cambridgeforum

Bees don't just make honey, they pollinate a third of our food supply. But bee colonies are disappearing at an alarming rate in the US.  In addition to being ecologically essential, bees are highly social and complex creatures that are vulnerable to a barrage of attacks ranging from parasitic mites to pesticides and herbicides.

Most conversations today involve distracted people looking at their phones and not their partners. This, according to Sherry Turkle, is leading to a "crisis of empathy" at work, at home and in our public life. Turkle is Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, and spent four decades studying the relationship between people and technology

Peter Blood and Annie Patterson’s  popular songbook Rise Up Singing is renowned for getting people to sing: to empower, to build community, and to have fun. To celebrate the release of their  new songbook, Rise Again, Cambridge Forum hosted a sing-along concert featuring Peter and Annie; Charlie King; the Nields; Kallet Epstein & Cicone; and […]

Fifty years ago the Civil Rights Movement was far from declaring victory.  The experiences of the 1964 Freedom Summer demonstrated that a legal foundation for African American civil rights may have been a necessary condition but it was hardly sufficient to ensure a peaceful transition to full social and civic equality. Jack Landron, a young … Continue reading Witness to History: Remembering Freedom Summer →

Afro-American folk singer James Sparky Rucker  talks about  the glorification of the outlaw in popular and traditional folk music. Using songs and lyrics, he traces the tradition of celebrating outlaws  from Jesse James to modern gangsta rappers. ” I was standing on the corner when I heard my bulldog bark, He was barking at the two […]

Harvard’s Graham Allison discusses his new biography (co-authored with Robert Blackwell) of Lee Kuan Yew, “the power behind the throne” in modern Asian political leadership. The 89-year-old founding father of modern Singapore, Lee has been a mentor to every Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping, and has counseled every U.S. president since Nixon. This concise book […]

Joseph Nye of the Harvard Kennedy School discusses the foreign policies of 20th century American presidents and assesses the effectiveness and ethics of their choices with David Gergen, Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School . He identifies two main types of presidential temperaments – transformational and transactional– and argues that […]

In this Cambridge Forum Classic, best-selling writer David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous, tells a story that reveals the  subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. What lessons can we learn from our relationship with the natural world? Download audio file (CF-EcoImaginationAbram.mp3)

  or How the World Economy Fell Apart and Why the Economists Didn’t Have A Clue James K. Galbraith examines current economic debates about austerity, government spending, tax policy, and job creation. How much is our understanding – on Main Street and on Wall Street, in Washington and at America’s kitchen tables – about the […]

DESCENT INTO LIMBO: Maurice Sendak’s Life in Children’s Art Download audio file (CF-DESCENT-INTO-LIMBO.mp3) For over five decades beloved children’s author Maurice Sendak has taken children and parents on amazing literary adventures, from the night kitchen to where the wild things are. He traces his lifelong journey in children’s literature and art. Follow Cambridge Forum on […]

Henry “Pistol” Bow Mason pitched in the Negro Leagues for the great Kansas City Monarchs and also in the Majors with the Phillies. Here he shares his experiences of playing in the Negro League, playing alongside such greats as Satchel Page, Willy Mays, and Jackie Robinson. In 1951, after completing high school, Mason left Marshall, [...]