Photo by Ken Richardson

Steven Pinker is one of the most famous—and divisive—academics in America. A cognitive psychologist at Harvard, he’s spent five decades writing about how we think, picking fights with the left, and wading into culture wars that most professors avoid. Bill Gates calls him a favorite writer. His critics call him a cover for racists. He’s been accused of providing intellectual ammunition to the alt-right, and of dismissing inconvenient evidence when it doesn’t fit his theories. He’s also, right now, one of the loudest voices pushing Harvard to change.

My introduction to him, though, was surprisingly gentle.

The past few years, Pinker has turned his attention to what’s happening at Harvard itself—a lack of academic freedom, the monoculture he sees taking over, and the groupthink undermining research and education. What first caught my eye was something he wrote for the Boston Globe in 2024, on how Harvard had been handling student protests over the war in Gaza. Pinker wrote about teaching Sunday school as a young man, leading students through moral dilemmas with no obvious right or wrong answer. Now, he said, he found himself “wishing that my august institution taught its students this skill.”

Which demands a pointed question: If Harvard isn’t teaching students to think through hard problems for themselves, what, exactly, is the mission of the university?

This struck me as bold, since Pinker draws a paycheck from Harvard, but even more to the point, it seemed quite reasonable. And calm. Also, right at the heart of what we need to figure out about higher education.

It gets immediately complicated, however, given that a lot of people, including President Donald Trump, have been asking the same questions in a much harsher way. Trump has had a great deal to say about our elite universities, especially Harvard, and none of it is good. This has put Pinker in a bind between the woke and Trump. Between indoctrination from the left and whatever the Trump administration is. So Pinker has written not just about the monoculture at Harvard, but, lately, about the fallout if the Trump administration is able to drastically cut the school’s federal funding.

Pinker has fashioned himself as a public intellectual—someone who takes on big issues and demands that we do, too. It’s tricky territory. Of course, he could make a left turn and simply shut up. But speaking out, having his say, is what he does and wants to do, and—though he can be shy about admitting it—enjoys doing.

Pinker is taking this moment on not by jumping up and down, but in the same clear-as-a-bell way I first discovered—by getting right to the problem. In “Harvard Derangement Syndrome,” which ran in the New York Times last May, he argued that universities are obsessed with implicit racism and sexism but blind to a bigger problem: “my-side bias,” the tendency to believe whatever our political tribe believes. Universities, he wrote, should expect faculty to “leave their politics at the classroom door.” To that end, he even suggested “a bit of D.E.I. for conservatives.”

But Pinker’s critics—and there are many, especially in academia—argue that he’s guilty of exactly what he decries: my-side bias, ideological blinders, a willingness to engage with far-right figures in ways that give them legitimacy. He says he doesn’t set out to spark controversy—though he seems to welcome it when it comes. But it’s a double-edged sword in a dangerous time: Pinker has leaped into the fray of what ails Harvard—and higher education in general—starting with his own questions about our universities: What are they doing? Who are they for? Where are they going?

But there’s another question, one that goes to the core of what he’s all about, as Pinker tries to change the culture at Harvard: Is he the right guy for the job?

Something large was always at play for Pinker, who grew up in a Jewish community in Montreal. His kindergarten teacher told his mother he was the smartest kid she ever taught. His parents had bought a set of the World Book Encyclopedia—Pinker as a young boy devoured them. He loved science and math. His mother was a big reader, someone who knew everything. He asked her, at 17, “How do you get a job in a think tank?” She suggested he become a psychiatrist, but Pinker wasn’t interested in going to medical school. A college professor, then; this, they could agree on. They’d drive to McGill University together—Pinker lived at home all through college, “in the Canadian style,” he says—as his mother was working on a master’s in education. She brought home books on psycholinguistics that triggered an early interest—it was the era of Noam Chomsky getting famous in the revolution of cognitive science—and in his office in Cambridge, Pinker turns to look up at his books: “In fact, I have some on my shelves. I know exactly which ones they are.” Never mind that it was also the era of unemployed Ph.D.s; Pinker knew what he wanted. It took him all of three years to get a doctorate at Harvard in experimental psychology after graduating from McGill. He moves fast.

In his office, Pinker, on sabbatical, is informal, wearing a sweater and jeans, and the cowboy boots he’s known for that give him another inch. His famously spectacular curly hair has been trimmed down a bit, though it’s still spectacular. He’s smaller than I anticipated, and I realize that he’s generally so good-looking in photographs that I was expecting a commanding presence, but that’s not Pinker’s style. He’s eager, almost, to please—and a little edgy. He shifts often in his chair as we talk for three and a half hours—as if he can’t quite get comfortable; Pinker, 71, sprained a tendon in his hip two years ago, which ended his running, but he’s still an avid bicyclist. In his book How the Mind Works, he wrote: “Well into my procreating years I am, so far, voluntarily childless…ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes. By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake.… But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don’t like it, they can go jump in the lake.” His third wife, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, is a philosopher and novelist. He’s a professed liberal Democrat, though Pinker often gets accused of being a closet conservative. He takes on, with gusto, whatever I ask.

It quickly becomes obvious that the world comes alive for Pinker when it can be studied, understood, and explained. For a long time, he was mystified about why his father, who’d grown up dirt poor in Montreal after his parents emigrated from Poland in the 1920s, didn’t use his law degree, instead supporting his family by selling clothing in small Quebec towns; Pinker’s father himself never explained why. But then Pinker discovered the research of Thomas Sowell, a conservative economist and social theorist, on how ethnic groups often cultivate particular expertise over time and take it wherever they end up; for Pinker’s father, the Jewish cultural capital of commerce and finance—or, specifically, the garment industry—developed over centuries became the sure thing in order to move on from a childhood so destitute that a neighbor had to knit him mittens to survive a Montreal winter, since his parents couldn’t afford to buy them.

Sowell’s research, Pinker says, “actually helped me understand my own upbringing.” His research pushed against “the dominant mode of explanation that says the only differences among ethnic groups is how they’re treated from the outside, in terms of racism and prejudice. He argued that the traits within a culture matter as well.” With that, Pinker’s father wasn’t a victim of his circumstances, but part of a cultural tradition.

Pinker took his method of understanding, of needing to know and how he needed to know, into cognitive science. The Guardian once wrote of him, “No matter the topic of conversation, he will reach for a wider theory or study to explain it: the universality of facial expressions, the roots of physical attractiveness, the moral awe people feel for Noam Chomsky, why zebras have stripes.”

Pinker found more than a profession—he discovered a method. And the power of his books is in their insistence on going wherever the facts lead. After writing about language for academics, Pinker crossed over to a general audience with The Language Instinct in 1994, which made the case for the biological basis of language and hit big. In The Blank Slate, published in 2002, Pinker argued against a prevailing orthodoxy that we’re born without any innate characteristics, shaped entirely by environment and culture. Instead, he made the case that genetics plays a significant role in how our minds work and who we become. The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) detailed the long-term historical decline in violence, and Enlightenment Now (2018) made the case for reason and science creating a world of well-being and possibility foreign to earlier epochs. Those last two got Pinker a lot of heat for putting a sunny spin on the way things are now, especially among left-leaning thinkers who have called him a cheerleader for Western capitalism, blind to the inequalities it produces. And The Blank Slate has gotten Pinker criticized over the idea that biology is destiny, which leads into dangerous territory: racial differences, eugenics, the question of who gets to define human nature and why.

Biology as destiny is not what Pinker seems to be up to in The Blank Slate. In a nutshell, he argues that there are genetic differences between people, and that acknowledging this is not inherently a bad or dangerous thing; rather, it’s something to be understood. When he made this argument nearly 25 years ago, it was highly controversial. It still is.

In The Blank Slate, Pinker had three central beefs with academic orthodoxy. First: that human nature does not exist. Second: that our minds and bodies exist apart from each other. Third: that we are born innately good. Instead, he had come to believe many traits are universally human; that our minds are an information processing system plugged in to the hardware of our brains (“I think that intellectuals are just kind of squirrelly about that,” Pinker says. “They’re squeamish about the idea that the mind is just the activity of the brain.”); and that, while we are quite capable of doing good, it is not the underlying state of humanity. Pinker takes the basic position of philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who wrote that the condition of man is a war “of every man against every man.” In other words: The natural state of human beings is guided by self-interest and engaged in an ongoing struggle for power and resources.

Pinker says the book was not meant to stoke controversy, but explore what already existed. “I thought that the moral emotions had crept into the science, distorting the way scientists could do and report their research,” Pinker says. “And so the major goal of the book was to drive a wedge between them, so that if, for example, you thought that there were differences between men and women, that did not imply that you were against equal rights for women or condoning prejudice and harassment of women.”

Pinker’s frustration comes through in The Blank Slate—a sense that we’ve gotten human nature wrong. I read a passage to him from the book:

“The blank slate has also served as a sacred scripture for political and ethical beliefs. According to the doctrine, any differences we see among races, ethnic groups, sexes, and individuals come not from differences in their innate constitution, but from differences in their experiences. Change the experiences—by reforming parenting, education, the media, and social rewards—and you can change the person.”

I say to Pinker: “You’re close to take-no-prisoners territory there, don’t you think?”

“It’s provocative,” he says, and thinks for a moment. “I am after, just relentlessly after, clarity. I just want the idea to be as identifiable, visible, clear, understandable as possible.”

In the preface of The Blank Slate, Pinker quotes Anton Chekhov: “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.” I ask him whether that underpins what, when all is said and done, he believes he’s really about.

“I probably should have used that as an epigraph,” he says, pleased that we land on something so direct and simple. “If there’s a kind of moral passion behind my work, that would capture it.”

And now, Pinker says, The Blank Slate feels newly relevant:

“The idea that political and moral equality require sameness, which is one of the fallacies that I tried to expose, has come back with a vengeance in wokeness,” he says. And that winds him up a bit: “The idea that there is no such thing as biological sex, that sex is an arbitrary label assigned at birth, like a first name, or the bad biology that would say sex is a continuum—these are meant as ways to safeguard, but weren’t something I conceived of when writing The Blank Slate. If they were, I would have put them in there.”

“I am after, just relentlessly after, clarity,” says Pinker, shown here in his Cambridge home. / Photo by Ken Richardson

But why take this sort of thing on, given the risk?

The Blank Slate was much praised for opening up the nature-nurture debate—it was shortlisted for the Pulitzer, but it also garnered some now-wait-a-minute reviews that sometimes attacked Pinker for oversimplifying things. Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club, a Pulitzer-winning intellectual and cultural history of late-19th- and early-20th-century America, reviewed the book skeptically in the New Yorker. Pinker’s villains, Menand wrote, were “social scientists, progressive educators, radical feminists, academic Marxists, liberal columnists, avant-garde arts types, government planners, and postmodernist relativists.” His heroes were cognitive scientists and ordinary folks. “I wish I could say that Pinker’s view of the world of ideas is more nuanced than this,” Menand wrote.

It isn’t just Pinker’s conclusions that have drawn fire—it’s his method. “By far the nastiest and most aggressive academic responses I have seen come from humanities professors when there are ideas from the sciences that they see as encroaching on their territories,” Pinker told the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2019. “That’s when you get rage and withering condescension.” It’s not hard to find.

Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale, reviewed Enlightenment Now for the New Republic, arguing that Pinker’s conclusions were too narrow. “Behind this self-styled posture as a man of evidence and science,” Moyn tells me, “I think he’s a man of faith who won’t confront the evidence that doesn’t go his way. I think there’s so much that he’s sweeping under the carpet that it’s hard not to wonder what could lead him to extrapolate from a few data points to a big theory that’s so simple-minded.”

And Daniel Smail, a Harvard history professor, wrote a withering takedown of The Better Angels of Our Nature for an academic journal, dismissing Pinker’s optimism about civilization as naive. His verdict: “Better Angels is not a work of history. It is best understood as a work of moral and historical theology.”

Pinker, as is his way, calmly rejects the Moyn and Smail appraisals, though he admits this sort of thing makes him angry, and small wonder why: The accusations that Pinker is “a man of faith” or that he was writing “historical theology” strike at the most basic underpinning of his approach: Chasing the facts as he finds them, on the way to making his case for the way things really are. The charge, essentially, is that Pinker is guilty of his own my-side bias. “Those reactions of both Moyn and Smail, I think, are outrageously false,” Pinker says.

Pinker has his defenders in academia, too. David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas, calls Better Angels “extremely accurate. People have criticized that work, and I think unfairly, because it just violates all of our intuitions.” And even Moyn gives Pinker credit for “advancing the public conversation” in writing “accessibly” for a broad audience.

In other words, the debate over Pinker’s work has never really been settled—it’s ongoing, and it’s personal.

This isn’t for the faint-hearted, being a lightning rod, especially given the past decade’s atmosphere. In late 2017, for instance, during a panel discussion at Harvard about free speech, Pinker said, “Political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population that might be—I wouldn’t want to say ‘persuadable,’ but certainly whose affiliation might be up for grabs. The often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right: Internet savvy, media savvy, who often are radicalized in that way.” Pinker was actually arguing that by shutting down debate, the left was pushing smart, contrarian people toward the alt-right—not because the alt-right was correct, but because it was the only place willing to engage certain questions.

Still, the right had a field day. Neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer ran a headline that read, in part: “Harvard Jew Professor Admits the Alt-Right Is Right About Everything.” The left hammered Pinker for giving ammunition to extremists, regardless of his intent.

And this is the pattern: Bad actors and dark thinkers have appropriated Pinker’s research and writing for their own ends—and Pinker has done little to stop them.

Charles Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve in 1994, which linked IQ differences among races to genetics, has since cited The Blank Slate to support his views. Last year, Pinker appeared on the Aporia Podcast, an outlet that supports a revival of race science. In 2024, the Guardian reported that one of Aporia’s cofounders, Matthew Frost, once said that he’d been recruiting mainstream writers to give the podcast “legitimacy via association.” Pinker gave them an hour. After the Guardian chastised him for appearing on Aporia, Pinker told the newspaper he only agreed to be interviewed after the outlet “attacked” his views on human progress. He also said he believes it is vital to persuade audiences one disagrees with, which is why he appears in media with diverse political orientations.

Pinker likes to say he manages his “controversy portfolio carefully.” But that means the trouble he might get into—not the trouble he creates for others by lending his credibility to people like Murray, with whom he engages rather than dismisses. Late last year, he and Murray had a back-and-forth in the Wall Street Journal about Murray’s views on “terminal lucidity” proving the existence of the soul; Pinker, ever skeptical of faith, chastised Murray for reaching beyond the data. But the debate itself was the point: Whether Pinker won the argument didn’t really matter—Murray got the platform, a serious intellectual exchange with a Harvard cognitive scientist.

Nicolas Guilhot, a professor of intellectual history at the European University Institute, has long tracked Pinker’s thinking and writing (including a tough review of Enlightenment Now in 2018 for a diplomacy and foreign policy journal). I asked him whether Pinker bears any responsibility for how his work gets used.

“Of course he can’t prevent people from running with his ideas,” Guilhot told me in an email. “But he is at the very least cavalier about what he knows are the possible—and probable—implications of the views he peddles. This is all the more problematic because there are no progressive policies to point to that would latch on to his view of human nature, while there is a plethora of right-wing and reactionary agendas that are based on it. None of this is an accident, and Pinker is very much a participant of the recent restoration of a deterministic idea of ‘nature’ that has seamlessly connected neoliberal projects (of which he is definitely a representative) to reactionary ones.”

