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Designing Good Lives
MASS Design’s domestic initiatives address the basic elements of a good life: housing, health, food, and sustainability. Most are led from MASS Design’s Boston office, the firm’s operational hub. Though he served as lead architect on The Embrace memorial, …
Issue: May-June 2023
Seeking Climate Solutions
The University has entered a new phase of engagement with the global climate-change problem, as the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability funded its first substantial grants to five interdisciplinary, cross-school research clusters. The …
Issue: May-June 2023
Harvard Global Institute Grant Supports Climate-Change Research in China
The newly formed Harvard Global Institute (HGI) has announced that its first grant will go to China 2030/2050 (based at the Harvard Center Shanghai; see below)—$3.75 million for an interdisciplinary research project focused on climate change, …
The Immunity Engineer
One story David Mooney tells starts with a slug. “This slug does a really good job of creating a mucus that allows it to stick really tightly, so predators can’t just peel it off and eat it,” he says. The mucus, a marvelous material, turns out to consist …
Issue: January-February 2025
A Lover of All Things English
Even as a young literature student at Harvard, Erin Moore ’98 already yearned to be on the other side of the Atlantic, where the authors she studied lived, breathed, and wrote. In junior year, long before the College institutionalized study-abroad …
Issue: September-October 2015
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 Soft Bot That Jumps
For most people , the word “robot” conjures up the image of a lumbering metallic machine. Now, researchers report that they can fabricate robots with the exact opposite features—soft, pliant, and mobile—using 3-D printing. Today in Science, researchers at …
Transforming Portraiture and the World
Intimidating, stoic, yet somehow accessible, Nobel laureate and novelist Toni Morrison, Litt.D. ’89, emerges from the white background of a painting by contemporary portraitist Robert McCurdy. According to a new exhibition catalogue published by the …
On Being “Printerly”
In her introduction to Contact: Art and the Pull of Print , Jennifer L. Roberts wants you to know what the book is not about as much as what it is . One term, she explains, won’t be mentioned past this very deliberate point of omission: “reproduction” and …
Issue: July-August 2024
Beyond the Transcript
Last year, Harvard's senior admissions officers urged applicants to the College-- and their parents--to relax a little, lest the rising generation of undergraduates pursue achievement so relentlessly that they end up burning out prematurely ("Harvard to …
Issue: November-December 2001
Olives Revisited
Since its opening in 1989, Olives' high-end Mediterranean cuisine has made a big splash in Boston. The restaurant has now spun off a chain of upscale outposts in Las Vegas, Washington, D.C., and Aspen. Recently we visited the flagship establishment to …
Admissions Equity
Several years ago, a journalist at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow whispered a pitch for what he thought an explosive story: that Harvard gave admissions preference to “legacies”—children of alumni. I knew that, I replied. I had in mind M. Elaine Mar’s vivid …
Issue: November-December 2006
The Buddies in the Boat
For almost 50 years , this has been Garrett Olmsted’s recurring dream: “I’m back at Harvard,” said the former Crimson lightweight oarsman, “and I go down to the boathouse. And at first they don’t notice that I’m 30 or 40 or however old I am.” Olmsted ’68, …
In Africa, Food vs. Climate?
Though scientists have long known that Africa is a major contributor to rising levels of atmospheric methane, the primary culprit has been a mystery: emissions from the typical sources, such as wetlands and landfills, couldn’t account for the total …
Issue: January-February 2025
Challenges to Harvard’s President: An Update
The following are developments since the confrontational Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) meeting following the announcement of the forthcoming resignation of Dean William C. Kirby. At that meeting, faculty members criticized President Lawrence H. …