Harvard University Alumni

"Connecting with people is the only way you can build a successful business. Try to find people who you think will disagree with you, especially early on. You may not change your idea, but you will refine it, if needed, and strengthen your conviction."

"Mutually beneficial relationships. Helping others has helped me throughout my career. Business leads come from people unexpectedly, often months after a random discussion. And this all starts with trying to figure out how to help others. I have learned over the years to focus on what I can give instead of what I can get. It’s a discipline that I continue to strive to uphold."

"In the face of difficult circumstances, be responsive, not reactive, Dara advises. There are things you can’t control, and there are things you can control. Separate the two."

"Success is not final; failure is not fatal."

"It’s really about cohesively thinking of the job to be done, thinking about the tools in your toolkit and then bringing these things together in a way that drives results. I think a lot of myself as a conductor of an orchestra"

"I want people who are swimming, not skimming"

"As a leader, it’s easy to focus on what’s going to happen, and how. Spending time going through the ‘why’ really helped the team rally and come together"

"Leadership is never a solo act. The best leaders lift as they rise, creating environments where people feel valued, challenged and empowered to do their best work"

"We need a world where more people in positions of power reflect the population, and so I think about how I can contribute to that in a small way"

"This is a strategic brand partnership, but to actually get it all the way through, it had to be a cross-functional initiative, right?"

"This was an NBDB [never been done before]"

"I knew there was authenticity there"

"... As a mathematician coming of age in the early years when women were underrepresented, namely the 1970s, I received informal mentoring in the form of experiential advice from rare encounters with females who had achieved professional recognition; their words of wisdom were substantive resources that allowed me to persevere. I am inspired by the book Every Other Thursday (Daniell 2006) which tells the story of a group of professional women, including scientists, university professors, and administrators, who met twice a month for twenty-five years, establishing specific practices such as goal setting, networking, and checking on each other's progress. I am inspired to see more intentional examples of mentoring taking panel for women and girls interested in the ."

"The notion of Algebraic Complete Integrability (ACI) of certain mechanical systems, introduced the early 1980s, has given great impetus to the study of moduli spaces of holomorphic vector bundles over an algebraic curve (or a higher-dimensional variety, still at a much less developed stage). Several notions of 'duality' have been the object of much interest in both theories. There is one example, however, that appears to be a beautiful isolated feature of genus-2 curves. In this note such example, which belongs to a 'universal' class of ACIs, namely (generalized) s, is interpreted in the setting of the classical geometry of Klein's quadratic complex, following the Newstead and Narasimhan-Ramanan programme of studying moduli spaces through projective models."

"The nature of s comes down to a differential equation and a duality. The interplay between the two variables is still something of a mystery (to this writer). By virtue of the lattice of periods, the theta function is at the same time one of the most powerful objects of algebraic geometry. Much classical mathematics of curve theory (Riemann surfaces) is derived using this algebraic aspect. The key idea is to interpret the moduli space of line bundles over the curve as a principally polarized abelian variety. Exploitng its self-dual property provides two variables whose duality establishes a linearization of the class of non-linear s that have as a prototype."

"[After referring to warnings from the FBI and Trump's tweets to his supporters] Despite these warnings, Capitol Police leaders failed to request or assign a single extra police officer to duty that day, and few who were on duty were in riot gear. Mutual sympathies between police and Trump marchers are well known—"Back the Blue!" is a frequent chant at his rallies—and there were clearly many police and military among the marchers."

"The thousands of crusaders were pouring from Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues and coursing freely, like blood from an open wound, onto the unobstructed Capitol grounds. Screaming protesters, some shooting pepper spray or bear spray or thrusting their flags like spears, had been facing off against the outnumbered and under-armed Capitol Police since before Trump had finished speaking. Already the flimsy line of metal barriers had been breached, the crowd had pushed past the base of the steps, the single line of police, broken and bedraggled, struggled to keep them out of the building."

"Still, however much we want to relegate the events of January 6 to the realm of the near-missed catastrophe, our politics remain imprisoned in a series of events unfolding from that day. The coup did not end on January 6 or even in the early hours of January 7, when Congress finally certified the election of the new president. Today this unfinished chain of cause and effect—call it a slow-motion coup—continues to unfold before the country. The coup drives news coverage. The coup elects candidates. And the coup has already gone far toward leaching from our democracy the one element indispensable for a peaceful politics: the legitimacy of our means of conferring power. By launching and leading his slow-motion coup, Donald Trump has led the country into an unfamiliar and darker world."

