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Web ExtrasSeptember 23, 2008Update: Alex Ross Wins MacArthurMusic critic Alex Ross ’90 has just been named a MacArthur Fellow. Ross is a regular columnist for the New Yorker and his encyclopedic first book, The Rest Is Noise, chronicles twentieth-century music from Gustav Mahler to John Cage. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism and made numerous best-of-the-year lists, including those of the New York Times and Washington Post. In awarding him the fellowship, the foundation said: “In an era when many proclaim the imminent demise of concert halls due to waning attendance, Ross offers both highly specialized and casual readers new ways of thinking about the music of the past and its place in our future.” Read more about Ross and his criticism in this article from the July-August 2008 issue of Harvard Magazine. August 26, 2008A Window on BeijingThe Olympics focused global attention generally on air pollution in China, and particularly on air quality in Beijing. For visual evidence of the state of the skies in Beijing, check the photographs and commentary provided here by James Fallows ’70. More >> August 26, 2008Camp Cooking, and ChildrenReading from his own works, longtime New Yorker writer Ian Frazier ’73 recounts the perils of preparing “breakfast in a paper bag” and elucidates some colorful realities of living with offspring. More >> August 26, 2008A Ringing FarewellAfter 78 years, the Russian bells of Lowell House are headed back to their former home at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow. More >> August 26, 2008Ecophilic InitiativesThe University will cut its net greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 percent during the next eight years, President Drew Faust vowed in a July 8 announcement. This is Harvard’s first-ever commitment to bring emissions below a specific level, but during the past several years, the University and its constituent parts have been going green in other ways. More >> August 26, 2008How They Built Houses in JapanIn 1979, to commemorate 20 years of partnership between the sister cities of Boston and Kyoto, 43 enormous crates arrived at the Boston Children’s Museum. The crates contained, in bits and pieces, a nineteenth-century, kyo-machiya style townhouse of the sort used as workshop and dwelling by Kyoto merchants. Carpenters from Japan accompanied the boxes and spent months in the museum, diligently putting the house back together for permanent display. More >> July 11, 2008Update: Researchers Identify Autism GenesResearchers at the Harvard-affiliated Broad Institute have identified six genes they believe play a crucial role in autism. Their study appears in today’s issue of the journal Science. The Boston Globe’s White Coat Notes blog reported on it:
One of the study authors, Bullard professor of neurology and professor of pediatrics Christopher A. Walsh, offered hope that pinpointing these genes may facilitate the development of therapies to help children who have, or are at risk for, autism. “Sometimes the genes aren’t completely inactive. We know that intensive training or enriching of the environment in animal models has ways of turning genes on that would normally be silent,” he told White Coat Notes. Read the rest of the Globe coverage here. Read Harvard Magazine’s cover story on autism, from the January-February 2008 issue, here. June 24, 2008Songs from “Something Else” by Eisa DavisEisa Davis ’92—actress, playwright, musician, dancer—is also known as the creator of “soulful, jazz-inflected songs.” Her debut album, “Something Else” (available for purchase at CDBaby and on iTunes), features 10 of her own compositions. Two sample tracks can be heard here:  “40 Moons” “Come On” Rather than choosing any one form, Davis says in Harvard Magazine’s profile by Julia Wallace, she finds them mutually reinforcing. Her music “helps my playwriting for its rhythm and inevitability. Writing songs has helped me to become a more confident performer and to understand a character’s lyricism, and playwriting has helped my acting and music….” Each craft is unique, she says, “and yet they all feed each other in sometimes unexpected ways.” Indeed. June 23, 2008From Soap Operas to Opera Solos Ethan Herschenfeld ’90, an operatic bass, began performing for an undergraduate Gilbert and Sullivan production. Vocal training led to a sudden appearance in a Swedish production of The Magic Flute and his solo career was launched, as described in Daniela Amini’s profile in the July-August 2008 issue of Harvard Magazine. Here, he performs “Verst after Verst, one by one” from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, by Dmitri Shostakovitch, 1934, with pianist Yelena Kurdina, recorded at Gurari Studios, New York, in 2006. An intensely dramatic performer, Herschenfeld says, “I’m not interested in using the opera for a political or artistic agenda,” but rather to fulfill the audience’s desire “to hear great singing and get wrapped up in a story.” For more info, see www.ehbass.blogspot.com June 20, 2008Wish You Were HereHarvard Map Collection in Pusey Library has recently become home to more than 10,000 map postcards. Siegfried Feller, donor of the collection, is a librarian, retired from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. These samples, from an America exploring itself along its highways, complement those described in “Vintage Brevities,” July-August 2008, just in time for summer vacationing (if the price of gas does not preclude an outing). More >> |
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