I put this to Pinker directly: You insist on following evidence wherever it leads. Do you take any responsibility for who has followed your work—and where they’ve taken it?

“If I have been misleading or unclear in a way that would egg on deplorable actors, I would take responsibility for that,” Pinker says. “But if I express things perfectly clearly—there’s a huge world out there. I can’t take responsibility for how some random person out on Twitter interprets a paper or an interview if there’s no content in the interview that would actually egg on or encourage them. And I can’t boycott every forum whose members hold some opinion that some third party finds repugnant.”

Then, of course, there is Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein collected heavyweight intellectuals, and in terms of funding and gifts seemed to have a particular affinity for Harvard. Pinker attended a few gatherings where he was present, but claims he never liked Epstein.

In 2008, Pinker’s friend and Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz defended Epstein, who had been charged with soliciting prostitution from a minor. Dershowitz had consulted Pinker for help interpreting the wording of a statute concerning the use of the mail to solicit minors to engage in prostitution or sexual activity. For that crime, Epstein pleaded guilty and served 13 months in prison.

Pinker says he doesn’t blame Dershowitz for defending Epstein, nor does he believe he did anything wrong by helping interpret the law. “I believe in the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of legal representation of the accused,” Pinker says. “If I had known then what I know now about the extent of Epstein’s crimes, and that it would be used in his defense, I might have second thoughts.”

But Pinker got an early clue about just who Epstein was, and it didn’t stop him from showing up.

In the Epstein document trove released by the U.S. Department of Justice, more than 430 results mention Pinker—often emails about events Epstein buddies John Brockman, Pinker’s literary agent, and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss wanted Pinker to attend (many emails are included several times). The only one from Pinker himself—to an Epstein assistant in March 2012, four years after the conviction—said he’d be “delighted to meet with him” when Epstein visited Harvard. “I probably shouldn’t have said yes,” Pinker says now, “but I was being polite—he was a donor to Harvard.” (Pinker says they didn’t ultimately meet up.)

In 2014, as part of a project he was working on, Krauss invited Pinker to help organize a conference at Arizona State University on the origins of violence after the publication of Better Angels. At the end of the event, Krauss asked Pinker to allow Epstein to come say hello, Pinker says. Someone snapped a picture, which now lives online.

“I would not have agreed to do anything that was associated with Epstein or branded with him,” Pinker says. “If I was perhaps more assertive, maybe less polite and Canadian, when Krauss said, ‘Will you let Epstein come over to your table and sit down with you?’ I could have said no. Probably I should have said no. I didn’t say no.” He also didn’t say no to organizing a conference largely funded by Epstein.

Pinker dismisses criticism of his connections as guilt by association—whether it’s Murray or Epstein, he insists that proximity isn’t endorsement. But the pattern is visible: years of polite yeses, a willingness to lend his credibility to people and platforms that most academics would avoid. At some point, the accumulation starts to speak for itself.

Which brings us back to Harvard—and whether Pinker is the right person to lead the university out of its current trouble.

Pinker, part of the Council on Academic Freedom that has been shaping policies at Harvard, has both critics and defenders in the world of academia. / Photo by Ken Richardson

The most important piece that Pinker has written about Harvard—and, really, higher education in general—was “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” last year for the New York Times, as the Trump administration’s threats on funding and problems within the university coalesced. It was a cry for sanity and a path forward. He prefaced it with: “I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged.”

Pinker pointed out that he had written “The Trouble With Harvard” for the New Republic back in 2014, which called for an admissions policy based on merit and took on the idea that professors should be engaged in their students’ self-discovery: “Perhaps I am emblematic of everything that’s wrong with elite American education, but I have no idea how to get students to build a self or become a soul.” In 2023, he wrote a five-point plan for the Globe on how Harvard could save itself, and “How I Wish Harvard Taught Students to Talk About Israel,” the piece that first caught my eye, along with others on problems at the school.

In “Harvard Derangement Syndrome,” Pinker made the case for proportionality. Yes, Harvard has serious problems—he’d been saying so for years. The appropriate treatment, Pinker argued, was to diagnose which parts need which remedies—not to “cut its carotid and watch it bleed out,” as he believed Trump and his allies were attempting to do. The school’s core mission was at risk, Pinker argued: If there’s fear of asking certain questions, then research is crippled, just as it would be by the government slashing funds to conduct it. And that funding is not a privilege for Harvard, but necessary to help us advance our understanding in any number of big ways.

Pinker ended his piece with a sort of call to arms, quoting physicist David Deutsch: “Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.” To cripple the institutions that acquire and transmit knowledge, Pinker wrote, “is a tragic blunder and a crime against future generations.”

But writing op-eds is one thing. Could Pinker actually change anything?

In 2023, Pinker and five copresidents, along with dozens of other Harvard faculty, formed the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, made up now of some 200 members, which regularly challenges university policies and pushes for change. For Pinker and others on the Council, evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven essentially getting driven out of Harvard as a lecturer was a turning point—she had said in an interview in 2021 that the biological definitions of male and female are essential to science, then was summarily accused of transphobia, the fallout of which continued into 2023. “That’s kind of what DEI officers are empowered to do,” Pinker says: “The fact is, there is very little racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia on modern university campuses, especially in a Northeastern elite university like Harvard. So there’s actually nothing to root out—they’re going to have to be increasingly ingenious and energetic in interpreting things as transphobic so that they’ve got something to do.” Hooven had been Pinker’s teaching assistant as a graduate student, and he ended up bringing her back as an associate in his lab at Harvard.

A week before Christmas in 2023, two members of the Harvard Corporation, Paul Finnegan and Tracy Palandjian, asked members of the Council to join them for a private dinner at Bar Enza in Cambridge. It was a shocking invite: The Corporation runs Harvard, and they’re notoriously secretive. “It’s almost like the Politburo-watchers in the era of the Soviet Union,” Pinker says. “But this was at the moment of the university’s deepest crisis.” Then-president Claudine Gay was getting hammered for her handling of demonstrations over the October 7 Hamas attacks on Jews in Israel; she had testified before Congress two weeks earlier, and in early January, she would resign. “In a rare moment of openness, the Corporation was actually soliciting some faculty opinions,” Pinker says. Like a principal calling the mouthiest students down to the office to ask: How do I run this place?

The meeting was cordial, but Pinker and three other Council members were direct: “Large sectors of the country hold Harvard in contempt,” Pinker says he told Finnegan and Palandjian. “This is the Corporation’s problem.”

The meeting warranted an article in the New York Times a couple of days later, which didn’t please the Corporation; Pinker says the Council didn’t reach out to the paper. But he didn’t mind the exposure, writing to his Council colleagues (and sharing the emails with me): “They’re a legitimate target of reporting by the national media—the days when they could run Harvard like a private blue-blood Bostonian club are gone.” And this: “The public has a legitimate interest in knowing what led to this mess, and the Corporation is part of the story. To be honest, they screwed up in picking Claudine, they probably screwed up in keeping her, they screwed up in their plagiarism investigation [of her], including threatening the New York Post with a defamation lawsuit, and they screwed up in their public pronouncements.”

It was clearly go time, with Pinker leading the charge. His involvement and directness have given other faculty the courage to take public stands. Eric Maskin, the Nobel-winning economist and a copresident of the Council, puts it this way: “Steve has been effective within the Harvard community in emboldening people who were inclined in that direction not to shut up.” An interesting admission: that a Nobel laureate would think twice about the risk before speaking out.

The Council had only the one direct meeting with the Corporation. But they were just getting started. Pinker and former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey Flier kept writing occasional opinion pieces and worked back channels, especially through private conversations with Alan Garber, the president who replaced Gay; he proved much more open to their initiatives. The Council pushed for applicants to faculty jobs in arts and sciences to no longer be required to write diversity statements, “which pretty clearly,” Pinker says, “eliminated anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar.” The Council also pushed for institutional neutrality on issues that don’t directly affect the university, given how Harvard got into trouble, in particular, for Gay’s waffling rhetoric on demonstrations over the war in Gaza.

Both initiatives were adopted by Harvard.

Within Garber’s first few months as interim president after Gay resigned, he formed a working group on open inquiry and constructive dialogue at Harvard. It’s impossible to say how much the Council’s pressure—the op-eds, the behind-the-scenes meetings with Garber—got the ball rolling, but the working group’s report that October was clear in concluding that the lack of open inquiry is a crisis for higher education.

For Harvard to officially admit that, Flier says, is a big deal, and he is enthused: “Every time I write an article or an op-ed, I wonder ‘Will someone try to cancel me or destroy me now?’” Flier says. “That is less common today because there’s more awareness of this and there’s more opposition to it, and the people who used to do it are more afraid of doing it now. That is a huge change. And unless you lived through it, you wouldn’t see the change.”

Pinker is more cautiously optimistic. “I see green shoots,” he says. In his “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” piece, Pinker wrote, “Young people are shaped by peers more than most people realize.… In many cases, students’ politics are no more attributable to indoctrination by professors than are their green hair and pierced septums.” What can you do about that? Yet at least both the Corporation and Garber are speaking the Council’s language now, in public statements on academic freedom when Garber’s tenure was extended beyond 2027. “I think he was always on board,” Pinker says, “but he would not have prioritized it if not for our pressure.”

The Council will keep looking into graduate student education on academic freedom, Pinker says (given that many undergrads spend more time being taught by grad students than professors), and intellectual diversity of the faculty (affirmative action for conservatives, as Pinker half-jokingly puts it). They also plan to study—per Pinker’s obsession with data—how universities actually work. “Universities are surprisingly ignorant of how universities work,” he says. Pinker insists he’s gotten no pushback at Harvard for any of his public criticisms, or his push now for change.

But the greatest threat to Harvard, Pinker says, is from the outside: “that the Trump administration will attempt to cripple it using every means at its disposal. That with a compliant Supreme Court, it may not even matter if Harvard has the law on its side, which I think it does.”

It’s tough to predict where that will end, or how open to different points of view the university will really become. But something does feel different. The university is on notice. Pinker and the Council will keep pushing—as if taking a page from the wokeness playbook in keeping everybody on high alert. We’re watching.

Pinker is convinced he’s pursuing the truth as he finds it. His method has made him a star. It’s also left a trail of complications.

As always, Pinker is convinced he’s pursuing the truth as he finds it. His method has made him a star. It’s also left a trail of complications—the associations, the bad actors who cite his work, the questions about what doors he’s opened and for whom.

Whether that makes him the right person to lead Harvard out of its current troubles is a question the university will have to answer for itself. Pinker, for his part, shows no signs of slowing down. He carries on as if he is certain his work and beliefs deserve whatever airing he decides to give them.

It brings to mind the line Pinker quotes in The Blank Slate, from Chekhov: “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”

The question now is whether Pinker applies that same scrutiny to himself and the way he operates. Harvard may be waiting on the answer.

Illustration by Comrade

Here’s the thing about Cape Cod potato chips: They were always about much more than the chips. They were about that low-slung building in Hyannis where, on rainy days, you’d take the kids to press their faces against Plexiglas and watch the chips tumble down the line. And at the end, somebody handed you a free bag, still warm.

Two brothers started the company in 1980 and named it for the place itself, which, in retrospect, was either a stroke of genius or a terrible idea, because once you name something “Cape Cod,” you are making a promise about where it belongs. The brand became the Cape in the same way Sam Adams is Boston or Ben & Jerry’s is Vermont. Which is why what happened next really stings. In time, the brothers sold the company. It got sold again. Eventually Campbell’s—the soup people—bought its parent company in 2017 and quietly moved almost all production to Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. By the end, the Hyannis factory was making just 4 percent of the chips—the place that gave them their name now basically a souvenir of itself.

This month, Campbell’s will shut it down. Forty-nine jobs will be gone. The chips will still be in nearly every American supermarket—they just won’t be made on Cape Cod by Cape Codders. Instead, the building will go dark. And another small piece of Massachusetts’ economic soul will pack up and leave.

Photo by CNMages/Alamy

It was hardly a surprise. The parade of departures in Massachusetts has become almost routine. New Hampshire politicians spent last year’s holiday season gloating over their latest gifts: business transplants like the 250 employees of power equipment manager SynQor, formerly of Boxborough, and security and healthcare technology company Analogic, gone from Peabody with 500 jobs in tow. Massachusetts’ Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act tracker reported an unusually high toll in January: 905 employees canned at 10 companies, from CRRC (the once-touted Chinese subway-car manufacturer whose woes have stalled MBTA service) and biotech stalwarts Takeda and Thermo Fisher to Zipcar—born in Cambridge in 2000, the kind of startup that Massachusetts used to mint and hold onto—and soup-and-sandwich staple Panera.

Other large layoffs can be traced back to last year. Sarepta Therapeutics slashed nearly 500 Massachusetts jobs, pharmaceutical giant GSK moved operations from Cambridge to Pennsylvania, and Symbotic, a Wilmington-based AI robotics firm—exactly the type of company Massachusetts is supposed to be incubating—cut 400 workers from its Andover facility. In December, Yankee Candle—the South Deerfield icon that built a tourist empire on scented wax—saw its parent company slash 900 jobs and shutter stores nationwide. Another Massachusetts original dramatically downsized.

And it’s not just companies leaving. Some aren’t bothering to come here in the first place. German biotech firm Repairon GmbH recently chose Providence over Boston for its first U.S. headquarters—picking Rhode Island over the ecosystem we’ve spent decades building and signaling that even our life-sciences pipeline is struggling to compete with cheaper, hungrier neighbors. HubSpot cofounder Brian Halligan captured the mood on X in January with a post that went viral in Boston tech circles: “I’m starting to worry about Massachusetts.” He should be.

We know companies are leaving. But so are the people. U.S. Census Bureau data shows 33,340 more residents left the state than came in during the year ending last July, and leading the exodus was young adults who in better times would be starting families and companies here. A Boston Globe/Suffolk University poll last fall also found nearly a third of respondents had considered leaving Massachusetts in the year prior over the high cost of living. One in three. Think about that at your next dinner party: Someone at the table is probably looking at Zillow listings in North Carolina.

Then there’s the forecast nobody wanted to hear. Boston University finance professor Mark Williams published a study last year that should have been a five-alarm fire: His analysis of the impact of President Donald Trump’s tariff hikes, immigration crackdown, and proposed cuts in medical and scientific research funding concluded that Massachusetts’ core industries would be “disproportionately harmed” by “shrinking commerce, growth, tax revenue and labor supply.” The numbers showed that higher tariffs alone could cut economic growth here by $12.8 billion, costing the state $1 billion in lost tax revenue and close to 80,000 jobs. That’s roughly double the population of Salem headed for the unemployment line.

In private briefings with local business executives and during interviews for this story, Williams updated his forecast to reflect what’s actually happening. Trump’s policies have become “a giant wrecking ball,” he says, coming on top of preexisting problems, including an aging population, declining fertility rates, and relentless cost pressures on childcare, healthcare, energy, and housing.

