At Harvard, writer Masha Gessen recounts individual migration tales
Migration is not a tale of numbers. Although too often reports on the massive global population shifts of the past few decades devolve into statistics, the real stories are those of the people — the individuals who choose or were forced to leave a place previously defined as “home” and seek another. That was the focus of Masha Gessen’s lecture “How We Think About Migration,” delivered Wednesday at Paine Hall. In this, the first of two lectures on “How Do We Talk About Migration” that Gessen delivered as part of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, the author and journalist focused exclusively on individuals, giving the sold-out crowd narrative snapshots of real people uprooted and often still on the move. “I’ve been thinking about what a concentrated effort to tell stories about migration would look like,” Gessen said to open the lecture, which was sponsored by the Office of the President...