News

DEAR WENDY, the forthcoming young adult novel by Ann Zhao '24, has been named one of the Geek Girl Authority’s 10 Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2024. 

A panel of local historians joins Radio Boston to look back on 2023 and tell us what lessons they want taken into 2024. The panel includes Wellesley College professor Kellie Carter Jackson and David Gergen, a former White House adviser to four U.S. presidents and founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Professor Selwyn Cudjoe writes for the Trindad Daily Express: "On Saturday of last weekend, I drove from Boston to Harlem to hear my daughter’s sermon at Rev Al Sharpton’s Action Network Committee (ANC) located on West 145th Street. Her sermon, 'A Visit from Your Future,' traced “the life of a wealthy and ruthless businessman named Ebenezer Scrooge, the major character of Charles Dickens’ novella, A Christmas Carol."

Childhood brain development may be driven in part by the trillions of bacteria that live inside our guts, new research has found. This research was conducted in Wellesley biology professor Vanja Klepac-Ceraj's lab; senior research scientist Kevin Bonham is interviewed in this story.

Black and Latino kids use social media differently from white kids, says Linda Charmaraman, director of the Youth, Media and Wellbeing Research Lab at Wellesley Centers for Women: “It’s culturally more acceptable in youth of color households to use technology for social and academic reasons compared with white households,” Charmaraman said. “Parents don’t worry as much about it. There isn’t as much shame around it.”

Afghan girls face educational barriers with the Taliban. Pashtana Durrani, a visiting fellow at the Wellesley Centers for Women, defies this by operating a covert school, nurturing their unyielding thirst for knowledge. She fights for a brighter future.

The American composer Katherine Kennicott Davis wrote the song "Little Drummer Boy" in 1941. She originally called it “Carol of the Drum” and wrote it under the pseudonym C.R.W. Robertson. “[One day], when she was trying to take a nap, she was obsessed with this song that came into her head and it was supposed to have been inspired by a French song, ‘Patapan,’” says Claire Fontijn, a musicologist at Wellesley College. According to Fontijn the idea for the song came to Davis when she was trying to take a nap, and stop thinking about the French song “Patapan” and it kept playing in her head like “pa-rum-pum-pum.” That’s how those lyrics ended up in “Little Drummer Boy.”

Wellesley's Science Complex was an honoree in Interior Design’s 2023 Best of Year Awards.

The Biden administration hopes to use generous tax credits to boost electric-vehicle sales and push automakers away from Chinese suppliers. A key material in EV batteries shows why it is proving hard to do both at once. A 2022 law that President Biden championed revamped a $7,500 tax credit for consumers who buy electric vehicles. Among the new rules, the law stipulated that the credits can’t go toward buying any EVs containing battery parts from a “foreign entity of concern,” which includes China... “I would want to know how any automaker, based on the supply chain they’re working with today, meets these standards in 2025,” said Jay Turner, a professor of environmental studies at Wellesley College who wrote a book about batteries.