His prediction: Massachusetts “could head into recession by Q3 2026”—and Democrats winning the midterms won’t save us. Neither will Trump’s departure in 2029. “It will require multiple years after Trump is out of office for the state to regain its financial footing,” Williams says.

The question isn’t whether Massachusetts is in trouble. It’s whether anyone in charge has a plan.

Illustration by Benjamen Purvis

Here’s what few people want to admit: It’s not one crisis. It’s at least three. Higher education, healthcare, and biotech—the three bedrocks Massachusetts has been telling itself make it unsinkable—are all unraveling at the same time. And because they’re interlocking, each one accelerates the collapse of the others. Universities train the talent. Hospitals employ it. Biotech commercializes it. Lose one pillar, and you have a problem. Lose all three at once, and you don’t have a downturn. You have a structural collapse.

Start with higher education, which has seen a dozen colleges close or merge over the past decade, from the Boston Conservatory in 2016 to Eastern Nazarene College last year—one of the nation’s worst attrition rates. Moody’s issued a negative fiscal 2026 outlook for higher ed nationally, citing caps on federal student loans, cuts in research grants, and a projected decline in high school graduates. Looming over it all: artificial intelligence advances that threaten to render parts of the traditional college model obsolete. National enrollment dropped 15 percent from 2010 to 2021. “Twenty to twenty-five percent of all colleges are going to close,” says Brandeis University president Arthur Levine. “If federal cuts continue, it’s going to be a huge economic problem for Massachusetts. If another nation were doing to us what we’re doing to ourselves, we would declare it an act of war.”

And the customers who might have saved us are going elsewhere. A generation of high school seniors who once dreamed of New England campuses are choosing Sun Belt schools—drawn by lower tuition, warmer climates, and job markets that don’t feel like a gamble. The ones who do want to come here increasingly can’t justify the cost: A four-year degree at a private Massachusetts university can reach $400,000 before a student earns a dollar. Some institutions are already experimenting with three-year degree programs to stanch the bleeding, compressing the model in ways that cut a full year of tuition revenue—and a full year of the local economic activity that comes with it. If that’s the next iteration of higher education, what comes after it is anyone’s guess. But it almost certainly involves fewer students, fewer professors, and fewer dollars flowing through Massachusetts.

The truth is that the pipeline is already collapsing. At UMass Chan, Ph.D. admissions plummeted from 73 to 13 in a single year. Harvard is cutting science Ph.D. enrollment in half. Boston University has paused admissions in six fields entirely. The students who would have become the next generation of researchers aren’t just going elsewhere—in some cases, the programs that would have trained them no longer exist. And the researchers who are already here are being recruited away. Australia’s Monash University has invested $10 million to lure more than a dozen American academics from Harvard, MIT, Dartmouth, and Cornell—offering stable funding and academic freedom that Washington, DC, is no longer willing to guarantee.

Our hospitals aren’t faring much better. Only six of the state’s nearly two dozen healthcare systems boasted positive operating budgets last year; the median operating margin for acute care hospitals dropped to negative 2 percent. Mass General Brigham, the state’s largest and wealthiest system, underwent hundreds of layoffs last year in an attempt to close a $250 million budget gap. UMass Memorial Health, facing an $86 million operating loss in the first half of fiscal year 2025 alone, shuttered a behavioral health program, a teen substance abuse treatment center, and two primary care clinics. “It’s going to get ugly the next three years,” UMass Memorial CEO Eric Dickson told the Globe in December. “I mean, I should have retired last year.” At Boston Medical Center, where more than 40 percent of patients are on Medicaid, an ER physician told the Globe she’s watching “the seams of our healthcare system come apart.” And the Steward Health Care collapse—which killed Carney Hospital in Dorchester and Nashoba Valley Medical Center—is still sending shockwaves through the system. The Big Beautiful Bill’s Medicaid cuts, meanwhile, could strip another $424 million a year from Massachusetts hospitals—with the hardest hit falling on safety-net facilities where uninsured and Medicaid patients are most concentrated, and where experts warn the cuts could trigger bankruptcies.

But if our long-running eds-and-meds boom is cracking, at least we have biotech—the golden goose, epitomized by the gleaming offices and labs that transformed Kendall Square from a string of parking lots to the global epicenter of cutting-edge research. Right?

Not so much. “We’ve been on the most incredible run in the biotech community since 2010, but like most industries, we are seeing a pullback, a retrenchment,” says state Senator Barry Finegold, chair of the legislature’s Joint Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies. “We’ve never had as much open lab space.” While innovators keep cranking out new products, last year’s 14 percent growth in new drug development nationwide still lags well behind China’s 37 percent increase—and Massachusetts, the industry’s center of gravity, is feeling the squeeze. According to a recent MassBio report, the state’s share of national venture capital dropped by 2 percent, and the number of funded companies slipped by 13 percent. And if it isn’t New Hampshire luring our golden geese away, it’s Rhode Island, spending millions through initiatives like the state’s Life Science Hub to siphon our companies and persuade new ones to settle there instead of here.

What about the clean energy sector, another focus of investment in the state budget? Surely that will pick up the slack? Not likely, given the Trump administration’s open hostility to alternative energy development. “Nobody has pockets like the federal government,” notes Mark Melnik, director of Economic and Public Policy Research at the UMass Donahue Institute. “Any kinds of investments in offshore wind or solar, so much of that needs to have some kind of relationship to where the feds see the economy going.”

“This is probably the most precarious I can recall the Massachusetts economy being,” Melnik adds. And while the professional and executive classes are feeling extraordinary heat, broad swaths of the rest of the population already seem to be cooked.

United states of America Map Isolated 3d Render Illustration

State leaders know there’s a problem. They just can’t agree on what to do about it.

State leaders know there’s a problem. They just can’t agree on what to do about it. “It’s true we’re facing headwinds, and we’re looking at the different ways to address them,” said Healey in her January State of the Commonwealth Address. “Donald Trump has made cuts and caused chaos,” she added as she rolled out her FY27 budget plan in mid-February. But while political leaders from the State House to City Hall are busy touting small-scale gestures—like a 10 percent cut in gas bills and 25 percent cut in electric bills this winter that utility companies will claw back later this year—and convening earnest discussions about competitiveness and affordability, the question remains: What, exactly, is the plan?

Williams’s assessment is that the political class doesn’t really grasp the scale of the disaster. “There’s not a sense of urgency—I don’t feel that at the governor’s level or Wu’s level,” he says. “I don’t see them thinking from a macro perspective. We can’t be Trump-proofed.”

As businesses and residents flee to greener pastures, Governor Maura Healey has acknowledged the state faces economic headwinds. / Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images for Vox Media

Healey pushed back. “While Massachusetts faces economic headwinds driven by federal policy decisions and high costs,” she told Boston, “my administration is clear-eyed about the work required to address them.” And her administration has been anything but idle. During her three years in office, the governor has produced a 2023 economic development plan called “Team Massachusetts: Leading Future Generations,” signed the $4 billion Mass Leads Act funding everything from AI hubs to climate tech, created a Competitiveness Council of 20 business and labor leaders, and filed a $400 million DRIVE Initiative to backfill federal research cuts. Healey also cited more than 30 companies that have recently moved headquarters here, opened offices, or expanded their footprint—including Hasbro, Lego, and prominent players in biotech and AI.

On paper, it’s an impressive portfolio. In practice, the results tell a different story. Massachusetts has become one of only four states with fewer private-sector jobs than before the pandemic—roughly 24,000 lost since January 2020, according to the Pioneer Institute. And from April through June 2024 alone, the state experienced a net loss of more than 5,000 businesses.

The political system backs Williams up. Healey’s 2023 tax-cut package—designed to make the state more competitive—was heavily watered down by the legislature, and her effort to give cities and towns more revenue-raising ability was dead on arrival. Wu’s commercial-property tax plan, which critics warned would accelerate the business exodus, couldn’t make it through the Senate. The state’s two most prominent leaders proposed and pushed hard for their biggest economic ideas—and neither could get them done.

While the evidence mounts, some on Beacon Hill whistle past the graveyard. “Our recent revenue numbers continue to show the resiliency of our economy,” House Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz said at a budget hearing in February. “While some folks are almost wishing us into some type of recession for political gain, the leadership in this State House will continue to navigate our fiscal stewardship with persistence.”

That’s not stewardship. That’s denial. And Williams calls recent state and local budget increases—well in excess of inflation—a sign of exactly that.

But denial is only part of the problem. In the basketball parlance so beloved by Healey, a former Harvard point guard, our political culture is like a star center whose ability to pivot toward the hoop is blocked at every turn by a swarming defense. Organized labor, a potent force on Beacon Hill, often throws up roadblocks to cost savings, education reforms, and responses to fast-moving developments like the AI revolution—Lynch, the AFL-CIO president, warns the state is “behind in understanding the consequences.”

Meanwhile, the pace of everything from permitting to transportation projects has been stifled. “Decisions that might take weeks are now taking months,” Murray says. “There’s gotta be an urgency across the board.”

And yet the constraints of rivalries, ideology, and special-interest pressure pale in comparison to what the citizens themselves may impose. This year’s ballot is on track to offer a record number of binding questions, including strict statewide rent control, a 20 percent cut in the state income tax, and the repeal of legal recreational marijuana sales—each of which would shrink state revenue at the worst possible time. “Ballot questions appeal to base interests,” says Eastern Bank executive chair Bob Rivers, who led the failed 2024 resistance to dumping MCAS test passage as a high school graduation requirement. Adds Brooke Thomson, president and CEO of AIM: “There’s a desire for sledgehammer-type solutions when what you need is a scalpel.”

Can Massachusetts be saved? The people who know the economy best don’t sound optimistic.

Can Massachusetts avoid catastrophe? We’ve been down before and bounced back. But the people who know the economy best don’t sound optimistic.

“I do think there are thoughtful conversations happening,” says Melnik of UMass. But former State Treasurer Steve Grossman, now CEO of the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, calls for a “radical re-imagination” of priorities and policy because “leadership at every level doesn’t fully understand the crisis that is at our door.” For his part, Williams urges state and local leaders to stop enacting policies that weaken Massachusetts’ competitive advantages. The ideas shared with us by political and business leaders are sensible and achievable—and, given the political realities, likely doomed to die in committee.

Senator Finegold, who sits on the Competitiveness Council created last fall by Healey, identifies construction regulations that slow housing development as an obvious target for reform and urges a reduction in long waiting lists for vocational/technical schools. Cubby Oil & Energy president Charlie Uglietto, who served on Charlie Baker’s Commission on Clean Heat, calls for a turn away from electricity-or-bust toward incentivizing renewable diesel, as other states are doing: “Take a look at what would economically work while we’re trying to meet these goals and not set hard caps that can’t be met.”

Housing reform, more vocational training opportunities, renewable diesel—sound ideas, all of them. But against a $12.8 billion tariff hit, a brain drain of 33,000-plus residents a year, and a federal government actively redistributing our funding—sensible may not be enough. The hard truth is that all too often we’d rather be right than competitive.

Can we muster some humility and, while resisting the worst of Trumpism, reinvent ourselves as a place willing to shed political and ideological baggage before it drags us under?

Consider the alternative. New Hampshire’s politicians spent the holidays bragging about every company they’ve stolen from us. Rhode Island is landing the German firms that used to come here without a second thought. The vultures aren’t circling. They’ve already landed.

Listen closely, and you can already hear what comes next if nothing changes.

Empty storefronts.

Deserted lab space.

Vacated neighborhoods.

And on the floor of the abandoned Cape Cod potato chip factory in Hyannis—the phantom crunch of chip fragments that no one is around to step on.

The Damage, at a Glance

24,000

Number of people who lost jobs in Massachusetts since January 2020.

5,333

Number of businesses that closed in the state from April through June 2024.

6

Number of healthcare systems, out of nearly two dozen, that ended last year with positive operating budgets.

905

Number of jobs lost in Massachusetts in January 2026 alone.

$12.8 billion

Projected loss in economic growth from tariffs in the state.

$1.7 billion

Forecasted Boston revenue shortfall due to the office-market implosion.

33,340

Net number of residents who left the state during the year ending last July.

12

Number of colleges closed and merged over the past decade.

The Plan for Massachusetts’ Future—and Why It’s Stuck

The Idea: Governor Healey’s 2023 tax cuts.

The Status: Watered down by the legislature.

The Idea: Revenue-raising authority for cities and towns.

The Status: Dead on arrival.

The Idea: Mayor Wu’s commercial-property-tax increase.

The Status: Killed in the Senate.

The Idea: The MBTA Communities Act.

The Status: Estimated less than a one percent housing increase after five years.

The Idea: The DRIVE Initiative ($400 million to backfill federal research cuts).

The Status: Filed.

The Idea: Mass Leads Act ($4 billion to fund everything from AI hubs to climate tech).

The Status: Signed.

The Idea: Clean heat standards.

The Status: Delayed.

The Idea: Offshore wind expansion.

The Status: Delayed

The Idea: Electric-vehicle sales quotas.

The Status: Delayed.

The Idea: State Senator Barry Finegold’s housing/zoning reform.

The Status: Proposed.

Note: ChatGPT also generated this image for digital use.

This quiz is part of our annual September “Top Schools” package. Read also about how students are actually using AI (and what educators are learning) here.

AI can write better essays than your teenager and solve complex equations in a matter of seconds—and everyone is using it. Are you prepared for a future that’s now? Take this quiz to see how you fare.

1. Which of these AI “myths” should set off your BS detector?

A) AI always gives correct information.
B) AI can help outline essays.
C) Teachers sometimes encourage AI brainstorming.
D) Schools are experimenting with AI tutors.

The answer: A) AI lies with the confidence of a politician. Always fact-check that digital know-it-all.

2. Your teenager drops this bomb: “Everyone uses ChatGPT now—teachers don’t care.” Your move?

A) Confiscate their laptop like it’s 1995.
B) March to the principal’s office.
C) Ask what they’re using it for and actually read the assignment together.
D) Fire back with “Everyone speeds on the highway too—doesn’t make it legal when you get caught.”

The answer: C) Shocking concept: Having an actual conversation builds trust and clarifies the rules.

3. When teachers actually want students to use AI, what should the teacher do?

A) Say, “Use ChatGPT if you want,” and pray for the best.
B) Provide clear guidelines and citation requirements.
C) Grade purely on grammar and call it a day.
D) Tell students to go full incognito mode.

The answer: B) Responsible AI use isn’t the Wild West. Rules and transparency matter.

4. Which AI habit will save your kid from academic disaster?

A) Clearing cookies religiously.
B) Citing AI-generated ideas like any other source.
C) Only using ChatGPT during vampire hours.
D) Building a secret AI vault.

The answer: B) Teaching proper attribution now prevents plagiarism scandals later. You’re welcome.

5. Why do some teachers break out in hives when students go AI-heavy?

A) It crashes the school WiFi.
B) Grade inflation makes everyone look suspicious.
C) It can turn students’ brains to mush.
D) Teachers are secretly jealous of AI’s grammar skills.

The answer: C) When AI does all the thinking, students lose the ability to think. Not ideal.

6. How might AI actually level the playing field?

A) Give everyone the same essay to copy-paste.
B) Replace teachers with chrome-plated overlords.
C) Offer language and accessibility support on demand.
D) Charge premium rates for premium answers.

