A Q&A with author Laura Kipnis When professor Laura Kipnis — author of Against Love — found herself holed up with her partner in a tiny apartment in New York City, it was a scenario she would never have predicted — yet it forced her to reexamine the way the global phenomenon was affecting her personal…

The pathbreaking MIT professor on her new memoir, and the past, present, and future of our efforts to make technology feel human — In the fall of 1976, Sherry Turkle was recruited to the faculty of MIT to join what would soon become the program on Science, Technology, and Society — one of the nation’s first. …

Law professor Rosa Brooks on what she learned from five years with the Metropolitan Police — Rosa Brooks was a fortysomething Georgetown Law School professor in 2015 when she applied to join the reserves of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department. Being “white, female, over-educated, brought up on the political left,” as she puts it, she did not fit the stereotype of a cop (even a…

In his new book, Robert Putnam offers lessons from the Progressive Era — It might seem that America today has reached all-time peaks in income inequality, racial strife, and political partisanship. …

A Q&A with Harvard professor Debora Spar, author of ‘Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny’ — What happens when the machines we create begin to change us? This question lies at the heart of Debora Spar’s new book Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny, an examination of the way technology is upending our intimate and emotional lives. In Work Mate Marry Love…

In the non-linear trajectory of life, change is vital — In recent years, resilience — or “grit” — has emerged as the ultimate self-help virtue. As John Patrick Leary recently wrote in Teen Vogue, the “resilience industry acknowledges that we all go through rough patches, but it insists that our setbacks will only make us stronger,” which clearly appeals in…

Harvard lecturer and ‘Think for Yourself’ author Vikram Mansharamani explains his strategies for strengthening common sense in a time ruled by big tech — Between 2011 and 2017, at least 259 people died while trying to frame the perfect selfie. They fell off cliffs or down waterfalls or out high-rise windows while trying to snap the ideal shot for social media. These tragic deaths come amid rising cases of “death by GPS” and the…

Philip N. Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute, explains how bots, trolls, and junk news are harnessed by political actors to sow deception — Lie machines are on the rise — they’ve been built to undermine our faith in society’s key institutions and to encourage citizens to question authority. Lie machines have helped swing elections and sow discontent. And now they’ve been tuned to abet authoritarianism during the coronavirus crisis.

A Q&A with Christiana Figueres, climate champion and architect of the Paris accord — Christiana Figueres became perhaps the world’s most influential shaper of global climate policy when she was appointed executive secretary of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change in 2010. The timing couldn’t have been worse — that was just six months after the colossal failure of the world’s governments to…