Search
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
Curiosities: Animating a New Species at the Peabody Essex Museum
PVC tubing and zip ties form the essential “bones” of Dutch artist Theo Jansen’s otherworldy yet mobile strandbeests (“beach animals”), eight of which are on display at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) starting September 19. Included is his latest and …
Issue: September-October 2015
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
Arsenic and Old Lead
The Arnold Arboretum anticipated closing a deal last December to sell the Case Estates, its 62.5-acre property (complete with barn and two other structures) in Weston, Massachusetts, to the town of Weston for $22.5 million. But first the town “decided …
Issue: September-October 2007
Michelle A. Williams Appointed Harvard Public Health Dean
Michelle A. Williams has been appointed dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (SPH), filling the vacancy created when Julio Frenk departed last summer to assume the presidency of the University of Miami. Williams will be familiar to many …
Nicco Mele
Nicco Mele owes a lot to the Internet. The new director of the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy grew up across Asia and Africa—the son of two foreign-service officers—and first connected with American culture by …
Issue: November-December 2017
Harvard College Names New Heads of Houses
Danoff dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana today announced five new sets of faculty deans, the term for heads of the undergraduate Houses that the College adopted in 2016 . Cabot, Eliot, Kirkland, Quincy, and Winthrop will each have new leadership, …
The Outsiders’ Insider
Backstage at the Montalban Theater in Los Angeles, Franklin Leonard ’00 takes his catered sandwich to the green room. It’s his party, in a manner of speaking, and the table’s been set with beer and wine and someone else’s preferred brand of bourbon, and …
Issue: July-August 2016
Sunil Amrith
“Picture the Bay of Bengal as an expanse of tropical water: still and blue in the calm of the January winter, or raging and turbid with silt at the peak of the summer rains,” writes historian Sunil Amrith in Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of …
Issue: September-October 2017
As Supreme Court Takes Up Gun Ban, Greenhouse Is Watching
Did the framers of the Bill of Rights intend the "right to bear arms" to apply only for the purpose of forming a militia, or more widely, for purposes such as self-defense? Is the possibility that American citizens will need to rise up against a …
Harvard Scientists #Strike4BlackLives
On Wednesday, thousands of scientists around the globe—including at Harvard—paused research, meetings, and classes to take part in a daylong work-stoppage supporting the continued demonstrations that have emerged worldwide after George Floyd’s killing in …
Five Questions with Peter R. Girguis
Peter R. Girguis is a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard and co-director of the Harvard Microbial Sciences Initiative. His research focuses on how marine organisms survive and thrive in the ocean, particularly in deep-sea and …
Harvard, Heeled
Harvard Hardwood, the Harvard Magazine basketball report One day in the early 1980s , Harvard men’s basketball coach Frank McLaughlin got off the phone with legendary University of North Carolina coach Dean Smith, and could not have been more excited. …
Are Super Responders Special?
As a medical student in the 1980s, Isaac “Zak” Kohane heard stories—from patients, mentors, and colleagues—of nearly miraculous recoveries from cancer. A patient given weeks to live instead survives for years. An experimental drug works exceptionally …
Issue: September-October 2019
News Briefs
University Professor Arrested Friedman University Professor Charles M. Lieber—a much-honored leader in nanoscale science and bio-compatible electronics, and chair of the department of chemistry and chemical biology—was arrested on January 28, charged with …
Issue: March-April 2020