The answer: C) AI can be a great equalizer for non-native speakers and students with learning differences.

7. Your kid gets falsely accused of AI cheating. Time to:

A) Lawyer up immediately.
B) Stay quiet and hope it blows over.
C) Ask for evidence, review the policy, and let your kid defend themselves.
D) Launch a crusade to ban AI from all schools forever.

The answer: C) Due process isn’t just for courtrooms. Ask questions, demand transparency, and involve your kid.

How’d you do? If you aced this, congratulations—you’re ready for the AI age. If not, don’t panic. You’re just getting started in the most interesting parenting challenge of our time.

This quiz was first published in the print edition of the September 2025 issue as part of a package on AI and education.

Illustration by Comrade

iStock / Getty Images Plus

About the 2025 list

This year’s rankings offer a statistical analysis of the top-performing high schools in the Greater Boston area. To ensure accuracy and consistency, it is compiled with the most recent data available at presstime from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), which publishes a limited amount of information on each school, including MCAS and SAT scores. In an effort to provide additional transparency, we’ve included median household income and home prices for each high school’s town(s). We have also included several “honor roll” lists so you can see in what areas, exactly, different schools excel, as well as a list of high-performing schools in areas with lower median home prices. 

Note: Scroll down and then right to see all categories. To view the top 100 schools all at once, choose ‘100 entries per page.’

Top Public High Schools in Greater Boston for 2025

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Methodology: This chart ranks public high schools in towns or districts within, or partially within, I-495. To compile the list, we used the most recent data for each school available at presstime from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. In cases of missing information, we used data from a previous year as necessary. In some cases where no data was available, a value equal to the weighted average of a school’s other categories was used. We omitted highly specialized schools and schools reporting insufficient information, as well as charter schools.

To calculate the rankings, statistician George Recck, director of the Math Resource Center at Babson College, analyzed the results, comparing each high school’s data points to the overall average for all schools. He then applied a percentage weight to the standardized value for each school to create an aggregate “score” to determine each high school’s rank. We considered it more desirable to have smaller class sizes and lower student-to-teacher ratios.

Median home prices, provided by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors and MLS Property Information Network, are from 2024. Median household incomes are from the Census’s American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates (2019–2023) and reflect 2023 dollars. For schools that serve multiple cities or towns, a weighted average for median home price and median household income was created based on the population of each city or town. Neither of these data points factored into a school’s overall ranking.

To assess schools more comprehensively than test scores alone allow, this year we’ve added three new categories for each high school—percentage of students participating in an arts course, percentage of students completing at least one digital literacy or computer science course, and percentage of 11th and 12th grade students completing at least one advanced course, which can be found on DESE’s School and District Report Cards.

The Honor Roll
Top High Schools By Other Metrics

| Average class size | Student-to-Teacher Ratio | MCAS |

Average Class Size

Student-to-Teacher Ratio

Bang for Your Housing Buck*

*For this chart, we selected the institutions whose high school rankings most significantly surpassed the ranking of their respective median home price and listed them here alphabetically.

10th Graders Meeting or Exceeding Expectations on MCAS

English Language Arts

Math

Science & Technology/Engineering

Research by Harriet Gaye and Mia Kovachev

An abridged version of this ranking was first published in the print edition of the September 2025 issue.

Related

The ChatGPT Generation: How Students Are Actually Using AI (And What Educators Are Learning)

Illustration by Neil Jamieson

This cover story is part of our annual September “Top Schools” package.

On the penultimate day of school just before summer break, I’m standing in front of some two dozen fifth graders in a Brookline elementary school classroom awash in color. Everyone, including the teacher, is wearing the T-shirts they tie-dyed a few days earlier. The vibe is cozy and analog, no screens anywhere. The kids sit close together—either sprawled on the carpet at my feet or perched on chairs around their desk clusters. They’re not quite adult size, not yet teens, just as likely to climb a tree as grapple with Big Questions. Which means they’re the perfect age to tell me what it’s like to be a kid at the dawn of AI.

Towering above these 10- and 11-year-olds, I feel like the proverbial drug dealer on the playground. I’ve spent the past few months talking with educators about all the ways we could screw up the next generation if we give kids access to AI tools too soon, but also what could happen if we wait too long. I don’t want to be that person who first suggested that AI could do all their work for them.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha students are already using AI to lighten their loads, crack every code, game every assignment, and solve every problem. After all, the temptation is everywhere. They’re uploading photos of their daily worksheets to Snapchat and getting instant answers. They’re recording lectures, transcribing them into notes, and spinning those into flashcards—before lunch. They’re feeding essay prompts into ChatGPT, copying the results, zhuzhing a few phrases so it passes the sniff test, and calling it a day. While scrolling TikTok, they’re acing math homework with the help of automated apps. Meanwhile, they’re spilling their private data all over the internet.

Who can blame students for feeling a little nihilistic about school? AI is challenging life as we know it, from schoolwork to actual work, sparking an existential debate about what they’ll need to know to succeed in a world where machines run the show. AI is seeping into every industry, threatening to down-skill traditionally well-paid professions, including data science, financial analysis, medical imaging, statistics, legal research, marketing, and more. This trend will only accelerate as more companies harness AI to improve performance and cut costs.

Some Boston-area parents and tech entrepreneurs—including HubSpot’s Dharmesh Shah and Kayak founder and serial entrepreneur Paul English—argue that the best way to prepare kids for the coming AI-slathered future is to get them working with it early—in school. The $252 billion ed-tech industry is projected to double in the next five years, as developers introduce an astounding array of AI-boosted tools that promise to make teachers’ and kids’ lives easier. This includes “AI wrappers”—proprietary platforms built on top of general-purpose large language models like ChatGPT—that are designed to be kid- and teacher-friendly while promising boundless customizable learning experiences for every kind of learner and classroom.

Yet a big part of going to school is learning that life is complex and developing all kinds of intellectual and emotional skills to cope with that fact. “Your brain develops pathways based on your experiences and based on how hard you work,” says Ted McCarthy, former principal of Sutton High School and current interim director of Massachusetts Academy of Math & Science. “If you keep shortcutting it, you’re never going to develop the ability to work hard on your own.” In other words, conflict and disagreement, confusing assignments, academic challenges, even getting out of bed at the crack of dawn theoretically prepare us for the world of work and relationships, regardless of what the future brings.

Nir Eisikovits, a philosophy professor and founding director of the Applied Ethics Center at UMass Boston, warns that offloading more of our thinking to algorithms “weakens our ability to think for ourselves.” Left unchecked, this reliance on tech threatens to hollow out both the cognitive grit and the emotional agency that underpin meaningful learning—and mental well-being—in K–12 education. He reminds me of Socrates’s famous dictum: The unexamined life is not worth living. If we fail to emphasize critical thinking early in a child’s life, he says, if schools allow AI to grease the skids, short-circuiting the hard work, it could “usher us into an unexamined life.”

AI will undoubtedly trigger a wholesale redesign of school as a concept, in Massachusetts and beyond—and much sooner than we think.

Whether you believe the technology offers promise or peril in the world of education, the stakes couldn’t be higher: AI will undoubtedly trigger a wholesale redesign of school as a concept, in Massachusetts and beyond—and much sooner than we think. We urgently need to determine the outcomes we want for the next generation and then reverse-engineer an education system to match. And we have to tackle hard conversations right now, whether we’re ready or not. “We’ve all been put into this experiment that no one signed up for, and it’s moving too fast, and no one can keep up,” says Greg Kulowiec, a K–12 AI strategy consultant for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Get things right, and we’ll find new ways to reach students of all backgrounds and abilities—helping them thrive in ways we never imagined. Get it wrong, and our kids could struggle to survive, let alone succeed.

Illustration by Dale Stephanos

In Ms. Baran’s Brookline classroom, the absence of easy answers is kind of the point. When students get stuck on a problem, they’re told to sit with it for a while before asking for help. Ruminating over challenges encourages kids to overcome the fact that “our brains automatically go to, ‘We can’t do this,’” explains one fifth grader. As they learn how to coach themselves out of tricky problems, they’re developing patience and perseverance. And if they’re still stuck, they’re told to reach out to their friends.

Sure, Ms. Baran wants her students to learn facts, spelling, and arithmetic. But far more important, she wants her fifth graders to see each other as collaborators in this project we call life.

“But AI prevents you from doing all that,” one fifth grader interjects on the day I visit, and heads swivel. If she could use a computer to get all the answers, she says, she’d naturally turn to her Chromebook first—instead of her brain and instead of her friends. That’s why, another student pipes up, “it’s important not to expose kids too much, just so they know…that AI isn’t the only thing that can help you learn.” Everyone nods.

Of course, fifth grade is low stakes; students get reports instead of letter grades, and none of their schoolwork will affect their chances of getting into college. So I ask the kids whether they’d use AI if the stakes were indeed higher, as in middle school and high school, when GPAs could begin to chart their life course. Maybe, they say. They’ve watched older siblings or babysitters rely on AI for homework. To this generation, using digital tools like that—even if it’s technically cheating—feels like a no-brainer. At the same time, they want their teachers tracking their work, because they feel that connection is important to their growth.

Getting a little “unsanctioned help” is nothing new—back in my day, using CliffsNotes in English class risked a suspension, but everyone did it anyway—yet AI takes it to the next level. To see how easy it is to cheat these days, I Google, “AI do my…” and it autofills “homework.” Instantly, I find StudyX, SmartSolve, and StudyMonkey (the tagline? “Learn Smarter, Not Harder, with AI,” followed by the claims: No more all-nighters. No more stress and anxiety. No more asking friends for help). Then there’s NoteGPT; that teaser reads, “Solve your homework instantly for free. Whether it’s math, science, or any other subject, upload your picture or PDF and get accurate solutions effortlessly.”

I click on Writify.ai, a stripped-down interface that offers to solve all my problems, festooned with cheery emojis to express…friendliness? It first asks for my “homework challenge,” so I straight up ask it to write a paper on The Great Gatsby. It prompts me for a teensy bit more info: what grade I’m in and whether it should analyze anything specific. Then, it asks if I want a few topic ideas (so helpful!)—or simply an essay about the book’s “overall message.” I say I’m in the 8th grade, type “overall message,” and Writify instantly generates an outline. Like most AI tools, it doesn’t want to let me go that easily. The tech is hungry for human data to make it stronger, so AI interfaces practically beg us to offload all of our work and thinking. “Would you like me to help you write a rough draft based on this plan?” Writify asks. “Or do you want to try writing a part first?” Rough draft, I answer. “Great choice!” it responds (typical AI, so cloying) and begins cranking out my essay while I scroll Instagram.

Free and easy AI tools like these have created an absurd game of cat and mouse that, let’s admit, students are handily winning. If anything, AI has given them the freedom to decide what activities are worth their time. At the tony all-boys Belmont Hill School—a Harvard-esque neoclassical brick-and-Ionic-column campus with a school crest that features a sextant(!)—a rising junior describes AI as his turbocharged study buddy, perfect for whipping up flashcards, parsing dense biology concepts, or brainstorming AP Euro essay angles. He uses AI even though his parents forbid it—not because it might compromise learning at Belmont Hill (where tuition clocks in at $64,800 per year), but because they don’t want him getting kicked out for violating the school’s AI policy.

His willingness to break the rules for better grades reveals something darker: The reality is that it’s never been harder to get into top schools. Case in point: Cutthroat Massachusetts has the dubious distinction of being where one of the first lawsuits in the country over AI in schools was filed. Last September, Dale and Jennifer Harris (a teacher and writer, respectively) sued Hingham Public Schools teachers and administrators after their son, whom they characterized as a straight-A student bound for an elite college, received a poor grade and was kept out of the National Honor Society that year for using AI as a research and drafting tool.

While the courts may focus on whether he violated Hingham’s AI policy, the case reveals something more telling: Students are wholly convinced they know better than their teachers how to use AI. Take the Belmont Hill student sitting across from me, an aspiring engineer. He may not be outsourcing entire papers to ChatGPT, but he’s spent the past year figuring out how to get AI to do what he calls “busy work,” confident he can distinguish between valuable intellectual exercises and meaningless time-wasters.

But can he? I turn to Belmont Hill history teacher George Sullivan, who has joined us for this conversation, and ask what he thinks. “A lot of students feel like they can judge for themselves what assignments are not worth doing fully,” Sullivan says diplomatically, “but I’m not sure that judgment is always accurate.” The student shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

Back to the cat-and-mouse game that dominates our schools in 2025, where teachers are turning to increasingly invasive surveillance tools to determine who, or what, actually did the work. Consider Draftback, a Chrome extension tool that allows them to review how a Google Doc came together. Every keystroke, copy and paste, deletion, and addition is recorded so the teacher can determine whether the data points to plagiarism. Using Draftback doesn’t guarantee that a student won’t dump an AI-generated answer into their paper, but it might discourage them from trying.

Some teachers are even trying old-fashioned pen-and-paper exercises to wrest the thinking from data centers back into classrooms. Peter Weller, an English and journalism teacher at South Hadley High School, got so frustrated with his students’ AI-generated papers and the dull class discussions that ensued that he bought a stack of composition notebooks and Uni-Ball pens for his kids. These days, he kicks off each class by asking the students to respond in their journals to prompts—sometimes an artwork, sometimes a quote, sometimes a piece of poetry—and then share their thoughts with the group. Weller says that the exercise has been transformative. “We’re building and establishing a sense of community. We are communicating; we’re telling stories,” he says. Helping the students make connections with one another and the world, he says, “is one of the most rewarding things that I do.”

Analog tools may offer a temporary reprieve from AI in the classroom, but pretending AI doesn’t exist isn’t the answer, says Greg Kulowiec, the AI adviser to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Kulowiec spends his days trying to understand the bewildering array of ed-tech offerings while running AI literacy workshops for teachers and students. “If I promote [AI], then I can teach how to effectively use it,” he says. “And if I ban or ignore it, then students are going to be left to their own understanding, which might be sophisticated, and it might not.”

Illustration by Dale Stephanos

One compelling effect of AI is that it’s forcing soul-searching questions about education, equity, and ethics. Former Sutton High School principal Ted McCarthy thought he understood the AI problem—until one parent stopped him in his tracks. The school was developing its AI guidelines, and during one committee meeting, the parent asked what seemed like a straightforward question: “If a student uses AI to help them with homework, is it cheating?” Well, yes, of course. Then the parent asked whether giving his son feedback on his essay was cheating. Hmm, no. “Well,” the parent continued, “what if the kid doesn’t have anyone at home who can help? Why is it okay for a student to use Mom or Dad, but it’s not okay to get feedback from another source? Doesn’t that approach privilege certain students?”

After spending the academic year grappling with questions like these, Sutton High’s committee released a “living” set of guidelines for AI use that teachers and students will tweak together as new tools emerge.

In the midst of all this new tech, McCarthy’s primary concern is whether the kids are still learning. “If things become so easy to do with AI,” he says, “then students don’t develop the ability to persevere, to think, to struggle, to fail, to pick themselves back up.”

In fact, there’s precious little research showing that AI tools actually boost learning. One recent MIT study investigating participants’ brain activity during an essay-writing project found that those who offloaded a significant amount of their work to AI consistently showed weaker brain connectivity than those who didn’t, and underperformed at both the neural and behavioral level. The more participants leaned on AI to do their work, the more their brains atrophied.