"[At a campaign event held at Freeland, Michigan on September 10, 2020. President Donald Trump:] "We brought you a lot of car plants, Michigan! We brought you a lot of car plants. You know that, right?" Comes in prompt response the ear-splitting roar of affirmation, clear as clear can be: Yes, Mr. President, we know that! A joyful knowledge, a knowledge to celebrate: all those jobs in all those car plants! But what exactly is it possible to know about those car plants? I could not have been the only one in that obstreperous crowd, made up overwhelmingly of Michiganders, to know the presumably important fact that, well ... those car plants didn’t exist. [Ellipses and italics in the original source] Any member in good standing of the ancient "reality-based community" could have told you that since the coming of Trump no new car plants had been built in Michigan, that since his ascension not less than three thousand Michiganders had lost jobs in the vital auto sector."

"[Observing the Trump rally at The Ellipse preceding the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021] The imagery of Trumpism is about strength and cruelty and dominance even as the rhetoric is about loss and grievance and victimization: about what was taken and what must be seized back by strength."

"That the Steal came fully formed from the president's mind and grew thanks to the fear and negligence of the politicians who thought they could "humor" him, that such a demonstrably false idea is now, as a firmly held belief of half the American electorate, a dominating strain in American history—that these astonishing events could come to disfigure the public life of the United States testifies to the decadence of the country's traditional hierarchies of power and information."

"By virtue of Trump's embodied grievance, his shamelessness, and his daring and skill at shaping a narrative—and then, when it is debunked, shaping another—Trump proves himself victorious, again and again, in attracting and holding eyeballs, which are the golden currency of our age. That American politics was destined to be absorbed by television and the communication and entertainment media it spawned could be foreseen as far back as John F. Kennedy, but the "reality star" Donald Trump is this new world's first grand apotheosis."

"[I]n a system of government built on dispersed power that can function only through compromise—in which a policy progresses through the bureaucracy by officials "working" a problem, not dictating a solution—Trump's authoritarian strain was repeatedly frustrated. He knew instinctively how to dominate the news cycle. But for all his self-promotion as a genius in "the art of the deal," his inability to focus or to lead meant that he never figured out how to convert that attention into power within the government that would help him put his policies, however ill-judged, into effect. Instead he fought against the obstacles that the institutions and the laws represented."

"Trump's campaign rhetoric so often flirts with incitements to violence that most of those comments scarcely even make the news. We are long accustomed to him denouncing his opponents or his judges or members of the news media as traitors. He must come up with something truly striking and original—for example, calling for the chairman of the joint chiefs to be executed for treason—to make us take notice."

"There is a jewish strategy. The great part of the jewish strategy is that most of it is pretty much open source. If you want to push your children really, really hard to survive and if you want to tell them "You've got a dragon breathing fire down the back of your neck because you've always been oppressed and you never know when you have to leave very quickly on short notice", you can duplicate the jewish experience. Good luck!"

"Black Lives Matter was a piece of genus called declarative marketing. I don't know if you've ever heard of it via products in the 1970's called "Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific" or "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!" was the name of the product. So the name of the product is called Black Lives Matter. How can you disagree with that?"

"Who came up with ethno-nationalism? [Is] swedes caring about Sweden ethno-nationalism? FU! You know, people have a right to be in their country without somebody saying "Oh, that's just blood and soil like from the nazis.""

"... She is an academic mathematician turned Wall Street quant turned data scientist who has been involved in and recently started an algorithmic auditing company. She is one of the strongest voices speaking out for limiting the ways we allow algorithms to influence our lives and against the notion that an algorithm, because it is implemented by an unemotional machine, cannot perpetrate bias or injustice."

"… In her new book, “The Shame Machine,” the writer and data scientist Cathy O’Neil, writing with Stephen Baker, examines how shame has been both commodified and weaponized by a society that is increasingly estranged from real life. Who stands to profit from our ubiquitous shame-driven culture wars? she wonders. And is there anything to be gained from them? … … O’Neil suggests that we enter treacherous waters when we start -ing people online; it is a fantasy to believe that it does anything other than enrich ."

"The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world. Shame is a potent mechanism to turn a systemic injustice against the targets of the injustice. Someone might say, “This is your fault” (for poor people or people with addictions), or “This is beyond you” (for algorithms), and that label of unworthiness often is sufficient to get the people targeted with that shame to stop asking questions."

"For shame machines, there is nothing more profitable than a painful and intractable scourge shrouded in mystery. False promises sell, and since they don’t work, the market stays strong. Failure, in fact, is central to the dieting business model, fueling earnings for giants like and . They profit from a never-ending stream of shame-addled, self-loathing repeat customers. Weight Watchers’ former chief financial officer, Richard Samber, told ' that 84 percent of the customers failed in their diets and cycled back to the company. “That’s where your business comes from,” he said."

