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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.

Helena de Bres, professor of philosophy, was a guest on WNYC New York Public Radio's "All of It" podcast to discuss her new book: How to be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins. 

Trailer for the film Stamped From the Beginning. Africana studies professor Kellie Carter Jackson joins other leading female academics and activists such as Dr. Angela Davis, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and Brittany Packnett Cunningham to guide viewers through a searing account of how racist tropes and imagery were developed and enshrined in American culture.