John Harvard's Journal
Laugh Lines
July-August 2016 [1]
Rashida Jones ’97, College Class Day speaker [5], on selling a script for a $16-million movie, only to watch the deal fall through and then making the movie with her partner, for $840,000—“almost a year of Harvard tuition.”
Sheryl Sandberg
Photograph by Stu Rosner
Chief Marshal Sheryl Sandberg ’91, M.B.A. ’95, COO of Facebook, representing the twenty-fifth reunion class at the Commencement day luncheon spread in Widener Library: “I am so happy to be here because this is one of the very few things I get to do that Mark Zuckerberg does not. I worked really hard to graduate from Harvard—twice. And then I go work for someone who didn’t graduate once.”
Fiftieth reunioner Daniel Brooks ’66, waiting with classmates to process into Tercentenary Theatre for the afternoon oratory, where he was “looking forward to a Spielberg spiel.”
Latin Salutatorian Anne Ames Power ’16 [6] offered a “dictionary” of Harvardian terms (with English translation tucked into the Morning Exercises programs for the unschooled). Teasing out meanings, she explained: “[A]t Harvard a ‘concentration’ can be defined as ‘an individual course of study’ as well as ‘what you lack in Friday morning class’”—and added the senior-year revelation “that ‘thesis’ can be a noun, a verb, and a state of being.”