News & Stories

Podcast: Energy connectivity in Africa

Vera Songwe, under-secretary-general and executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, on economic development and energy connectivity in Africa.

A new goal for soccer: Improving attitudes toward refugees

Across the globe, 26 million people have been displaced from their home countries by civil war, drought, political persecution, and other crises. At the same, attitudes against refugees are hardening in many countries; a 2018 survey found that 40 percent of Kenyans have heard that refugees are a security threat, and 45 percent don’t think […]

Podcast: Energy access in Africa and beyond

Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO of Sustainable Energy for All and co-chair of UN-Energy, on energy access, electrification in Nigeria, and the power of data.

3 Questions: Richard Samuels on Japan’s 3.11 triple disaster and its impact 10 years later

Ten years ago, on March 11, 2011, Japan was struck by the most powerful earthquake in its recorded history. Of 9.1 magnitude by many accounts, the earthquake occurred off the Pacific coast of Tohoku and triggered a tsunami and meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Nearly 20,000 Japanese — and most of their […]

Foreign policy advice: Don’t look back

President Joe Biden’s administration represents a fresh start for the U.S. in foreign affairs. But as experts observed at an online MIT panel on Wednesday, the U.S. cannot just reset foreign policy to the last time Biden worked in the White House, as vice-president in the Obama administration. Too many things have changed, too dramatically, […]

3 Questions: Ernest Moniz on the future of climate and energy under the Biden-Harris administration

Climate and energy are two key areas on the Biden-Harris Administration’s agenda. Here, Robert C. Armstrong, director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), asks Ernest J. Moniz — professor emeritus post-tenure, MITEI’s founding director, special advisor to MIT President Rafael Reif, and former U.S. Secretary of Energy — about key challenges and targets that the […]

Massive, swift federal investment needed to address climate change, panelists say

To stave off the worst immediate outcomes of climate change, the U.S. needs to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, according to a report released this June by the U.S. House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. In the final event in MIT’s Climate Action Symposia series, held Nov. 16, a panel of policymakers […]

3 Questions: Jonathan King on the future of nuclear weapons testing

In an open letter published on July 16 in Science, four MIT professors and nearly 70 additional scientific leaders called upon fellow researchers to urge U.S. government officials to halt plans to restart nuclear weapons testing. Corresponding author and professor of biology Jonathan King sat down to discuss the history of nuclear testing, his personal […]

Op-ed: International scholars are vital to American innovation and competitiveness

Earlier today, following a lawsuit filed by MIT and Harvard University, the federal government rescinded a policy that would have prevented potentially hundreds of thousands of foreign students from studying in the U.S. this fall if classes were taught remotely. “Yet the larger battle is far from over,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif writes in […]

Will the Covid-19 pandemic change national security?

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to inflict huge damage around the world, international affairs experts are increasingly wondering: Will the virus make countries reconsider their national security strategies? After all, conventional defense capacities have been of limited use against a devastating contagion — and more viruses like Covid-19 may well be out there. While few […]