Some students have already figured that out—and they’re steering clear of AI. “I feel like if you start using ChatGPT to write your essays too much, you become over-reliant on it,” says a rising senior at Massachusetts Academy of Math & Science, a public magnet school in Worcester. “Then it will get to a point where you won’t be able to write without it.” The student dreams of becoming a surgeon and a writer, so she avoids AI when she’s composing prose, fearing she’ll lose her own voice and critical muscle. But I’m getting the sense that she’s more of the exception to the rule.

One potential positive outcome is that the controversy around AI will push teachers to rethink how they’ve been doing things. Most teaching methods haven’t changed much in decades, Sullivan points out, even though the world certainly has. When information is everywhere and easy to find, why are we still asking kids to memorize facts? “We have to really have some hard conversations,” McCarthy agrees. “What do we really want kids to learn…and why?” It’s a crucial question given that AI could one day take over 70 percent of the skills for most jobs.

Fearing the future depicted in Wall-E—in which tech isolates us from one another and we spend our days passively consuming mindless content—UMass Boston’s Eisikovits believes future curricula must double down on teaching critical thinking skills, especially through writing. Eisikovits also pushes back on a popular analogy—that resistance to AI in 2025 is similar to past resistance to calculators. “These are tools that circle back on the person using them and change how they see the world, how they see themselves, what their options are,” he says. “For young people in school, it’s reshaping their capacity to think critically.”

ChatGPT may seem harmless, but every AI model carries the biases of its creators, warns Jeff Karg, managing director of Boston Innovation. As governments and corporations learn to use these tools to influence what we buy, how we think, and whom we vote for, those biases get baked into every response. That’s why Karg believes future generations will need razor-sharp critical-thinking skills to spot hidden agendas. As a hedge, he says today’s classrooms should double down on morality, ethics, history, civics, and media literacy.

To protect our kids from a Wall-E future, we need to raise them to see AI for what it really is and have the skills to shape it for the better. The machines “are not thinking, and they don’t understand anything,” Kulowiec says. “Someone is going to have to verify what these machines are cranking out. Someone has to be in charge.” And if AI does deliver a more automated world, kids will need a strong sense of who they are in a society where their work no longer defines them. Future generations, Eisikovits says, will need “to figure out what’s interesting to them, to figure out hobbies, to figure out how they will live a meaningful life.”

So maybe it’s time educators had more thoughtful conversations with the people they’re trying to help—namely, the students. Michael Chang, assistant director of the Earl Center for Learning & Innovation at Boston University, has spent the past few years working with high schoolers in summer workshops around the country, finding new ways to leverage AI in the classroom. During these intense sessions, he says he was surprised to learn that students didn’t want AI to do their work and didn’t see it as a “tool” they needed to be taught to use. Instead, they wanted AI to promote opportunities to “seed, nurture, and extend human relations,” according to a research report.

In one workshop, students brainstormed ideas for a bot that would assist in classrooms—not like a creepy Alexa or Siri, but as an entirely student-scripted bot that reflected the values and goals of the group. A big part of the exercise at that point was getting students to agree on the bot’s guardrails. Setting the tone and deciding what kind of feedback would actually promote quality conversation took multiple rounds of debate.

This thoughtful AI use is very different from what tech companies are pitching to schools. Consider the AI tutor. Kulowiec built one for his workshops that helps students explore Karl Marx’s writings. He uploaded all the texts he wanted them to read, then programmed strict guardrails about how the bot should talk and what questions students could ask. But, as Kuloweic points out, it’s still “a generative AI tool. Even with the best intention, the guardrails with most of these platforms can be overcome just by plugging away at it long enough.”

The AI tutor could become another classroom resource, agrees Genesis Carela, a senior policy analyst for Massachusetts at EdTrust, which works to dismantle racial and economic barriers in education. She says it could be especially useful in reaching disengaged students who would benefit from more personalized curricula, as well as students who learn differently and might thrive in a one-on-one environment where they can set their own agenda and pace.

But there’s a catch. If AI tutors take over entirely, warns Marina Bers, an education professor at Boston College, they could strip away opportunities for social-emotional growth and human mentorship. Teachers are the most important part of this learning, she says. Bers worries that more tech could create a two-tiered system: Underfunded schools get more bots, while wealthy schools keep their human teachers. That would leave some children “sitting in front of a screen”—cut off from peers and missing out on eye contact, empathy, and motor-skill development.

Whatever changes are coming, schools (and, subsequently, caregivers) also need to think hard about what data they’re giving away; most tech gives teachers access to every student click and keystroke. At the very least, this is precious data that could be bought and sold. At the very worst, this is information that could be weaponized against teachers, school districts, or even the students themselves.

These are just a few of the issues the state and local teachers’ unions are monitoring closely. “AI is already part of our classrooms and workplaces,” the Boston Teachers Union (BTU) wrote in a statement to Boston. “While it can support teaching and learning, it must never replace the human relationships and professional judgment that make schools thrive. The BTU calls for strong safeguards, clear guidelines, and educator voices to ensure AI serves students—not corporations—and protects the dignity, privacy, and purpose of public education.”

Here’s a radical thought: Maybe AI will save education by forcing us to blow it up and start over. “All this focus on AI is hiding the real question,” Bers says, “which is, ‘What is human intelligence now?’” Instead of creating awkward human-machine partnerships in which we’re constantly policing boundaries, maybe this is the moment to let each do what they do best. Rather than cramming AI into existing frameworks, we could seize this opportunity to redesign education around what makes us uniquely human.

If we go that route, classrooms like Ms. Baran’s in Brookline—with hands-on projects and real-world learning—could be the answer. They’re the opposite of the busywork assignments that AI is practically begging kids to outsource.

I ask the fifth graders which classroom activities they wouldn’t want offloaded to a computer, and their faces light up as they talk about their Rube Goldberg machine project. Over weeks, they planned and built contraptions to pop a balloon using five precise “transfers of energy.” They relied on art, craft, communication, and collaboration. With each tweak and modification, success came closer—until finally the dominoes tumbled, the ball rolled, the blocks fell, the little car sprinted, and pop! The room erupted in cheers. That’s where real learning happens: in the struggle. Wrestling with a blank page, failing and trying again, refusing shortcuts. The pure joy that follows is what you get from perseverance—and it’s exactly the kind of learning AI can’t replicate.

So what if schools focused on developing the human skills that AI can’t touch? Former Boston venture capitalist turned education entrepreneur Ted Dintersmith has spent a decade exploring this question. He even road-tripped across the country to visit schools and talk with teachers and students. He’s seen innovative curricula everywhere. A New York City elementary school built grades 3 to 5 around hip-hop, using rap beats to teach math and percussion to explain physics. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, a first-grade teacher told his class on day one, “We’re going to learn how to design robots.” When they asked if he knew how, he said, “Nope. We’ll figure it out together.”

Dintersmith’s conclusion? Kids learn better when they apply learning to solve real-world problems. That’s why, like many educational experts I spoke to, he wants shop class and vocational training in every school. In one Winchester, West Virginia, school district, he explains, students learned carpentry and welding—skills that opened doors to careers or made for compelling college essays. For Dintersmith, vocational education isn’t just job training. It’s about reconnecting learning with real purpose, boosting local economies, and giving students skills that automation can’t replace.

Indeed, something seems to be pushing Gen Z and Gen Alpha back into the very real world of craft, observes Mike van der Sleesen, cofounder of Vanson Leathers, a company that makes high-end motorcycle racing gear in Fall River. On a hot Saturday in July, we meet in the 19th-century mill building that houses Vanson’s showroom and factory. The massive old mill lacks air conditioning, the windows are plastic, and the ceiling fans are spinning wildly. Yet the handwork involved in making gear is attracting a new generation to manufacturing, says van der Sleesen. In the 50-plus years that he’s had the factory, he says, he’s never seen such enthusiasm among younger generations to sew a badass leather jacket.

Van der Sleesen introduces me to a recent hire, 21-year-old Anthony Stewart, a sandy-haired competitive motorcycle racer. After one year of college, Stewart says, he realized he wanted to work with his hands instead of a computer, but he never thought about manufacturing until he stumbled on Vanson while driving around Fall River on a whim. When he entered the factory, he was hooked. He loved that it was “wicked old.” Working in manufacturing, Stewart says, has made him “really appreciate goods that are quality and take human effort to build.”

Whether they’re rebelling against digital overload or preparing for an AI-dominated future, young people in Massachusetts are indeed flocking to vocational training in record numbers. Between 6,000 to 11,000 students are currently on waitlists for voc-tech schools in Massachusetts. In response, Governor Maura Healey filed a supplemental budget in February that included $75 million to support career technical training.

Post-pandemic research has confirmed that young people learn more from doing things together, in the physical world, than anyone could have imagined. Remote learning left many students restless and struggling to focus. When they returned to the classroom, teachers noticed shorter attention spans, more behavioral problems, and kids who seemed overwhelmed by real-world interactions after so much time on Zoom. That’s why education experts like BU’s Chang worry about letting AI take over too much of teaching. “Grading isn’t just a robot checking answers—it’s a relational task,” he says. One fifth grader puts it even better: “What Ms. Baran does is not only educational, it’s also emotional. She feels what students are feeling. If a student is sad, she won’t try to push them into something.”

If I’ve learned anything from AI, it’s that teaching is wildly more complicated than it looks. Knowing each student’s weak spots, tracking growth over time, and offering encouragement through failure makes teaching “way, way more complex and harder than rocket science,” says Justin Reich, a former high school history teacher and director of the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT. “You’re trying to rearrange the neurons inside young people’s minds for prosocial purposes, but you can’t go in there and touch them. You have to put them in a room with a bunch of other people and have their eyeballs and their ears bang into sounds and words and reading and other kinds of things, and hope that the sequence of instructional activities for this diverse group of students is going to lead to the outcomes that you want.”

Put more poetically, Bers says that educators are architects of inquiry who “know how to think, how to ask questions, how to connect things that will not be connected otherwise.” Even Paul English, the founder of Kayak who argues that we can’t get AI into schools fast enough, insists that AI can be a teaching assistant, “but it can’t truly love someone and take care of someone the way a good teacher can.”

Generated by Benjamen Purvis using AI for our 2024 “Boston’s AI Revolution” package

In many ways, our current educational system is beautifully engineered to produce adaptable, resilient, and independent adults. It’s built on the belief that to become engaged members of society, students need exposure to a broad range of knowledge and ways of thinking. Mastery in reading and writing helps them play with the universe of ideas. Studying science helps them meaningfully work with the physical world. Through art and music, they develop fine-motor skills and experience life through different senses.

If these are the benchmarks for future success, Ms. Baran’s fifth graders have hit the jackpot. They’re learning in a well-funded public system that values exploration as much as facts. Massachusetts-based educators have spent decades figuring out what works, collaborating with students and one another to spark curiosity and deepen understanding. Schools here have broad freedom to innovate, guided by state standards that emphasize equity and critical thinking. The goal? To raise adults who know how to think, not just what to think.

Here’s something else worth considering: The minds behind AI came from schools just like this one. Sam Altman went to a progressive school in St. Louis before dropping out of Stanford—meaning his high school gave him what he needed to change the world. Same with Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. These tech leaders developed their curiosity and problem-solving skills in traditional classrooms. Then they used that foundation to build machines that mimic human thinking. Perhaps, then, it’s no coincidence that AI is largely an American innovation, developed at places like MIT, Stanford, NASA, and IBM by people educated by humans who prioritized thinking and exploration. The biggest AI companies—OpenAI, NVIDIA, Microsoft—are American, too. If our schools were truly broken, would they have produced the minds that created this technology?

At the same time, it’s important to acknowledge that the system works for some, but not for all. Maybe the most pressing problem we’re facing isn’t AI at all, but the fact that access to good teaching and resources remains chronically uneven. Gregory Molinar, who grew up in Fall River and is a father of four children under 17, feels that schools have mostly failed both him and his kids. His oldest attends a vocational-technical school, but even so, Molinar says something is missing—and as a result, his children aren’t staying engaged. “We are forcing millions of children to learn one way, and if that way doesn’t align with them, then we label them failures and crush them starting at a young age,” he says. If reliable AI tutors were available, he’d let the computer homeschool all of his kids. Molinar’s willingness to embrace that option underscores the stakes: When the system lets families down, parents naturally will look elsewhere, even if it means handing over their kids’ education to a machine.

The truth is, we’re reaching a tipping point. The overwhelming, unavoidable presence of generative AI in our lives demands a dramatic rethink of everything—school, work, and life itself. But AI is also provoking fascinating conversations about the value of being human.

Remember that Great Gatsby essay I asked Writify.ai to pen for me? I never read it. Too many words. But I did scan it, and when I got to the last line, I stared in wonderment. After cranking through all of the Great Gatsby papers all over the world, artificial intelligence concluded with an age-old warning to lean into our humanity. “Fitzgerald’s story reminds us to be careful about what we wish for,” it read, “and to understand what truly matters in life.”

This article was first published in the print edition of the September 2025 issue with the headline: “The ChatGPT Generation.”

Illustration by Comrade(@comradehq)

Illustration by Dale Stephanos

I remember the day I got obsessed with a tiny, see-through worm.

I was in a classroom at Northeastern University, where I worked at the time, giving a science-communication workshop to a group of graduate students. When I asked what they studied, a young biologist named Maria told me she works with an animal called C. elegans.My humanities brain heard “sea elegance.” I imagined a giant creature swimming gracefully through the water, like the Little Mermaid. This was not correct, as Maria explained, with an enthusiasm that I would learn is not rare among a certain subset of genetic biologists. C. elegans worms are roughly a millimeter long, and they’re what you might get if God designed an animal specifically for science. They’re transparent, so there’s no need to dissect them. They grow to adulthood in less than four days and quickly have hundreds of babies. They have 959 cells, and scientists know what each one of them does—they can even make individual cells glow different colors under fluorescent light.

Then Maria told me that she attends a regular gathering called the Longwood Area Worm Meeting.

I decided that I, too, needed to attend the Longwood Area Worm Meeting.

Thus began a trip into the world of C. elegans worms and the people who love them. In 25 years as a writer in Boston, I’ve come across plenty of subcultures, from Revolutionary War reenactors to fans of the royal family, from dive-bar denizens to bibliophiles. There might be no group more enthusiastic, self-aware, or life-affirming than the worm people.

The December 2010 issue of Worm B / Illustration by Greg Nelson

And the best part might be how these dedicated scientists really lean into the worm of it all. Every professor I visited had an office adorned with worm art, from paper-cutout worms to glass-sculpture worms to a clock whose numbers were replaced with the stages of a worm embryo. On the internet, I found archives of the Worm Breeder’s Gazette, a researchers’ magazine whose covers featured cartoon C. elegans worms: wearing hats, playing Quidditch, performing the “Alas, poor Yorick” speech from Hamlet. There’s a biannual international C. elegans conference—officially called the International Worm Meeting—that has been known in the past to host a much-anticipated worm comedy show. Once, they did a worm-themed parody of Borat.

