The green group's foundation said it's moving its reserves to firms that emphasize sustainability or the environment.

Fire season is fueling momentum in Washington for drones, AI and forest-mapping tech. California companies are leading the charge.

The California Air Resources Board announced plans to revoke the rule in January.

The commission president is acknowledging a new alternative right-wing majority as she fights to preserve her signature political achievement.

The move risks weakening the bloc’s international green ambitions.

The victims included 38 children. More than 4,000 people have been left homeless across the Eastern Cape province.

The wider Athens area, as well as several Aegean islands, were on Level 4 of a 5-level scale for the danger of wildfires due to the weather conditions.

Much like Middle Eastern oil production in the 1970s, China today dominates the global refinement of critical metals that serve as the foundation of the United States economy. In the 1970s, America’s oil dependence led to shortages that slowed growth and brought huge spikes in prices. But in recent decades, U.S. fracking technology created a new way to extract oil, transforming the nation from one of the world’s largest oil importers to one of the largest exporters.

Today the U.S. needs another technological breakthrough to secure domestic supplies of metals like lithium, cobalt, copper, and rare earth elements, which are needed for everything from batteries to jet engines and electric motors. Nth Cycle thinks it has a solution.

The company was co-founded by MIT Associate Professor Desirée Plata, CEO Megan O’Connor, and Chief Scientist Chad Vecitis to recover critical metals from industrial waste and ores using a patented, highly efficient technology known as electro-extraction.

“America is an incredibly resource-rich nation — it’s just a matter of extracting and converting those resources for use. That’s the role of refining,” says O’Connor, who worked on electro-extraction as a PhD student with Plata, back when both were at Duke University. “By filling that gap in the supply chain, we can make the United States the largest producer of critical metals in the world.”

Since last year, Nth Cycle has been producing cobalt and nickel using its first commercial system in Fairfield, Ohio. The company’s modular refining systems, which are powered by electricity instead of fossil fuels, can be deployed in a fraction of the time of traditional metal refining plants. Now, Nth Cycle aims to deploy its modular systems around the U.S. and Europe to establish new supply chains for the materials that power our economy.

“About 85 percent of the world’s critical minerals are refined in China, so it’s an economic and national security issue for us,” O’Connor says. “Even if we mine the materials here — we do have one operational nickel mine in Michigan — we then ship it overseas to be refined. Those materials are required components of multiple industries. Everything from our phones to our cars to our defense systems depend on them. I like to say critical minerals are the new oil.”

From waste, an opportunity

In 2014, O’Connor and Plata attended a talk by Vecitis, then a professor at Harvard University, in which he discussed his work using electrochemical filters to destroy contaminants in pharmaceutical wastewater. As part of the research, he noticed the material was reacting with metal to create crystalline copper in the filters. Following the talk, Plata asked Vecitis if he’d ever thought about using the approach for metal separation. He hadn’t but was excited to try.

At the time, Plata and O’Connor were studying mineral-dense wastewater created as a byproduct of hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas.

“The original thought was: Could we use this technology to extract those metals?” O’Connor recalls.

The focus shifted to using the technology to recover metals from electronics waste, including sources like old phones, electric vehicles, and smartwatches.

Today, manufacturers and electronic waste facilities grind up end-of-life materials and send it to huge chemical refineries overseas, which heat up the metal into a molten liquid and put it through a series of acids and bases to distill the waste back into a pure form of the desired metal.

“Each of those acids and bases have to be transported as hazardous goods, and the process for making them has a large greenhouse gas and energy footprint,” Plata explains. “That makes the economics difficult to square in anything but huge, centralized facilities — and even then it’s a challenge.”

The United States and Europe have an abundance of end-of-life scrap material, but it’s dispersed, and environmental regulations have left the West few scalable refining options.

Instead of building a refinery, Nth Cycle’s team has built a modular refining system — dubbed “The Oyster” — which can reduce costs, waste, and time-to-market by being co-located onsite with recyclers, miners, and manufacturers. The Oyster uses electricity, chemical precipitation, and filtration to create the same metal refining chemicals as traditional methods. Today, the system can process more than 3,000 metric tons of scrap per year and be customized to produce different metals.

“Electro-extraction is one of the cleanest ways to recover metal,” Plata says.

Nth Cycle received early support from the U.S. Department of Energy, and when Plata came to MIT in 2018, Nth Cycle became part of the MIT Industrial Liaison Program’s STEX25 startup accelerator.

“What’s so important about being at a place like MIT is the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the ‘tough tech’ ethos of Cambridge,” Plata explains. “That’s been hugely important to the success of Nth Cycle and one of the reasons we moved the company to the greater Boston area. Being able to access talent and patient capital was key.”

Onshoring metal refining

Plata says one of the proudest moments of her career came last year at the groundbreaking ceremony for Nth Cycle’s first mixed hydroxide (nickel and cobalt) production facility in Ohio. Many of Nth Cycle’s new employees at the facility had previously worked at auto and chemical facilities in the town but are now working for what Nth Cycle calls the first commercial nickel refining facility for scrap in the country.

“O’Connor’s vision of elevating people while elevating the economy is an inspiring standard of practice,” Plata says.

Nth Cycle will own and operate other Oyster systems in a business model O’Connor describes as refining as a service, where customers own the final product. The company is looking to partner with scrap yards and industrial scrap collection facilities as well as manufacturers that generate waste.

Nth Cycle is mostly working to recover metals from batteries today, but it has also used its process to recover cobalt and nickel from spent catalyst material in the oil and gas industry. Moving forward, Nth Cycle hopes to apply its process to the biggest waste sources of them all: mining.

“The world needs more critical minerals like cobalt, nickel, lithium, and copper,” O’Connor says. “The only two places you can get those materials are from recycling and mining, and both of those sources need to be chemically refined. That’s where Nth Cycle comes in. A lot of people have a negative perception of mining, but if you have a technology that can reduce waste and reduce emissions, that’s how you get more mining in regions like the U.S. That’s the impact we want this technology to have in the Western world.”

Es Devlin, the winner of the 2025 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT, creates settings for people to gather — whether it’s a few people in a room or crowds swelling a massive stadium — arenas in which to dissolve one’s individual sense of self into the greater collective. She herself contains multitudes; equally at home with 17th century metaphysical English poet John Donne, 21st century icon of music and fashion Lady Gaga, or Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli.

In the course of the artist and designer’s three-decade career, Devlin has created an exploded paint interpretation of the U.K. flag for the Closing Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, a box of illuminated rainfall for a production of the Crucible, a 65-foot diameter AI-generated poetry pavilion for the World Expo, an indoor forest for the COP26 Climate Conference, a revolving luminous library for over 200,000 in Milan, Beyonce’s Renaissance tour, and two Super Bowl halftime shows. But Devlin also works on a much smaller scale: the human face. Her world-building is rooted in the earliest technologies of reading and drawing: the simple acts of the eye and hand.  

