A few years ago, the American Public Health Association declared noise to be a public health hazard, which leads to more heart disease, hearing loss and other health impacts as well as lost productivity. Noise isn’t just about decibel level – although that’s important - it is about its constancy and intrusiveness. Who likesthat high-pitched car alarm that goes off at 3 am or the cacophony of bleeping machines that overload your nervous system, when you are trying to heal in a hospital bed?

Chris Berdik, a science and education journalist, first became interested in noise when he wrote a feature for the Boston Globe on noise pollution. He was captivated by the idea that a pollutant could inflict such wide-ranging harms to mental and physical wellbeing, which were both pervasive and inscrutable. Some people regarded noise as lethal as secondhand smoke, while others saw noise complaints as a proxy for being anti-tech or disliking your neighbors.


Berdik’s research took him to European villages and cities where EU regulations require settlements of a certain size to identify noise-protected “quiet areas”. He concluded that in order to mitigate the harmful effects of noise, loudness needs to be controlled and quiet protected. How often do we find ourselves having to shout in restaurants or repeat our orders; why can’t we focus on a deadline at work instead of our concentration being hijacked by the chatter of coworkers? Berdiksuggests that “soundscapes” in workplaces, schools, hospitals and restaurants need to be planned in advance, so they can support not undermine our larger endeavors.

Chris Berdik has been a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly and a research editor at the investigative magazine, Mother Jones. As a freelance journalist, his writing has appeared in Popular Science, Wired, New Scientist, the NYT, the WP, Salon, Politico, Slate, the Boston Globe, among other publications. His latest book is CLAMOR: How Noise Took Over and How We Can Take It Back.

Dive into new drama programs and celebrate Mother's Day with recipes, music, and more.

Photojournalist Ulrike Welsch, Chair of Health Studies at MassBay Community College Denise Garrow-Pruitt, and Photo Editor of The Boston Globe Bill Greene discuss Boston's desegregation efforts in the 1960s, through the lens of many photographs of the times, moderated by Melissa Taboada Editor of the Great Divide Education Team at The Boston Globe.

Kittie Knox was a young biracial cyclist in the 1890s who fought against race-based limitations in America’s post-Reconstruction reaction against Black advancement. During her cycling career (1893 – 1899), she became a well-known century (100-mile) rider, protested the League of American Wheelmen’s color bar in 1895, and refused to conform to conventions about fast riding and wearing a long skirt while cycling. For decades after her untimely death, Knox’s groundbreaking story was virtually unknown outside of the world of cycling.

Scholar and writer Larry Finison has worked to bring her remarkable life back to a wider audience and speaks about Kittie Knox in the context of the late 19th century cycling craze.

Larry Finison is a social psychologist by training and public health practitioner by profession and then turned to the social history of bicycling. He is the author of Boston's Cycling Craze, 1880-1900, Boston's 20th Century Bicycling Renaissance, and Bicycling Inclusion and Equity (2023). His most recent work is Kittie Knox: Exclusion and Inclusion in Boston’s Black Athletes: Identity, Performance, and Activism.

Climate change, global disruption, and labor scarcity are forcing us to rethink the underlying principles of industrial society. How can a new generation reanimate the best ideas of our industrial forbearers and begin to build a realistic and human-centered future? Join us at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation for a conversation with David Mindell who envisions a new form of industrialism that draws upon the first principles of the Industrial Revolution that date back to the 18th Century in his recent book 'The New Lunar Society'.

While discussing new industrialism, he will tell the story of the Lunar Society, a group of engineers, scientists, and industrialists who came together to apply the principles of the Enlightenment to industrial processes. The Lunar Society included pioneers like James Watt, Benjamin Franklin, and Josiah Wedgwood whose conversations both ignited the Industrial Revolution and shaped the founding of the United States.

Acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns visited the Concord Carlisle High School and introduced a film clip from his upcoming documentary, The American Revolution, highlighting the tense and pivotal battles of Lexington and Concord that ignited the war.

“Listen my children and you shall hear of the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.”

This talk will explore Revere’s patriotic technological service to his country, starting before his famous ride and ending long afterwards. Paul Revere pioneered new manufacturing techniques in iron casting, bronze bell and cannon making, and copperwork.

As the first American to roll copper into sheets for the young United States Navy, Revere’s innovative practices helped lead his young nation into the industrial age.

Join Joan C. Williams—award-winning scholar of social inequality and Distinguished Professor of Law (Emerita) at UC San Francisco—for a discussion about her new book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Get Them Back. Her latest book is an urgent wake-up call to mend the broken relationship between college and non-college grads of all races that is driving politics to the far right in the US. Williams says that the single change that could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic - lies in changing the class dynamics driving American politics.

The far right manipulates class anger to undercut progressive goals, and liberals often inadvertently play into their hands. In Outclassed, Joan C. Williams explains how to reverse that process by bridging the “diploma divide”, while maintaining core progressive values. She offers college-educated Americans insights into how their values reflect their lives and their lives reflect their privilege. With illuminating stories —from the Portuguese admiral who led that country’s COVID response, to the lawyer who led the ACLU’s gay marriage response — Williams demonstrates how working-class values reflect working-class lives. Then she explains how the far right connects culturally with the working-class, deftly manipulating racism and masculine anxieties to deflect attention from the ways far-right policies produce the economic conditions that disadvantage the working-class! Whether you are a concerned citizen committed to saving democracy, a politician or a social justice activist in need of messaging advice, Outclassed offers concrete guidance on how liberals can forge a multi-racial cross-class coalition capable of delivering on progressive goaL.

CAMBRIDGE FORUM is partnering with Harvard Book Store and GBH Forum Network to record this event for free public enjoyment and distribution.