Latest news with #MuseumofScience
Time Out
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Music of the Cosmos
Courtesy Conductor Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops bring audiences among the stars for a multimedia program on May 23 and 24 at 7:30pm that explores the intersection of music, space, and science fiction. Featuring the incomparable George Takei as your cosmic storyteller and developed in partnership with the Museum of Science, Boston and its Center for Space Sciences, the Music of the Cosmos concert will boldly go where no man (or woman) has gone before. Stay after the concert for a meet and greet with Takei and special guest Astronaut Sunita Williams. By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions. 🙌 Awesome, you're subscribed! Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon! Discover Time Out original video
Boston Globe
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
For the team behind ‘Utopian Hotline,' disagreement is ‘the space that's interesting to us'
Justin Nestor, co-artistic director of Theater Mitu, points at a projection on the Planetarium dome while fine-tuning "Utopian Hotline" at the Museum of Science Planetarium. He's joined by, from left, founding artistic director Rubén Polendo, guest artist Stivo Arnoczy, and company member Cinthia Chen. Brett Phelps for The Boston Globe The At the Planetarium, the group, led by Nestor and founding artistic director Rubén Polendo, adapts their original performance for a fitting — and much larger — venue. They spoke with the Globe during a residency at the museum in late March. Advertisement Where to find them: Ages: Polendo is 54. Nestor is 40. Originally from: Nestor's from Dorchester, and Polendo from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Live in: Brooklyn Rubén Polendo, founding artistic director of Theater Mitu, working on "Utopian Hotline" in the Museum of Science Planetarium. Brett Phelps for The Boston Globe Why Nestor says they're 'really annoying' to work with: When adapting a work for a new space — a more artistic than pragmatic process that he calls 'translating' — 'we're not good at ignoring anything.' How they started: Growing up in a 'very Mexican family,' Polendo said, he experienced 'a lot of gathering around a table to celebrate, to mourn, to be confused, to argue.' He went into science, and as a young biochemist, he missed that mealtime energy. It had 'a more emotional and impactful link into the questions that certainly were present in science,' he said. Polendo turned to theater. Four collaborators on Theater Mitu's "Utopian Hotline" pose for a portrait in the Museum of Science's Planetarium. From left, Rubén Polendo, company member Cinthia Chen, Justin Nestor, and guest artist Stivo Arnoczy. Brett Phelps for The Boston Globe For Nestor, an 'artist, maker and creative technologist,' per his Advertisement What they make : 'Communal experiences of shared time and space,' Nestor said. How they work : Collaboratively. Eighteen company members are crafting 'Utopian Hotline.' 'We begin with a large question that is both inspiring and at times burdening,' Polendo said, 'that brings us together not into a point of agreement but actually into a point of disagreement. That's the space that's interesting to us.' 'When we reach a level of conversation and argument that words no longer function,' he added, 'the only way we can continue the argument is to begin to make something.' Justin Nestor (right) with Theater Mitu company member Cinthia Chen and guest artist Stivo Arnoczy. Brett Phelps for The Boston Globe Advice for artists : 'The job of the artist is to stay in the attempt,' Polendo said. 'That's why artists have a practice. Because you're constantly attempting.' UTOPIAN HOTLINE By Theater Mitu, presented by ArtsEmerson and the Museum of Science. At Museum of Science, 1 Science Park, May 1-18. Tickets $25 general, $17.50 museum members. Rubén Polendo works on "Utopian Hotline" at the Museum of Science Planetarium. Brett Phelps for The Boston Globe
Boston Globe
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Eight ways to celebrate Women's History Month around Boston
PORTRAIT OF A LADY The Harvard Art Museums are home to various portraits of 19th-century American women, including ' March 6, 12:30 p.m. Free. 32 Quincy St., Cambridge. Get Love Letters: The Newsletter A weekly dispatch with all the best relationship content and commentary – plus exclusive content for fans of Love Letters, Dinner With Cupid, weddings, therapy talk, and more. Enter Email Sign Up Last year's TogetHER panelists. This year's panel will be held at Legacy Place in Dedham. Haley Abram Advertisement LISTEN AND LEARN Legacy Place in Dedham is celebrating International Women's Day with TogetHER 2025, a panel of female industry leaders. Beginning with a pre-panel social event, ticket-holders are encouraged to mingle, snack on