Features
The Year a Beat Poet Squatted at Harvard
In 1954, Gregory Corso moved into Eliot House. How he stayed there is a literary legend.
Owen Wister
One hundred years ago, the Macmillan Company published The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, a novel about an unnamed Wyoming cattleman. The...
Medicine by Model
It's a troubling area, the economics of saving lives. Take cervical cancer, for example. In the United States we have spent enormous sums for...
Tough Love
Editor's Note: Nicholas Dawidoff '85 has just published The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World, a richly detailed...
The Future of War and the American Military
The people who run the American military have to be futurists, whether they want to be or not. The process of developing and building new...
Murasaki Shikibu
The Japanese woman who wrote the extraordinary Tale of Genji a thousand years ago is known only by a nickname. Her given name went unrecorded...
Managing with Markov
It has attracted less attention, perhaps, than searches for Big Foot or a cure for the common cold, but the quest for the optimal baseball...
Brainy Women
The human brain rests in cupped hands as easily as a cantaloupe. It is softer and spongier to the touch, of course, and its surface is more...
Masters of Metal
"Glory and prosperity" are the first words of a benediction often inscribed on medieval Islamic metalwork, and any civilization that...
Alternative medicine ("integrative medicine") goes mainstream
In the 1950s the American Cancer Society had a Committee on Quackery. Later that turned into a committee on "unproven methods of cancer...
A Woodsplint Basket
Displayed in the "Hall of the North American Indian" at Harvard University's Peabody Museum, the basket looks like many others made in...