For Congregation in 2024, she made chalk and charcoal drawings of 50 strangers. Before this project, Devlin says, she had most likely drawn around 50 portraits in total over the course of her practice — mostly family or friends, or the occasional covert sketch of a stranger on the subway. But drawing strangers required a different form of attention. “I was looking at another, who often looked different from me in many ways. Their skin pigmentation might be different, the orientation of their nose, eyes, and forehead might be other to what I was used to seeing in the mirror, and I was fraught with anxiety and concern to do them justice, and at pains not to offend,” she recalls. 

As she drew, she warded off the desire to please, feeling her unconscious biases surface, but eventually, in this wordless space, found herself in intense communion. “I gradually became absorbed in each person's eyes. It felt like falling into a well, but knowing I was held by an anchor, that I would be drawn out,” she says, “In each case, I thought, ‘well, this is it. Here we are. This is the answer to everything, the continuity between me and the other.’” She calls each sitter a co-creator of the piece. 

Devlin’s project inspired a series of drawing sessions at MIT, where students, faculty, and staff across the Institute — without any prior drawing experience necessary — were paired with strangers and asked to draw each other in silence for five minutes. In these 11 sessions held over the course of the semester, participants practiced rendering a stranger’s features on the page, and then the sitter spoke and shared their story. There were no guidelines about what to say, or even how to draw — but the final product mattered less than the process, the act of being in another’s presence and looking deeply. 

If pop concerts are the technology to transform private emotional truth into public feeling — the lyrics sung to the bathroom mirror now belted in choruses of thousands — Devlin finds that same stripped-down intimacy in all her works, asking us to bare the most elemental versions of ourselves. 

“We’re in a moment where we’re really having a hard time speaking to one another. We wanted to find a way to take the lessons from the work that Es Devlin has done to practice listening to one another and building connections within this very broad community that we call MIT,” says Sara Brown, an associate professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section who facilitated drawing sessions. The drawings were then displayed in a pop-up group exhibition, MIT Face to Face, where 80 easels were positioned to face the center of the room like a two-dimensional choir, forming a communal portrait of MIT. 

During her residency at MIT, Devlin toured student labs, spoke with students and faculty from theater arts, discussed the creative uses of AI with technologists and curators, and met with neuroscientists. “I had my brain scanned two days ago at very short notice,” she says, “a functioning MRI scan to help me understand more deeply the geography and architecture of my own mind.”  

“The question I get asked most is, ‘How do you retain a sense of self when you are in collaboration with another, especially if it’s another who is celebrated and widely revered?’” she says, “And I found an answer to that question: You have to be prepared to lose yourself. You have to be prepared to sublimate your sense of self, to see through the eyes of another, and through that practice, you will begin to find more deeply who you are.”

She is influenced by the work of philosopher and neuroscientist Iain Gilchrist, who suggests that a society dominated by the mode of attention of the left hemisphere — the part of the brain broadly in charge of language processing and logical thinking — also needs to be balanced by the right hemisphere, which operates nonverbal modes of attention. While the left hemisphere categorizes and separates, the right attends to the universe as an oceanic whole. And it is under the power of the right hemisphere’s mode of attention, Devlin says, that she enters the flow state of drawing, a place outside the confines of language, that enables her to feel a greater sense of unity with the entire cosmos.

Whether it’s drawing a stranger with a pencil and paper, or working with collaborators, Devlin believes the key to self understanding is, paradoxically, losing oneself.

In all her works, she seeks the ecstatic moment when the boundaries between self and world become more porous. In a time of divisiveness, her message is important. “I think it’s really to do with fear of other,” she says, “and I believe that dislodging fear is something that has to be practiced, like learning a new instrument.” What would it be like to regain a greater equilibrium between the modes of attention of both hemispheres of the brain, the sense of distinctness and the cosmic whole at once? “It could be absolutely definitive, and potentially stave off human extinction,” she says, “It’s at that level of urgency.”  

Presented by the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Eugene McDermott Award for the Arts at MIT was first established by Margaret McDermott in honor of her husband, a legacy that is now carried on by their daughter, Mary McDermott Cook. The Eugene McDermott Award plays a unique role at the Institute by bringing the MIT community together to support MIT’s principal arts organizations: the Department of Architecture; the Program in Art, Culture and Technology; the Center for Art, Science and Technology; the List Visual Arts Center; the MIT Museum; and Music and Theater Arts. During her residency at MIT she presented a week of discussions with the MIT community’s students and faculty in theater, architecture, computer science, MIT Museum Studio, and more. She also presented a public artist talk with Museum of Modern Art Senior Curator of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli that was one of the culminating events of the MIT arts festival, Artfinity. 

Things are speeding up in generative AI legal cases, with two judicial opinions just out on an issue that will shape the future of generative AI: whether training gen-AI models on copyrighted works is fair use. One gets it spot on; the other, not so much, but fortunately in a way that future courts can and should discount.

The core question in both cases was whether using copyrighted works to train Large Language Models (LLMs) used in AI chatbots is a lawful fair use. Under the US Copyright Act, answering that question requires courts to consider:

1. whether the use was transformative;
2. the nature of the works (Are they more creative than factual? Long since published?)
3. how much of the original was used; and
4. the harm to the market for the original work.

In both cases, the judges focused on factors (1) and (4).

The right approach

In Bartz v. Anthropic, three authors sued Anthropic for using their books to train its Claude chatbot. In his order deciding parts of the case, Judge William Alsup confirmed what EFF has said for years: fair use protects the use of copyrighted works for training because, among other things, training gen-AI is “transformative—spectacularly so” and any alleged harm to the market for the original is pure speculation.Just as copying books or images to create search engines is fair, the court held, copying books to create a new, “transformative” LLM and related technologies is also protected:

[U]sing copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative. Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them—but to turn a hard corner and create something different. If this training process reasonably required making copies within the LLM or otherwise, those copies were engaged in a transformative use.

Importantly, Bartz rejected the copyright holders’ attempts to claim that any model capable of generating new written material that might compete with existing works by emulating their “sweeping themes, “substantive points,” or “grammar, composition, and style” was an infringement machine. As the court rightly recognized, building gen-AI models that create new works is beyond “anything that any copyright owner rightly could expect to control.” 

There’s a lot more to like about the Bartz ruling, but just as we were digesting it Kadrey v. Meta Platforms came out. Sadly, this decision bungles the fair use analysis.

A fumble on fair use

Kadrey is another suit by authors against the developer of an AI model, in this case Meta’s ‘Llama’ chatbot. The authors in Kadrey asked the court to rule that fair use did not apply.