Mostly, of course, the conference is about science—a certain kind of science. A fair amount of biology research is built around pragmatic goals: prove this hypothesis, find that pharmaceutical cure. But as Maxwell Heiman, a Harvard geneticist who runs the Longwood Area Worm Meeting, explained to me, C. elegans research is “curiosity-driven.” Scientists make worms with specific mutations—say, a gene that is turned off, or an inability to make certain enzymes—and then work backwards to figure out how things work in non-mutants. Put simply: If you want to understand how cells work, it’s useful to ask a worm.

It may sound abstract, but it’s hard to overstate the impact of these worm-driven discoveries. C. elegans has given us insight into Alzheimer’s and kidney disease, the aging process, the effects of certain man-made chemicals, and what’s called “programmed cell death,” which helps prevent tumors from forming. Worm research has led to four Nobel prizes—including the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which went to UMass’s Victor Ambros and Harvard’s Gary Ruvkun for discovering tiny gene-regulating material called microRNA. (If they haven’t already, someone should illustrate the worm with a golden Nobel Prize on a ribbon slung around its neck.)

Along the way, these unassuming worms have become itty-bitty ambassadors for basic science and the tinkerer types who practice it. Now, though, the future of worm-informed breakthroughs is at risk. The Trump administration has made moves to slash federal funding from agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, including the indirect costs that universities and hospitals incur for research endeavors.

Not surprisingly, an air of uncertainty has settled over the worm community, which easily could be seen as non-essential in the age of DOGE. (And that’s not even considering what this administration might think of the worms’ most fascinating feature: The majority of C. elegans start their lives as males, then switch to females.) But after delving into Boston’s worm scene this winter, I’d argue that the scientists solving life’s mysteries through worms are precisely the ones we want to keep around.

These unassuming worms have become itty-bitty ambassadors for basic science and the tinkerer types who practice it. Now, though, the future of worm-informed breakthroughs is at risk.

Earlier this year, I found myself peering into a petri dish in Heiman’s lab, 14 floors up in a glass-walled building near Boston Children’s Hospital. To the naked eye, it looked like a blob of goop. If I squinted, I could see that it was covered with white specks, as if someone had shaken off some dandruff.

Then I peered into the dish under a microscope. Suddenly, the specks were long, snake-like creatures, slithering across a bed of bacteria, making the kinds of tracks cross-country skiers etch in fresh snow. Heiman told me that when people first start working with C. elegans, “they’ll have nightmares about snakes and things.” But to me, it felt mesmerizing, like staring at an old-school screen saver. I could have watched them in a Zen-like state all day.

A C. Elegans worm, in all its illuminated glory. / Source: www.genome.gov/10000570, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

They weren’t snakes, of course, but nematodes, also known as roundworms—and, it turns out, they’re the most common multicellular animals on the planet. They live on bruised bananas, on rotting apples in the orchard, anywhere they can find the bacteria on which they feast.

It was Sydney Brenner, a brilliant South African geneticist, who turned nematodes into a pillar of research in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Intent on understanding cell development—how animals grow, on the smallest levels, to work the way they do—he settled on Caenorhabditis elegans as the animal he’d study. The first part of its name comes from the Greek words for “recent” and “rod,” the second from the Latin word for “elegant.” (My humanities brain had it partly right.) Like some other so-called model organisms used by geneticists—fruit flies, E. coli bacteria, baker’s yeast—C. elegans was tiny and simple and reproduced quickly. But its main appeal, Brenner would later say, was that “it had a beautiful sex life.” After all, it makes both sperm and eggs and breeds with itself. Entirely on its own, it can spit out some 300 identical offspring.

It’s a perfect scenario for creating vast reserves of worms, altered with specific mistakes. The labs across Boston are full of mutant worms: worms that roll instead of slither, worms that are short and stubby instead of long and winding, worms that—by worm standards—are very, very old. Heiman studies how worm nerve cells make contact with other cells, so his lab creates worms with neurons that glow green or red under a fluorescent light. Under a scope, they look like high-tech creatures crawling around in a video game.

Today, Boston scientists are using these worms to contribute to our understanding of the human body. Monica Colaiacovo, a professor at Harvard Medical School, uses worms to study how cells accurately divide their chromosomes during the reproductive process called meiosis; in humans, miscounted chromosomes can lead to miscarriages, infertility, and birth defects. Erin Cram, an associate dean for research at Northeastern, is exploring how a worm’s reproductive system—which relaxes and contracts to move its eggs—forms and functions, which turns out to be similar to the way human muscle cells work in, say, a lung. When Javier Apfeld, a Northeastern professor who works down the hall from Cram, wanted to understand why animals get old and die, he found it useful to study a creature that typically lives only 20 days. “Why don’t they live 100 days?” he said. “Is there a reason why they get old and die and not just live indefinitely? You know, in a worm, you can do lots of tiny experiments and ask lots of questions.” He’s created mutant worms that have lived as long as 250 days. The door to his lab is labeled “WORM IMMORTALITY TEAM.”

I wondered if these elderly worms might someday lead to a miracle drug or a fountain-of-youth therapy. But Apfeld told me that worm people don’t always think in that linear way. “If we understand how biology works, then lots of useful applications will come out of it,” he said. “But honestly, that’s not the only thing that drives people. People are just curious, and they want to know how living systems work.”

That curiosity can send them down some unexpected paths. At one point, Apfeld told me, scientists discovered that worms were moving away from fluorescent light as if it bothered them—which made them realize that, even without eyes, the worms had a way of seeing. “They have light perception,” he told me. “It turns out they can also sense sound in some ways.” It’s not something that the scientists set out to study. “But that’s where the question wants to go, because the worms seem to care. And so we’ve been
caring about it.”

C. elegans under a microscope. / Photo By ГП – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikicommons

I eventually made it to the beating heart of Boston’s thriving worm subculture: an early-morning gathering of the Longwood Area Worm Meeting, in a gray-walled conference room at a research building near Boston Children’s Hospital. There were coffee and bagels set up in a corner, as nearly 50 researchers from BU, Harvard, Northeastern, MIT, and other schools—professors, postdocs, graduate students, some undergrads—sat around a U-shaped table and in chairs lining the wall. The Beanpot semifinals were the night before, and it occurred to me that I was at a kind of Beanpot of basic science. (The Longwood Area Worm Meeting logo is a primitive drawing of a worm covered in university shields.)

Thomas Liontis, a Ph.D. student in Professor Alla Grishok’s lab at Boston University, was scheduled to present a study on worm longevity and the tradeoffs between lifespan and reproduction. (It turns out that long-lived worms don’t make as many babies.) Beforehand, he waxed poetic to me about one of the principal virtues of worm life—its brevity. “I can’t imagine waiting three months for your mutant worm to grow,” he said.

During his presentation, he shared slides full of charts and illustrated worms to the rapt audience, then described some of his methodology. To determine how healthy his old worms were, he said, “I looked at every worm for five seconds. Is it moving or not?” Then I witnessed this Ph.D. candidate impersonate a weak, old worm.

Some professors asked questions, gently pressing Liontis on details to help him prepare for the rigor of peer review. I had no idea what they were talking about most of the time, but a key feature of this community became abundantly clear: Worm people tend to help one other. They readily share insights, lab processes, even worms themselves. It’s not rare for one lab to reach out to another to ask for batches of custom-made worms.

Not every strain of science enjoys this blissful lack of competition, which makes sense if you’re trying to get a product to market or publish research with financial implications. This, too, is a reason some choose to study worms. “Most things about worm gonads, we’re never going to be able to monetize that at all. So we just happily and openly share it with everyone,” Northeastern’s Erin Cram told me.

The Longwood Area Worm Meeting gave off that vibe: professors and students grooving on the free exchange of worm knowledge, enjoying each other’s worm-infused company. Before the meeting, when Liontis told me that he’s “interacted with other communities, and the worm community is the best,” an older scientist turned around in her chair and emphatically agreed.

Worm research is “the best job in the world,” said Alex Soukas, a Harvard professor, when I talked to him after the meeting. “Nobody tells you what to do. You get to investigate what you want based on what questions you’re asking.”

I was starting to think that these worms have a way of bringing out the best in humans—generosity, cooperation, and an unbridled curiosity about life. But these days, the worm people are worried. In truth, Soukas said, basic science has felt under threat for years due to diminishing federal investments, grant-making capriciousness, and the siren song of private industry, which lures promising graduate students from the academy. While the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget nearly doubled between 1998 and 2003—“We all grew up in this fantasy land where it was much easier to get grants,” Soukas said—that budget changed only nominally after 2003, and now it is shrinking. In the first few months of 2025, billions of dollars were cut from NIH funding. Additionally this year, the federal government froze $2.2 billion in federal grants from Harvard—where I work now—citing complaints about campus antisemitism and ideological conformity.

It’s difficult to know how these Trump-era battles over research funding will shake out; many universities have already paused hiring and Ph.D. admissions and fret that they might not be able to keep every lab open. And among basic scientists, there’s a growing fear that the public doesn’t fully understand how research happens or why people should care about the study of an infinitesimal worm. “We need to keep working on conveying more broadly, to non-scientists, the kind of work that we do,” said Harvard’s Monica Colaiacovo. “You do need basic science to be able to eventually get to the specific vaccine or drug or treatment. It all starts with basic science. And we’re very fortunate to be in a country where we do wonderful science. We’ve been at the forefront of science for a long time, and so I’m hoping that that will continue to be the case.”

Because if we stop asking worms how they work, we risk losing insights not just into their world—but also into our own.

A version of this story appeared in the print edition of the May 2025 issue with the headline, “Boston’s Snazziest Worm.”

Illustration by Benjamen Purvis / Photo illustration by Benjamen Purvis

Slate-gray clouds and the threat of rain loomed over Sharon High School’s football field on Thanksgiving Day last fall, yet hundreds of students and their families surged through the gates for a matchup between the hometown Eagles and the Oliver Ames High School Tigers from Easton, who had a 5–5 record heading into the final game of the year. Though Sharon was winless that season, the players were fired up, hungering for their first taste of victory.

The stands buzzed with energy—former classmates reuniting, fans rooting for their schools, and cheerleaders hyping up the crowd. With mere minutes remaining in the first half, Sharon safety Rohan Shukla took what looked like a routine hit. The 5-foot-11, 150-pound sophomore staggered to the sidelines under his own power, seeming to walk it off. Then, in an instant, he crumpled to the ground.

The crowd fell silent as medical staff rushed toward the fallen player. Oliver Ames’s 21–0 lead became meaningless as officials called off the game. Medics loaded Rohan into an ambulance, rushing him first to Good Samaritan Hospital in Brockton, then to Mass General, where doctors diagnosed a subdural hematoma—blood pooling dangerously between his skull and brain. Surgeons worked swiftly to control the bleeding, yet despite an emergency operation, the 15-year-old slipped into a coma.

For a month, his family and friends waited anxiously for any sign of improvement. Finally, there was hope as Rohan slowly began to regain consciousness. Thirty-five days after his injury, he was moved to Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, where doctors have cautioned that Rohan’s recovery will will be a long one.

Like any parent, I followed Rohan’s story with dismay, but it also struck a nerve: Ten years ago, I wrote an article for this magazine about whether I should let my then-eight-year-old son, Finn, play football. At the time, concussions were at the forefront of everyone’s minds. Nearly every day, it seemed, a story about the dangers of brain injury made headlines. This was back when researchers had just started acknowledging that young, developing brains are actually more vulnerable to injury and that the effects of many minor hits throughout a season could be more damaging than head injuries in older players. In response, youth football enrollment dropped nationwide; between 2016 and 2023, tackle football participation rates declined 29 percent for kids ages 6 to 12.

When Finn came home from school one day, begging me to let him play football, I felt torn—and determined to educate myself before I made a decision. I read everything I could on the subject, spoke with concussion experts, and even met with the football coaches at our local MetroWest high school, who served up a convincing football-will-change-your-life pep talk. They painted a picture of how it could transform my son, building his confidence and forging lasting friendships. Then one coach delivered the clincher: “Football carries with it an intangible coolness.”

But was all that worth the potential risk of head injury? Not convinced, my husband and I decided to punt the decision down the road: We told Finn that if he still wanted to play when he got to high school, we’d revisit the topic then. Thankfully, we never had to make that decision. As we’d secretly hoped, Finn lost interest in football and instead swam competitively in high school (a blessedly non-contact sport). But it easily could have gone the other way.

And so Rohan’s Thanksgiving Day injury struck a deep chord—and not just with me, but with thousands of others. A team captain launched a GoFundMe campaign to give Rohan the “best chance for recovery…in a sport he loves the most,” which has since raised $89,000. The Sharon community and beyond rallied around the family, offering prayers, meals, and support to Rohan, his parents, and his twin brother.

That’s when I learned something that hadn’t made the news: Rohan had reportedly sustained a concussion earlier in the season and had just been cleared to play in the Thanksgiving Day game. This detail hit me like a Mack truck. As I probed deeper, uncovering facts about Rohan’s accident, one question haunted me: Could this tragedy have been prevented?

Sharon High School sophomore Rohan Shukla was hospitalized after suffering a brain injury during a Thanksgiving Day football game. / Photo via GoFundMe

To fully understand what happened at the Thanksgiving Day game, we have to start with a controversial 2010 decision by the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association (MIAA). The organization split the state’s southeastern Hockomock athletic league into two parts: the Davenport division for the five smaller schools (Sharon, Foxborough, Canton, Stoughton, and Oliver Ames in Easton) and the Kelley-Rex division for the five larger schools (Mansfield, Attleboro, North Attleboro, Franklin, and King Philip in Wrentham), though two years later, the distribution shifted slightly and two new schools joined the league. Some locals were upset by the decision, accusing the league of having gone soft in an attempt to create more winners and bring in more revenue—but ultimately, the split held. The consolation was that the league would realign the divisions, based on grades 9 through 11 enrollments, at a meeting of principals and athletic directors every few years.

However, in 2022, the MIAA introduced a new “competitive equity” formula for division alignment. This change was part of a broader movement by superintendents, athletic directors, and state sports association leaders across the country to address competitive imbalances in school athletics. Their concern was simple: Students at better-funded schools had significant advantages over those with fewer resources. The new formula went beyond enrollment numbers, examining factors including stability (how many kids move in and out of the district) and high-needs populations. It looked at the percentage of English-language learners, special education students, and economically disadvantaged students—recognizing that not every family could afford after-school sports or expensive club teams for skill development. In theory (and hopefully practice), this would help level the playing field and reduce movement between divisions.

As a result, at the biannual realignment meeting in late 2023, it was decided that the Sharon Eagles (who had just returned to the division after playing independently, with some success, in 2021 and 2022) would move to the Kelley-Rex division with the larger schools for the fall 2024 season. They’d now be competing against Franklin, King Philip, Attleboro, Taunton, and Milford high schools. To understand the significance of this move, consider that Sharon (enrollment 1,161) hadn’t played the city of Taunton (enrollment 2,877) since 2012. Suddenly, Sharon had been thrust into the big leagues, and some parents weren’t thrilled.

