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Articles by Joe McGonegal
Leading the AI Frontier: Danielle Benecke on Legal Risk, Technical Feasibility, and Commercial Reality | Stanford Law School
Danielle Benecke, LLM ’15 is founder and global head of Baker McKenzie‘s Applied AI practice, which designs and delivers AI-native legal and compliance services for complex, high-stakes matters. One pundit declared it “one of the coolest jobs in legal” today. Benecke was previously a Legal Design Lab fellow at SLS and has served as venture coach in CodeX’s AI and Law program. Danielle Benecke, LLM ’15 You talk a lot about existential threats for your clients.
I reward myself as a parent whenever I avoid using my phone near the kids. It was hard at first, but now I crave human connection. Original
I started giving myself points every time I didn't use my cellphone for something around the kids. At first I would only get one or two points a day. Now I crave more human connection than looking at my screen. Rain delayed the Red Sox game my 7-year-old daughter and I attended last week. Cotton candy and peanuts kept the kids in our section, including her, at bay for the wait. But scanning the 500 adults crammed into section 32 at Fenway, I noticed that nearly 100% had smartphones out.
It's time to reassess alumni volunteer roles (opinion)
You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. It’s well documented that nonprofit organizations have seen a sharp decline in donor counts in the past decade. Higher education has not been spared. “‘Donors down, dollars up’ is a key trend in our philanthropic world right now,” Brian Gawor, vice president of research at the enrollment management company Ruffalo Noel Levitz, wrote in March.
Podcast: Darwin’s First Theory
by Joe McGonegal on August 8, 2017 · 0 comments in Alumni Life, Authors, Learning, Podcast, Podcast A year before he founded MIT, William Barton Rogers earned a reputation as a great public speaker in in Boston by debating Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz about Darwin’s theory of evolution. A geologist, Rogers saw a great deal of plausibility in Darwin’s theories, and history has rewarded him for his insight.
Alumni Books Podcast: Inside the Lost Museum
When a student approached Steven Lubar ’76 with the idea of rebuilding a museum at Brown University that closed its doors over 100 years ago, he couldn’t resist. The Jenks Museum, named after Brown professor John Whipple Potter Jenks, had been closed in 1915, with most of its collections in natural history sent to the town dump. In 2015, Lubar and his students, along with artist Mark Dion, re-envisioned, re-curated, and reinstalled the museum as “The Lost Museum” exhibit at Brown.
Tor Co-Founder: It’s “A Daunting Sense of Responsibility”
A decade ago this month, Nick Mathewson ’00 MEng ’00 co-presented a paper at the USENIX Security Conference in San Diego on a project the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory hired him to code. The paper was “Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router.” Those who have followed the headlines of the last year know what a remarkable run the free anonymity software has had.
Podcast: The Hardware Hacker
Andrew Bunnie Huang ’97, MEng ’97, PhD ’02 is the author of The Hardware Hacker: Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware, published in March 2017 by No Starch Press. Huang discusses the book in the MIT Alumni Books Podcast.
Podcast: Darwin’s First Theory
A year before he founded MIT, William Barton Rogers earned a reputation as a great public speaker in in Boston by debating Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz about Darwin’s theory of evolution. A geologist, Rogers saw a great deal of plausibility in Darwin’s theories, and history has rewarded him for his insight. Like Rogers, Rob Wesson ’66 has found great rewards in applying his own love of geology to Darwin’s work.
Podcast: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff
Podcast: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff Counterfeiting money in the 1700s was not so sophisticated a skill. Some got away with a trick as simple as chiseling away the number “20” on a unit of currency and replacing it with the word “100.” To counter such counterfeits when he started printing currency in 1738, Ben Franklin started spelling the word “Pennsylvania” differently on each different denomination.
Podcast: How Government Insiders Subvert the Public Interest
There are nearly 90,000 governments in the United States, with a new one born every 18 hours. Mark Zupan PhD ’87 has devoted his career to studying the political economy and microeconomics. In his new book, Inside Job: How Government Insiders Subvert the Public Interest, Zupan reflects on the efficiencies and inefficiencies of governments at all levels: city, state, regional, and federal. In this alumni books podcast, Zupan, President of Alfred University, discusses his new book.
The growing challenge of engaging alums in a crowded content market (essay)
Anyone looking at aerial photos of Donald Trump’s inauguration next to those of Barack Obama’s drew some quick conclusions in January. For those of us who produce large-scale events, however, there was an eerie similarity to the decline of inaugural attendance in those eight years and the decline of event attendance everywhere. The Rio Olympic Games last summer prompted several versions of this headline: Why so many empty seats?
Alumni Books Podcast: The Sphinx of the Charles
Alumni Books Podcast: The Sphinx of the Charles Tobias Ayer ’96 has a lot of pride in his alma mater, but it’s the school up the river, and its legendary crew coach Harry Parker, that he chose to profile in his new book this past fall. The Sphinx of the Charles: A Year at Harvard with Harry Parker chronicles Ayer’s years spent as an assistant on Parker’s coaching staff and as a shadow to Parker doing research for the book in one of his last seasons. Ayer discusses the book in this podcast episode.
