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Presidential Portrait
On the chill, blustery afternoon of May 1, a piece of Harvard’s living history lit up the Faculty Room in University Hall. The occasion was the unveiling of the portrait of Neil L. Rudenstine, who served as the University’s twenty-sixth president from …
Issue: July-August 2006
A Melting World
Photographs by David Arnold and H. Bradford Washburn The breathtaking aerial photographs of mountains and glaciers shot by H. Bradford Washburn Jr. ’33, A.M. ’60, L.H.D. ’75, during a lifetime of exploratory cartography captured a frozen wilderness that …
Issue: May-June 2006
“The Promise of This New Presidency”
Claudine Gay spent part of the last day of summer and the first day of the fall semester introducing herself to the community she has led since July 1—and in doing so, building a bridge to the aspirations she holds for the University during her …
Harvard Capital Campaign Crosses $7-Billion Mark
The University announced today that The Harvard Campaign— launched publicly three Septembers ago with $2.8 billion given or pledged toward a $6.5-billion goal—had secured gifts or commitments totaling “more than $7 billion” as of this past June 30, the …
The Medical Civil Rights Act
In 2015, Robert Dluhy ’62, a physician at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, watched in horror with much of the country as the story of 25-year-old Freddie Gray unfolded on national television. Gray, a black man, had been …
Overhauling the Endowment
When Harvard Management Company (HMC) president and CEO Stephen Blyth reported on endowment investment returns last fall, he bluntly described declining performance; laid out a new mission statement and investment goals; detailed a new asset-allocation …
Issue: January-February 2016
Former Overseer Diana Nelson ’84 Named to the Harvard Corporation
Diana L. Nelson ’84 will become the newest member of the Harvard Corporation, the University announced on Monday. Her term of office begins officially on July 1. Nelson has previously co-chaired the College Fund, served on the Radcliffe Institute’s dean’s …
The Homelessness Public Health Crisis
For Shawn Pleasants, the descent into homelessness wasn’t so much a plummet as an awful, incomprehensible slide. It was hard at first to even grasp the basic reality. “We lived in my Ford Explorer for a little over a year before I was willing to admit …
Issue: May-June 2024
At 75, Murray Dewart Reflects on His Career as a Sculptor
Murray Dewart ’70, a Boston-raised sculptor, was born into a family of three generations of clergymen but always knew he wanted to be an artist. It wasn’t until he found the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts during his junior year at Harvard and threw …
Issue: March-April 2024
Megan Marshall ’77 Wins Pulitzer for Biography
Megan Marshall ’77, RI ’07, has won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for biography for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life , an account of the nineteenth-century Cambridge-born author, journalist, critic, and pioneering advocate of women’s rights who died with …
Life After Brain Injury
Carolyn Gold’s memoir chronicling her long, slow recovery from a brain injury caused by West Nile encephalitis begins with a mosquito bite that she does not remember. It most likely happened sometime in August 2017, while Gold, M.Ed. ’85, was on vacation …
Quality of Care
Several years ago, Lisa Iezzoni, S.M. ’78, M.D. ’84, one of the most prominent researchers in healthcare and disability, decided to ask doctors what they thought about patients with disabilities. Their answers were stunning. In interviews and focus …
Issue: May-June 2025
Realities of Empire
Empires fascinate. Not only scholars, but writers of fiction, geographers, sociologists, videogame and movie producers. We historians ask why and how they are they formed: by conquest, surely, though sometimes by marriage or alliances. How are they …
Issue: May-June 2022
The State of Black America
During a searching discussion Thursday evening at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) on the “State of Black America,” historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad opened with a trenchant warning: “We are facing uncharted waters.” Surveying the rise of Trumpism and the …
Music and Language, Reconciled
Readers of the New York Review of Books who are also lovers of music—and who have reached a certain age—will know that music-lovers in the past have been able to read the writings of some musical titans who also were superb prose stylists. I think in …
Issue: March-April 2022