico
ALLEVIATING POVERTY
Photo by Olga Korica, The New York Times
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Cash aid to impoverished mothers increases brain activity in babies | J-PAL
A study that provided mothers living in poverty with cash stipends for the first year of their children’s lives appears to have changed the babies’ brain activity in ways associated with stronger cognitive development, a finding with policy implications for the child tax credit.
Story at The New York Times
FAST COMPANY
A one-time economic boost changes lives for at least a decade | Abhijit Banerjee
“There’s a long traditional view that maybe these people aren’t able to sustain themselves,” says Banerjee, a Nobel Prize-winning professor of economics at MIT and coauthor of the recently published paper looking at this study’s impact 10 years later. “This study was an attempt to challenge that view."
Story at Fast Companyz
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Published 17 February 2022