"... Eventually, I became a tenure-track professor at , which had a combined math department with . And then I made a big change. I quit my job and went to work as a quant for , a leading hedge fund. In leaving academia for finance, I carried mathematics from abstract theory into practice. The operations we performed on numbers translated into trillions of dollars sloshing from one account to another. At first I was excited and amazed by working in this new laboratory, the global economy. But in the autumn of 2008, after I'd been there for a bit more than a year, it came crashing down The crash made it all too clear that mathematics, once my refuge, was not only deeply entangled in the also fueling many of them. The housing crisis, the collapse of major financial institutions, the rise of unemployment—all had been aided and abetted by mathematicians wielding magic formulas."

"… techno utopia is this idea that the machine-learning tools, the algorithms, the things that help Google, like, have cars that drive themselves, that these tools are somehow making things objective and fair when, in fact, we really have no idea what's happening to most algorithms under the hood."

"Indeed, in wartime jargon, the notion of "good Japanese" came to take on an entirely different meaning than that of "good Germans," as Admiral William F. Halsey emphasized at a news conference early in 1944. "The only good Jap is a Jap who's been dead for six months," the commander of the U.S. South Pacific Force declared, and he did not mean just combatants. "When we get to Tokyo, where we're bound to get eventually," Halsey went on, "we'll have a little celebration where Tokyo was." Halsey was improvising on a popular wartime saying, "the only good Jap is a dead Jap," and his colleagues in the military often endorsed this sentiment in their own fashion."

"Even after they were checked at Midway and Guadalcanal in 1942, many Japanese remained convinced that the Anglo-American enemy was indeed psychologically incapable of recovering In actuality, the contrary was true, for the surprise attack provoked a rage bordering on the genocidal among Americans. Thus, Admiral William Halsey, soon to become commander of the South Pacific Force, vowed after Pearl Harbor that by the end of the war the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell, and rallied his men thereafter under such slogans as "Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Jap." Or as the U.S. Marines put it in a well-known variation on Halsey's motto: "Remember Pearl Harbor- keep 'em dying.""

"In the wake of Pearl Harbor, a single word favored above all others by Americans as best characterizing the Japanese people was "treacherous," and for the duration of the war the surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet remained the preeminent symbol of the enemy's inherent treachery. The attack also inspired a thirst for revenge among Americans that the Japanese, with their own racial blinders, had failed to anticipate. In one of his earliest presentations of the plan to attack Pearl Harbor, even Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, who presumedly knew the American temperament firsthand from his years as a naval attache in Washington, expressed hope that shattering opening blow against the Pacific Fleet would render both the U.S. Navy and the American people "so dispirited that they will not be able to recover.""

"Among the Allied war leaders, Admiral Halsey was the most notorious for making outrageous and virulently racist remarks about the Japanese enemy in public. Many of his slogans and pronouncements bordered on advocacy of genocide. Although he came under criticism for his intemperate remarks, and was even accused of being drunk in public, Halsey was immensely popular among his men and naturally attracted good press coverage. His favorite phrase for the Japanese was "yellow bastards," and in general he found the color allusion irresistible."

"I think it would have been humanly impossible for two people, over a period of eight years, to agree more consistently and thoroughly than Mr. Hull and I have done. There has never been the slightest important difference of opinion between us, and so far as I am personally concerned I think it would be impossible for any man in my position, who has been so closely associated with the Secretary- who has had the opportunity of being associated wuth a man of his extraordinary moral courage and consistency, and I think an almost unique intellectual integrity- to have anything except very deep devotion for him."

"On January 17, 1940, Harold Nicolson heard that there was 'still a group in the war Cabinet working for appeasement and at present in negotiation via the former Chancellor Bruning to make peace with the German General Staff on condition that they eliminate Hitler'. But the chance that the German 'opposition' might play the deus ex machina was long gone. Roosevelt was even less realistic. He continued to act as if a compromise peace might still be concocted on the basis of Munich-style concessions to the dictators; hence the 1940 trips to Europe by the Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, and the Vice-President of General Motors, James Mooney, the former touting concessions to Germany that even Chamberlain and Halifax thought laughable. Only with the fall of France was appeasement finally buried."

"The dog needs boundaries, I warned, as Odie clambered on to laps and snuggled at various feet, ensconced in the folds of a blanket. Then, like a stealthy invader, he crept up the stairs. And then one day, behold, he was on the big bed where we congregate for family time. I screeched and Odie jumped off. He tried again and I growled. But Odie can read vibes. He knew that the consensus view maintained that shoving an innocent dog off the communal bed was not the done thing."

