Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s political career began when her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, was jailed after announcing plans to challenge Belarus President Aliaksandr Lukashenko in 2020. The political newcomer ran in her husband’s place, and after Lukashenko was declared the winner in a contest widely viewed as fraudulent, mass protests broke out in Belarus for months...

Novelist Joshua Cohen arrived at Harvard Hillel’s Rosovsky Hall on a recent icy night, stomping his feet and shrugging the snow off his black overcoat with a wide, furry lapel. The New Yorker staff writer and book critic James Wood, professor of the practice of literary criticism, followed. It was exactly the type of night that Cohen describes in his account of Dr. Benzion Netanyahu’s disastrous arrival at the fictionalized Corbin College in 1960. It was hard not to see Cohen’s coat and think of...

A young family dreamed of a backyard with a swing set, garage, and all the benefits of suburban living without giving up the contemporary vibe of their Boston high-rise apartment. After purchasing a classic 2000s Colonial, they tasked Elms Interior Design with bringing the 6,500-square-foot home in line with their style. The one challenge was that they didn’t have time to take on any major construction projects...

Lara Salahi was yawning over the phone. She’d just rolled off the 4 a.m. shift at NBC Boston, where she moonlights as a producer when she’s not teaching broadcast and digital journalism at Endicott College. But at that moment, the Associate Professor of Broadcast and Digital Journalism was in multi-tasking mom mode, picking up her two young children from the school carpool line and no doubt punching straws into juice boxes while firing back deeply thoughtful responses to interview questions. Salahi does many things well all at once. Most recently, that included reporting an investigative three-part story with the support of a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. “I spent my entire career trying to get away from local news,” she said. “I really didn’t understand the power it holds. But now I know that it’s not enough to just sit high up in a big newsroom.”

Shaye J.D. Cohen works in an office with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all four walls. Volumes in English, Hebrew, and Aramaic are piled on every available and makeshift surface. Most of the texts are bound in leather, with pages as translucent as onion skins. The speckled pattern of the wool sweater Cohen wears is so similar to the stacks that he appears in near-camouflage at his desk. Cohen, the Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy in the Department of Near Eastern...

It’s highly unusual for MIT students to be encouraged to throw one another to the floor, but that’s exactly what was happening during a lab that met in the Wrestling Room at the duPont Athletic Center at MIT in November. After learning some basic judo moves and pairing off, students were instructed to shift their body weight and apply force all the way from their feet to their hands. “Your goal is to take your opponent down without hurting them,” explained Jennifer Light...

Marlon Forrester is sitting at a long table in the SMFA library where he used to study as an undergraduate. When he leans in to answer a question, he pulls the sunglasses off his face and really connects. His presence is as electric as the fast-paced games of sidewalk chess he likes to play in the Fenway outside Blick Art Materials, setting down bags of supplies and risking parking tickets to claim checkmate. “As artists, we’re all giving birth to something,” he believes. And at the...

As a child, Chike Aguh’s mother, an immigrant from rural Nigeria, cut dress fabric for minimum wage at a shop outside New York City. “My parents came to America because they saw an economy where their kids would not have it as hard as they did,” says Aguh, A05. “The America that they came to was built by the American worker.” Because of his own family’s success, it became Aguh’s personal mission to help others rise, too. He has worked as a second-grade teacher, a lecturer at Columbia University

“As a historian, I always tell my students that one of our greatest responsibilities is to correct the myths of the past because without accurate knowledge of history, the present is chaotic and the future is unclear,” said Elizabeth Matelski, Associate Professor of History. And when it comes to Endicott’s past, arguably the greatest myth is that of Robin Mingo, namesake of Mingo Beach, one of the College’s three picturesque shorelines. A lesser-known, troubling truth is waiting some

