Brandeis Magazine

“When we talk about racism and stereotypes, it’s not just the […] freedom to vote and to become doctors and have degrees and do successful things. It’s also to just be human beings who have errors, who have wants, who are contradictory — pardon my French, but to f*** up as much as anybody else.”

— Harleen Singh, associate professor of South Asian literature and women’s studies,
on dismantling Hollywood’s stereotypes about Asian women, on the NPR News website (July 16).

“It’s frankly refreshing to see this office talking about helping people, and not about punishing them. For better or worse, model laws for controlled substances have led to changes in the past. So it is smart, I think, to follow this path to reform laws that unfortunately need modernizing in many states.”

— Traci Green, director of Brandeis’ Opioid Policy Research Collaborative,
on the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy’s push to reform drug laws
and support harm-reduction programs, on the BuzzFeed News website (Aug. 2).

“By studying race — racism, inequality, understanding institutions’ systems, all those things — we’re not just making America a better place for African Americans. [We are making] America a freer, and more democratic and more inclusive place for all of us."

— History professor Leah Wright Rigueur on the importance of studying race
as part of a public-school curriculum, in a conversation on ABC News’ “This Week” (June 20).

There are important concerns here, not just for the opioid crisis, but for other public-health problems that are caused by corporate greed. If individuals that make decisions that lead to a massive loss of life are able to walk away billionaires, then it sets a very bad precedent.”

— Andrew Kolodny, medical director of opioid policy research at the Heller School, on
the Sackler family’s attempt to shield itself from lawsuits, on the WGBH News website (June 3).

“We’ve seen things like this before. It’s all too early to crunch the numbers. But this seems a bit much. This seems more.”

— Yehudah Mirsky, professor of Near Eastern and Judaic studies, on the increase of
antisemitic attacks in the U.S. during the escalated violence between Israelis and
Palestinians in May, on the BBC News website (May 28).

“We’re learning that we can, in fact, build wormholes that stay open using simple quantum effects. For a very long time, we didn’t think these things were possible to build — it turns out that we can.”

— Brianna Grado-White, postdoctoral fellow in physics, on breakthroughs
in studying the passages to the other side of the universe predicted
by general relativity, in Scientific American (May 20).