Past Events

Professor Jing-Ke Weng’s lab at MIT and the Whitehead Institute focuses on the distinctive chemistry and genetics of medicinal plants. Dr. Weng explains the process, the discoveries, and the challenge of simulating plant chemistry for large-scale medical purposes.

Tatiana Schlossberg reveals the complicated, confounding and even infuriating ways that we all participate in a greenhouse gas-intensive economy and society.

Soil and climate scientist Walter Jehne works to educate farmers, policymakers and others about “the soil carbon sponge” and its crucial role in reversing and mitigating flooding, drought, wildfires, and rising global temperatures. He shows us how we can safely cool the climate and restore essential biodiversity by repairing our disrupted hydrological cycles, returning excess carbon to the soils, where it can build a sponge that soaks up water and revives the biosphere.

Local artists Lani Asuncion, Christina Balch, Keaton Fox and moderator Jesa Damora discuss using art and technology to bring people together in today's digital world. Combining the messiness of technology with their bodies and experiences, these women artists explore and question the relationships between people, technology, and nature.

As a global conservation organization, the New England Aquarium celebrates the ocean, but also draws attention to major issues facing its ecosystems. Pollution from single-use plastic is one of the ocean’s most pressing issues. This talk highlights corporations that share a similar vision of creating solutions to plastic pollution that start by minimizing waste at the beginning of the consumption chain. They will share exactly how corporations are working toward a planet with reduced reliance on plastic. The use of plastics is everywhere—in our homes, our offices, and our oceans. This talk also draws attention to the toll the plastic manufacturing process takes on the ecosystem and on our climate. Image: (CC) [Marine debris litters a beach on Laysan Island in the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge, where it washed ashore.](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beach_strewn_with_plastic_debris_(8080500982).jpg) (Susan White/USFWS)

Nothing is a hotter topic in Boston than housing: the constantly rising costs of rent and home ownership, the gentrification of certain neighborhoods, the lack of diversity in other neighborhoods, and the need for better living solutions in our tiny footprint of a city. What often gets left out of the conversation is the effect that housing has on a community and vice versa. This panel discussion explores the idea of creating community through the built environment. With speakers from a variety of backgrounds, the panel explores creative housing approaches that have great impact on the community: cohousing, artist co-ops, and affordable housing. Image: [Pexels.com](http://www.pexels.com/search/housing/)

The [@IGBoston community](https://igboston.tumblr.com/membership) met to see the new IGBoston Snapshot photo gallery at BSA Space and discussed photography with three established New England photographers. Learn about their experiences and discuss the rise of social media and its impact on photography as a profession and creative outlet. This discussion complements BSA Space's temporary exhibition, IGBoston Snapshot. The exhibition is a visual narrative of the IGBoston community, captured moment by moment. Designed as an Instagram feed, the exhibition illustrates how social media inspires the artists that contribute to it. Image: Pexels.com

Dr. Slatyer explains how dark matter –the mysterious 85 percent of the matter in the universe—continues to elude scientific understanding. She describes how dark matter collisions might create observable signals, and how we can attempt to pick out those signals from telescope observations. Image: [Science For The Public](http:///www.scienceforthepublic.org/)

Speculative Boston is a reading series for science fiction, fantasy, and horror of all kinds. This talk includes authors K. Chess and Max Gladstone, who talk about their latest works and the wonders of speculative fiction! K. Chess is author of _Famous Men Who Never Lived_ and Max Gladstone discusses his newest book, _Empress of Forever_. Image: [Pexels.com](http://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-ceramic-cup-and-saucer-next-to-a-pile-of-books-on-wooden-park-bench-2669380/)

Brookline Booksmith's Transnational Literature Series presents an evening of poetry with Ilya Kaminsky and Kaveh Akbar. Kaminsky reads from _Deaf Republic_, set in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. Kaveh Akbar reads from his debut collection of poems, _Calling a Wolf a Wolf_, dealing with addiction and the strenuous path of recovery. **Details** _Deaf Republic_ confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them. _Deaf Republic_ opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya’s girls, heroically teaching signs by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. _Calling a Wolf a Wolf_ boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous path of recovery, beginning in the wilds of the mind. Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight. “John Berryman and James Wright (and his son Franz Wright) haunt _Calling a Wolf a Wolf_, but Akbar also has a voice so distinctly his―tinted in old Persian, dipped in modern American, ancient and millennial, addict and ascetic, animal and more animal. In the end, nothing brings man―human or man―down to Earth more than the kingdom of flora and fauna.”―Porochista Khakpour, Virginia Quarterly Review.