Culture
September 2026 • Politics
Above the Fray? Rethinking the Supreme Court Independence
What the Supreme Court ever what we thought it was?
June 2026 • Culture
BEFORE 1776: KING PHILIP’s WAR AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA
What happens when we challenge the standard narrative of King Philip’s War? We’ve been taught that in Wampanoag country the war ended in total devastation: leaders killed, survivors enslaved. But is that the whole story?
April 2026 • Work
WHAT IS COLLEGE FOR TODAY?
College once offered a clear path to opportunity and civic life. Today, that path is shifting fast — squeezed by rising costs, AI’s impact on work, and political battles over the mission of higher education. Nicole Lynn Lewis and Susan Blum join moderator Anya Kamenetz to ask: What is college for now, and who is being left behind?
March 2026 • General
FREEDOM LOST, FREEDOM WON: American History Through a Black Family’s Story
The American story is often packaged as a linear climb toward a “more perfect union”. But for many Black families, history feels less like a ladder and more like a pendulum—swinging between hard‑won breakthroughs and the inevitable backlashes that follow. Join Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and commentator Eugene Robinson for an exploration of this rhythmic history.
November 2025 • Work
BUILDING HOPE IN CYNICAL TIMES
Cambridge Forum speaks with three individuals – a pastor, an author and a professor of mass-media, who have all forged strategies to navigate the stresses of everyday existence. Their experiences offer pragmatic suggestions, and optimistic ideas about how meaning can be reclaimed in a cynical age.
October 2025 • Climate
BIG CARS – at what cost?
Big cars dominate our lives and we just love the personal comfort and distraction afforded by the gadgets behind the wheel. But for how long can we ignore the true costs of our driving habits on others and the planet, without paying the price?
September 2025 • Culture
A.I. and the Death of Critical Thinking
Until we know more about the cognitive effects of technology like ChatGPT, should we be inserting it into the classroom? And if, as recent studies indicate, it homogenizes thinking and creativity, are we content to let our kids’ education go into experimental free fall?
March 2025 • Culture
The Moving Image: A Force to Be Reckoned With
Americans now get their news and information from screens and video platforms rather than the “printed” word. The growing impact of this “force” in our society has no precedent in history.
December 2024 • Culture
Monumental Graffiti – and the role of public art
What is graffiti – is it vandalism, ornament or art? Anthropologist, Rafael Schacter proposes that we think of it as a monument – and it is indeed an ancient phenomenon. Originally thought to have come from the Italian archaeological term Graffito, meaning a deliberate mark made by scratching or engraving on a large surface such […]
November 2024 • Arts
Orwell, 1984, etc.
Cambridge Forum is pleased to mark the 75th anniversary of the publication of 1984 with an in-depth discussion about George Orwell’s life, work, and legacy.
February 2024 • Culture
A Long Time Coming: The Role Of Race In American History
Ray Anthony Shepard has put together an award-winning book for young readers to counter what he says are “years of sanitized Black History months and schoolbooks.”
November 2023 • Culture
Building Bridges to Belonging
Are there simple steps we can all take in our everyday lives to forge lasting connections? Yes, says Stanford psychologist Geoffrey L. Cohen.
December 2023 • Health
Single-Minded: Can You Live a Happy Satisfied Life, Alone?
Consider the state of singlehood: research indicates that people who live alone are generally unhappier. Not so, according to Bella DePaulo.
June 2023 • Politics
Gunfight: Is Healthy Gun Ownership Ever Possible?
Ryan Busse, former executive at Kimber America, a major gun manufacturer and author of Gunfight talks about his battle with the gun industry which he says, has radicalized America.
March 2023 • Culture
Bringing Healing to the Homeless
Traci Kidder, author of Rough Sleepers, explores how a small but dedicated group of people have improved thousands of lives by facing homelessness rather than looking away.
March 2022 • Classics
Black History: On Rewind
To celebrate our newly digitized collection of eminent historical black orators, Cambridge Forum has teamed up with the Lincoln Institute to present a panel discussion.
February 2022 • Culture
The Curse of the Smartphone
It is hard to imagine life without the ubiquitous smartphone. What negative effects is this dependency having on our behavior? What can we do about it? Paul Greenberg has some answers.
November 2021 • Culture
What I Learned in Prison
Journalist Chris Hedges has been teaching classes in drama, literature, philosophy and history in a program offered by Rutgers University to inmates in the New Jersey prison system.
