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Off the Shelf
Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America, by Hugh Eakin ’96 (Crown, $32.99). This learned, brilliantly written account explains how the European avant-garde came to captivate the American elite—as now embodied in that “hegemonic empire of art and …
Issue: November-December 2022
Cooper Gallery Lights Up Mount Auburn Street
The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art glows at night—a lantern of lit cedar against the dense red brick of Mount Auburn Street. Visitors get their first look into the building through slices of glass, between tall cedar slats. The …
Rebelling and Expelling
By most standards, 2020 wasn’t a great year to graduate: as a pandemic worsened, seniors left professors and friends behind and dealt with a graduation ceremony held online. At least they got degrees. Shortly before the graduation of the class of 1823, 43 …
Issue: September-October 2020
“He Found Himself at a Loss”
For the DeSanctis family, medicine had always been a way of life. Roman DeSanctis, M.D. ’55, was a renowned—and busy—cardiologist, and for his wife, Ruth, and four daughters, that often meant celebrating birthdays early in the morning, so that he could …
Vincent H. Bish Jr.'s Graduate English address
Four Lone Names “ Because it was illegal for them to practice religion, slaves would use a traditional kettle to pray. Prayers for freedom were often whispered into the kettles, which were often kept under floorboards of slave cabins to keep them out of …
HAA Honors Alumni Clubs and SIGs
The honors, awarded at the Harvard Alumni Association’s winter meeting in February, celebrate both alumni and shared interest groups (SIGs) that have organized exceptional programs. Established in 2015 to “create a strong, connected, collaborative …
Issue: March-April 2018
Forum: Is Harvard Complacent?
Consider this irony: Harvard and other elite American research universities, so crucial to innovation in almost every area of our lives, find it almost impossible to innovate within their own operations and embedded assumptions. They regularly transform …
Issue: September-October 2021
Updike's Literary Archive: Sneak Preview
Harvard's Houghton Library has purchased the papers of the late author John Updike '54, Litt.D. ’92 (as previously reported), and the New York Times recently published several pieces germane to Updike and his archive. Although the materials, which now …
The Childcare Crisis
Lauren Birchfield Kennedy, J.D. ’09, and Sarah Siegel Muncey, Ed.M. ’05, met through a mutual friend when they were both pregnant. “Our babies were born within just a couple days of each other,” Kennedy says, “and like so many working moms, we thought, …
Pandemic in the Workplace
As U.S. states and economies worldwide take tentative steps toward reopening, a pertinent study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health suggests that workplace transmission of the coronavirus accounted for 48 percent of the initial outbreaks in …
Erin McDermott Announced as Harvard’s First Woman Athletic Director
Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean Claudine Gay announced this afternoon that Erin McDermott will become the University’s new Nichols Family Athletic Director, the first woman to fill the role in Harvard history. McDermott will begin at Harvard on July 1, …
Sunil Amrith, Kate Orff, and Damon Rich Awarded MacArthur Grants
Sunil Amrith , Mehra Family professor of South Asian studies and professor of history, has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (better known as the “genius grant”), a no-strings-attached award of $625,000 paid out over five years. The …
“Attacking the Concept of Debt”
Only a few years ago, Douglas Jones, who worked night shifts as a security guard at a nursing home in Roxbury, was hesitant to spend even $10 more than his typical budget allowed. Payments on his student loan debt were being withdrawn directly from his …
Slightly Supernatural
It wasn’t until after she moved into the haunted house that Laura van den Berg’s latest novel really started coming together. The Third Hotel follows Clare, a young widow who takes a trip to Havana in the wake of her husband’s sudden death and then begins …
Issue: September-October 2018
Labor Litigator
In a Hartford, Connecticut, courtroom last fall, Shannon Liss-Riordan ’90, J.D. ’96, was trying to prove that Ocean State Job Lot, a New England retail chain, illegally withheld overtime pay from its assistant managers. Eligibility for overtime, she …
Issue: March-April 2017