appetizers, grab a sweet treat, or sip on a cocktail, before panelists take the stage. Moderated by Kiss 108's Billy & Lisa co-host Lisa Donovan, the event will feature Courtney Cole, a WBZ-TV anchor; Liza Levy, a music industry professional and co-founder/president of the artist development organization product and merchandising officer of the shoe brand HEYDUDE. Those interested can buy tickets at the March 6, 6-8:30 p.m. $25. Showcase Cinema de Lux, 670 Legacy Place, Dedham. "Gardener at Day's End" oil by Andrea Petitto, who will be featured at Addison Art Gallery's "Artful Women in Song & Paint" event. Andrea Petitto ARTFUL WOMEN IN MUSIC AND PAINT The March 8, 5-7 p.m. Free. 43 South Orleans Road, Orleans. Advertisement A GLOBAL NETWORK The United Nations Association of Greater Boston is highlighting female leaders during its 'Empowering Environments' panel, bringing together a group of local women inspiring change. The lineup includes Phyllis Barajas, founder and CEO of Latino leadership network March 11, 5:30-8:30 p.m. $10-$20. Boston Public Library, 700 Boylston St. The Museum of Science will hold a Women's History Month celebration on March 22, highlighting various female STEM leaders with "Meet the Scientist" events. Ashley McCabe TILL YOU DROP Female entrepreneurs have brought vibrant storefronts, personalized products, and carefully curated services to the Boston area. At Boston Women's Market at Night Shift Brewing, more than a dozen vendors will set up shop — find everything from locally formulated skincare from March 15, 12-5 p.m. 87 Santilli Highway, Everett. Advertisement WOMEN IN STEM Women have been contributing groundbreaking ideas and work to the STEM field for centuries. The Museum of Science will celebrate these contributions with local STEM leaders for its Women's History Month programming in collaboration with the March 22, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Museum of Science, 1 Science Park. WOMEN GO FAR Soon after the start of spring, an unsanctioned women-only 10-mile and 5K run will kick off at DICKS'S House of Sports Boston. Participation requires a March 30, 8:30 a.m. $35. 760 Boylston St. Marianna Orozco can be reached at
Boston Globe
07-02-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
The double helix of science and democracy
Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Put those dynamics together and one of America's greatest legacies — our ability to produce knowledge that leads to material progress — feels shakier than ever. Advertisement So Globe Ideas and the president of the Museum of Science, Tim Ritchie, asked Danielle Allen, director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, and David Kaiser, an MIT professor of physics and the history of science, Edited excerpts of the discussion follow here. Tim Ritchie : I think we all believe that if humanity is going to rise up to the big challenges we face, we have to have thriving science. But if we're going to have science bend itself toward goodness, we have to have good societies built by democracy, by people who know what is best for themselves and their communities. David Kaiser : I don't find it very helpful to consider science and democracy as separated spheres — 'Keep your politics out of my science' or vice versa. I don't know what that means. If science must necessarily be done by groups of people, then of course we're social and political beings and that should be a source of strength, not a source to run from. One of the roles for politics, among many, is resource allocation. How do members of a society come to agree on how to distribute resources among worthy causes? Science, which needs a lot of resources, has to be political. We have to make the case in a persuasive way about why this kind of activity is worthy of support and hopefully not subject to the turmoil of election cycles. Making a persuasive case — not as if support is our birthright or should happen just because we said so — is one of our most important responsibilities among many. This requires sustained political engagement. Advertisement MIT's David Kaiser at the Science and Democracy event on Jan. 9, cosponsored by the Museum of Science and Globe Ideas. Studio Nouveau Danielle Allen : Oftentimes we think that politics is all about material goods, resource allocation and the like. I want to say it's actually about something more fundamental. It's about human dignity, and human dignity resides in the capacity of people to be the authors of their lives. My school of democracy was my family's dinner table. I had extended family who were super civically engaged, across the political spectrum. There was this one incredible year in my youth, 1992, when both my aunt and my dad were running for office in California. She was running for Congress from the far left. My dad was running for US Senate as a Reagan Republican. So we had amazing dinner