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Yesterday’s News
1930 The Harvard Engineering Society enjoys an illustrated address on the building and running of the first vehicular tunnel under the Hudson River from Manhattan to New Jersey: the two-year-old Holland Tunnel, named for its first chief engineer, Clifford …
Issue: March-April 2020
Meteorologist Matthew Cappucci’s Weather Obsession
Matthew Cappucci ’19 has never exactly fit in, and at a bingo hall 40 minutes east of Washington, D.C., it is no different. He is so much younger than his adversaries that a nearby grandmother feels compelled before each game to tell him which bingo sheet …
Issue: March-April 2022
Completing the Century
From photographer Berenice Abbott to labor activist Elaine Black Yoneda, from Wyoming governor Nellie Tayloe Ross (born in 1876) to Tejana singer Selena Perez Quintanilla (born in 1971), Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary Completing the …
Issue: January-February 2005
Controlling AI Influence over Consumers
Consumer-facing artificial intelligence—algorithms that adjust product pricing based on what they know about a buyer—could, in some circumstances, inappropriately take advantage of the public, argue a pair of Harvard Law School scholars who are assessing …
Issue: March-April 2024
A Roadmap for Reforming Civic Education
Several months before the invasion of the United States Capitol threw the nation’s seat of legislative power into peril, the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s survey on civic knowledge found that barely half of American adults can name all three branches …
Omnibus Omicron Intelligence
Can Omicron lead to long-COVID? How durable is current vaccine protection against severe disease? What are the new, state-of-the-art treatments for people who become infected? Between four and five hundred members of the Harvard Medical School (HMS) …
Samantha Power and Libya Policy
The New York Times reports that Samantha Power, J.D. '99—former executive director of the Harvard Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy , and now at the National Security Council—has an important influence on President Barack Obama's policy …
Doug Elmendorf and Karen Dynan: How Much Can the Federal Budget and the Deficit Continue to Grow?
Even before the coronavirus shifted the U.S. economy into low gear , demanding a massive stimulus in response, federal debt as a percentage of GDP was as high as it had been since the years following World War II. Simultaneously, given the nation’s …
Vulnerable Sculpture
Sculpture breaks free of the frames that confine paintings and drawings. Released into the wider world, sculptures may even inhabit the fourth dimension via movement in time, as mobiles do. Sarah Sze’s vulnerable works take the mirroring of life even …
Issue: September-October 2006
Harvard Launches Science and Engineering Startup Program
Harvard’s already impressive ability to transform breakthroughs made in University labs into commercial products that could benefit society, especially in the biomedical realm, took another step forward today with the announcement of a new initiative that …
Financing Climate Adaptation—and Deciding What to Let Go
What will happen when sea-level rise, wildfires, droughts, and floods begin to erode the tax base that cities and towns will use to pay for seawalls, firebreaks, and other expensive projects that could help them prepare for climate change? Financial …
Karts Get Some Respect
Stephan Wilkinson ’58, automotive editor at Popular Science , is said to be a longtime expert on the way men entertain themselves when no one is telling them what to do. In Man and Machine ( Lyons Press, $16.95 , paper) he goes on entertainingly and …
Issue: March-April 2006
Curl Up with the Cloud-gatherer
"Your wooden arm you hold outstretched to shake with passers-by." This spring Harvard University Press publishes the five-hundredth volume in its Loeb Classical Library and, to celebrate that landmark, also brings forth a sampler of the library’s greatest …
Issue: March-April 2006
Admissions Lawsuit, Round Two
Today, the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston heard oral arguments in the lawsuit arguing that Harvard’s use of race in admissions discriminates against Asian Americans. The much-watched case , which was first filed in 2014 by Students for Fair …
Freud's Guesswork on Dreams
One of Sigmund Freud’s great complaints about his mistreatment in life was that although he won a literary award for his famous book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), it never received a scientific award. A century later, his peers’ judgment has been …
Issue: July-August 2005