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“To Be True to Our Complicated History”
Midway through the list of names was when the crowd fell fully silent. Some 300 people, suddenly pinned in place, stood motionless in a half-circle around the outdoor podium where Janet Halley, Royall professor of law, was reading out the names of slaves …
Brevia
Park Plans Proceed Although the University’s plans for completing its first science building in Allston remain uncertain, it is proceeding with community amenities promised to the neighborhood as part of the long-term ambition to develop academic …
Issue: September-October 2009
Off the Shelf
Harvardiana. The Selected Letters of John Kenneth Galbraith, edited by Richard P.F. Holt (Cambridge, $34.99). Economists today may look down on Galbraith’s economics—but can any of them write as he did? Includes the classic exchange with Dean Henry …
Issue: September-October 2017
Rethinking the Medical Curriculum
Harvard Medical School (HMS) is reforming its four-year curriculum structurally, pedagogically, and philosophically. The new curriculum, which builds on the New Pathway curricular reform of 1987 and an iterative update in 2006 called the New Integrated …
Issue: September-October 2015
Closed Doors
Universities customarily are open places. There is security where required (dorms, labs, libraries and museums), but a visitor can get to most appointments without producing identification or passing through checkpoints. This porosity corresponds to the …
Issue: March-April 2020
Carrie Lambert-Beatty: What Happens When an Artwork Deceives Its Audience?
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A WORK OF ART DECEIVES ITS AUDIENCE? The term “parafiction” refers to an artistic performance or presentation that depicts fiction as fact. This idea has particular relevance for our current post-truth moment, in which Americans find …
“Crossing Boundaries”
Historian Drew Gilpin Faust, founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (RIAS), will become the twenty-eighth president of Harvard University on July 1. She was elected by the Corporation, Harvard’s senior governing board, with the …
Parklands and Wastewater
Wandering the hilly paths of Boston Harbor ’s Deer Island, breathing in the ocean breeze and marveling at panoramic views, visitors would never know what exactly goes on beyond the security gates, or inside the giant steel eggs that dominate the southern …
Issue: May-June 2022
All in a Day: Hull’s Lifesaving Legacy
The best route to Hull is by boat. As the MBTA’s commuter ferry snakes among Boston Harbor’s islands, passengers can eye the treacherous shipping route that gave rise to the town’s Point Allerton Lifesaving Station in 1889. Back then, the “small, …
Issue: September-October 2015
Our Masked Selves
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, amid spreading fears and sheltered isolation, Los Angeles artist Richard Nielsen painted a colorful portrait of himself in a mask. Soon, he was painting friends and family members in their …
Issue: March-April 2021
Romare Bearden
On november 28, 1977, Calvin Tomkins’s biographical word-sketch of artist Romare Bearden appeared in The New Yorker . Prompted perhaps by his gallery, Bearden then decided to cast his own life as a sequence of collages. A 1979 exhibit displayed 28 works, …
Issue: January-February 2020
Sports Medicine Man
At around 14, Brant Berkstresser realized he wasn’t much of an athlete. “I grew up in a large high school,” he says, “and I was very small.” His goal was to graduate weighing more than 100 pounds. “I started my senior year at 98,” he says. “I graduated …
Issue: January-February 2020
Surpluses and Scholarship
A decade after the financial crisis overturned Harvard’s academic ambitions, the University has righted its financial ship, and then some: a $298 million surplus in the fiscal year ended last June 30, anchored by some $1.9 billion distributed from the …
Issue: January-February 2020
A Potter’s Practice
In a quiet corner of Harvard’s ceramics lab in Allston, buzzing with activity on a Friday afternoon, artist Ashton Keen is in her studio, examining a clay teacup she’s recently made. A potter’s wheel sits at her elbow, and several large buckets of clay, …
Off the Shelf
Prayer: A History, by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, Ph.D. ’84 (Houghton Mifflin, $29.95). He is a senior editor at Parabola, she is a professor of religion at Smith, and this is an epic—well written, packed with interesting information, often …
Issue: March-April 2006