Neither were some of the players, for two reasons: They’d be moving divisions while also adjusting to a new coach. Longtime Sharon football coach Dave Morse had resigned at the end of the 2023 season, replaced by Ben Shuffain, a 1999 Sharon grad who was coming off a winning season as head coach for Carver’s high school team. Worried that they’d be crushed by schools with significantly more robust football programs, a handful of Sharon players quit the team. Their fears weren’t unfounded—Sharon’s 2024 roster had just 48 players, compared to Attleboro’s 81. Rohan was among a dozen sophomores who decided to stick it out for the season.

Now, as any longtime South Shore resident might tell you, the town of Sharon isn’t exactly known for its football. In 2012, when Sharon High pulled off a surprise upset by winning the MIAA Division III Super Bowl, sports journalist and 1998 Sharon grad Rich Levine called it a “Cinderella” story, made all the more impressive by the fact that “for the last 20-plus years, Sharon High School has been one of the worst football teams in the state,” he wrote in a column on NBC Sports Boston. “It became a part of our identity.” Levine lightheartedly blamed the preponderance of Jewish moms in town: “Football and Jewish mothers have a longstanding rivalry that I believe dates back to the Stone Ages,” he wrote. “The fact that a significant portion of the player pool simply wasn’t allowed to play limited the team’s potential and always wreaked havoc on the overall depth and numbers.”

Due to dwindling interest, Sharon no longer has a Pop Warner feeder league to introduce tackle football to young players (although a new youth program is in the works for this fall). Elementary- and middle-school-age kids in town who want to play football can join leagues in nearby towns. As a result, most Sharon players don’t learn how to tackle—or be tackled—until ninth grade. Coach Shuffain acknowledged this lack of experience as a potential hurdle in a 2024 Boston Globe season preview, expressing concern with the depth at the high school level.

This raises a crucial question: Is it possible younger players, like Rohan, had to step into starting positions before they were ready?

Is it possible younger players, like Rohan, had to step into starting positions before they were ready?

The Eagles’ fall season was painful from the start. After opening with a 7–42 loss to Marlborough, the team endured a string of embarrassing shutouts: 0–38 against Dover-Sherborn, 0–34 to Westborough, 0–42 versus Attleboro, 0–50 against King Philip, and 0–46 facing Milford. The boys who’d quit the team prior to the season had seen it coming—Sharon was getting creamed by the competition, leaving parents worried. By the time the Thanksgiving Day game against Oliver Ames rolled around, Sharon had dropped 10 straight. “Everybody was like, ‘Somebody’s going to get hurt,’” said one Sharon mom, who, like many parents I spoke to, asked not to be named for fear of reprisal in the community. “The teams were so unbalanced.”

Rohan had reportedly sustained a concussion earlier in the season that required rest and rehabilitation. Under state and MIAA rules, he couldn’t return until he was symptom-free and received medical clearance. The state’s concussion protocol then required a careful progression: light aerobic exercise, followed by sport-specific training, non-contact drills, full-contact practice, and, finally, game play. Athletes can only advance through these stages if they remain symptom-free. This careful approach exists because a second blow to the head before full recovery—even a minor one—can trigger second impact syndrome (SIS), a rare but deadly condition where the brain suddenly swells. According to Massachusetts Medical Society guidance for coaches, SIS can lead to unconsciousness or cardiac arrest within minutes.

Still, there’s one notable flaw in this protocol: It relies largely on self-reporting, which is notoriously unreliable, especially with teens who might just want to play and don’t want to let down their teammates and coaches.

When Rohan suited up for the Thanksgiving Day game against Oliver Ames, he was one of a few players wearing a Guardian Cap, a soft-shell padding that attaches to the exterior of a helmet for added protection. While these caps, invented in 2010, reduce collision impact through their extra layer of padding, they can’t definitively prevent concussions—particularly crucial for Rohan, who may have already been at higher risk for deadly SIS after his earlier concussion. The good news, though, is that so far, the NFL’s experience with Guardian Caps has been promising: After requiring them in 2022 for certain positions during training camp and preseason, the league expanded the mandate to all pre-season and regular season contact practices starting in 2023. Last fall, the league found a 50 percent reduction in concussions among players wearing Guardian Caps during the preseason, and officially allowed players to wear them during games, too.

The NFL also made changes to the kickoff—long considered one of the game’s most dangerous plays. The kicker stands on his own at the 35-yard line while the rest of the coverage team and most of the return team line up between 5 and 10 yards from one another, waiting to move until the ball touches a player or the ground. The goal is to prevent players from running at each other at top speed, thereby reducing the number of high-impact, head-on collisions. A 2018 study of Ivy League football games, published in the medical journal Injury Prevention, showed that kickoffs accounted for 6 percent of all plays but 21 percent of concussions from 2012 to 2018.

It’s concerning that these changes haven’t trickled down to youth football: The majority of high school teams are still wearing old-school helmets and using the traditional kickoff format. That’s despite research from multiple studies, including some at Boston University, showing that “players who start playing tackle football at a young age, sustaining more of those smaller head blows in their teenage years, are more likely to suffer from CTE [chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease] and the long-term, lingering effects,” according to an October 2024 story in the Brink, which covers research news at BU. A 2019 study in the journal Annals of Neurology by a team of researchers from the Boston University CTE Center found that the risk of developing CTE increases 30 percent with every year spent playing tackle football.

Mary Beth Miotto, cochair of the Massachusetts Medical Society’s Committee on Student Health and Sports Medicine, believes football-related concussions in youth and young adults are a “public health problem,” and yet “we’re not looking at it in a very systematic way in terms of outcomes and interventions,” she says. We’re also not funding it. The NFL—a multibillion-dollar company—has a committee whose sole task is to review injury data after every season and examine videos to see how injuries occur. A nonprofit organization such as the MIAA likely doesn’t have the bandwidth to take this on. Instead, Miotto says, it needs to happen on a national level—not only collecting the data and analyzing it but also making changes to the game that will help reduce the incidence of serious injuries. Miotto believes the onus is on the NFL to provide access to resources and push down some of the funding for research—and soon. “It’s taking too long,” she says. After all, we now know that concussion issues “don’t just start once they sign an NFL contract.”

In the meantime, some high schools have made it their mission to make the game safer. A league of independent schools in New York City, for instance, eliminated the kickoff and onside kicks altogether and set limits on full-contact practices. Riverdale Country School athletic director John Pizzi, who initiated the rule changes to the New York City league, told the Riverdale Press that he “wanted to change football in America,” and noted to CNN that the new rules led to a 33 percent decrease in concussions between 2019 and 2021. He’s hoping to inspire similar changes in high school athletic conferences nationwide.

Closer to home, at Stoughton High School, there’s a different approach. When the football program equipped every player with a SAFR helmet cover last season—a polyurethane foam cover that fits over existing helmets—head coach Christopher Evans saw striking results. “All I have is anecdotal data,” he told me, “but we did not have a single concussion this season with our players who were wearing the SAFR helmets. Our opponents didn’t change, our style of play didn’t change, and the game of football didn’t change. So you have to really dig in and ask, ‘What was the difference?’” Evans points to the helmets and strong off-season training for the improvement. While the program is still fundraising to cover the equipment costs, he’s convinced it’s worth the investment. “Every decision we make,” he says, “is in the best interest of the kid.”

After talking to the experts, one question still gnawed at me: Why wasn’t there more vocal pushback from Sharon parents, coaches, and administration when they learned they’d be moving to the more competitive Kelley-Rex division? The Eagles had finished fifth out of six teams in the Davenport division in 2023, making it hard to understand what would have compelled, or even justified, the move. When I emailed a representative from the MIAA, asking for more of an explanation, I got no response. That was hardly surprising: Over the past few months, when I tried to talk to parents or players about Rohan’s accident, my phone calls and emails went unanswered. Sharon residents had understandably circled the wagons to protect his family’s privacy.

However, I believe the town’s acquiescence could potentially be traced back to an unlikely source: the Sharon boys’ basketball team’s dominant 2023–2024 season. Last year, the Eagles advanced all the way to the state semifinals, beating Bedford High School and extending what the Boston Globe called the team’s “magical run” to their first appearance in the state finals since 1991. Despite a hard-fought game, the Eagles fell to Malden Catholic, but Sharon got a taste of victory—and residents liked it. “That basketball run was such a big deal to this town,” the Sharon mom told me. The players became local celebrities, greeted by friends and strangers alike. Athletic success was a novelty in Sharon: After all, I was told by way of explanation, “People don’t move here for their kids’ athletic careers.”

Residents and students were still riding that high when football season began in the fall. The basketball team had shown that Sharon could compete with the best of them, and people were excited to see whether the football team would follow in their footsteps. Now, we know the answer is a definitive “no”—the team lost every game, badly, and despite following concussion protocols and wearing a Guardian Cap, Rohan Shukla suffered a nearly fatal injury.

In the aftermath of Rohan’s injury, the response felt strangely muted. Ten years ago, when I first wrote about youth football, parents were fired up—ready to publicly rally together to ban contact sports altogether. Now, the reaction seemed more resigned: Yeah, we know football is dangerous; let’s just move on. In fact, over the past two years, the number of kids playing high school football is on the rise after trending down for a decade, according to a survey by the National Federation of State High School Associations. When I asked Miotto, of the Massachusetts Medical Society, what she thought the difference was, she suggested that perhaps post-pandemic, parents “just got a little amnesia.” After all those months of school shutdowns and social isolation, we desperately wanted our children off their screens and interacting with other kids in real life. I would have signed up my twin boys for anything coming out of the pandemic—even football.

And yet, despite improvements in safety measures and equipment, concerns about head injuries and serious, long-term health consequences persist. There were 16 fatalities among college, high school, middle school, and youth league football players in 2023, 13 of which were directly or indirectly related to football participation, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research. In August 2024 alone, there were seven deaths from football, for reasons ranging from heat stroke to severe head injury.

There’s no question that Sharon was outsized and outmatched in the Kelly-Rex division.

There’s no question Sharon was outsized and outmatched in the Kelley-Rex division. In its efforts to level the playing field and close the gap between the haves and the have-nots, the MIAA seems to have overcorrected and left Sharon exposed. While the affluent town certainly has the resources to hire experienced coaches and maintain top-tier facilities—and many Sharon families can afford to send their children to training camps and hire private trainers—there was a crucial missing piece: Until this year, Sharon didn’t have enough players to support a youth football program, and the high school roster was so thin that coaches had no choice but to start freshman and sophomores who might otherwise have been on junior varsity.

The MIAA should have anticipated this. The essence of sports and competition lies in the possibility of victory, yet the Eagles stood no chance against the powerhouse teams in their new division.

There’s optimism ahead, though: Sharon coach Ben Shuffain has taken the matter into his own hands, withdrawing the Eagles from the league and scheduling games independently. Next year, Sharon will play schools such as Dighton-Rehoboth (enrollment: 621), Wareham (enrollment: 533), and Martha’s Vineyard (enrollment: 744). When a commentator on Facebook asked, “Not playing a [Hockomock] schedule next year?” Shuffain replied, “We are not. Building the program from the ground up with a youth program and giving our kids a safer and more competitive football experience.”

That’s really all any parent can ask for. We know football is a violent sport—that’s a huge part of the appeal for fans—and freak accidents happen. But we have to trust that coaches and administrators are making decisions with the well-being of our kids as their top priority. Otherwise, we’re just throwing Hail Marys.

This article was first published in the print edition of the May 2025 issue with the headline: “Hail Mary.”

Previously

• Inside the High-Stakes, Zero-Sum Game of Youth Club Sports

Illustration by Benjamen Purvis

While Silicon Valley chases immortality pills and uploads consciousness to the cloud, Boston has quietly become ground zero for actually living longer, better lives. As part of our April issue on aging well, here are how three academic institutions are helping the city become the world’s next longevity hub.

At Boston University, they’ve discovered centenarians’ secret isn’t what they do—it’s what they don’t.

What began as a mild curiosity for Thomas Perls turned into his life’s work. While a Harvard geriatrics fellow, he was assigned a group of patients at Hebrew Rehabilitation Center in Jamaica Plain, including two people more than 100 years old. Wanting to speak with them, he assumed they would be easy to locate, likely confined to their beds due to their age. Not so: The 102-year-old woman was in high demand playing piano on different floors each day, and the 101-year-old man, a lifelong tailor, was teaching his craft to younger patients and staff. Perls would have to make an appointment just to get on their busy schedules. Fascinated by their vitality, he launched the New England Centenarian study in the mid-’90s, which has been based at Boston University since the early aughts and is now the world’s largest and most comprehensive study of centenarians and their families. At first, Perls’s biggest hurdle was finding enough 100-year-olds. He first checked voter records before discovering a critical shortcut: local newspapers, which frequently celebrated people’s 100th birthdays on the front page. Now, after 32 years, Perls has studied those who’ve lived past 100, 105, and 110, finding that they often don’t develop many health problems until their mid-nineties and that their age-related illnesses are very compressed at the end of their lives. What separates Perls’s research from others is his focus not on what causes diseases, but what prevents them.

Also at BU, they’re fundamentally changing longevity research.

George Murphy, cofounder and codirector of BU’s Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM), found Perls’s approach compelling. Ten years ago, Murphy had developed a groundbreaking technique to create master stem cells from blood samples without using embryonic tissue. At first, his team applied this method to develop treatments for heart and lung disease, but their focus eventually shifted. “We kind of turned everything on its head a couple of years ago, at the behest of collaborating with Tom, and started harnessing all the power of our center away from disease to resilience. Everybody gets exposed to diseases throughout their lives but vary in the way they respond to these things.” Inspired by centenarians’ ability to evade age-related diseases better than others, Murphy and his team are now studying the genes and factors that prevent people from getting sick and developing therapeutics that can help people live longer.

MIT AgeLab. / Courtesy

At MIT, they’re making aging better—and having a blast doing it.

Walking into MIT’s AgeLab is a bit like entering a real-life Pee-wee’s Playhouse. You are greeted by the host, founder and director Joseph Coughlin, an exuberant man in a natty pastel sports coat and bow tie who can’t wait to show off his toys. Most immediately eye-catching is “Miss Daisy,” a full-size, cherry-red VW Beetle that is actually a driving simulator, or as Coughlin jokes, “a several-­million-dollar video game.” While driving Miss Daisy, some of the AgeLab’s thousands of participants each year face a large external ­projection screen that simulates different weather and driving conditions, which, as you navigate and steer, lets Coughlin and his researchers “track your eyes, reaction time, attention, pulse rate, skin conductance, palm sweat, and ultimately how stressed you are under certain conditions,” he says. Coupled with the AgeLab’s collaborations with government transportation officials and car companies such as ­Volkswagen, the technology allows for the study of various age-related issues (including impaired vision and the impact of medications on focus and reaction time) so products can be modified accordingly for older people, allowing them to do the things they’ve always done.

Next up is AGNES (age gain now empathy system), a full-body suit that Coughlin says “gives you the joys of feeling two or three chronic conditions that you’re likely to experience in your late seventies and early eighties. To understand and feel the friction, fatigue, and frustration that older adults with arthritic hands or diabetic neuropathy feel.” Pepsi, Coke, General Mills, and GlaxoSmithKline, as well as auto manufacturers like Daimler, have all used AGNES to develop aging-friendly consumer product packaging, including over-the-counter medicines. Notably, CVS redesigned its new stores with lower shelving, wider aisles, and higher-contrast “lollipop signs” after consulting with AGNES.