table conversations. My dad would argue for market liberties and for civic virtues, and my aunt would argue for public sector investment in every segment of society and experiments in living. And as I watched them, I finally realized that there were two things that they were sharing. One was just this clarity of purpose: They were both seeking empowerment for themselves, for their families, for their communities. Then they were having this massive argument about how to unlock human potential, how to convert empowerment into well-being. But while they had that argument, they never ever broke the bonds of love, however vehement they were in their positions. Advertisement I think this relates to science in that you can have debates that are really intensely felt, but you have to bring with that a willingness to use these shared decision-making mechanisms — the votes, the elections, the institutions — to yield a result that you're going to live by even if you don't perfectly love it, but you're going to come back to the conversation again the next time. In science, too, people will win debates at certain points in time, but that doesn't actually end the conversation. We think of science as this accumulation of discoveries, but actually even Einstein is having his theory of relativity be modified by contemporary work of all kinds. I think democracy has a special relationship to science because both are forms of human social organization that respect human potential. That's the point of the synergy. And because of that core shared commitment, there is a way in which democracy and science can flourish better together. Harvard's Danielle Allen at the Science and Democracy event on Jan. 9, cosponsored by the Museum of Science and Globe Ideas. Studio Nouveau Ritchie : Where are we telling the stories of awesome and wonderful things in science? Whether it's on YouTube or TikTok — or Twitch or Rumble for that matter — people are getting their science and their view of politics online. Should Danielle Allen and David Kaiser be mixing it up with Joe Rogan? Should your smart colleagues be going to where people are on social media and be more robust and more brave out there? Advertisement Allen : Yes, for sure. We should be taking stories to where people are and sharing the wonder. I think there is so much good to share in the work of universities and the work of science. And I think the hard question is really how to support people in doing that. It's not necessarily the muscle that one develops after years in the lab or years in the archive and the like. There was the 19th-century habit of Ritchie : Let's go on the road and make science great again? Allen : Yes, yes. I will say yes to that. Ritchie : An audience member online is asking about the COVID vaccine, a fascinating example of democracy and science. A lot of funding there, lots of information, and lots of mistakes. What have you learned from the race to find a COVID vaccine and this relationship between democracy and funding and science? Advertisement Kaiser : I'll give one: How do we live under uncertainty? Not just live under it as individual thinking people, but how do we communicate it? How do we try to formulate public policies that will affect lots and lots of people without knowing everything we'd want to know up front? That's the world we live in, that's our condition. And how do we communicate a kind of intellectual modesty in the face of grand challenges? 'We don't know everything. We have compelling reasons why we're going to try this now.' That's different from 'Back off. The scientists are in town.' Allen : Politics is fundamentally about value judgments and about choosing a direction collectively. Science can't answer those questions. And so in that regard, I do think it matters that science and scientists enter into those decision-making moments precisely with that spirit of humility. 'No, we don't necessarily have the answer. What we do have is a lot of information about the choices, the trade-offs, the stakes of the different choices, and so forth.' I don't think we got that balance right in the time of COVID. Audience member : My question is about corporations. They provide lots of the funds, trained personnel, and time to do science. Are there ways that you think we should change how corporations are regulated or operated to be better for science and democracy? Allen : I think the COVID moment gave us a beautiful example of how in principle the public sector, the commercial private sector, and civil society can work together. We couldn't have had those vaccines if there hadn't been decades of public sector democracy investment in bench science, the discovery of mRNA. But bench science alone can't get you to unlock the full human good of a discovery. You need the capital that a Moderna or Pfizer has to scale up something like a vaccine. But those vaccines weren't getting into