On this particular afternoon, their maiden flight, they did a wide, half-mile loop out over the ocean and then headed straight at me with tremendous speed. A juvenile osprey, although slightly smaller than a full-grown adult, is still a large bird, with powerful and sharp talons. My immediate impulse was to run for cover, since the birds could have ripped my face off. But something held me there. When they were within 15 or 20 feet of me, the two birds suddenly veered upward and away. But before that dazzling and frightening vertical climb, for about a second, we made eye contact. They looked right at me.

Words cannot convey what was exchanged between us in that instant. It was a look of connectedness, of mutual respect, of recognition that we shared the same land. It was a look that said, as clear as spoken words, “We are brothers in this place.”

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Since the advent of smallpox inoculation in the eighteenth century, the idea that a disease introduced to the body in some lesser, weakened form might prevent full-blown infection has been one of the greatest public health insights of the modern era, inspiring the invention of numerous vaccines and saving countless human lives. But, just as humanity acquired the god-like power to stop infectious disease in its tracks, some feared we had gone too far, leading to the skepticism that has hijacked public health discourse today.

In three sweeping essays written for our current moment of scientific mistrust, Thomas Levenson searches for the origins of the most common arguments against vaccines: that they are unnatural; that they are more dangerous than the illnesses they claim to prevent; and that they are an affront to freedom. Each arose from the earliest development of particular vaccines and the campaigns to distribute them. Even as the pattern repeats, Levenson reveals how innocent that skepticism initially was and, in each case, how very human fears and questions ultimately turned into something darker, where no truth would be enough to overcome the doubt.

Searing but ultimately empathetic, A Pox on Fools explores the human impulse to question and wonder—sometimes past the point at which the very act of questioning turns deadly.

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Couch, S.M. ’15, is associate director of our graduate program in science writing. The MIT Staff Award for Distinction in Service “is given annually to a staff member at MIT whose service to the Institute results in positive lasting impact on MIT’s community.”

Said one nominator, “I am grateful every day I get to witness Chris’s impact on our students and alumni, the MIT community, and the field of science journalism more broadly. At a dark time for facts, Chris is a light. Her passion for this work, its capacity to do good and effect change, and her belief in the role our students play in its landscape, makes it easier to get up in the morning and keep doing what we’re doing.”

And said another, “Year after year, students cite Chris as the most exceptional teacher and the heart of our program. Her ability to mentor, support, and challenge students has left an enduring mark on GPSW. Each year since joining the program, she has taken on greater responsibilities, expanding her leadership in ways that have fundamentally strengthened our community.”

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We’d also like to take this chance to congratulate four CMS/W students on their invitation into the Xi Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa! They include:

• Katrina Chan, CMS Major
• Rian Evans, 21W Minor
• Katelyn Howard, 21W Minor
• Alexis Yi, 21W Minor

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“Beyond the Manosphere: Masculinities Today” is a clickbait thirst-trap trend-driven symptom of everything wrong with museums entering the attention-economy game. The veneer of urgency and cultural relevance feels forced and already dated. It’s the tweedy teacher saying “No cap” two years too late—while also using it slightly wrong. I believe the kids call this “cringe.”

In Art in America.

The post “Two Museums Take on Performative Masculinity, Looksmaxxing, Incels, and Other Macho Buzzwords That Don’t Belong There.” appeared first on MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing.

This article considers anti-Blackness and implicit bias through the lens of aesthetics, tracing their manifestations from Immanuel Kant’s philosophy to contemporary news and avant-garde media. The article treats anti-Blackness as global and environmental, eschewing approaches that focus on individual spectacles of violence, racist representations, and systemic reform. The essay’s central thesis is that the racialized and white-supremacist content of the philosophical foundations of Euro-American aesthetics, particularly Kant’s “ideal of beauty,” introduced the racial as a transcendental aesthetic category. The underinterrogation of the racial in the history of aesthetics has contributed to a persistently colorblind optimism regarding the ethical promise of abstraction, particularly in cinema studies. This argument is developed through a close reading of specific sequences from Terence Nance’s experimental television series, Random Acts of Flyness (HBO, 2018–22). The analysis focuses on two key moments from the first episode—the “Black Face” montage and a segment on the “fluidity” of identity—which the article argues implicitly critique early twentieth-century abstract cinema. The article demonstrates how the ethical figuring of aesthetic abstraction—while hegemonically lauded as universal and objective—further marginalizes the material experiences of Black subjects, and other people of color, when the racial is not engaged as a transcendental aesthetic category.

In Camera Obscura (2026) 41 (1 (121)): 139–153.

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“My term ‘equilexical sonnet’ indicates a poem of fourteen lexically identical lines. I introduce and examine five diverse examples by Ron Padgett, Carl Andre, Christopher Knowles, Eugen Gomringer and Terrance Hayes. Then, I explain how equilexical sonnet writing can, in addition to resulting in new literary works, offer insight into this subcategory of poems and into poetry itself. In particular, I focus on how the difference between the imaginative world of many traditional poems and the operational nature of a computational poem is highlighted by my own extension of Padgett’s ‘Nothing in that Drawer’ into ‘File Not Found’.”

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