Much of the Kadrey ruling by Judge Vince Chhabria is dicta—meaning, the opinion spends many paragraphs on what it thinks could justify ruling in favor of the author plaintiffs, if only they had managed to present different facts (rather than pure speculation). The court then rules in Meta’s favor because the plaintiffs only offered speculation. 

But it makes a number of errors along the way to the right outcome. At the top, the ruling broadly proclaims that training AI without buying a license to use each and every piece of copyrighted training material will be “illegal” in “most cases.” The court asserted that fair use usually won’t apply to AI training uses even though training is a “highly transformative” process, because of hypothetical “market dilution” scenarios where competition from AI-generated works could reduce the value of the books used to train the AI model..

That theory, in turn, depends on three mistaken premises. First, that the most important factor for determining fair use is whether the use might cause market harm. That’s not correct. Since its seminal 1994 opinion in Cambell v Acuff-Rose, the Supreme Court has been very clear that no single factor controls the fair use analysis.

Second, that an AI developer would typically seek to train a model entirely on a certain type of work, and then use that model to generate new works in the exact same genre, which would then compete with the works on which it was trained, such that the market for the original works is harmed. As the Kadrey ruling notes, there was no evidence that Llama was intended to to, or does, anything like that, nor will most LLMs for the exact reasons discussed in Bartz.

Third, as a matter of law, copyright doesn't prevent “market dilution” unless the new works are otherwise infringing. In fact, the whole purpose of copyright is to be an engine for new expression. If that new expression competes with existing works, that’s a feature, not a bug.

Gen-AI is spurring the kind of tech panics we’ve seen before; then, as now, thoughtful fair use opinions helped ensure that copyright law served innovation and creativity. Gen-AI does raise a host of other serious concerns about fair labor practices and misinformation, but copyright wasn’t designed to address those problems. Trying to force copyright law to play those roles only hurts important and legal uses of this technology.

In keeping with that tradition, courts deciding fair use in other AI copyright cases should look to Bartz, not Kadrey.

Summer is the perfect time to curl up with a good book — and MIT authors have had much to offer in the past year. The following titles represent some of the books published in the past 12 months by MIT faculty and staff. In addition to links for each book from its publisher, the MIT Libraries has compiled a helpful list of the titles held in its collections.

Looking for more literary works from the MIT community? Enjoy our book lists from 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.

Happy reading!

Science

“So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs — and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease” (Penguin Random House, 2025)
By Thomas Levenson, professor of science writing

For centuries, people in the West, believing themselves to hold God-given dominion over nature, thought too much of humanity and too little of microbes. Nineteenth-century scientists finally made the connection. Life-saving methods to control infections and contain outbreaks soon followed. Next came the antibiotic era in the 1930s. Yet, less than a century later, the promise of that revolution is receding due to years of overuse. Is our self-confidence getting the better of us again?

“The Miraculous from the Material: Understanding the Wonders of Nature” (Penguin Random House, 2024)
By Alan Lightman, professor of the practice of humanities

Nature is capable of extraordinary phenomena. Standing in awe of those phenomena, we experience a feeling of connection to the cosmos. For Lightman, just as remarkable is that all of what we see around us — soap bubbles, scarlet ibises, shooting stars — are made out of the same material stuff and obey the same rules and laws. Pairing 36 full-color photos evoking some of nature’s most awe-inspiring phenomena with personal essays, “The Miraculous from the Material” explores the fascinating science underlying the natural world.

Technology and society

“The Analytics Edge in Healthcare” (Dynamic Ideas, 2025)
By Dimitris Bertsimas, vice provost for MIT Open Learning, Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management, associate dean for business analytics, and professor of operations research; Agni Orfanoudaki, and Holly Wiberg

Analytics is transforming health care operations, empowering medical professionals and administrators to leverage data and models to make better decisions. This book provides a practical introduction to this exciting field. The first part establishes the technical foundations of health care analytics, spanning machine learning and optimization. The second part presents integrated case studies that cover a wide range of clinical specialties and problem types using descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics.

“Longevity Hubs: Regional Innovation for Global Aging”  (MIT Press, 2024)
Edited by Joseph F. Coughlin, senior research scientist and MIT AgeLab director, and Luke Yoquinto, MIT AgeLab research associate 

Populations around the world are aging, and older adults’ economic influence stands to grow markedly in future decades. This volume brings together entrepreneurs, researchers, designers, public servants, and others to address the multifaceted concerns of aging societies and to explore the possibility that certain regions will distinguish themselves as longevity hubs: home to disproportionate economic and innovative activity for older populations.

“Data, Systems, and Society: Harnessing AI for Societal Good” (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
By Munther Dahleh, the William A. Coolidge Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS)

Harnessing the power of data and artificial intelligence (Al) methods to tackle complex societal challenges requires transdisciplinary collaborations across academia, industry, and government. In this book, Dahleh, founder of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), offers a blueprint for researchers, professionals, and institutions to create approaches to problems of high societal value using innovative, holistic, data-driven methods.

“SuperShifts: Transforming How We Live, Learn, and Work in the Age of Intelligence” (Wiley, 2025)
By Ja-Naé Duane, academic research fellow at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research, and Steve Fisher

This book describes how we’re at the end of one 200-year arc and embarking on another. With this new age of intelligence, Duane and Fisher highlight the catalysts for change currently affecting individuals, businesses, and society as a whole. They also provide a model for transformation that utilizes a holistic view of making radical change through three lenses: you as a leader, your organization, and society.

“Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation” (MIT Press, 2024)
By Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain

Today’s technology has overtaken religion as the chief influence on 21st-century life and community. In “Tech Agnostic,” Epstein explores what it means to be a critical thinker with respect to this new faith. Encouraging readers to reassert their common humanity beyond the seductive sheen of “tech,” this book argues for tech agnosticism — not worship — as a way of life.

“The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution” (MIT Press, 2025)
By David Mindell, the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing and professor of aeronautics and astronautics 

Climate change, global disruption, and labor scarcity are forcing us to rethink the underlying principles of industrial society. In this book, Mindell envisions this new industrialism from the fundamentals, drawing on the 18th century when first principles were formed at the founding of the Industrial Revolution. While outlining the new industrialism, he tells the story of the Lunar Society, a group of engineers, scientists, and industrialists who came together to apply the principles of the Enlightenment to industrial processes.

“Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023” (MIT Press, 2024) 
Edited by Nick Montfort, professor of digital media, and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

The discussion of computer-generated text has recently reached a fever pitch but largely omits the long history of work in this area — text generation, as it happens, was not invented yesterday in Silicon Valley. This anthology aims to correct that omission by gathering seven decades of English-language texts produced by generation systems and software, long before ChatGPT and Claude.

