How do you find the right direction in your life and understand who you truly are? On PBS’s Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates Jr. allows celebrities like Scarlett Johannsson and Questlove to better understand themselves by helping them to discover their family histories and ancestral origins.

How the DTCC Safeguards Financial Services

Hutchins Center advisory board member, and vice chairman at Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, Larry Thompson appeared on Bloomberg TV last week to discuss cybersecurity and protecting financial services.

CAMBRIDGE — Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's collection of African traditional art includes bold, expressive masks, vessels, and figures — carved in wood, cast in bronze, sometimes adorned with beads or feathers. We don't know who made them. We do know how they were made.

For photographer Dawoud Bey, activism and art have long been linked. Bey, whose portraits of Harlem form the centerpiece of the exhibit "Harlem: Found Ways‚" now at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art, first connected with his chosen visual medium through a protest.

Through July 15, Harvard's Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art analyzes the history and changes in a historic neighborhood in "Harlem: Found Ways.‚" Anchored by two photo series by Dawoud Bey, created 40 years apart, the exhibit highlights the gentrification that's changing Harlem's identity as a famed black culture capital.

The first Cuban chef with a Michelin star, and the chef — and owner — of the private paladar where former President Barack Obama dined during his trip to Cuba, have something more in common than love of cooking: Both represent snippets of success that Afro-Cubans can find in the emerging private sector on the island.

Almost apologizing because he "doesn't want to make things worse,‚" Afro-Cuban activist Norberto Mesa Carbonell recalled how Cuban police arrested him for trying to celebrate the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination last month.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article...

Many Afro-Cuban activists say that despite the social advancements made in Cuba in recent years, blacks on the Spanish-speaking Caribbean island still face and battle overt racism.

Más de 30 activistas, escritores, intelectuales, académicos y emprendedores cubanos, en su mayoría afrodescendientes, participaron en una reunión en la Universidad de Harvard para celebrar los logros del movimiento afrocubano y trazar una agenda para el trabajo futuro, reporta el diario El Nuevo Herald.

More than 30 Cuban activists, writers, academics and entrepreneurs, mostly of African descent, gathered at Harvard University for an unprecedented meeting to celebrate the achievements of the Afro-Cuban movement on the island and set the course for future work.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article...

Más de 30 activistas, escritores, intelectuales, académicos y emprendedores cubanos, en su mayoría afrodescendientes, convergieron en una reunión que calificaron como "histórica‚" en la Universidad de Harvard para celebrar los logros del movimiento afrocubano y trazar una agenda para el trabajo futuro.

Read more here: http://www.elnuevoherald.com/noticias/mundo/america-latina/cuba-es/artic...

William Julius Wilson talks about new research that will study race and adversity. And Glenn Hutchins, North Island chairman talks about funding the project through the Hutchins Family Foundation.

The Afro-Cuban painter Juan Roberto Diago came of age in the 1990s in the midst of a firestorm. The collapse of the Soviet Union devastated Cuban trade and the island's economy suffered a teeth-jarring blow. Famine followed. Social unrest was inevitable.

When you think of a classroom, you might not envision graffiti adorning the walls, with a DJ spinning Public Enemy to accompany a break dancer.

With hip-hop education, though, classroom management takes its cues from students' real life experiences.

When documentarian Ken Burns and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. kicked off a national speaking tour on race in Charleston, S.C., in December, Donald Trump's run for the Republican presidential nomination was a disturbing phenomenon, but one that seemed likely to collapse once voters actually started going to the polls. Three months later, Trump is the Republican front-runner.