The Harvard Brief

Children who grow up in troubled circumstances―experiencing
deprivation or instability, living in a dangerous neighborhood or an
abusive family―are more prone to aggression, recklessness, and sexual
promiscuity later in life. To most of us, the lesson is clear: adverse
childhood conditions make human development go awry.

In The Nature of Nurture: Rethinking Why and How Childhood Adversity Shapes Development (Harvard
University Press, 2026), renowned developmental psychologist Jay Belsky
challenges this interpretation and offers an exciting alternative based
on Darwinian theory. There is no reason to assume, he points out, that
the psychology of “well-behaved” people is normal while that of
“antisocial” adults is aberrant. Instead, the supposedly dysfunctional
behaviors correlated with childhood adversity could well be ingenious
adaptations to harsh environments. If you are surrounded by danger and
uncertainty, then being quick to lash out at potential threats and
having lots of offspring at an early age are good ways to maximize your
reproductive chances. From an evolutionary perspective, having just a
few children and lavishing care on each works well in a stable world,
but not in a perilous one.

Belsky exposes the romanticism
underlying our idealized notions that “natural” equals “good” and that
nature intends to maximize human happiness and well-being. When instead
we take seriously the fact that humans, too, have been shaped by
evolutionary pressures, we can better understand why, how, and for whom
childhood experience shapes later life.

A revealing look at the decline in formal employment in favor of
hiring contractors, freelancers, temps, and marginal workers, who are
excluded from traditional benefits and career ladders.

Companies cannot exist without workers, but they are increasingly
reluctant to have employees. Instead of providing the benefits and
protections that have traditionally come with employee status,
businesses are turning to tactics that let them treat people as
interchangeable parts, to be used and discarded as needed. Drawing on an
original survey of over 6,000 workers, Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment (Harvard University Press, 2026) reveals
the striking extent of this transformation across the occupational
hierarchy, affecting everyone from janitors to nurses.

Paul Osterman identifies three distinct categories of disposable
workers: contractors, freelancers, and marginal employees. The marginal
category, unique to Osterman’s analysis, describes workers who are
employees from a narrow legal standpoint but are held at arm’s length by
their firm—left without job security, skill training, or opportunities
for promotion. Many low-wage service workers toil in marginal jobs, but
so do white-collar professionals such as adjunct university faculty and
staff attorneys at law firms. When the three categories are added up,
they account for more than 35 percent of the American workforce.

Not all disposable workers object to their arrangements. But most
contractors and marginal employees would prefer standard employment, and
there is a significant cost to their current status. In response, Disposable Workers
offers a range of policy recommendations, including mechanisms to
prevent over-reliance on contracting and freelancing as well as reforms
to improve job quality for part-timers and marginal employees. As the
deconstruction of employment affects more and more workers, the
importance of such measures will only grow.

Paul Osterman is Professor Emeritus of Human Resources and Management
at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His numerous books include Good Jobs America, Who Will Care for Us? (Russell Sage, 2011); and The Truth about Middle Managers (Harvard Business School Press, 2009), Who Will Care For Us: Long Term Care and the Long Term Workforce (Russell Sage,2017), Gathering Power: The Future of Progressive Politics in America (Beacon Press, 2003); Securing Prosperity: The American Labor Market: How It Has Changed and What to Do About It (Princeton University Press, 1999), and Working In America: A Blueprint for the New Labor Market (MIT Press, 2001).

How did a vast, nationwide institution like a modern postal system
come into being in Qing China—right at the very end of the empire?

In The Making of China’s Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation (Harvard University Press, 2024), Weipin Tsai
takes up this question by tracing the origins and early development of
China’s postal system. The book asks not only how such an institution
was built, but why it emerged when it did and in the particular form it
took. In doing so, Tsai situates the post office within the Qing’s
broader efforts to modernize, showing how its development intersected
with political maneuvering, imperial pressures, and changing ideas about
the nature of the state.

The Making of China’s Post Office examines both the
high-level decisions and the ground-level operations that shaped the
system’s creation and expansion. Tsai pays particular attention to the
economic and social pressures that drove its growth, as well as the
everyday work of postal employees, including the nitty-gritty of routes,
logistics, and administration. This dual focus allows Tsai to show how
the circulation of mail depended on the interplay between central
ambitions and local realities, while also uncovering the work that
happened at the local level.

Tsai’s book offers a new perspective on China’s encounters with
imperialism, efforts at centralization, and changing conceptions of
governance. In following the routes and emerging and routines of the
post, The Making of China’s Post Office delivers a rich account
of how a modern communications network took shape. This book will be of
interest to readers of modern Chinese history, as well as those working
on global histories of infrastructure, communication, and the state.

Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Generations of Japanese scholars and students have turned to these two texts and their creation myths to understand what it means to be Japanese and where Japan fits into the world order.
As the shape and scale of the world explained by these myths changed, these myths evolved in turn. Over the course of the millennium covered in this study, Japan transforms from the center of a proud empire to a millet seed at the edge of the Buddhist world, from the last vestige of China’s glorious Zhou Dynasty to an archipelago on a spherical globe. Analyzing historical records, poetry, fiction, religious writings, military epics, political treatises, and textual commentary, Matthieu Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic changes that led to new adaptations of Japanese myths. Felt demonstrates that the meanings of Japanese antiquity and of Japan’s most ancient texts were—and are—a work in progress, a collective effort of writers and thinkers over the past 1,300 years.
Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

Furious Harvests (Harvard University Press, 2026) transports
readers to Alex Averbuch’s homeland of eastern Ukraine. Amid the bloody destruction brought by Russia’s war of aggression, the poet toils in fields of memory, reaping lyrics from family archives and mementos to amass testaments to the complex and painful histories of this place and its peoples. A family tree, letters to home, and the faint scent of a grandmother’s dress kept in the back of a closet speak to histories of inter-ethnic violence, WWII forced laborers, and the Holocaust. Mixing dialects, styles, registers, and voices, Furious Harvests—presented in a bilingual edition—defiantly cries out in its
rage and longing toward reconciliation of the self and other. 

Alex Averbuch is assistant professor of Ukrainian literature and culture in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan.

Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar focused on Ukrainian history, culture, and politics.