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March-April 2008

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Letters

SPECTRUM OF AUTISM OPINIONS As the parent of a child with autism and a writer on the subject for About.com, I enjoyed reading “A Spectrum...

The College Pump

"Your wooden arm you hold outstretched to shake with passers-by." Turkeys are menacing innocent students at the Business...

Treasure

Harvard people with medals they aren’t sure what to do with have often given them to the University. Many of these impressions of history...

In this Issue

Photograph by Rungroj Yongrit/epa/Corbis

The United States is in urgent need of a comprehensive, rational, and—above all—honest policy to guide its energy future, a policy...

Illustration by James Steinberg

On January 20, you will inherit a legacy of trouble: Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Palestine, North Korea for starters. Failure to manage any one of...

Sousan Abadian

Photograph by Craig Lambert

The hamlet of Alkali Lake, about 100 miles north of Vancouver, is home to one of a handful of surviving Shuswap bands of Native Americans in...

Ko K'un-hua

Photomontage by Naomi Shea; courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library

Yale was the first American college to offer instruction in Chinese, in 1877; apparently, no one signed up. The next year, a group of Boston and...

Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan

Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan
Photograph by Jim Harrison

Photograph by Jim Harrison Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan “Just because something is familiar doesn’t mean you understand it. That...

Letters

SPECTRUM OF AUTISM OPINIONS As the parent of a child with autism and a writer on the subject for About.com, I enjoyed reading “A Spectrum...

Right Now

Illustration by Lee Calderon

Forty years ago they were “Born Free,” 20 years ago they were “Born in the U.S.A.,” but today kids are born digital, and...

Mutation is the engine of evolution: organisms would not be able to evolve new characteristics if their DNA did not randomly acquire small...

If males are from Mars and females from Venus, as self-help author John Gray memorably suggested, sex hormones usually get the blame for placing...

When an infection assails the body, the response is predictable. Fever, loss of appetite, fatigue, that achy feeling—we never get just one...

New England Regional

Listings by category: Seasonal Theater Dance Nature and Science Libraries Exhibitions Dance Film Music SEASONAL April 11 at 8 p.m. To...

The charmingly small, civilly quiet T.W. Food, in the Huron Village area of Cambridge, seems to have arrived in the right place at the right...

As winter is nudged out by the first warm days of spring and the refreshing sight of a few green shoots, we all welcome the chance to explore...

John Harvard's Journal

Photograph by Jim Harrison (View larger) Subsurface construction proceeds on Harvard Law School's northwest building, which extends along...

Harvard’s new undergraduate financial-aid policies, affecting even students from high-income families, were announced on December...

In the wake of Harvard’s December announcement, a host of other institutions—Haverford, Penn, Pomona, and Swarthmore among...

On camping trips in northern Ontario as a Boy Scout, David Charbonneau, Ph.D. ’01, Cabot associate professor of astronomy, remembers...

Harvard’s new formula for undergraduate financial aid, unveiled on December 10, overshadowed its consequential changes in support for...

 1923 The committee examining Harvard’s admissions process discourages giving preferential treatment to alumni children because...

For decades, insurers and risk-management departments have told doctors that if they make a mistake, the last thing they should do is admit it...

The culture of medicine has long tried to keep doctors from making mistakes by indoctrinating them to believe that they shouldn’t make...

Harvard Business School (HBS) is throwing a year-long centennial celebration. The anniversary itself falls on April 8, the date in 1908 when the...

Allan M. Brandt became dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), on January 1. A...

During her tenure as dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), from mid 2005 through last December, Theda Skocpol says, “I...

Endowment Manager EarningsHarvard Management Company’s (HMC) annual disclosure of the salary, bonus, and benefit payments to its president...

Many Harvard undergraduates give personal happiness and reflective decision-making short shrift in the race for academic accolades and...

During its first international tour, in 1921, the Harvard Glee Club inspired French composers Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud to write new...

Hockey parents, they say, don’t like their kids to become goalies because goaltenders wear so much costly protective equipment. But those...

The women’s hockey team ended January with a perfect 14-0 record in the ECAC, and a 17-1-0 record overall, earning them the top ranking in...

Montage

At the Leverett House Grill in the late 1980s, Joanne Chang ’91 first turned pro as a baker, selling four freshly baked chocolate chip...

How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (Free Press, $35), by James L. Kugel, formerly Starr professor of Hebrew literature...

It was a rare rainy night in Los Angeles. Filling up his tank at a local gas station, a man noticed the silhouette of another man, just beyond...

For a long time, Patricia Marx ’75 assumed she “would wake up in the suburbs with three kids and a mother hairdo.” It...

We are all “medical citizens,” embedded as potential or actual patients, with physicians, in a system of social, moral, and...

Nearly 50 years after declaring their independence, Americans were electrified by the triumphant return of the Marquis de Lafayette, eager to...

Set designer Derek McLane (Harvard ’80) has designed stages for "Grease," "Guys and Dolls," "The Pajama Game," and Pulitzer Prize-winning "I Am My Own Wife," and many other plays.

Suzanne Ekman hopes someone can identify a source for the following line, possibly from a Mark Van Doren poem: “…but where were...

Alumni

At 6 a.m. in western Baghdad, the thermometer has already punched through 100 degrees across the barren lands around Camp Victory. As Colonel...

This spring, alumni will choose five new Harvard Overseers and six new elected directors for the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) board. Ballots...

On April 5, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni and their guests are invited to a day-long celebration featuring afternoon symposiums on...

The HAA clubs committee Awards honor individuals who provide exemplary service to a Harvard club or shared interest group (SIG), as well as...

The Harvard Club of Boston, founded “to give effective expression to the Harvard spirit,” kicked off its centennial celebration with...

On April 16, all College alumni and their spouses/partners and high-school-age offspring can visit the College, attend classes, and meet faculty...

The Harvard Club of Chicago, the oldest continually operating Harvard club in existence, celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2007. The year-long...

The College Pump

"Your wooden arm you hold outstretched to shake with passers-by." Turkeys are menacing innocent students at the Business...

Treasure

Harvard people with medals they aren’t sure what to do with have often given them to the University. Many of these impressions of history...