In 2020, Dina Deitsch, director and chief curator of Tufts University Art Galleries, led a public art audit that took a hard look at the overwhelming dominance across Tufts’ campuses of art by—and depicting—white males. From that analysis (conducted as part of the Tufts as an Anti-Racist Institution initiative), she and the Public Art working group concluded that while the university’s imagery wasn’t overtly racist, it was exclusionary because as it did not include any people of color. Deitsch

As the mother of a gregarious 5-year-old boy, I experience parenthood in all its wonder and burnout. I’ve also had four miscarriages, which I continue to grieve. Those losses have led to others: I’ve let go of close relationships with friends who got pregnant with their first, and then second, and then third babies. At times, I’ve found their joy too painful to watch. When people casually post their ultrasound photos on Instagram, I shut my eyes and breathe through flashbacks of my own devastat

After testing dozens of laundry baskets and hampers, we found the six best ones—from classic baskets to laundry sorters—to suit a variety of needs.

I clamped my hands over my ears as the obstetrician cranked up the volume on the ultrasound machine. After three pregnancy losses, I was convinced that we’d be met only with static. “I think you’re going to want to hear this,” the doctor said. And there was the unmistakable drumming of my son’s heart. At that moment, I promised myself that I would always be grateful for this baby, and for my body that found a way to grow with him. And yet, when it’s 4:58 a.m. and I’m awakened by him bellowing for potato chips and cartoons, parenting can feel tedious, lonely and exhausting.

Isabella Stewart Gardner was the original Boston patron of the arts. Occupying a Venetian Gothic Revival building defined by its dramatic palazzo courtyard, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is still the beating heart of the city’s art scene, even nearly a century after its founder’s death. In 1884, Gardner and her husband, Jack, inherited their country home, Green Hill, in Brookline, Massachusetts, and began using it as a pastoral summer retreat. Images: Michael J. Lee.

I try to explain that my brain lifts off in flight. With “Firekeeper’s Daughter,” I become an avatar of the main character, Daunis Fontaine, an 18-year-old Ojibwe woman, sprinting through the damp reservation woods in Michigan, chest heaving, trying to bust up a local drug ring. It feels so real, and I am so focused on trying to understand and respect her world, which is so unlike mine, that when I am interrupted mid-paragraph, it takes me seconds to land back on the couch, into my 41-year-old m

The nine-to-five in-person American workday is rigid, arbitrary, and increasingly outdated. Yet, if an employee wants to trim their hours to part time they often risk losing opportunities for advancement, getting caught in a slippery slope of pulling far more than 20 hours a week in exchange for more flexibility but less pay. And for women who are parents, they frequently end up getting slapped with the “mommy track,” label and taken less seriously by colleagues who relentlessly value a 60-hour

Working as designers at a real estate company, Brittney Hart and Justin Capuco felt pressured to take just two weeks of paid leave when their twins arrived. They remember the time as one hard, delirious blur. Having since gone on to found their own firm, Husband Wife, they now have the flexibility to be home in the evenings, when their preschool-aged kids are still awake, says Capuco. If you’re pregnant, adopting, fostering, going through surrogacy, or managing someone who is about to welcome a

There’s a difference between rewards and bribes, but it’s subtle. Bribes are offered in desperation to get a child to cooperate in a difficult, often unplanned situation — as a kind of prepayment for compliance. Rewards are considered in advance, given upon completion of a task, and structured to motivate. For Ferdaws Seraj, a mom of two in Fairfax, Va., the toughest part of parenting after an intense workday followed by the dinner-prep grind is not giving in to the kids’ nagging or crying.

Shaped privet hedges meet untamed swathes of periwinkle hydrangeas and layer upon layer of herbaceous plantings that sway in the Atlantic salt breeze. Greenwich, Connecticut–based landscape designer James Doyle and his team at James Doyle Design Associates have cultivated a Nantucket sanctuary here on the island’s bluffs. The clients had very specific needs and wants because they spend a lot of time on the island from mid-summer into the fall. The large family gatherings that they host form the

Israeli tourists have been flocking to the UAE, but an expected boom in group tours around Passover isn’t going to happen—this year