October 2021 • Culture
The Truth at The Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul
James Carroll explores what has broken the modern Catholic Church as chronicled in The Truth At The Heart Of The Lie.
September 2021 • Culture
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation
Kristin Du Mez traces how a militant ideal of white Christian manhood has come to pervade evangelical popular culture in America.
August 2021 • Classics
N***er: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
Randall Kennedy takes on not just the N-word word, but our laws, attitudes, and culture with references that extend from the Jim Crow south to Chris Rock and the O. J. Simpson trial.
May 1996 • Culture
Beloved Community: Cornel West & bell hooks
Can America ever become such a beloved community as Martin Luther King Jr. imagined it, a society free of prejudice where racial differences would be erased and forgotten?
July 2003 • Culture
Brown: The Last Discovery of America
Author of Brown: The Last Discovery of America, Richard Rodriguez reflects on the color brown and explores issues of race, arguing that America has been brown since its inception.
June 2021 • Health
Has the Pandemic Made the World Better?
Despite the damage and carnage, the pandemic accelerated our ingenuity and innovation and good things happened. What good things will you keep from 2020?
April 2021 • Politics
Severe Information Disorder: Can We Restore a Healthier Information Economy?
Many of the problems we face in the world today—the global pandemic, the economic crisis, political violence of the kind that rocked the US Capitol in January—are the result of our severe information disorder. How do we create a universe of truthful and verifiable information, available to everyone? We are […]
April 2021 • Culture
Coming to Our Senses: Empathy
MIT Professor Sherry Turkle helps us understand how we might rejuvenate our senses and flex our empathy muscles once again.
February 2021 • Culture
The Power of Ethics: How to Make Good Choices in a Complicated World
Susan Liautaud shows how ethics can be used to create a sea change of positive decisions that can ripple outward to our families, communities, workplaces, and the wider world.
January 2021 • Culture
How To Think Long-Term In A Short-Term World
It’s time to trade in shortsightedness for long-term thinking. That’s according to author and philosopher Roman Krznaric, who writes about the power of ideas in his new book The Good Ancestor.
November 2020 • Culture
How to Make Meaningful Conversation
Architect and designer Fred Dust considers ways to have constructive conversations that are critical to problem-solving in all sorts of different settings from schools to non-profits and governments.
September 2020 • Health
Does COVID-19 Signal the End of the American Era?
Wade Davis attracted global attention with his opinion piece in Rolling Stone raising this question: Does Covid-19 signal the end of the American era? Why did he ask this question and why has it struck a chord around the world?
September 2020 • Culture
Magdalena: River of Dreams
Anthropologist Wade Davis’s latest book, Magdalena: River of Dreams brings to life the story of the great Río Magdalena, illuminating Colombia’s complex past, present, and future.
July 2020 • Culture
Parenting While Black
Writer, poet, and teacher Clint Smith in conversation with Jude Nixon, Professor of English at Salem State University. Their discussion explores what it means to raise children during this challenging period of Black Lives Matter.
November 2019 • Culture
Appalachia: A Cultural Crossroads
This forum features performances by Revels musicians Jake Blount and Libby Weitnauer exploring the history and roots of traditional music of Appalachia.
June 2019 • Politics
Fake news vs facts: living in a post-truth world
Are we living in a post-truth world where “alternative facts” replace actual facts and feelings have more weight than evidence? How did we get here? Lee McIntrye discusses our modern dilemma.
January 2019 • Classics
Living With Robots
Judith Shulevitz, from the Atlantic Monthly, and Maxim Pozdorovkin, filmmaker of The Truth About Killer Robots discuss the future of robots.
October 2018 • Politics
Good and Mad: How Women’s Anger is Reshaping America
Rebecca Traister, author and NY magazine journalist, examines the history of feminism and the #Metoo movement in the light of recent political events in Washington and beyond.
February 2018 • Culture
Romance in the Information Age
New Atlantis editor Christine Rosen, actor Johnny Lee Davenport, and art historian Curt DeCamillo tackle the issue of how our social media and personal technologies influence our emotions.
December 2017 • Culture
Race Still Matters
Political activist, author, and Harvard University professor Cornel West speaks on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his national best-seller Race Matters.
November 2017 • Culture
Who Can You Trust?
Rachel Botsman writes about and researches how technology is transforming trust and what this means for life, work, and business.
