The Harvard Brief

To think through soil is to engage with some of the most critical issues of our time. In addition to its agricultural role in feeding eight billion people, soil has become the primary agent of carbon storage in global climate models, and it is crucial for biodiversity, flood control, and freshwater resources. Perhaps no other material is asked to do so much for the human environment, and yet our basic conceptual model of what soil is and how it works remains surprisingly vague. In cities, soil occupies a blurry category whose boundaries are both empirically uncertain and politically contested. Soil functions as a nexus for environmental processes through which the planet’s most fundamental material transformations occur, but conjuring what it actually is serves as a useful exercise in reframing environmental thought, design thinking, and city and regional planning toward a healthier, more ethical, and more sustainable future. Through a sustained analysis of the world’s largest wastewater agricultural system, located in the Mexico City–Mezquital hydrological region, Thinking Through Soil: Wastewater Agriculture in the Mezquital Valley (Harvard UP, 2025) by Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich & Dr. Seth Denizen imagines what a better environmental future might look like in central Mexico. More broadly, this case study offers a new image of soil that captures its shifting identity, explains its profound importance to rural and urban life, and argues for its capacity to save our planet. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father (Harvard UP, 2023) is a rollicking portrait of the paradoxical patriot, whose measured pragmatism helped make American independence a reality. Americans are surprisingly more familiar with his famous signature than with the man himself. In this spirited account of John Hancock's life, Brooke Barbier depicts a patriot of fascinating contradictions--a child of enormous privilege who would nevertheless become a voice of the common folk; a pillar of society uncomfortable with radicalism who yet was crucial to independence. About two-fifths of the American population held neutral or ambivalent views about the Revolution, and Hancock spoke for them and to them, bringing them along. Orphaned young, Hancock was raised by his merchant uncle, whose business and vast wealth he inherited--including household slaves, whom Hancock later freed. By his early thirties, he was one of New England's most prominent politicians, earning a place on Britain's most-wanted list and the derisive nickname King Hancock. While he eventually joined the revolution against England, his ever moderate--and moderating--disposition would prove an asset after 1776. Barbier shows Hancock appealing to southerners and northerners, Federalists and Anti-Federalists. He was a famously steadying force as president of the fractious Second Continental Congress. He parlayed with French military officials, strengthening a key alliance with his hospitable diplomacy. As governor of Massachusetts, Hancock convinced its delegates to vote for the federal Constitution and calmed the fallout from the shocking Shays's Rebellion. An insightful study of leadership in the revolutionary era, King Hancock traces a moment when passion was on the side of compromise and accommodation proved the basis of profound social and political change.

It's easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one has done more to reveal the problem than Thomas Piketty. Now, in this surprising and powerful new work, Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic. Over the centuries, he shows, we have been moving toward greater equality. In A Brief History of Equality (Harvard UP, 2022), Piketty guides us with elegance and concision through the great movements that have made the modern world for better and worse: the growth of capitalism, revolutions, imperialism, slavery, wars, and the building of the welfare state. It's a history of violence and social struggle, punctuated by regression and disaster. But through it all, Piketty shows, human societies have moved fitfully toward a more just distribution of income and assets, a reduction of racial and gender inequalities, and greater access to health care, education, and the rights of citizenship. Our rough march forward is political and ideological, an endless fight against injustice. To keep moving, Piketty argues, we need to learn and commit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make equality a lasting reality. At the same time, we need to resist historical amnesia and the temptations of cultural separatism and intellectual compartmentalization. At stake is the quality of life for billions of people. We know we can do better, Piketty concludes. The past shows us how. The future is up to us. Javier Mejia is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Political Science Department at Stanford University.

Recently, musicologists and others have started writing about Black participation in opera. Lucy Caplan’s Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera (Harvard UP, 2025) is a major new publication on this topic. Caplan examines what she calls a Black operatic counterculture in the US dating from the performance of H. Lawrence Freeman’s first opera, The Martyr, in 1893 until the 1950s. Rather than centering her analysis on opera as a symbol of uplift or on the ways that the operatic establishment excluded Black participation, Caplan thinks about how opera was part of a project of self-fashioning in Black communities. She argues that opera could be one way to answer the question, in the words of Black librettist Karen Chilton, “How do we become ourselves?” Focusing on institutions and networks, while also not ignoring influential figures, Caplan delves into the rich history of Black opera through numerous points of entry. This is not a strictly chronological retelling of a few, already well-known operatic “firsts.” Instead, Caplan writes about everything from critics to short-lived opera companies, from celebrities to supernumeraries, and recreates this previously untold complex and multifaceted operatic legacy.

Do competitive elections secure democracy, or might they undermine it by breeding popular disillusionment with liberal norms and procedures? The so-called Italian School of Elitism, comprising Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels, voiced this very concern. They feared that defining democracy exclusively through representative practices creates unrealistic expectations of what elections can achieve, generating mass demoralization and disillusionment with popular government. The Italian School’s concern has gone unheeded, even as their elite theory has been foundational for political science in the United States. Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science (Harvard UP, 2025) argues that scholars have misinterpreted the Italians as conservative, antidemocratic figures who championed the equation of democracy with representative practices to restrain popular participation in politics. Natasha Piano contends not only that the Italian School’s thought has been distorted but also that theorists have ignored its main objective: to contain demagogues and plutocrats who prey on the cynicism of the masses. We ought to view these thinkers not as elite theorists of democracy but as democratic theorists of elitism. The Italian School’s original writings do not reject electoral politics; they emphasize the power and promise of democracy beyond the ballot. Elections undoubtedly are an essential component of functioning democracies, but in order to preserve their legitimacy we must understand their true capacities and limitations. It is past time to dispel the delusion that we need only elections to solve political crises, or else mass publics, dissatisfied with the status quo, will fall deeper into the arms of authoritarians who capture and pervert formal democratic institutions to serve their own ends. Natasha Piano is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. She specializes in democratic theory and the history of political thought, focusing on the realist and empirical traditions in political science and Italian political theory Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here