Alumni Books Podcast: Architecture and Advocacy
, recently published by Robert Coles MArch ’55, is the memoir of one of the Northeast’s most prominent civic voices in architecture and planning. Coles, whose MIT thesis focused on urban renewal in Buffalo, New York, resettled in his hometown after graduation and opened his own firm there in 1961.
Podcast: When Field Research Goes Wrong
Dean Karlan PhD ’02, a professor of economics at Yale University, published Failing in the Field: What We Can Learn When Field Research Goes Wrong this fall, coauthored with Jacob Appel. The book addresses some of the most common failures of field research and randomized control trials and argues for a more transparent culture in academia.
Alumni Books Podcast: Brilliant Beacons
Eric Jay Dolin PhD ’95 is the author of a dozen books, most recently Brilliant Beacons: A History of the American Lighthouse. Noting that the thousand or more lighthouses built on American shores literally “lit the way” for the country on history’s darkest nights, Dolin set out to tell the greatest stories surrounding the lighthouses’ various contributions to American life.
Alumni Books Podcast: Barbecue
“You don’t have to tell me that the world doesn’t need another barbecue cookbook,” writes John Shelton Reed ’64 in the preface to Barbecue, his twentieth book and third on Southern food. The point of this book, writes Reed, is not to offer fancy variations on traditional dishes, but to collect what for him are the quintessential Southern dishes every barbecue aficionado should know.
Alumni Books Podcast: Sharing the Work
Myra Strober PhD ’69, a renowned expert on women in the workforce, has some advice for her fellow alumni. “Men shouldn’t allow their wives to make decisions about leaving the labor force by themselves,” she says. “Those decisions really are family decisions. Men have a role to play in encouraging their wives to stay in the workforce, and help them to do that by sharing the work at home.
PODCAST: Dark Territory-The Secret History of Cyber War (Alumni Books Podcast)
A few months before Edward Snowden revealed a trove of documents he acquired during his time as a contractor for the NSA, Fred Kaplan SM ’78, PhD ’83 pitched a new book to his editor at Simon and Schuster, a book that would complete his trilogy on modern warfare.
Slice of MIT from the MIT Alumni Association
In her new book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos, Priyamvada Natarajan ’91, SM ’11 tells the stories of Albert Einstein’s troubles with gravity, an expanding universe, and dark matter. Arguably the most brilliant man of the century, Einstein was repeatedly proven wrong by his contemporaries and struggled to align his theories with new advances in observational physics.
Podcast: How to Simultaneously Lead and Disrupt
Podcast: How to Simultaneously Lead and Disrupt Michael Tushman PhD ’76 worries a lot about inertia in successful companies. The more successful they become, he argues, the more risk-averse and the less likely to tinker and innovate. Tushman offers a simple list of such firms in his first chapter. For the leaders of companies such as Sears and Polaroid, he argues, management became an end in itself over leadership.
Podcast: The Rise and Fall of American Growth
Podcast: The Rise and Fall of American Growth On February 21, the New York Times bestseller list featured a new title ranking 18th in its nonfiction list. It was an unusual blip in an otherwise trendy trade-books list, even more so given the book’s length: 800 pages. Yet The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War, by Robert Gordon PhD ’67 has struck a chord.
Alum Books Podcast: Somewhere There Is Still a Sun
Alum Books Podcast: Somewhere There Is Still a Sun The odds have certainly been against Michael Gruenbaum ’53. In his eighty-five years, the survivor of the Terezin concentration camp during World War II has overcome them each step of the way. In this MIT Alumni Books Podcast, Gruenbaum discusses some of the odds-defying paths his life has taken, and the new memoir, Somewhere There Is Still a Sun, that he has published this year (with Todd Hasak Lowy) chronicling his experience at Terezin.
Slice of MIT from the MIT Alumni Association
In this MIT Alumni Books Podcast, Robert Shiller SM ’68, PhD ’72 discusses his new book, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception, a book he co-authored with George Akerlof PhD ’66. The audio was recorded live at an MIT Alumni Association event at Fidelity Investments in Boston. At the event, Shiller talked with Nanette Byrnes, senior editor of business reports at MIT Technology Review.
Slice of MIT from the MIT Alumni Association
Hal Linder ’58 paid $4,000 for his bachelor’s degree in geology at MIT. In six decades following graduation, Linder got his money’s worth, surveying and prospecting on all seven continents, eventually discovering a gold mine in California which produced over 1.2 million ounces. Linder chronicles his adventures above and below the earth’s crust in a new book, Wild Places: The Adventures of an Exploration Geologist. Listen to an interview with Linder in this episode of the MIT Alumni Books Podcast.