"The dog repays our love by being the only one to faithfully meet and greet us when we come home. Instead of mumbling something unintelligible without looking up from the TV remote, Odie skids and skates to the door, paying no heed to the risk of a fractured leg. His tail wags overtime as he makes cute guttural sounds and promptly rolls over for a belly scratch while holding out hope for a snack. It is impossible to resist anyone who takes such unalloyed pleasure at your presence and whose behaviour is not dictated by what happened at the office that day."

"I had returned from my Fulbright year at the University of Chicago, blessed with only the joys and none of the irritations of being pregnant with twins. Landing in Melbourne, I went for a routine ultrasound as a beaming, expectant parent. I came out a grieving patient. The twins were dying in utero, unsuspectedly and unobtrusively, from some rare condition that I had never heard of. Two days later, I was induced into labour to deliver the two little boys whom we would never see grow. Then I went home."

"It can be tricky but I try to put my patients' grief into perspective without being insensitive. It's extraordinary how many of them really appreciate knowing that I, and others, have seen thousands of people who are frightened, sad, philosophical, resigned, angry, brave and puzzled, sometimes all together, just like them. It doesn't diminish their own suffering but helps them peek into the library of human experiences that are catalogued by oncologists. It prompts many patients to say that they are lucky to feel as well as they do despite a life-threatening illness, which is a positive and helpful way of viewing the world. I will never know what kind of a doctor I might have become without the searing experience of being a patient. The twins would have been 10 soon. As I usher the next patient into my room to deliver bad news, I like to think that my loss was not entirely in vain."

"The ASRC [Asylum Seeker Resource Centre] needed a volunteer doctor and I said yes, thinking it would be easy work. In quick succession I saw a little boy with a broken arm, a distressed rape victim, a man with uncontrolled hypertension, and a woman with acute asthma, all of whom had been turned away from hospital. The nurse took the little boy to her doctor friend who would plaster his arm at home, and I rummaged through an old carton of supplies to find some antihypertensives and an inhaler. The rape victim fled, confirming that I was not the therapist she needed. I finished my first shift wistful for the controlled environment of my hospital but conflicted that it, and other hospitals, would deny care to sick patients."

""What kind of a doctor will you be?" "An able one, I hope." "I hope that you become a doctor who will engage with the problems of the world." For an 18-year-old medical student, this aspiration was as professorial as it was intangible. Why worry about global health when the muscles of the back and leg needed memorising? And how did reproductive rights matter when the exam involved peering down a microscope to identify bacteria?"

"I once wrote a report on the inequities I had witnessed on an elective rotation in my Indian home town. He spent hours refining it and encouraged me to aim high. Months later, I excitedly told him that my essay had been accepted for publication in the Lancet. "But wait, they want to remove the best bits," he frowned. A mention in the world’s most prestigious journal was enough for me but this prolific author had other ideas. "Tell the editor why your whole essay deserves to be published." I gasped at the prospect of committing premature career suicide, but he encouraged me to avoid the easy way out. "When you own your work, you signal your integrity." He was right. The Lancet eventually printed my essay in full and his pride outshone my relief. His lesson would accompany me throughout life, and we stayed in touch beyond medical school."

"During my research on ghost tours in the South that included slavery as a theme, I found that many of these tours had characteristics in common, such as the romanticization of relationships between enslavers and the enslaved, the diminishment of the sexual abuse that enslaved Black women endured, a gratuitous focus on violence, an exoticization of Black faith traditions, and a demonization of white women. I would say that if tourists hear narratives about slavery that sound too easy-going to be true or too grotesque to be respectful of people’s lived experience, they are probably listening to exaggerated or fabricated narratives crafted to increase revenue rather than to educate the public."

"I look for strong female characters that are up against challenges but are OK in the end."

"It is indeed a delicate task to work with evidentiary sources as well as the imagination to interpret the past, but I would argue that historians do this all the time. We always bring our creative mental faculties to bear when reconstructing the past. We draw inferences from sources, speculate about cause and effect, and envision times and places that we can never experience directly. Some scholars (and I count myself among them!) enjoy the challenge of pushing this process further to write history in intentionally narrative ways and even to write fiction based on historical knowledge and primary sources."

"“So strong had his voice become that people on neighboring ranches and farms would drag their rocking chairs onto their patios on the nights they knew he was visiting and listen to the corridos he and Fernando Cisneros sang, their voices carried on the gentle breezes of the Gulf for miles on end.”"