Education, work, and innovation

“Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You” (Routledge, 2025)
By Lotte Bailyn, the T Wilson Professor of Management, Emerita and professor emerita of work and organization studies; Teresa M. Amabile; Marcy Crary; Douglas T. Hall; and Kathy E. Kram

Whether they’re one of the 73 million baby boomers reaching their full retirement benefit age or zoomers just entering the workforce, at some point most working Americans will retire. The optimal approach to retirement is unique to each person, but this book offers wisdom and anecdotes from more than 120 people and detailed interviews with 14 “stars” regarding their retirement transitions.

“Accelerating Innovation: Competitive Advantage through Ecosystem Engagement” (MIT Press, 2025)
By Phil Budden, senior lecturer of technological Innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management; and Fiona Murray, associate dean for innovation, the William Porter Professor of Entrepreneurship, and professor of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management 

Leaders in large organizations face continuous pressure to innovate, and few possess the internal resources needed to keep up with rapid advances in science and technology. But looking beyond their own organizations, most face a bewildering landscape of external resources. In “Accelerating Innovation,” leaders will find a practical guide to this external landscape. Budden and Murray provide directions for navigating innovation ecosystems — those hotspots worldwide where researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors congregate.

“Writing, Thinking, and the Brain: How Neuroscience Can Improve Writing Instruction” (Teachers College Press, 2024)
By Joel R. S. Nazareno, learning science and education outreach specialist at MIT Open Learning; Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa; and Christopher Rappleye

Writing is the highest form of thinking, as evidenced by neuroimaging that shows how more neural networks are activated simultaneously during writing than during any other cognitive activity. This book will help teachers understand how the brain learns to write by unveiling 15 stages of thinking that underpin the writing process, along with targeted ways to stimulate them to maximize each individual’s writing potential.

“Entrepreneurship: Choice and Strategy” (Norton Economics, 2024)
By Erin L. Scott, senior lecturer of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management; Scott Stern, the David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology and professor of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management; and Joshua Gans

Building on more than two decades of academic research with thousands of companies and MIT students, Scott, Stern, and Gans have developed a systematic approach for startup leadership. They detail four key choices entrepreneurs must make, and “four strategic approaches to find and frame opportunities.”

“Failure by Design: The California Energy Crisis and the Limits of Market Planning” (University of Chicago, 2024)
By Georg Rilinger, the Fred Kayne Career Development Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and assistant professor of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management

The California electricity crisis in 2000 caused billions in losses and led to bankruptcy for one of the state’s largest utilities. More than 20 years later, the question remains: Why did the newly created electricity markets fail? In “Failure by Design,” Rilinger explores practical obstacles to market design to offer a new explanation for the crisis — one that moves beyond previous interpretations that have primarily blamed incompetent politicians or corrupt energy sellers.

Culture, humanities, and social sciences

“Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight” (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
By Arthur Bahr, professor of literature

In this book, Bahr explores the four poems and 12 illustrations of the “Pearl-Manuscript,” the only surviving medieval copy of two of the best-known Middle English poems: “Pearl” and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” He explores how the physical manuscript enhances our perception of the poetry, drawing on recent technological advances that show it to be a more complex piece of material, visual, and textual art than previously understood. By connecting the manuscript’s construction to the text’s intricate language, Bahr suggests new ways to understand the power of poetry.

“Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes” (Princeton University Press, 2025)
By Andrea Campbell, the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science

Most Americans want the rich to pay more to fund government, yet favor regressive over progressive taxes. Why this policy-preference gap? In this book, Campbell describes how convoluted tax code confuses the public about who pays and who benefits, so tax preferences do not turn on principles, interests, or even party. Instead, race and racism play large roles, and tax skepticism among Americans of all stripes helps the rich and anti-tax forces undermine progressivity.

“Uprooted: How post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe” (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
By Volha Charnysh, the Ford Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science

Each year, millions of people are uprooted from their homes by wars, repression, natural disasters, and climate change. In “Uprooted,” Charnysh presents a fresh perspective on the consequences of mass displacement, arguing that accommodating the displaced population can strengthen receiving states and benefit local economies. With rich insights and compelling evidence, the book challenges common assumptions about the costs of forced displacement and cultural diversity and proposes a novel mechanism linking wars to state-building.

“Crime, Insecurity, and Community Policing: Experiments on Building Trust” (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
By Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences; Graeme Blair; and Jeremy M. Weinstein

How can societies reduce crime without exacerbating adversarial relationships between the police and citizens? Through field experiments in a variety of political contexts, this book presents the outcome of a major research initiative into the efficacy of community policing. Scholars uncover whether, and under what conditions, this influential strategy for tackling crime and insecurity is effective. With its highly innovative approach to cumulative learning, this writing represents a new frontier in the study of police reform.

“Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter” (MIT Press, 2025)
By Jana Dambrogio, the Thomas F. Peterson Conservator at MIT Libraries, and Daniel Starza Smith 

Before the invention of the gummed envelope in the 1830s, how did people secure their private letters? The answer is letterlocking — the ingenious process of securing a letter using a combination of folds, tucks, slits, or adhesives such as sealing wax, so that it becomes its own envelope. In this book, Dambrogio and Starza Smith, experts who have pioneered the field over the last 10 years, tell the fascinating story of letterlocking within epistolary history, drawing on real historical examples from all over the world.

“Long-Term Care around the World” (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
Edited by Jonathan Gruber, the Ford Professor of Economics and head of the Department of Economics, and Kathleen McGarry

As formal long-term care becomes unaffordable for seniors in many countries, public systems and unpaid caregivers increasingly bear the burden of supporting the world’s aging population. “Long-Term Care around the World” is a comparative analysis of long-term care in 10 wealthy countries that considers the social costs of both formal and informal care  —which is critical, given that informal unpaid care is estimated to account for one-third of all long-term care spending.

“Empty Vessel: The Global Economy in One Barge” (Penguin Random House, 2025)
By Ian Kumekawa, lecturer of history

What do a barracks for British troops in the Falklands War, a floating jail off the Bronx, and temporary housing for VW factory workers in Germany have in common? The Balder Scapa: a single barge that served all three roles. Through this one vessel, Kumekawa illustrates many currents: globalization, the transience of economic activity, and the hazy world of transactions many call “the offshore,” the lightly regulated sphere of economic activity that encourages short-term actions.

“The Price of Our Values: The Economic Limits of Moral Life” (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
By David Thesmar, the Franco Modigliani Professor of Financial Economics and professor of finance, and Augustin Landier

Two economists examine the interplay between our desire to be good, the personal costs of being good, and the point at which people abandon goodness due to its costs. Aided by the results of two surveys, they find that the answers to modern moral dilemmas are economic, and often highly predictable. Our values may guide us, but we are also forced to consider economic costs to settle decisions.