Slice of MIT from the MIT Alumni Association
In First to File: Patents for Today’s Scientist and Engineer, Henry Heines ’67 cites a number of puzzling patent cases, perhaps none more entertaining than the application for the clothespin. “The claim, which sets out the metes and bounds of what the patent covers and doesn’t cover…went on for something like two pages, which I think is hilarious,” he says. Hear Heines’s thoughts on this patent and other recent patent disputes in the MIT Alumni Books Podcast interview.
Alum Books Podcast: The Proof and the Pudding
Alum Books Podcast: The Proof and the Pudding Mathematicians build upon proofs in advancing their craft. So do cooks, who often use ingredients made of ingredients—ketchup, for instance, or condensed soup. For Jim Henle PhD ’76, the beauty of both practices is in understanding from where those basics come and being able to make them oneself.
Alum Books Podcast: Crisis in Ukraine
When Boris Nemtsov, an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin and Russian policy on Ukraine, was murdered on a bridge in Moscow in February, the outlook that Eugene Rumer PhD ’88 had on Putin’s Russia changed dramatically. “I was shocked,” says Rumer, whose new book, Crisis in Ukraine, was published by MIT Press that month. “I was in a state of shock and confusion for some days.
MIT Alumnus Seeks Financial Empowerment for All
MIT Alumnus Seeks Financial Empowerment for All In February 2014, President Barack Obama named José Cisneros ’78 to the new President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability for Young Americans. In large part, this was an acknowledgement of Cisneros’s work to help lower-income residents in San Francisco enter the financial mainstream. Appointed city treasurer in 2004 and elected to three terms since, Cisneros has spearheaded innovative financial programs for adults as well as kids.
Alum Books Podcast: Betraying the Assassins’ Guild
On a cold fall day, while waiting for the M2 shuttle back to the MIT campus, Livia Blackburne PhD ’13 passed a window display at the Harvard Coop. It was for a new series of young adult fiction about a girl and her vampire boyfriend. “I picked it up, started reading, and got incredibly addicted. I got all four books and read them in three days. That just reminded me how much I loved reading and how I once wanted to be a young adult author,” she recalls.
Encouraging Entrepreneurs to Solve Urban Problems
On returning from summer internships to their second year at MIT Sloan, friends Clara Brenner MBA ’12 and Julie Lein MBA ’12 found they had both worked for startups that tackled urban problems—Brenner at Fundrise and Lein at Revolution Foods. And they had both loved the work. After that, “we wanted to focus our studies on startups building products and services that solve community problems in cities,” says Brenner.
Alum Books Podcast: New Bio Chronicles MIT’s First Alumna
Ellen Swallow Richards, born this day in 1842, graduated from MIT in 1873 and later became an instructor there. In this edition of the MIT Alumni Books podcast, Richards’s cousin, three generations removed, tells the story of Richards’s remarkable life. Listen now. Pamela Curtis Swallow discusses “The Swallow Experiment” and the legacy of her forebear in this podcast. “What a difference she made in her years at MIT,” Swallow says. “I’m so proud of her.
Photo of the Week by Irina Medvedev SM ’01-November 29, 2014
Photo of the Week by Irina Medvedev SM ’01—November 29, 2014 Irina Medvedev is a photographer in Cambridge, MA. View more work on her website. View other alumni photos of the week.
Photo of the Week by Paige Parsons ’90-November 22, 2014
Photo of the Week by Paige Parsons ’90—November 22, 2014 Paige Parsons is a photographer in San Francisco. View more work on her website. View other alumni photos of the week.
Photo of the Week by Forrest Milder ’73, SM ’74-November 15, 2014
Photo of the Week by Forrest Milder ’73, SM ’74—November 15, 2014 Previous post: Your Rooftop Should Be Paying You
Photo of the Week by Rowland Williams ’72-November 8, 2014
Old Mill underpass (© Rowland Williams). Rowland Williams ’72 is a photographer living in Amesbury, MA. View more photos on his website. View more alumni photos of the week. Tagged as: 1972
Photo of the Week by Shelley Lake SM ’79-November 1, 2014
A lion’s tale, Kenya (© Shelley Lake). Shelley Lake SM ’79 is a photographer in Florida. View more of her work on her website. View other alumni photos of the week. Tagged as: 1979
MIT Authors Address Boston Book Fest
Last week’s Boston Book Festival brought 150 notable authors to Copley Square to share their stories, research, and reflections on the future of publishing. Eight of the authors were from MIT. A few highlights: Also speaking: Judith Donath SM ’86, PhD ’97, on the Digital by Design panel, spoke about the state of social media today. Donath is most recently the author of The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online. MIT Technology Review editor Jason Pontin moderated the panel.
MIT Alumni Tackle Cybersecurity Threats
A generation ago, MIT alumni broke new ground in computing by connecting the masses and their machines to one global grid. Today, many MIT alumni are earning renown for limiting, securing, or dismantling these connections. Thanks to an expanding cybercrime infrastructure, dozens of alumni now hold cybersecurity posts for major companies around the world. On LinkedIn, more than 400 alumni list cybersecurity as either a job title, specialty, or academic interest.
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