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Things Fell Apart
Nicholas Lemann ’76— past dean of Columbia Journalism School, New Yorker staff writer —has an uncanny ability to reveal society’s undercurrents through smaller stories (standardized testing, selective admissions, etc., in The Big Test: The Secret History …
Issue: September-October 2019
From the Field to the Front Office
A few weeks after her college graduation, Jessica Gelman ’97, M.B.A. ’02, landed in Israel, where she would spend a year playing Euro-League basketball. After her first practice, a reporter asked her “You went to Harvard, what are you doing here?” That …
A Mind of One’s Own
In a small New England town, sitting at a plain wooden table, 17 3/8ths inches square, Emily Dickinson created nearly 1,800 poems that continue to entrance and mystify readers across the globe. That table will again be on display at Harvard’s Houghton …
Issue: March-April 2020
Allston Planning Explained
A room in the Holyoke Center Arcade has been fitted out to help Harvard planners communicate the University’s aspirations for an Allston campus. The move follows the release of a 40-page interim planning report last June that was intended to generate …
Issue: January-February 2006
The Forty-Year Fight
“I thought every college had an ethnic-studies program,” says Itzel Vasquez-Rodriguez ’17. She dreamed of pursuing Chicano studies in college, and says she was “shocked to learn that Harvard not only doesn’t have Chicano studies, they don’t even have an …
Fall River: Phoenix Rising?
The “P” word has long haunted Fall River. “People come to the city, see the Braga Bridge and waterfront, the historic buildings, and say, ‘Hey, this place looks like a mini-San Francisco—this place has so much potential! ’” says Patrick Norton, executive …
Issue: May-June 2023
Harvard College Opera Celebrates 25th Anniversary
This weekend, the curtains will open in Agassiz Theatre to reveal a series of tall gray arches, set against a painted backdrop of a sky that looks borrowed from Magritte. Far above the heads of the singers in the Harvard College Opera’s Le Nozze di Figaro …
Thrills, Baseball & Other
With this talk of thrills we are not of course referring to the 2015 Red Sox. We are harking back to the happier days of the 1927 Crimson baseball team— “one of the best of all time,” according to The Second H Book of Harvard Athletics . Isadore Zarakov …
Issue: September-October 2015
Restoring Justice
“I spent 28 years in prison,” Armand Coleman was saying to the Harvard Law School students and professors gathered over Zoom on an early spring afternoon. For 22 of those years, he lived in a maximum-security prison; for 12, he was in solitary …
Issue: July-August 2021
Bats, In Fact
Poor bats . For so long, they’ve been maligned and misunderstood. They’ve starred in witchy medieval stories and gothic tales, from Dracula to Batman. They’ve symbolized the depths of evil and the underworld, depicted as blood-sucking, hair-tangling …
Issue: January-February 2024
Harvard Sustainability Report Updated
The University has released an updated sustainability report , detailing its progress from fiscal year 2006 through fiscal year 2014 in five core areas—energy and emissions, campus operations, nature and ecosystems, health and well-being, and culture and …
Pre-Pixel Portraits
Long before selfies, Harvard graduates had a powerful instinct to preserve their class identities in portraiture: 85 of the 88 members of the College class of 1852 traveled to Boston to sit for daguerreotypes, unique images captured on silvered copper …
Issue: May-June 2015
Toward Theater
If the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) approves an undergraduate concentration in “theater, dance, and media,” as expected later this semester, it will begin to fulfill a vision first outlined more than six years ago—or, depending on the historical …
Cryptic Puzzle: “Dropouts”
Download the puzzle Download the hints Download the solution You can find all puzzles published in Harvard Magazine between 1986 and 1998 at John de Cuevas’s website, www.puzzlecrypt.com, under Harvard Puzzles . You will also find additional puzzles …
Honoris Causa
Five men and three women received honorary degrees at Commencement. University provost Alan M. Garber introduced the honorands in the following order, and President Drew Faust read the citations, concluding with the recipient’s name and degree. For fuller …
Issue: July-August 2014