“Spheres of Injustice: The Ethical Promise of Minority Presence” (MIT Press, 2025)
By Bruno Perreau, the Cynthia L. Reed Professor of French Studies 

How can the rights of minorities be protected in democracies? The question has been front and center in the U.S. since the Supreme Court’s repeal of affirmative action. In Europe too, minority politics are being challenged. The very notion of “minority” is being questioned, while the notion of a “protected class” risks encouraging competition among minorities. In “Spheres of Injustice,” Perreau demonstrates how we can make the fight against discrimination beneficial for all.

“Attention, Shoppers! American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy” (Princeton University Press, 2025)
By Kathleen Thelen, the Ford Professor of Political Science

This book traces the evolution of U.S. retailing from the late 19th century to today, uncovering the roots of a bitter equilibrium where large low-cost retailers dominate and vast numbers of low-income families now rely on them to make ends meet. Thelen reveals how large discount retailers have successfully exploited a uniquely permissive regulatory landscape to create a shopper’s paradise built on cheap labor.

“Routledge Handbook of Space Policy” (Routledge, 2024)
Chapter by Danielle R. Wood, associate professor in the program in media arts and sciences and associate professor in aeronautics and astronautics

In her chapter, “The Expanding Sphere of Human Responsibility for Sustainability on Earth and in Space,” Wood proposes a multifaceted definition of sustainability and explores how the definition can be exercised as humans expand activity in space. Building on the tradition of consensus building on concepts of sustainable development through United Nations initiatives, Wood asserts that sustainability for human activity in space requires consideration of three types of responsibility: economic, social, and environmental.

“Victorian Parlour Games: A Modern Host’s Guide to Classic Fun for Everyone” (Chronicle Books, 2024)
By Ned Wolfe, marketing and communications assistant at MIT Libraries

“Victorian Parlour Games” is a beautifully designed and compact hardcover volume full of the classic, often silly, games played in the late 19th century. The Victorians loved fun and played hundreds and hundreds of party games. This endlessly delightful party games book collects some of the very best for your reference and pleasure.

Arts, architecture, planning, and design

“Against Reason: Tony Smith, Sculpture, and Other Modernisms” (MIT Press, 2024)
Chapter by Judith Barry, professor in the Art, Culture, and Technology Program, with Kelli Anderson

This collection of essays reveals the depth and complexity of the sculpture of American modernist Tony Smith, placing his multifaceted practice in dialogue with contemporary voices. Barry’s chapter, "New Piece: Elective Geometries," describes the transformation of Smith’s sculpture into the form of a flipbook and centerpiece “pop-up.”

“Steina” (MIT Press, 2025)
Edited by Natalie Bell, curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center

Accompanying the related exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center and Buffalo AKG Art Museum, “Steina” brings renewed recognition to Steina (b. 1940, Iceland), tracing her oeuvre from early collaborative works with her partner Woody Vasulka to her independent explorations of optics and a liberated, non-anthropocentric subjectivity.

“Jewish Theatrical Resources: A Guide for Theaters Producing Jewish Work” (Alliance for Jewish Theater, 2025)
Chapter by Marissa Friedman, marketing and communications manager in the Art, Culture, and Technology Program; Jenna Clark Embry; Robin Goldberg; Gabrielle Hoyt; Stephanie Kane; Alix Rosenfeld; and Marissa Shadburn

Produced by the Alliance for Jewish Theatre, this guide was created to help non-Jewish theaters produce Jewish plays with authenticity, cultural awareness, and care. Friedman contributes a chapter on dramaturgy, exploring how the primary role of a dramaturg is to support a playwright and production team in articulating their artistic vision, and setting forth an ideal model for the dramaturgy of a Jewish play, with both a theatrical dramaturg and a Jewish dramaturg.

“Play It Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts” (MIT Press, 2025)
By Samuel Jay Keyser, the Peter de Florez emeritus professor of linguistics

Leonard Bernstein, in his famous Norton Lectures, extolled repetition, saying that it gave poetry its musical qualities and that music theorists’ refusal to take it seriously did so at their peril. “Play It Again, Sam” takes Bernstein seriously. In this book, Keyser explores why we enjoy works of poetry, music, and painting, and how repetition plays a central part in the pleasure.

“The Moving Image: A User’s Manual” (MIT Press, 2025)
By Peter B. Kaufman, associate director of development at MIT Open Learning

Video is today’s most popular information medium. Two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic is video. Americans get their news and information more often from screens and speakers than through any other means. “The Moving Image” is the first authoritative account of how we have arrived here, together with the first definitive manual to help writers, educators, and publishers use video more effectively.

“Beyond Ruins: Reimagining Modernism” (ArchiTangle, 2024)
Edited by Raafat Majzoub SM ’17, visiting lecturer at the Art, Culture, and Technology Program; and Nicolas Fayad

This book explores the renovation of modern architecture in the Global South as a tool for self-determination and community-building. Focusing on the Oscar Niemeyer Guest House in Tripoli, Lebanon, Majzoub and Fayad examine heritage as a political and material process. Through case studies, visual essays, and conversations with architects, artists, and theorists, the book addresses challenges of preservation, gaps in archiving, and the need for new forms of architectural practice.

“The Equitably Resilient City: Solidarities and Struggles in the Face of Climate Crisis” (MIT Press, 2024)
By Lawrence J. Vale, the Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning and associate dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning; and Zachary B. Lamb

Too often the places most vulnerable to climate change are those that are home to people with the fewest economic and political resources. And while some leaders are starting to take action to reduce climate risks, many early adaptation schemes have actually made preexisting inequalities worse. In this book, Vale and Lamb ask how cities can adapt to climate change and other threats while also doing right by disadvantaged residents.

Novel and biography

“The Novice of Thanatos: An Epic Dark Fantasy of Horror, Death, and Necromancy” (Satirrell Publishing, 2025)
By Scott Austin Tirrell, director of administration and finance at the Art, Culture, and Technology Program

A fantasy novel that follows 11-year-old Mishal, a gifted yet troubled boy inducted into the secretive Order of Thanatos. Set in the grim and mystic realm of Lucardia, the story is framed as a first-person memoir chronicling Mishal’s initiation as a novice psychopomp — one who guides the dead across the Threshold into the afterlife. As Mishal navigates the Order’s rigid hierarchy, academic rigor, and spiritual mysteries, he begins to uncover unsettling truths about death, the soul, and the hidden agendas of those in power. Haunted by a spirit he cannot abandon and burdened by a forbidden artifact, Mishal must decide whom to trust and what to believe as his abilities grow — and as the line between duty and damnation begins to blur.

