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Massachusetts Hall , for many people, is Harvard. It guides visitors through Johnston Gate into what is now Harvard Yard. Its compact design—pleasingly proportioned Early Georgian red brick with white trim, devoid of frills—defines the architectural idiom …
Issue: July-August 2020
A Harvard Startup on Shark Tank
Family histories are often passed down by word of mouth—imperfect, fleeting, and fragmented. A memory shared at the dinner table, a story retold at a holiday gathering, a name recalled in passing. But what if these moments could be captured, preserved, …
AI and Adversarial Attacks
The privacy and security issues surrounding big data, the lifeblood of artificial intelligence, are well known: large streams and pools of data make fat targets for hackers. AI systems have an additional vulnerability: inputs can be manipulated in small …
Issue: January-February 2019
Lepore and Longfellow
In "How Longfellow Woke the Dead," Kemper professor of American History Jill Lepore (who also chairs the history and literature program) offers a serious reading of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride," rescuing it from the status of …
Harvard Reveals Healthcare Costs
In the wake of faculty members’ sharp objections to Harvard’s imposition of coinsurance and deductibles on nonunion employees’ health insurance , announced last September, President Drew Faust promised to provide data on the University’s healthcare …
Home Sweeter Home
Don’t curb your enthusiasm: Spring is the ideal time to maximize your home’s value, whether by sprucing up your surroundings with a small renovation or leveraging equity for bigger changes. Real-estate, organization, and mortgage experts in and around …
Issue: March-April 2020
Harvard 34, Holy Cross 6
A scintillating performance by senior quarterback Andrew Hatch helped Harvard to a 34-6 win over Holy Cross in a season-opening night game at the Stadium on Saturday. Hatch, who transferred from Louisiana State University in 2009, got the starting …
Orchestrating Attention: “The Most Substantive Work You Can Do”
While quarantining , California-based artist and writer Jenny Odell, who sees walking as fundamental to thinking, found her usual refuge, Oakland’s Morcom Amphitheatre of Roses, closed. Instead, as she told viewers tuning into the Graduate School of …
Conquest of the Air
Orville Wright's historic first flight lasted just 12 seconds. The Wright Flyer traveled 120 feet, a skip across the sand at Kitty Hawk's Kill Devil Hills. The Wright brothers got their biplane in the air three more times on December 17, 1903, eventually …
Issue: May-June 2003
Honoring Artemis
In an “Imitator’s Note” prefacing her new collection, After Callimachus: Poems, professor of English Stephanie Burt writes, “These pages reflect, interpret, adapt, respond to, and sometimes simply translate the poems, and parts of poems, that the ancient …
Shruthi Kumar ’24, Senior English Address: “The Power of Not Knowing”
As prepared for delivery. For Kumar’s additional remarks, please read the accompanying article . The Power of Not Knowing Today, we are celebrated for what we know. In fact, for most of our lives, we’ve learned to feel a sense of accomplishment from the …
On My Honor
Harvard undergraduates now have an honor code—spelling out expectations of integrity in their academic work, as legislated by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) last spring. This fall, they will have to “affirm their awareness ” (emphasis added) of …
Issue: May-June 2015
Attention to Detail
On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, interspersed amid Michelangelo’s famous frescoes—God’s fingertip reaching out toward Adam’s, the sun and planets coming into creation, Adam and Eve banished from Eden—is a series of 10 bronze-painted medallions …
Issue: March-April 2021
Ice Cream and Vinegar
Seventeen authors, several of them Harvardians, reread a book or a poem (or the Sgt. Pepper lyrics) that impressed them in their youths and write about how it—of course, they—have changed. Rereadings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $20) is edited by …
Issue: September-October 2005
Kit Reed
When Christopher (“Kit”) Reed retired as executive editor in 2007, concluding 39 years of service to this magazine’s readers, we observed, “Had he not written with such humor and grace, and with such wry appreciation for the University’s traditions and …
Issue: September-October 2016