people's arms unless people trusted the vaccine. And here in Massachusetts that was a civil society effort — the Black Boston COVID collaborative, the Western Mass. COVID coalition. The point being you need public sector investment in science, you need corporations, and then you need civil society. And the hard question is: How can you have a regulatory or governance structure that keeps corporations serving the public, not converting everything that's public into something that's just extracted for private good? We are without any question living through a moment of real challenge around the question of what a corporation is, how it operates and the like, and whether or not democracies are masters of corporations or vice versa. That is the political question of the next decade, and I think the stakes are very high. Audience member : In a world where anyone can self-publish and information is shared through a multitude of modalities, is there a role for either a democratic institution or a private institution or otherwise to really ensure that anything that's labeled as science or fact is actually true? Kaiser : There's a fundamental First Amendment right in our country to be able to say what one wants within, obviously, some limits. If someone has a contrarian view about quantum entanglement — and many do, my inbox confirms that every day — I don't think there's any reason to block them from being able to share those ideas. One thing we can try to do is just do more of it ourselves. Flood the market. Let's go all in. If we know there are remarkably well-organized, often well-funded disinformation campaigns, I think saying, 'How dare you?' is an appropriate first reaction. The second reaction is, 'Well, that's a political campaign. We're living in a political world. What's our political campaign going to be?' I think it should be: Let's do more work getting things that we trust out there and explain why we trust it, as opposed to 'How dare you! Take it down. Censor that.' We don't need more martyr complexes out there. Brian Bergstein is the editor of the Globe Ideas section. He can be reached at
Boston Globe
26-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Free things to do in Boston this week: disco roller skating, movies, run clubs, and more
ALL IN THE KNEES Find your rhythm with bachata, a type of social dance with roots in the Dominican Republic, at Castle Island Brewing Co. in South Boston. Expect a playlist featuring tracks by Latin music artists likeJuan Luis Guerra and Romeo Santos at this free dance night. Jan. 29, 7-10 p.m. 10 Old Colony Ave. Advertisement Visitors at the Harvard Natural History Museum in the Earth & Planetary Sciences gallery. Julieta Sarmiento/EJSP Visual SCIENCE RULES Break free from a cold snap with the Harvard Museum of Natural History's ArtsThursdays: Winter Glow event, where curious minds can visit the space during a free night of crafts, exhibits, and performances. On display will be Jan. 30, 5-9 p.m. 26 Oxford St., Cambridge. Advertisement RUN WILD For those sticking to their New Year's fitness resolutions, there are plenty of ways to get active without the expense of a running club or membership. To keep the community moving, Marathon Sports has organized a Winter Warrior Challenge in partnership with comedian and running influencer Registration via required. Jan. 29, 6 p.m. 1654 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge. SWEET SING-ALONG Singer and music teacher Jeff Jam will be performing children's songs at the Boston Public Market; a way for kids to decompress on the weekends while adults get their farmers' market on. Jam is a Massachusetts-based performer and hosts the catchy, sing-along-able, weekly showcase with his acoustic guitar. Feb. 2, 10:15 a.m. The Nook, Boston Public Market, 100 Hanover St. Families attend a Jeff Jam concert at the Boston Public Market. Boston Public Market GET GROOVY As much as we all may try to fight it, disco is not dead yet. Celebrating the funky '70s genre is MassArt Boston's production organization, Eventworks. The student-led group will host House of Spin, a roller skating party where disco lovers can listen to their favorite tunes as they attempt to maintain their balance. Skate rentals will be available for free — that is, unless you want to BYOW, bring your own wheels. Jan. 31, 8-11 p.m. MassArt Pozen Center, 10 Tetlow St. Deals & steals MOVIE MAGIC It's far too cold to stargaze, but the Museum of Science's Omni Theaters is offering discounted tickets to those who want to look to the skies. Their five-story domed theater screens dynamic IMAX and enhanced films like 'Cities of the Future,' which explores real-life innovations-in-development, including flying vehicles. Check the museum's website for times and prices. $10 for adults, $9 for seniors, $8 for kids. Museum of Science, 1 Science Parkk. Advertisement Marianna Orozco can be reached at