With 11 students and 32 full-time staffers, Coughlin and his colleagues at the MIT AgeLab are clearly having fun doing serious business. “MIT is about envisioning and inventing the future. I want the AgeLab to write a new narrative of a 100-year life,” Coughlin says, adding that it’s about “setting the agenda for what 100 good years could be.” In some ways, he already has: His latest book, Longevity Hubs, shows how Boston’s unique mix of aging residents, universities, businesses, and government programs focused on seniors led Inc. Magazine to call it the “Silicon Valley for the octogenarian set.”

At Tufts University, they know what’s on your plate determines your fate.

Dariush Mozaffarian delivers a straightforward message: “Eat your veggies.” Or, as the director of the Tufts Food Is Medicine Institute more eloquently puts it, “It’s no secret—we all know what leads to longevity. It’s a very simple recipe of a healthy diet, physical activity, good sleep, low mental stress, and having meaning in life.” So rather than looking for a magic molecule or breaking down the components into some form of pill, he says his institute looks for “very real and practical ways to help people eat healthier food.”

Much of the organization works with healthcare systems and policymakers to bring “food-based nutritional therapies into healthcare,” as Mozaffarian puts it. The goal is simple: Doctors should be able to prescribe “a medically tailored meal, grocery basket, or fresh produce” that insurance covers, like drugs or surgery, or reimburses for, like gym memberships. Right now, the institute is bringing together healthcare providers, government officials, and nonprofit and business leaders to work on a variety of projects, including improving the nutritional quality of food assistance programs such as SNAP, WIC, and school meals. “Through healthcare, federal nutrition programs, and healthy food policies,” Mozaffarian says, “we could pretty radically improve health and longevity in this country.”

This piece was first published as part of a package in the print edition of the April 2025 issue with the headline: “Live Long and Prosper.”

Photo by Janice Checchio for Boston University Photography

Most teens dream of celeb encounters. Melissa Gilliam? She spent time as a kid lounging on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s living room couch (perks of her friend’s mom being a judicial icon). But for this Washington, DC, wunderkind, rubbing elbows with the Notorious RBG was just the opening act. Fresh from her stint as Ohio State’s executive VP and provost, Gilliam’s résumé reads like a renaissance scholar’s dream: college bigwig, educator, research whiz, and doctor who spent her early days as a pediatric and adolescent gynecologist, championing young women’s health. Now steering the ship at Boston University as its president, Gilliam has a boatload of ideas for the future of the school—but if you ask her, the best thing about Boston is simply being surrounded by water.

First of all, do you make your family call you “Madam President”?
[Laughs.] I’m lucky if they call me and ask, “Mom, what time is dinner?”

If you had to choose three adjectives to describe your leadership style, what would they be?
I think I’m collaborative. Humanistic. I care a lot about people. And I’m radically optimistic. My husband calls it toxically optimistic. [Laughs.]

What made you want to come to BU?
When they called me about this job, I picked up the phone, and they talked about this amazing institution that could do even more amazing things. It was sort of step-by-step. I wasn’t looking or saying, “Boy, I want to be at BU.” It was more like, “That’s intriguing. And that’s intriguing.” And then I followed the breadcrumbs, and I found this amazing institution at the end.

You have tremendous style. What’s your signature?
Do you know what I wear all the time? Hoop earrings. That’s my thing.

Person you most admire, living or dead?
It depends on the day of the week. So what’s today? [Laughs.] I think about Congressman John Lewis a lot. It helps me a lot, especially in difficult times. My mom’s an inspiration. My father’s an inspiration.

You have degrees from Yale, Oxford, Harvard, and the University of Illinois. Are they all on the wall of your office?
Not a single one is on my wall. You carry your degrees inside of you. I don’t need them on my wall.

Courtesy Boston University

Your father was an artist, and your mother was a journalist. What made you want to become a doctor?
When I was young, it was about wanting to make a difference in the world. And then I started graduate school, and I thought I’d keep my nose directly in the books. But again, I had this sense that I wanted to do something that would really have an impact on society, so I stopped. I did all of my medical school interviews, completed a master’s degree, and went to medical school. It was about trying to have a direct impact on other people’s lives.

Has women’s health historically taken a back seat when it comes to research and funding?
Absolutely. Statistically it has. There’s been an effort to try and correct it, but what’s also happened is that women haven’t been included as much in clinical trials. We don’t include pregnant women in clinical trials to the extent that we should. So we don’t have the knowledge.

What prompted your initial transition from gynecology to the administrative side of higher education?
Well, I always had an administrative role, while I’d also see patients and do research. Then, in 2016, the University of Chicago asked me to come into the central administration, and initially, I really didn’t want to. But then I thought, “Maybe I’ll learn something.” I also didn’t actually have to quit my other two jobs, so I was able to be in higher ed leadership, still do research, and still see patients. Then, when the pandemic came, I suddenly had to leave the operating room. I had to leave the clinic. And I realized I was still okay. I could be in higher education only and still feel fulfilled. I think I needed the pandemic to cut the cord.

Do you miss seeing patients?
I do. It’s wonderful sitting across from a teenager and really getting to talk about her life. And then I had a large part of my practice that was taking care of patients with disabilities, and so I don’t get to do that anymore. I miss that.

Photo by Jackie Ricciardi for Boston University Photography

Your areas of professional expertise are sort of at the intersection of everything that’s happening in the current political discourse. The repeal of Roe v. Wade, healthcare, campus protests… does that feel overwhelming to you?
I think about it in a couple of ways. The first is that I have expertise in working with adolescents and young adults, and I find that’s a good thing to ground myself during this time. But in terms of having navigated protests and things like that, it makes you realize that you have to take the long view. These are moments. They’re episodes, and they pass, sort of in waves. So part of what I’m doing is really focusing on the long-term and what’s important about a university and running an educational institution. I think, in many ways, my experience gives me perspective.

What are your thoughts on the repeal of Roe v. Wade?
It saddens me. It just saddens me.

How do you intend to handle the inevitable campus protests?
There are three things. The first is to really engage deeply with the students. I spend a lot of time listening and talking to students, trying to understand what they want and what they’re thinking. But the second thing is that it’s really about making sure we get the work of the university done, which is to educate students and create knowledge. I want to make sure that we protect people’s right to free speech, but at the same time, be sure that we’re doing the day-to-day work of the institution. And the third thing is that this should be a time of learning about the issues, so how do we give people the opportunity, even amid all of this, to learn and actually understand the issues, as opposed to forming opinions without having the opportunity to learn and discuss. We’ll definitely be creating forums for discussion.

Do you own a lot of your father’s artwork?
Yeah, a fair amount. My sisters and I own some together, and then I own some of it on my own.

Do you have any artistic inclinations?
Yes. I’m a ceramicist. I started working at BU in July, and I realized I have to figure out a new solution for a studio. It’ll probably need to be in my basement. At times, I’ve had studios in my backyard. When you’re really busy, you have to have something very nearby to be able to keep doing it.

Your mom started working as a reporter at 17. What was your first job?
Working at a store called In the Bag. I sold bags—luggage, handbags, all sorts of things. It was really fun because it was in Georgetown, and I got to talk to all the different people who came in. I would meet the rich and famous or the person who just broke the strap on her purse and needed a new one. It was interesting.

You’re clearly a super high achiever. Do you feel like you need to measure up to your parents?
Well, it’s funny, when you grow up in Washington, DC—I tell the story of being dropped off at my friend James’s house and sitting on the couch with his mom, who was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I literally rode in the carpool with Judith Viorst, who wrote Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, and the carpool in the story was my carpool. In DC, you grow up with the kids of congresspeople and senators, so I never thought much of it.

Any thoughts on student-debt forgiveness?
Debt forgiveness? That’s the government’s issue. But for us as an institution, we really want to pay attention to debt at graduation. My goal is for students to graduate and be able to do what they want to do with their lives, so the less debt, the better. I would love it if the government would pay. But I also understand the logistics there, so part of what we want to do as a university is to continue to think about that. And BU is fantastic. At this point, we’re spending $500 million a year on scholarships and institutional aid. That’s about a $300 million increase in the past decade alone. So we take it really seriously.

What was the thing about BU that surprised you the most?
I wasn’t aware of its scientific excellence. I knew it was strong, but this is a place where they have literally created new fields. There’s a creativity and an imagination that I just hadn’t anticipated. And the reason is because, a lot of times, you hear, “This place is a powerhouse,” or “That place is a powerhouse.” BU has been more modest, so you don’t realize what amazing things are happening here until you look more closely.

Photo by Janice Checchio for Boston University Photography

It’s a city university. Do you think there’s a difference between that and a more bucolic academic campus?
I spent two years at Oxford. It’s a tiny city. You’re away from everything, right? It’s a little bit removed from the world, and you can imagine you’re in summer camp. I love that feeling. But at BU, we are part of the city. We look at the city. We think about the city. And we have a particular role to play within that urban landscape. That will be a really big focus of what we do.

How so?
I think there’s a really nice aspect to do with having a medical school and Boston Medical Center, being able to care for the poor and underserved. So it’s not just that we’re urban. It’s our relationship to the city. We’ve always been integrated in a way that I think many universities haven’t had to be. We’ve always been very dependent on the city for infrastructure and for the way that we work, and we expanded over time. It’s always been a part of Boston, built out of Boston. A lot of our buildings are things like former car dealerships.

Do you have a favorite building or place on BU’s campus?
I really love our new Center for Computing and Data Science. That’s kind of an easy one because it’s our architectural marvel, the stacked-books building. It’s a net-zero building, completely sustainable. It’s helpful when I talk about the future and what’s possible to point at that building and say, “We can do this.”

What do you consider your biggest challenge at BU?
I think right now it’s, well, the euphemism is “deferred maintenance.” We have a big campus with lots of old buildings that we’ve acquired, and we have people in spaces where they can’t necessarily do their best work. So I’m trying to improve that.

Any other major goals that you have for your presidency?
Just one? [Laughs.] I have several. One tremendous goal involves the medical school. I want to really create a great alignment with our medical center and make it one of the premier medical schools, in conjunction with the medical center, in the country. We have so much potential, and we’re already doing such great things. I’ll also focus a lot on those operational things I’ve been describing, the infrastructure and the labs, and recruiting faculty.

What’s your favorite thing about Boston?
I’m really excited about being surrounded by so much water. It’s just so beautiful.

Most important question of all: Have you sworn allegiance to Boston sports teams?
I have sworn allegiance to Terrier hockey. We have a great athletics program, and I am completely down with it. Seriously, though, having come from Ohio State and seeing how athletics can be the tie that binds, I’m so excited about our scholar-athletes here. That’s where my allegiance is.

By the Numbers

BU All Stars

Boston’s largest university has produced some exceptional individuals.

129

Number of Grammy Award–winning alumni.

17

Number of former BU players who were on the NHL roster for opening night last season.

3

Number of former BU students who appeared on the Time 100 Most Influential People and Time 100 Next lists in 2023.

2

Number of alumni—Martin Luther King Jr. and Óscar Arias Sánchez, former president of Costa Rica—who have won the Nobel
Peace Prize.

21

Number of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists who have graduated
from BU.

As part of our Top Schools 2024 special report about kids and cell phones, we’ve asked two mothers of seventh graders to share their perspectives on why they have—or haven’t—given their child a smartphone.

Why I won’t give my seventh grader a smartphone…

“What scares me most is observing my own behavior with the phone. I’m addicted to Facebook. It has radically altered my life. I used to read copious amounts of books and magazines, and I don’t read them anymore. I see how it affects my relationships. It’s really negatively affected my life.

My daughter is a rising seventh grader. We got her a flip phone at 12 because I don’t want her to not be able to text with people. She has an iPad. She can use Messenger Kids with people. But I have all kinds of rules: If there are friends over, you can’t be on a screen. This was always my rule, but it’s really unraveling now that so many kids have phones.

She gets plenty of screen time. She watches tons of TV; she has time on the iPad. But the amount that she gets, given our restrictions, is just a fraction of what other people are contending with. Her anxiety is less than other kids. She has some, which I think is age-appropriate and seems universal for her generation. But we’ve witnessed her being able to do things that are kind of unusual in this age group: to just meet people.

We have signed a Wait Until 8th pledge. I’m not purporting to be an expert, but I am reading the studies. I just really want to raise a resilient, independent child who can solve problems, who can think analytically, with unsupervised play outside, interacting with the world and with other people. Not a week after we got her the flip phone, she got a message: ‘Hi; how are you?’ She wrote back, ‘Who’s this?’ thinking it’s some friend, because she doesn’t have enough names and numbers in her new phone. There was chatting back and forth. This was at 9 p.m.

I get those messages, and I delete them. But a child doesn’t know what to do with that. We’ve discussed it with her, but she was so excited to get a message from a friend that she got up and responded. The next thing you know, this guy was calling 11 times in a row. It was a grown man.

Still, we don’t want to prevent our daughter from socializing. My kid is highly socially skilled, enormously emotionally intelligent, and will have friends even if she’s the only one on the planet without a cell phone. I have total confidence in her with that. Even now, she keeps forgetting her flip phone. She’s not addicted to it. To be fair, we don’t suffer in the same way.” —Rachel Canar, Arlington

Why I gave my seventh grader a smartphone…

“My son got his first iPad at four, passed down to him by a friend of ours who worked at Apple when my daughter was born so that he could sit beside me and play games, so he’s very tech-savvy. We started with a two-hour limit per day, and when the time was up, it was up. Then, depending on if it was weekends, holidays, or COVID, limitations slowly went out the door.

We got him a phone for his 13th birthday, in 7th grade, because he was starting to be farther away from us, getting dropped off on a sports field. Just last night, I dropped him off and thought he would be there for two hours. After an hour, he texted and said, ‘Can you come get me? They’ve called the game.’

With his dyslexia, he has speech-to-text written into his IEP. Recently, he was doing a book report on Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, and he listened to it on Audible every night on his phone. We had a great discussion about the book that really opened up interest for him in the sciences. But what I was really impressed with was how much he absorbed that he definitely would not have if he’d ‘read’ it. I’ve also noticed that, as he’s becoming more independent, he’s using his phone for executive functioning, setting alarms to remind himself to do things.

There are definitely certain apps he cannot have. We have it set up so that he can’t download anything without our permission. He doesn’t have Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat—for us, it’s the curated life that isn’t real—but we allow Discord so he can talk with friends. They game or even watch movies ‘together.’

I think smartphones are only as scary as you want to make them, and they don’t absolve you from any responsibility as a parent, making sure that you know what they’re doing. But I’m sure that there are people who side-eye us.” —Jennifer Carberry, Westford

First published in the print edition of the September 2024 issue as part of our Top Schools 2024 package, with the headline, “On the Front Lines: What’s it like to parent in the age of smartphones?”

Are Smartphones Failing Boston’s Kids?

• The Sobering Truth About Kids and Smartphones
• How Schools Are Regulating Smartphones—Or Not
• Ask the Experts
  • Studies Show Smartphone Use and Social Media Can Affect…
  • How to Say “No” to Your Child’s Phone Use — and Stick to It
  • How to Manage Your Teen’s Social Media
• Also, in this issue:
  • The Top Public High Schools in Greater Boston, 2024