For young readers

“I Love You Bigger Than Everything That’s Big” (Stillwater River Publications, 2024)
By Lindsay Bartholomew, exhibit content and experience developer at MIT Museum, and illustrated by Sequoia Bostick

How much can you love someone? Higher than you can reach? Longer than a river? Bigger than the sky? The real answer — bigger than everything that’s big!

“A Century for Caroline” (Denene Millner Books / Simon and Schuster, 2025)
By Kaija Langley, director of development at MIT Libraries, and illustrated by TeMika Grooms

A great-grandma imparts the wisdom gained over her 100 years to an eager little girl in this tender picture book tribute to family and living a long, purposeful, beautiful life.

“All the Rocks We Love” (Penguin Random House, 2024)
By Taylor Perron, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and Lisa Varchol Perron, and illustrated by David Scheirer

It’s no secret that children love rocks: They appear in jacket pockets, on windowsills, in the car, in their hiding places, and most often, in little grips. This book is an appreciation of rocks’ versatility and appeal, paired with the presentation of real types of rocks and their play-worthy attributes. 

This week, EFF joined EDRi and nearly 50 civil society organizations urging the European Commission’s President Ursula von der Leyen, Executive Vice President Henna Virkunnen, and Commissioners Michael McGrath and Hadja Lahbib to take immediate action and defend human rights in Hungary.

The European Commission has a responsibility to protect EU fundamental rights, including the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals in Hungary and across the Union

With Budapest Pride just two days away, Hungary has criminalized Pride marches and is planning to deploy real-time facial recognition technology to identify those participating in the event. This is a flagrant violation of fundamental rights, particularly the rights to free expression and assembly.

On April 15, a new amendment package went into effect in Hungary which authorizes the use of real-time facial recognition to identify protesters at ‘banned protests’ like LGBTQ+ events, and includes harsh penalties like excessive fines and imprisonment. This is prohibited by the EU Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, which does not permit the use of real-time face recognition for these purposes.

This came on the back of members of Hungary’s Parliament rushing through three amendments in March to ban and criminalize Pride marches and their organizers, and permit the use of real-time facial recognition technologies for the identification of protestors. These amendments were passed without public consultation and are in express violation of the EU AI Act and Charter of Fundamental Rights. In response, civil society organizations urged the European Commission to put interim measures in place to rectify the violation of fundamental rights and values. The Commission is yet to respond—a real cause of concern.

This is an attack on LGBTQ+ individuals, as well as an attack on the rights of all people in Hungary. The letter urges the European Commission to take the following actions:

• Open an infringement procedure against any new violations of EU law, in particular the violation of Article 5 of the AI Act
• Adopt interim measures on ongoing infringement against Hungary’s 2021 anti LGBT law which is used as a legal basis for the ban on LGBTQIA+ related public assemblies, including Budapest Pride.

There's no question that, when EU law is at stake, the European Commission has a responsibility to protect EU fundamental rights, including the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals in Hungary and across the Union. This includes ensuring that those organizing and marching at Pride in Budapest are safe and able to peacefully assemble and protest. If the EU Commission does not urgently act to ensure these rights, it risks hollowing out the values that the EU is built from.

Read our full letter to the Commission here.

Can the cops get your online data? In short, yes. There are a variety of US federal and state laws which give law enforcement powers to obtain information that you provided to online services. But, there are steps you as a user and/or as a service provider can take to improve online privacy.

Law enforcement demanding access to your private online data goes back to the beginning of the internet. In fact, one of  EFF’s first cases, Steve Jackson Games v. Secret Service, exemplified the now all-too-familiar story where unfounded claims about illegal behavior resulted in overbroad seizures of user messages. But it’s not the ’90s anymore, the internet has become an integral part of everyone’s life. Everyone now relies on organizations big and small to steward our data, from huge service providers like Google, Meta, or your ISP, to hobbyists hosting a blog or Mastodon server. 

There is no “cloud,” just someone else's computer—and when the cops come knocking on their door, these hosts need to be willing to stand up for privacy, and know how to do so to the fullest extent under the law. These legal limits are also important for users to know, not only to mitigate risks in their security plan when choosing where to share data, but to understand whether these hosts are going to bat for them. Taking action together, service hosts and users can curb law enforcement getting more data than they’re allowed, protecting not just themselves but targeted populations, present and future.

This is distinct from law enforcement’s methods of collecting public data, such as the information now being collected on student visa applicants. Cops may use social media monitoring tools and sock puppet accounts to collect what you share publicly, or even within “private” communities. Police may also obtain the contents of communication in other ways that do not require court authorization, such as monitoring network traffic passively to catch metadata and possibly using advanced tools to partially reveal encrypted information. They can even outright buy information from online data brokers. Unfortunately there are few restrictions or oversight for these practices—something EFF is fighting to change.

Below however is a general breakdown of the legal processes used by US law enforcement for accessing private data, and what categories of private data these processes can disclose. Because this is a generalized summary, it is neither exhaustive nor should be considered legal advice. Please seek legal help if you have specific data privacy and security needs.

Type of data

Process used

Challenge prior to disclosure?

Proof needed

Subscriber information

Subpoena

Yes

Relevant to an investigation

Non-content information, metadata

Court order; sometimes subpoena

Yes

Specific and articulable facts that info is relevant to an investigation

Stored content

Search warrant

No

Probable cause that info will provide evidence of a crime

Content in transit

Super warrant

No

Probable cause plus exhaustion and minimization

Types of Data that Can be Collected

The laws protecting private data online generally follow a pattern: the more sensitive the personal data is, the greater factual and legal burden police have to meet before they can obtain it. Although this is not exhaustive, here are a few categories of data you may be sharing with services, and why police might want to obtain it.

• Subscriber Data: Information you provide in order to use the service. Think about ID or payment information, IP address location, email, phone number, and other information you provided when signing up. 
  • Law enforcement can learn who controls an anonymous account, and find other service providers to gather information from.
• Non-content data, or "metadata": This is saved information about your interactions on the service; like when you used the service, for how long, and with whom. Analogous to what a postal worker can infer from a sealed letter with addressing information.
• Law enforcement can use this information to infer a social graph, login history, and other information about a suspect’s behavior.

• Stored content: This is the actual content you are sending and receiving, like your direct message history or saved drafts. This can cover any private information your service provider can access. 
• This most sensitive data is collected to reveal criminal evidence. Overly broad requests also allow for retroactive searches, information on other users, and can take information out of its original context. 
• Content in transit: This is the content of your communications as it is being communicated. This real-time access may also collect info which isn’t typically stored by a provider, like your voice during a phone call.
  • Law enforcement can compel providers to wiretap their own services for a particular user—which may also implicate the privacy of users they interact with.

Legal Processes Used to Get Your Data

When US law enforcement has identified a service that likely has this data, they have a few tools to legally compel that service to hand it over and prevent users from knowing information is being collected.

