The Boston Globe profiles astronaut Stephanie Wilson ’88, a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers. A veteran of three space shuttle flights—the most recent the first to feature four women astronauts—she hopes to qualify for a much longer stay in space, perhaps a six-month tour on the international space station.
The Wall Street Journal has identified Gottlieb professor of law Elizabeth Warren, the leader of Congress’s oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, as a leading candidate to direct the new consumer financial protection agency. Warren, who has written extensively—including in Harvard Magazine—on bankruptcy and financial challenges to the middle class, was an early advocate of creating such an agency.
The New York Times profiled Cabot professor of public policy Kenneth Rogoff and his coauthor, Carmen Reinhart, whose book on financial crises, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, has become a bestseller in economics. (Read the Harvard Magazine review here. Rogoff also figures prominently in the current cover story, “After Our Bubble,” on the U.S. economy today.) Their empirical and historical research, the Times reported, differs from much of the theoretical work that has dominated the profession. Their timing was incredibly prescient.
Terrorism expert Jessica Stern, Ph.D. '92, formerly of Harvard Kennedy School and now lecturer on law, has written a widely discussed personal book, Denial: A Memoir of Terror, recounting how she and her sister , then young teenagers, were raped at gunpoint in their home, in Concord, Massachusetts—a crime that was investigated cavalierly at best. The New York Times and Chronicle of Higher Education (available to subscribers) have run long interviews about Stern’s painful self-discovery of the crime and its aftermath. The Times review of the book is here. Stern directs the program on terrorism and the law at the Law School. She was a panelist in Harvard Magazine’s January-February 2002 roundtable on terrorism, just after the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.
