June 25, 2025

The Debrief: Power and energy

It may sound bluntly obvious, but energy is power. Those who can produce it, especially lots of it, get to exert authority in all sorts of ways. It brings revenue and enables manufacturing, data processing, transportation, and military might. Energy resources are arguably a nation’s most important asset. Look at Russia, or Saudi Arabia, or…

3 things Rhiannon Williams is into right now

June 25, 2025
The last good Instagram account It’s a truth universally acknowledged that social media is a Bad Vibe. Thankfully, there is still one Instagram account worth following that’s just as incisive, funny, and scathing today as when it was founded back in 2016: Every Outfit (@everyoutfitonsatc). Originally conceived as an homage to Sex and the City’s…

Job titles of the future: Pandemic oracle

June 25, 2025
Officially, Conor Browne is a biorisk consultant. Based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, he has advanced degrees in security studies and medical and business ethics, along with United Nations certifications in counterterrorism and conflict resolution. He’s worked on teams with NATO’s Science for Peace and Security Programme and with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, analyzing…

Puzzle Corner Archives

June 25, 2025
July/August 25Guest edited by Edward Faulkner ’03 May/June 25Guest edited by Frank Rubin ’62 March/April 25Guest edited by Michael S. Branicky ’03 January/February 25Guest edited by Dan Katz ’03 November/December 24Guest edited by Edward Faulkner ’03 September/October 24Guest edited by Mark Douma ’63 and Frank Rubin ’62 July/August 24Puzzle Corner Editor Emeritus Allan Gottlieb ’67…

From MIT to low Earth orbit

June 24, 2025
Not everyone can point to the specific moment that set them on their life’s course. But for me, there’s no question: It happened in 1982, when I was a junior at MIT, in the Infinite Corridor. In those pre-internet days, it was where we got the scoop about everything that was happening on campus. One…

Travels with Rambax

June 24, 2025
KAOLACK, Senegal – The MIT students have just finished dinner and are crumpling soda cans into trash bins when they get the summons: “Grab your drums, grab your drums, grab your drums …”  It is time for the tanibeer, a nighttime drum and dance party, in Kaolack, a town amid salt plains and peanut farms…

What if computer history were a romantic comedy?

June 24, 2025
The computer first appeared on the Broadway stage in 1955 in a romantic comedy—William Marchant’s The Desk Set. The play centers on four women who conduct research on behalf of the fictional International Broadcasting Company. Early in the first act, a young engineer named Richard Sumner arrives in the offices of the research department without…

An intelligent, practical path to reindustrialization

June 24, 2025
This past spring, we launched a brand-new manufacturing initiative—building on ideas that are as old as MIT. Since William Barton Rogers created a school to help accelerate America’s industrialization, manufacturing has been an essential part of our mission—a particularly MIT brand of manufacturing, informed and improved by scientific principles and advanced by the kind of…

Art rhymes

June 24, 2025
As an MIT visiting scholar, rap legend Lupe Fiasco decided to go fishing for ideas on campus. In an approach he calls “ghotiing” (pronounced “fishing”), he composed nine raps inspired by works in MIT’s public art collection, writing and recording them on site. On May 2, he and the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble debuted six…