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November-December 2006

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Letters

Summing Up Summers The article on, and interview with, Lawrence Summers (Summers in Summary, September-October, page 56) should be required...

The College Pump

"Your wooden arm you hold outstretched to shake with passers-by." From the moment they first spoke in Cambridge, in February...

Treasure

George Pierce Baker had been teaching playwriting in English 47 when he had an epiphany: No critical comment from a professor could possibly be...

In this Issue

Corn—the raw material—alongside an Illinois ethanol facility

Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images

Americans annual consumption of gasoline (for both private and commercial transportation) amounts to more than 140 billion gallonsclose to 500...

The Gout, 1799, by Gillray. A full-time caricaturist, Gillray (1757-1815) created more than 1,500 works, many political. His favorite victims were George III and Napoleon. It is usual to think of Gillray, wrote British historian Dorothy George, as the most savagely uninhibited of English caricaturists. He slipped into madness at the end of his life and was cared for by his publisher, Miss Hanna Humphrey.

Courtesy of of the Harvard Medical Library/Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine

The social status of physicians rose in the eighteenth century as their understanding of disease grew apace. But effective new treatments or...

Grey relished photographic records of his exploits and travels: at center, on the Rogue River, Oregon, in 1925, and, counterclockwise, in his University of Pennsylvania baseball uniform around 1895; in Monument Valley, Utah, around 1920; and in Nova Scotia in 1924 with his 758-pound tuna, his first world record.

Photomontage by Naomi Shea. Zane Grey on horseback courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society. All other photographs of Grey courtesy of his son, Loren Grey.

Brief life of an American original: 1872-1939

Take your geographic information system (GIS) for a spin around the block. Its easy. Sit at your computer, which you have loaded with GIS...

Photograph by Alain Le Garsmeur/Getty Images

One of the most revealing questions you can ask about any poet has to do with his sense of responsibility. To whom or what does he hold himself...

Letters

Summing Up Summers The article on, and interview with, Lawrence Summers (Summers in Summary, September-October, page 56) should be required...

Right Now

Illustration by Juliette Borda

Beauty is Natures coin, John Milton wrote in 1634. It is currency in todays labor market as well. Since 1994, numerous studies have found that...

Each night that it has run since its April launch, the 72-inch optical telescope at the Oak Ridge Observatory in Harvard, Massachusetts, has...

Illustration by Jim Frazier

Education researchers and policymakers, like the rest of us, have long known that a good teacher can make all the difference to a childs...

These days, prescription drug ads bombard the consumer at every turn. Even so, the $4 billion spent annually on direct-to-consumer...

New England Regional

Flora's dining room dcor includes some unusual touches, like an aquarium.

Photograph by Stu Rosner

Textile mills reinvent themselves as airy, exposed-brick shopping malls. Auto showrooms metamorphose into art galleries and old schoolhouses...

Enjoy a range of offerings in and around Harvard Square this winter, from German folk dancing, Christmas carols, and a Da de los Muertos...

From European spices and fine French fare to free-range beef and elderberry wine, Harvard alumni throughout New England are asserting their...

John Harvard's Journal

Photograph by Jim Harrison

Yesterdays News Harvard Portrait Interim Agendas An Allston Metamorphosis? Adios, Early Admissions Money-Management Makeover Controversial...

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) has begun a effort to encourage innovative, effective teaching. A committee of nine senior professors...

Harvard Business School (HBS) classes are taught interactively by the case methodand by the professors themselves, who also do the grading...

Illustration by Mark Steele

1911 Witter Bynner 02 writes the Bulletin to protest Harvards refusal to allow Emmeline Pankhurst to address the Harvard Mens League for Woman...

Susanne Ebbinghaus

The recently appointed Hanfmann curator of ancient art at the Harvard University Art Museums and a lecturer on the classics, Susanne Ebbinghaus...

Although Derek Bok and Jeremy R. Knowles are serving as president and dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), respectively, on an...

Harvard's first science complex in Allston will be big by any measure. One thousand people will work in a facility designed as four buildings...

Harvard College has ended its early admissions deadline. Beginning in the fall of 2007, students applying for admission to the class of 2012...

The value of Harvards endowment increased by $3.3 billion during the fiscal year ended June 30, rising to $29.2 billion. The 12.7 percent...

Even before he arrived in the United States for a 12-day speaking tour, Mohammad Khatami, the former president of Iran, stirred controversy...

When a first draft of the human genome was sequenced in 2001, biology suddenly became much bigger. The genomethree billion DNA letters long...

Nobel NotablesTwo alumni have won Nobel Prizes in science. Roger D. Kornberg ’67, JF ’76, Winzer professor in medicine at Stanford University...

Women are underrepresented in academic science and engineering, according to a report issued in September by the National Academies, not because...

Before telegrams became scarce, the Japanese artist On Kawara would send them with the message I AM STILL ALIVE. Normally he would sign them...

Her mother says that Lindsey Scherf 08 was running as soon as she could walk; she might almost have sprinted out of the womb. Given her current...

Tracks are fairly level, but cross-country running demands mastery of hills, which offer a natural form of interval trainingalternating intense...

Jason Saretsky, Harvards new head coach of cross country and track and field (he succeeds Frank Haggerty 68, who retired in June), competed as a...

Beset by an ugly string of off-season incidents, the football team sought to make amends on the playing field. After pounding Holy Cross, 31-14...

Mens Soccer The Crimson (6-4, 1-1 Ivy) came back twice to beat Yale, 3-2, in a crucial rebound from losses to Penn (3-1) and Rhode Island (4-1)...

Montage

In Weld Boathouse, author Dan Boyne and singer Livingston Taylor strum their guitars.

Photograph by Jim Harrison

The singer-songwriter Livingston Taylor was artist-in-residence in Lowell House from 2000 through September, participating in House life and...

From an entry in The Republican Playbook (Hyperion, $16.95), containing all the schemes, scams, and dirty tricks used to achieve victory since...

At nightfall, the hyenas began to cry and laugh after we had eaten and were enjoying our recent successes in the art of nonfiction filmmaking...

Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence, by A.J. Langguth 55 (Simon & Schuster, $30). This gripping history of...

Martha Neumann hopes to learn if Freud indeed made a comment often attributed to him: Immortality is being loved by many anonymous people. Ann...

A review of Daniel Golden’s The Price of Admission: How Americas Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates

In high school, Philip Aaberg 71 took train voyages lasting 12 hours each way between his hometown of Chester, Montana, and Spokane to study...

Tucked into a single room behind a window in Harvard Square, the Grolier Poetry Book Shop is to the world of bookselling what La Sainte...

Since its founding, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has commissioned artists to depict explorations of the upper...

Alumni

Montana Miller, in her newest ethnographic milieu

Photograph by Brad Phalin/Bowling Green State University Office of Marketing and Communications

In a darkened alley next to the Cleveland Public Theatre, the crowd stares up at a sprite in white suspended from two rings high above the...

The Alumni College programs, run by the Harvard Alumni Association, range from day-long symposia to two-hour workshops and cover an array of...

The Harvard Alumni Association Awards were established in 1990 to recognize outstanding service to Harvard University through alumni...

Several college programs match students with paid and unpaid jobs and internships. To find out more about how alumni can provide these learning...

The College Pump

"Your wooden arm you hold outstretched to shake with passers-by." From the moment they first spoke in Cambridge, in February...

Treasure

George Pierce Baker had been teaching playwriting in English 47 when he had an epiphany: No critical comment from a professor could possibly be...