Events

Professor Doug Melton's work for the Harvard Stem Cell Institute hasn't always made him popular. He fought with the Bush administration over federal funding for his research, argued with religious fundamentalists over "family values" and "human dignity," and at one point had a full-time security guard stationed in his lab because of bomb threats. Read more

On February 28, two long-time Russia correspondents—Julia Ioffe, a senior editor at The New Republic, and Miriam Elder, the foreign editor at BuzzFeed—spoke about their work and the challenges of covering Putin's Russia. Read more

Ben Smith became editor in chief of BuzzFeed in 2011 when the website known for its listicles and cat photos got into the business of breaking news. Smith, an early hire at Politico, immediately built a reporting staff. Read more

Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert said there is a scientific basis for the advice that mothers give about how to be happy: get married, make money, and have children. The author of the bestselling "Stumbling on Happiness" discussed his research on happiness during a talk at the Nieman Foundation on February 19. Read more

During a talk at Lippmann House, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman addressed the future of China and Egypt as well as the furor over what he wrote about his high school reunion. Read more

The current class of Nieman Fellows at Harvard University has selected Pamela Colloff, an executive editor at the Texas Monthly, as this year’s recipient of the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism. Read more

Is the United States a land of opportunity where hard work can lead to success no matter where you start in life? According to Raj Chetty, Bloomberg Professor of Economics at Harvard, it largely depends on where you live. Read more

Cameroonian-born philosopher and political scientist Achille Mbembe is a professor at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa who specializes in issues of urbanization and modern society. He spent the fall of 2013 teaching a course on African cities at Harvard, and in December he stopped by the Nieman Foundation. Read more

Before coming to the Nieman Foundation on November 13, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris tweeted that he was going to discuss "the New New Journalism: Speaking Power to Truth," by which he meant a tendency of some media outlets, including The New York Times in the lead-up to the Iraq War, to believe in the statements of government officials even if there is no evidence to support them. Read more

In the weeks before Evan Osnos delivered the 2013 Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture at the Nieman Foundation, the problems facing journalists in China were prominent in the news: veteran correspondent Paul Mooney, who has written many hard-hitting stories about human rights abuses, had his resident journalist visa renewal request denied, and a recent New York Times report detailed charges that Bloomberg News withheld a story out of concern that it might upset Chinese leaders. Read more