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Your independent source for Harvard news since 1898

November-December 2018

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Letters

Letters on President Bacow, the solicitor general, Facebook, and more

Matching Harvard’s money to its mission

The College Pump

A well-used hod

Photograph by Lydia S. C. Rosenberg

Messenger from the past

Treasure

A puma subduing a captive 

Image courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, 1916TL41968)

Drinking in style, from antiquity to the 1960s

In this Issue

Karen King

Karen King

Photograph by Stu Rosner

Karen King studies texts from Christianity’s first centuries to reinterpret the history of the early church.

Millicent Todd Bingham looks over her mother’s shoulder in this double portrait from 1931.

Millicent Todd Bingham looks over her mother’s shoulder in this double portrait from 1931.

Photograph courtesy of the Todd-Bingham Picture Collection (MS 496E). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library

Brief life of an unlikely Dickinson scholar

Vamsi Mootha with an image from his lab showing thread-like mitochondria (green) moving within a cell.

Vamsi Mootha with an image from his lab showing thread-like mitochondria (green) moving within a cell.

Portrait and collage by Jim Harrison; image of mitochondria courtesy of Vamsi Mootha and the Mootha Laboratory

Probing the mysteries of mitochondria, Vamsi Mootha discovers new ways to understand metabolic disease.

Maurice Lalau image for “The Juggler of Notre Dame,” by Anatole France (1924)

(Click on arrow at right to see a gallery of images.) Maurice Lalau image for “The Juggler of Notre Dame,” by Anatole France (1924)

Image courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

A Dumbarton Oaks exhibition connects “an enchanted past” to the human condition.

Happy campers: For their team photo, a day or two after The Game, the Crimson wore practice jerseys, giving them rather a raffish look.

Happy campers: For their team photo, a day or two after The Game, the Crimson wore practice jerseys, giving them rather a raffish look.

Photograph courtesy of Harvard Athletic Communications

How the Crimson squad from the immortal ’68 Game revealed a transforming Harvard

Letters

Letters on President Bacow, the solicitor general, Facebook, and more

Matching Harvard’s money to its mission

Right Now

Illustration by Dan Page

Sandeep Datta says the brain composes behavior from pre-existing “syllables.”

Illustration by Chiara Zarmati/Salzman Art

Altering one gene in a gut microbe transforms metabolism.

Illustration by Tim Ellis

Can public goods survive white flight?

Harvard Squared

The Harvard Ceramics Program show and sale draws about 4,000 people.

Photograph courtesy of the Harvard Ceramics Program

Boston’s open studios, holiday craft fairs, and more

Dancers Twyla Tharp and Graciela Figueroa in After ‘Suite’ (1969)

Photograph by Jack Mitchell

A retrospective show at Boston’s ICA 

Snowy grounds at sunset

Photograph courtesy of the Trustees

Winterlights and scavenger hunts at the historic Stevens-Coolidge Place

Unite or Perish, Chicago (1968), by John Simmons 

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Fund for the Acquisition of Photographs.2018.119

Eighteen photographers capture the 1930s through the 1980s.

B & G Oysters

Courtesy of www.bandgoysters.com

A roundup of creative gift ideas for this holiday season

John Harvard's Journal

(Click on arrow at right to see a gallery of images.)  President Bacow delivers his inaugural address.

Photograph by Jim Harrison

The University’s new leader focuses on challenges to higher education in America.

New convening spaces now beckon on both sides of the Charles. Smith Campus Center, shown here, opens the former Holyoke Center to the street, and invites casual dining, study, hanging out, and performances.

Photograph by Jim Harrison

Smith Campus Center, Klarman Hall debut.

Khalil Abdur-Rashid

Photograph by Jim Harrison

The University’s Muslim chaplain

The bottom line on the endowment

Harvard’s $9.62-billion fund drive

Admissions litigation, sexual assault, humanities losses, endowment taxes

Illustration by Mark Steele

Headlines from Harvard’s history

Brian K. Lee

Photograph by Rob Greer

New development director, online degrees, leadership leaders, and more

George Andreou

Photograph by Stephanie Mitchell/HPAC

Harvard University Press director George Andreou on the future of academic publishing

Illustration by Maya Ish-Shalom

The Undergraduate considers study abroad.

On tippytoes: Harvard’s Justice Shelton-Mosley performs a sideline balancing act after one of his game-high 10 catches against Rhode Island. The senior wideout suffered a severe leg injury against Cornell a week later.

Photograph by Tim O’Meara/The Harvard Crimson

The early season holds no easy wins for Harvard football.

Saber fencer Eli Dershwitz enters his final Harvard season hungrier than ever.

Photograph by Stu Rosner

Ranked first in the world, fencer Eli Dersh­witz looks to the 2020 Olympics.

Montage

In the Metropolitan Opera’s scene shop, Sarah Meyers stands calmly next to a monster’s oversized snout.

Photograph by Robert Adam Mayer

Opera director Sarah Meyers doesn’t want you to notice everything.

Two Harvard doctors on William Carlos Williams

Shane McCrae

Photograph by Robert Adam Mayer

The propulsive intensity of Shane McCrae’s poetry

From the Peabody Museum collections, a reduced-scale macaw-feather fan—a burial offering—and its larger model, a real fan
Illustration by Andrew James Hamilton

Questions about how societies conceptualize, perceive, and interpret scale.

Standing tall: Mikimoto Ginza 2, in Tokyo, Japan: one of the new generation of striking highrises

Photograph by Edmund Sumner/View/Alamy Stock Photo

Recent books with Harvard connections

Philip Johnson at his iconic modernist Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, 1949

Photograph by Arnold Newman/Liaison Agency/Getty Images

A “star-chitect” as P.T. Barnum

Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words

Alumni

For Jill Vialet, photographed at Oakland’s Laurel Elementary School, play and work are nearly synonymous.

Photograph by Eric Kayne

Social entrepreneur Jill Vialet ’86 on “positive chaos” and fixing recess

Merriner with members of the high-school cross-country team from Galena’s Sidney C. Huntington School, named for a legendary Alaska Native outdoorsman and education advocate.

Photograph courtesy of Paul Apfelbeck

In rural Alaska, Jim Merriner runs a school district with a major educational footprint across the state.

The College Pump

A well-used hod

Photograph by Lydia S. C. Rosenberg

Messenger from the past

Treasure

A puma subduing a captive 

Image courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, 1916TL41968)

Drinking in style, from antiquity to the 1960s