Tag: Social Sciences

  • Nation & World

    Gender and religious scholarship

    A few minutes into a conference last week at the Radcliffe Gymnasium, a building technician appeared on the balcony to open some windows. At the podium below, one of the presenters paused to say, “Air is good.”

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Exploring the influence of cultural texts on Chile’s consciousness

    Economic change was a hallmark of the late 20th century, when nations such as Russia, China, and Chile turned away from state-centered economic models to adopt free market exchange. Liberalization was not a simple process, particularly in Chile — where decades of political and social upheaval had left the country crippled. Even so, by the…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Vermont and New Hampshire, geographic twins, cultural aliens

    Ever wonder about Vermont and New Hampshire?

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    The ‘social power’ of marriage

    By all accounts, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a funny man with a wide-ranging, brilliant, synthesizing mind. At the same time, many of his friends say, he had a gift for dramatic language that sometimes overshadowed his true intentions.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Four decades later, scholars re-examine ‘Moynihan Report’

    Before he was a United States senator from New York, before he was ambassador to India, before he taught government at Harvard, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) served as assistant secretary of labor under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and it was in that capacity that he issued a report in March 1965 titled “The Negro Family:…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Unfeeling moral choices traced to damaged frontal lobes

    Consider the following scenario: Someone you know has AIDS and plans to infect others, some of whom will die. Your only options are to let it happen or to kill the person. Do you pull the trigger? Most people waver or say they could not, even if they agree that in theory they should. But…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Bringing hard science to economics

    Guido W. Imbens, now in his first year as a professor of economics at Harvard, was still in high school in the Netherlands when he decided to study economics. For a bright, energetic boy who had always excelled at mathematics, there was nothing dismal about the so-called “dismal science.” At Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Imbens…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Prohibition politics created groundwork for modern liberalism

    While Prohibition in America failed to rid the nation of demon rum, it did unleash a wave of change in the American cultural and political sphere whose ripples are still seen today. According to new research by Lisa McGirr, a historian in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), the fallout from the impossible…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    What does it mean to have a mind? Maybe more than you think

    Through an online survey of more than 2,000 people, psychologists at Harvard University have found that we perceive the minds of others along two distinct dimensions: agency, an individual’s ability for self-control, morality, and planning; and experience, the capacity to feel sensations such as hunger, fear, and pain.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Cross-cultural study of entrepreneurs has surprising findings

    Bat Batjargal, an Oxford-trained political scientist and lecturer in social sciences at Harvard, talks a mile a minute – and can do so in five languages. He sprinkles every conversation about his work (on social network theory) with a constant phrase: “Fascinating stuff.” In two talks last week – on the social networks of entrepreneurs…

    6 minutes