Subpoena

Subpoenas are demands from a prosecutor, law enforcement, or a grand jury which do not require approval of a judge before being sent to a service. The only restriction is this demand be relevant to an investigation. Often the only time a court reviews a subpoena is when a service or user challenges it in court.

Due to the lack of direct court oversight in most cases, subpoenas are prone to abuse and overreach. Providers should scrutinize such requests carefully with a lawyer and push back before disclosure, particularly when law enforcement tries to use subpoenas to obtain more private data, such as the contents of communications.

Court Order

This is a similar demand to subpoenas, but usually pertains to a specific statute which requires a court to authorize the demand. Under the Stored Communications Act, for example, a court can issue an order for non-content information if police provide specific facts that the information being sought is relevant to an investigation. 

Like subpoenas, providers can usually challenge court orders before disclosure and inform the user(s) of the request, subject to law enforcement obtaining a gag order (more on this below). 

Search Warrant

A warrant is a demand issued by a judge to permit police to search specific places or persons. To obtain a warrant, police must submit an affidavit (a written statement made under oath) establishing that there is a fair probability (or “probable cause”) that evidence of a crime will be found at a particular place or on a particular person. 

Typically services cannot challenge a warrant before disclosure, as these requests are already approved by a magistrate. Sometimes police request that judges also enter gag orders against the target of the warrant that prevent hosts from informing the public or the user that the warrant exists.

Super Warrant

Police seeking to intercept communications as they occur generally face the highest legal burden. Usually the affidavit needs to not only establish probable cause, but also make clear that other investigation methods are not viable (exhaustion) and that the collection avoids capturing irrelevant data (minimization). 

Some laws also require high-level approval within law enforcement, such as leadership, to approve the request. Some laws also limit the types of crimes that law enforcement may use wiretaps in while they are investigating. The laws may also require law enforcement to periodically report back to the court about the wiretap, including whether they are minimizing collection of non-relevant communications. 

Generally these demands cannot be challenged while wiretapping is occurring, and providers are prohibited from telling the targets about the wiretap. But some laws require disclosure to targets and those who were communicating with them after the wiretap has ended. 

Gag orders

Many of the legal authorities described above also permit law enforcement to simultaneously prohibit the service from telling the target of the legal process or the general public that the surveillance is occurring. These non-disclosure orders are prone to abuse and EFF has repeatedly fought them because they violate the First Amendment and prohibit public understanding about the breadth of law enforcement surveillance.

How Services Can (and Should) Protect You

This process isn't always clean-cut, and service providers must ultimately comply with lawful demands for user’s data, even when they challenge them and courts uphold the government’s demands. 

Service providers outside the US also aren’t totally in the clear, as they must often comply with US law enforcement demands. This is usually because they either have a legal presence in the US or because they can be compelled through mutual legal assistance treaties and other international legal mechanisms. 

However, services can do a lot by following a few best practices to defend user privacy, thus limiting the impact of these requests and in some cases make their service a less appealing door for the cops to knock on.

Put Cops through the Process

Paramount is the service provider's willingness to stand up for their users. Carving out exceptions or volunteering information outside of the legal framework erodes everyone's right to privacy. Even in extenuating and urgent circumstances, the responsibility is not on you to decide what to share, but on the legal process. 

Smaller hosts, like those of decentralized services, might be intimidated by these requests, but consulting legal counsel will ensure requests are challenged when necessary. Organizations like EFF can sometimes provide legal help directly or connect service providers with alternative counsel.

Challenge Bad Requests

It’s not uncommon for law enforcement to overreach or make burdensome requests. Before offering information, services can push back on an improper demand informally, and then continue to do so in court. If the demand is overly broad, violates a user's First or Fourth Amendment rights, or has other legal defects, a court may rule that it is invalid and prevent disclosure of the user’s information.

Even if a court doesn’t invalidate the legal demand entirely, pushing back informally or in court can limit how much personal information is disclosed and mitigate privacy impacts.

Provide Notice 

Unless otherwise restricted, service providers should give notice about requests and disclosures as soon as they can. This notice is vital for users to seek legal support and prepare a defense.

Be Clear With Users 

It is important for users to understand if a host is committed to pushing back on data requests to the full extent permitted by law. Privacy policies with fuzzy thresholds like "when deemed appropriate" or “when requested” make it ambiguous if a user’s right to privacy will be respected. The best practices for providers not only require clarity and a willingness to push back on law enforcement demands, but also a commitment to be transparent with the public about law enforcement’s demands. For example, with regular transparency reports breaking down the countries and states making these data requests.

Social media services should also consider clear guidelines for finding and removing sock puppet accounts operated by law enforcement on the platform, as these serve as a backdoor to government surveillance.

Minimize Data Collection 

You can't be compelled to disclose data you don’t have. If you collect lots of user data, law enforcement will eventually come demanding it. Operating a service typically requires some collection of user data, even if it’s just login information. But the problem is when information starts to be collected beyond what is strictly necessary. 

This excess collection can be seen as convenient or useful for running the service, or often as potentially valuable like behavioral tracking used for advertising. However, the more that’s collected, the more the service becomes a target for both legal demands and illegal data breaches. 

For data that enables desirable features for the user, design choices can make privacy the default and give users additional (preferably opt-in) sharing choices. 

Shorter Retention

As another minimization strategy, hosts should regularly and automatically delete information when it is no longer necessary. For example, deleting logs of user activity can limit the scope of law enforcement’s retrospective surveillance—maybe limiting a court order to the last 30 days instead of the lifetime of the account. 

Again design choices, like giving users the ability to send disappearing messages and deleting them from the server once they’re downloaded, can also further limit the impact of future data requests. Furthermore, these design choices should have privacy-preserving default

Avoid Data Sharing 

Depending on the service being hosted there may be some need to rely on another service to make everything work for users. Third-party login or ad services are common examples with some amount of tracking built in. Information shared with these third-parties should also be minimized and avoided, as they may not have a strict commitment to user privacy. Most notoriously, data brokers who sell advertisement data can provide another legal work-around for law enforcement by letting them simply buy collected data across many apps. This extends to decisions about what information is made public by default, thus accessible to many third parties, and if that is clear to users.

(True) End-to-End Encryption

Now that HTTPS is actually everywhere, most traffic between a service and a user can be easily secured—for free. This limits what onlookers can collect on users of the service, since messages between the two are in a secure “envelope.” However, this doesn’t change the fact the service is opening this envelope before passing it along to other users, or returning it to the same user. With each opened message, this is more information to defend.

Better, is end-to-end encryption (e2ee), which just means providing users with secure envelopes that even the service provider cannot open. This is how a featureful messaging app like Signal can respond to requests with only three pieces of information: the account identifier (phone number), the date of creation, and the last date of access. Many services should follow suit and limit access through encryption.

