Prof. Kieran Setiya’s new book, “Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way,” is a “lovely, empathetic book,” writes Boston Globe reporter Meredith Goldstein. In a discussion with Goldstein about self-help and philosophy, Setiya noted that in his view “the ideal form of engagement with philosophy is active rather than passive.”
Researchers from MIT and Harvard have “re-evaluated a 2017 review that warned of a growing global sperm-count crisis and associated decline in male fertility and concluded the review vastly overstated the situation,” reports Robert Preidt for U.S. News & World Report.
In an article for The Guardian, graduate student Marion Boulicault details her new findings that suggest recent studies showing declining male fertility are overstated. “The lesson from the research on sperm decline is not that we are facing imminent human extinction (at least not for sperm-related reasons),” writes Boulicault. “Rather, it’s the more banal but accurate fact that there’s much we don’t know about the relationship between men’s reproductive health and environmental pollution.”
Reporting for NPR, Zeninjor Enwemeka spotlights MIT’s Ethics of Technology course, in which students explore how ethics is essential to their work as engineers and computer scientists. “I'm an ethicist, and I'm especially interested in these questions around ethics of things we make," explains postdoc and course instructor Abby Everett Jaques.