Articles

“I was wrong” is one of the most difficult things for a human being to say. Imagine saying it when you have been a conservative public intellectual and expert on public education for decades. Yet that is exactly what Diane Silvers Ravitch ’60 does in her engaging new memoir, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.

As fertility rates plummet in much of the world, Wellesley experts explain why it’s happening and what might be done to address it, and alums tell their own stories about their winding paths to becoming parents—or not.

While Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician is a very different kind of work from Dan Chiasson’s previous five books—all collections of poetry—as soon as you hear Chiasson discuss it, you know that he was destined to write this book.

“Because I grew up in Dhaka, in Bangladesh, right in the middle of the smoggy, light-polluted city, I do not remember seeing any star,” says Lamiya Mowla ’13, assistant professor of astronomy. That changed when she arrived at Wellesley.

In the College’s new Narrative Lab, students look deeply into how narratives are constructed and the ways they create meaning.

At this moment, we are seeing unprecedented attacks on higher education across the country, and the value of—and right to—academic freedom is being called into question. This is to the detriment of all of us.

Does quantum physics play a role in consciousness? For decades, the idea was dismissed as a fringe possibility. However, recent papers by Mike Wiest, associate professor of neuroscience at Wellesley, and his students are part of a new wave of findings giving credence to the idea.

Around the world, people are retiring later. How do you decide when it’s time? And what comes next? We talked to Wellesley experts to find out what they are thinking.

Professor of Art Jacqueline Marie Musacchio ’89 talks about the artist Francesca Alexander and her circle as if they were her own friends. It is a familiarity born out of years of research, culminating with her book The Art and Life of Francesca Alexander 1837–1917, published in February by Lund Humphries.