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Off the Shelf
Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times , by Joel Richard Paul, J.D. ’81 (Riverhead, $30), offers an accessible portrait of a giant from the third branch of government. The author, of the University of California Hastings Law School, …
Issue: March-April 2018
A True Believer
But first, a word about the Florida scrub jay. “Before the invention of the air conditioner, Florida was a spectacular wilderness,” notes John Fitzpatrick ’74, director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology (CLO). “By the mid twentieth century, the …
Issue: March-April 2007
Business for the Other Billions
Since late last autumn , Mira Mehta and Shane Kiernan have lived in converted chicken coops on a farm in Nigeria’s Nasarawa State—a two-hour drive, when roads are passable, northeast of Abuja, the capital of Africa’s most populous country. On December 23, …
Issue: September-October 2015
“This global, diverse, vibrant community”
As a classics concentrator and classical pianist, Tracy “Ty” Moore II ’06 still found time as an undergraduate to perfect the “Flying Death Necklace.” The stunt, performed in the Harvard South Asian Association’s Ghungroo show , required him to stand on …
Issue: September-October 2023
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
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 …
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
NFL Referee Ron Torbert Makes the Tough Calls
“It’s hard for me to watch a football game as a fan,” says Ron Torbert, J.D. ’88, a veteran National Football League (NFL) referee who was crew chief at the 2022 Super Bowl. “TV doesn’t show the game the way I like to watch it. TV follows the ball. As an …
Issue: November-December 2022
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
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
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
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 …