Ron Mitchell, Editor and Publisher of The Bay State Banner, welcomes Kimberly Lyle, CEO of Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation (DBEDC); Michael Kane, the Director of the Mass Alliance of ‘HUD Tenants (MAHT) and a long-time activist for affordable housing and tenants rights; and Luc Schuster, the Executive Director of Boston Indicators, a research center at the Boston Foundation.


Join us at the GBH Studio in Boston for this community conversation. Recorded in front of the cafe audience at the Newsfeed Cafe in the Boston Public Library, GBH Amplifies events feature a rotating cast of well-known hosts from local media, community organizations, and more.



GBH Amplifies is a community-building initiative funded by the Barr Foundation and supported by the GBH Forum Network, funded by the Lowell Institute.



Forum Network events are free and available to the public, but you must register for access.

Ron Mitchell, Editor and Publisher of The Bay State Banner, holds a conversation about the current condition of our education system with Massachusetts Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler, Boston Public Schools Superintendent Mary Skipper, and Roxbury Community College President, Jonathan K. Jefferson.

Join us at the GBH Studio in Boston for this community conversation. Recorded in front of the cafe audience at the Newsfeed Cafe in the Boston Public Library, GBH Amplifies events feature a rotating cast of well-known hosts from local media, community organizations, and more.

GBH Amplifies is a community-building initiative funded by the Barr Foundation and supported by the GBH Forum Network, funded by the Lowell Institute.

Forum Network events are free and available to the public, but you must register for access.

Jesse Hagopian is an award-winning educator and a leading voice on issues of educational equity, the school-to-prison-pipeline, standardized testing, the Black Lives Matter at School movement, and social justice unionism. He is an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine, an author, public speaker, organizer, and Ethnic Studies teacher at Seattle’s Garfield High School – the site of the historic teacher boycott of the MAP test in 2013.

Professor Gerald Denis, a molecular oncologist at Boston Medical Center, investigates a range of cancers and their causes. Some of his important studies include prostate cancer and breast cancer, which are increasing today. He focuses on relationships between specific factors such as metabolic conditions (e.g., obesity and diabetes) and certain types of cancer.

In this presentation, Dr. Denis explains how cancer research works, the international influence of American cancer research, and how the recent federal (NIH) defunding sets back the progress in cancer treatment at a time when cancers are increasing. 

President Trump has spent years demonizing the press, popularizing the concept of “fake news” and branding journalists the “enemy of the people”. But targeting the free press is only one of the democratic institutions that Trump has gone after since taking office for his second term.

The Trump administration’s flagrant disregard for civil rights has manifest itself in the deportation, arrest and imprisonment of immigrants, foreign students and random tourists in detainment facilities “illegally”, according to Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch. Those who oppose Trump are liable to become the next subject of attack, and this includes the lawyers who have challenged his actions in court. Trump also views academic centers of learning as a threat because they encourage independent and critical thinking; he has already punished Ivy league universities like Columbia and Harvard under the guise of anti-semitism, and now has turned his sights on institutions like the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum network, with plans to reshape it, and eliminate “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology”.

Cambridge Forum considers how far ordinary Americans are willing to go, to acquiesce or protest these developments in Demonizing the Truth. The guest speakers are David Enrich, business investigations editor for NYT and author of a new book 'MURDERING THE TRUTH: Fear, the First Amendment, & A Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.'

Berna Leon, a Spanish teaching assistant at Harvard's School of Government wrote an op-ed for The Guardian entitled “This Op-Ed could lead me to being deported from the U.S.”

Jesse Hagopian is a Seattle educator, the director of the Zinn Education Project’s Teaching for Black Lives Campaign, and the author of the book TEACH TRUTH: THE ATTACK ON CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND THE STRUGGLE FOR ANTIRACIST EDUCATION.

Berna León is a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, where he teaches political theory. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Sciences Po Paris and serves as Managing Director of the Future Policy Lab. His op-eds on democracy, inequality, and global affairs have been published in El País, Le Monde, and The Guardian.

DAVID ENRICH is the Business Investigations Editor at the New York Times and the bestselling author of Dark Towers and Servants of the Damned. The winner of numerous journalism awards, he previously was an editor and reporter at the Wall Street Journal.

GBH welcomes CEO of El Mundo Boston, Alberto Vasallo, III back to the stage at our studio in the Boston Public Library.

This week he is joined by four women leading the way for Boston in fashion, modeling and events.

Marlena Garcia is the founder of Nouveau Networking, a group focused on helping young talent enter the modeling industry safely and with eyes wide open.

Sabrina Ortega Lopez is a fashion designer working with patterns, mediums and colors that highlight her own style and heritage. She is determined to make Boston better known for its fashion talent.

Keyla Williams is the co-founder of Bogosplit Boutique, a shop in Boston's Copley Place Mall dedicated to empowering emerging designers and creative entrepreneurs, providing them with a global stage to showcase their talents.

Juliana Hernández is the founder of DEZ Collective. She uses her opportunities to create glamours events as a way to build community and support others in the fashion and entertainment industry.

Today, thousands of satellites orbit Earth. At the end of their missions they drop from space and burn up in Earth’s upper atmosphere.The resulting ash deposits thousands of tons of aerosols. Certain aerosols contain metal oxides and pollutants that can impact both the ozone layer and Earth’s thermal balance (heat and cooling factors).

Atmospheric scientist Dan Cziczo, an expert on aerosols and clouds, analyzes these particles that accumulate in Earth’s stratosphere, to determine their relationship to both ozone-depletion and climate change. He explains the concern about these unique space debris chemicals and their potential effect on the ozone layer and the cloud dynamics associated with climate. The studies on space debris represent a developing area of atmospheric science and is of great significance, given the continuing increase in the number of satellites.

Anne Berest’s first novel to appear in English, The Postcard, was a national bestseller, a Library Journal, NPR, and TIME Best Book of the Year, a Vogue Most Anticipated Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Goncourt Prize in France. It was described as “stunning” by Leslie Camhi in The New Yorker, as a “powerful literary work” by Julie Orringer in The New York Times Book Review, and as “intimate, profound, essential” in ELLE magazine. With her sister Claire Berest, she is also the author of Gabriële, a critically acclaimed, best-selling “true novel” based on the life of her great-grandmother Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, wife of Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp’s lover and muse, a leader of the French Resistance, and an art critic. Berest lives in Paris with her family.

Cosponsored by the Boston College Fiction Days Series.

The Lowell Humanities Series is sponsored by the Lowell Institute, Boston College's Institute for the Liberal Arts, and the Provost's Office.