Note that while e2ee has become a popular marketing term, it is simply inaccurate for describing any encryption use designed to be broken or circumvented. Implementing “encryption backdoors” to break encryption when desired, or simply collecting information before or after the envelope is sealed on a user’s device (“client-side scanning”) is antithetical to encryption. Finally, note that e2ee does not protect against law enforcement obtaining the contents of communications should they gain access to any device used in the conversation, or if message history is stored on the server unencrypted.

Protecting Yourself and Your Community

As outlined, often the security of your personal data depends on the service providers you choose to use. But as a user you do still have some options. EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense is a maintained resource with many detailed steps you can take. In short, you need to assess your risks, limit the services you use to those you can trust (as much as you can), improve settings, and when all else fails, accessorize with tools that prevent data sharing in the first place—like EFF’s Privacy Badger browser extension.

Remember that privacy is a team sport. It’s not enough to make these changes as an individual, it’s just as important to share and educate others, as well as fighting for better digital privacy policy on all levels of governance. Learn, get organized, and take action.

 

Evelyn Wang ’00 knows a few things about engineering solutions to hard problems. After all, she invented a way to pull water out of thin air.

Now, Wang is applying that problem-solving experience — and an enduring sense of optimism — toward the critical issue of climate change, to strengthen the American energy economy and ensure resilience for all.

Wang, a mechanical engineering professor by trade, began work this spring as MIT’s first vice president for energy and climate, overseeing the Institute’s expanding work on climate change. That means broadening the Institute’s already-wide research portfolio, scaling up existing innovations, seeking new breakthroughs, and channeling campus community input to drive work forward.

“MIT has the potential to do so much, when we know that climate, energy, and resilience are paramount to events happening around us every day,” says Wang, who is also the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT. “There’s no better place than MIT to come up with the transformational solutions that can help shape our world.”

That also means developing partnerships with corporate allies, startups, government, communities, and other organizations. Tackling climate change, Wang says, “requires a lot of partnerships. It’s not an MIT-only endeavor. We’re going to have to collaborate with other institutions and think about where industry can help us deploy and scale so the impact can be greater.”

She adds: “The more partnerships we have, the more understanding we have of the best pathways to make progress in difficult areas.”

From MIT to ARPA-E

An MIT faculty member since 2007, Wang leads the Device Research Lab. Along with collaborators, she identifies new materials and optimizations based on heat and mass transport processes that unlock the creation of leading-edge innovations. Her development of the device that extracts water from even very dry air led Foreign Policy Magazine to name her its 2017 Global ReThinker, and she won the 2018 Eighth Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water.

Her research also extends to other areas such as energy and desalination research. In 2016, Wang and several colleagues announced a device based on nanophotonic crystals with the potential to double the amount of power produced by a given area of solar panels, which led to one of her graduate researchers on the project to co-found the startup Antora Energy. More recently, Wang and colleagues developed an aerogel that improves window insulation, now being commercialized through her former graduate students in a startup, AeroShield.

Wang also spent two years recently as director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which supports early-stage R&D on energy generation, storage, and use.  Returning to MIT, she began her work as vice president for energy and climate in April, engaging with researchers, holding community workshops, and planning to build partnerships.

“I’ve been energized coming back to the Institute, given the talented students, the faculty, the staff. It’s invigorating to be back in this community,” Wang says. “People are passionate, excited, and mission-driven, and that’s the energy we need to make a big impact in the world.”

Wang is also working to help align the Institute’s many existing climate efforts. This includes the Climate Project at MIT, an Institute-wide presidential initiative announced in 2024, which aims to accelerate and scale up climate solutions while generating new tools and policy proposals. All told, about 300 MIT faculty conduct research related to climate issues in one form or another.

“The fact that there are so many faculty working on climate is astounding,” Wang says. “Everyone’s doing exciting work, but how can we leverage our unique strengths to create something bigger than the sum of its parts? That’s what I’m working toward. We’ve spun out so many technologies. How do we do more of that? How do we do that faster, and in a way so the world will feel the impact?”

A deep connection to campus — and strong sense of optimism

Understanding MIT is one of Wang’s strengths, given that she has spent over two decades at the Institute.

Wang earned her undergraduate degree from MIT in mechanical engineering, and her MS and PhD in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. She has held several chaired faculty positions at MIT. In 2008, Wang was named the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor; in 2015, she was named the Gail E. Kendall Professor; and in 2021, she became the Ford Professor of Engineering. Wang served as head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering from 2018 through 2022.

As it happens, Wang’s parents, Kang and Edith, met as graduate students at the Institute. Her father, an electrical engineer, became a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. Wang also met her husband at MIT, and both of her brothers graduated from the Institute.

Along with her deep institutional knowledge, administrative experience, and track record as an innovator, Wang is bringing several other things to her new role as vice president for climate: a sense of urgency about the issue, coupled with a continual sense of optimism that innovators can meet society’s needs.

“I think optimism can make a difference, and is great to have in the midst of collective challenge,” Wang says. “We’re such a mission-driven university, and people come here to solve real-world problems.”

That hopeful approach is why Wang describes the work as not only as a challenge but also a generational opportunity. “We have the chance to design the world we want,” she says, “one that’s cleaner, more sustainable and more resilient. This future is ours to shape and build together.”

Wang thinks MIT contains many examples of world-shaping progress, She cites MIT’s announcement this month of the creation of the Schmidt Laboratory for Materials in Nuclear Technologies, at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion center, to conduct research on next-generation materials that could help enable the construction of fusion power plants. Another example Wang references is MIT research earlier this year on developing clean ammonia, a way to make the world’s most widely-produced chemical with drastically-reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

“Those solutions could be breakthroughs,” Wang says. “Those are the kinds of things that give us optimism. There’s still a lot of research to be done, but it suggests the potential of what our world can be.”

Optimism: There’s that word again.

“Optimism is the only way to go,” Wang says. “Yes, the world is challenged. But this is where MIT’s strengths — in research, innovation, and education — can bring optimism to the table.”

Reuters is reporting that the White House has banned WhatsApp on all employee devices:

The notice said the “Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use.”

TechCrunch has more commentary, but no more information.

New research suggests that a rapidly warming Arctic is driving long-lasting summer extremes, like this month's sweltering temperatures.

The Center for Biological Diversity says EPA has ignored a Freedom of Information Act request asking for names of companies that have sought exemptions to Clean Air Act regulations.

A measure sponsored by three Texas Republicans would erase fuel emissions standards for motor vehicles.

The senator used a hearing to propel his theory on China, environmental groups and climate litigation.

"I'm not anyone's henchman," Emil Bove told lawmakers during his confirmation hearing Wednesday.