March 2017 • Culture
Ways of Being in the World
Krista Tippett, host of award-winning NPR program “On Being”, discusses her latest book Becoming Wise: an inquiry into the mystery and art of living. She’s joined in conversation by poet and author David Whyte.
December 2016 • Health
Loneliness in the Digital Age
In this two-part forum, we attempt to unravel some of the causes of this pernicious condition and consider the ways to ward off, or at least alleviate, the curse of loneliness.
October 2016 • Culture
A Manifesto Against Parenting
Alison Gopnik discusses her book The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children.
February 2016 • Classics
Reclaiming Conversation
Most conversations today involve distracted people looking at their phones and not their partners. This, according to Sherry Turkle, is leading to a “crisis of empathy” at work, at home and in our public life.
March 2015 • Work
The Health of Democracy: Privatizing Education
How do contemporary efforts to privatize public education square with the civic role that education has played in American democracy?
January 2015 • Politics
The Health of Democracy: The Role of the Media
Alex Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, and Charles Sennott, founder of Global Post and The GroundTruth Project, assess how today’s press—print and electronic—is carrying out its mission.
October 2014 • Culture
Immigrant Struggles, Immigrant Gifts
By examining the immigrant experience of various ethnic and religious groups throughout U.S. history, Immigrant Struggles, Immigrant Gifts demonstrates that the same patterns of native resistance, immigrant struggles, and contributions have occurred repeatedly.
December 2014 • Culture
Christ Actually: Jesus in the 21st Century
Award-winning author James Carroll discusses his new book, Christ Actually: The Son of God for The Secular Age with Harvey Cox of Harvard Divinity School.
April 2001 • Arts
Folklore of Violence
Afro-American folk singer James Sparky Rucker talks about the glorification of the outlaw in popular and traditional folk music. Using songs and lyrics, he traces the tradition of celebrating outlaws from Jesse James to modern gangsta rappers.
November 2013 • Arts
The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience
Musician and author Stephen Wade takes an in-depth look at the ordinary people who recorded live music for the Library of Congress during the 1930s and ’40s.
November 2013 • Culture
The App Generation
Famed Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner and Katie Davis of the University of Washington’s Information School discuss how digital media is changing the manner in which young people learn and relate to the world.
April 2013 • Work
The Richer Sex
Journalist and author Liza Mundy predicts that in the coming decades, women will overtake men as primary breadwinners and become the most financially powerful generation of women in history.
January 2011 • Culture
Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership
MacArthur Fellow Lewis Hyde defends the concept of the cultural commons. How has our cultural heritage, the store of ideas and art we have inherited from the past, come to be seen as intellectual property?
January 2013 • Culture
The World Until Yesterday
Best-selling author Jared Diamond argues there are profound differences between so-called “traditional” societies and industrial or post-industrial societies in everything from the way we count to the way we meet strangers.
November 2012 • Culture
Using the Internet to Create a Just, Sustainable Economy
The New Economic Institute hosts Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons and Change Congress, discussing the part the Internet could play in fostering a just and sustainable economy.
October 2012 • Health
May Doctors Help You Die?
Dr. Marcia Angell, senior lecturer in the Division of Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, discusses the Massachusetts ballot initiative in support of physician-assisted suicide.
October 2012 • Work
What’s the Economy For Anyway?
Activist, author, and film-maker John de Graaf looks beyond the current downturn to explore the assumptions underlying our economy.
January 2012 • Culture
Being Alive and Having To Die
Author Dan Cryer discusses his biography of the Rev. Forrest Church, the foremost Unitarian Universalist of our time.
September 2011 • Culture
Bullies and Cyberbullies
Psychologist Elizabeth Englander, neuroscientist Tracy Vaillancourt, and storyteller Odds Bodkin look at bullying from the perspectives of victims, victimizers, and communities.
April 1998 • Culture
Wisdom for Mind and Heart
In 1998, Reverend Peter J. Gomes, author of The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart spoke at the Cambridge Forum about what he saw as a revival of spirituality in American society
September 2010 • Culture
Philanthropy Reconsidered
George McCully, creator of the Catalogue for Philanthropy, discusses the philosophy underlying voluntary giving.
October 2010 • Culture
In Between
Mark Morrison-Reed, a Unitarian Universalist minister, discusses In Between: Memoir of an Integration Baby, his memoir of growing up during the era of the civil rights movement.
February 2005 • Culture
Beloved Community: African American Lives
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, discusses African American Lives at Cambridge Forum in 2005.