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Off the Shelf
Health Care Reform, by Jonathan Gruber, Ph.D. ’92, with HP Newquist, illustrated by Nathan Schreiber (Hill and Wang, $30; $13.95 paper). Think “Healthcare reform: the comic book.” An illustrated guide to the new law by the MIT professor of economics who …
Issue: January-February 2012
The Gravity of Groups
One evening during graduate school, Mina Cikara was chatting with her future husband and another friend, who was wearing a baseball cap backward. At first, she recalls, it was a very civil conversation. But then her friend turned around, revealing a New …
Issue: May-June 2024
The First-Generation Gap
On any given day in Harvard Yard, you can find students wearing shirts that say “Primus Pride.” They are members of the First Generation Student Union (FGSU), a student organization created in 2013 that exists, according to its president Andrew Pérez ’20, …
Arts First
“The artist is always working with mingled gladness and disappointment towards an ideal he never attains. It is his struggle toward that ideal which makes his life a happy one.” — President Charles W. Eliot It’s been quite a year …
Issue: March-April 2017
Public Health Messaging in a Pandemic
On June 21 via Zoom, a panel of five medical and public health experts discussed the last two years of the pandemic—the successes and the failures—from academic, scientific, public health and policy perspectives. These researchers and clinicians, along …
A Man and His Castle
Hammond Castle Museum is a romantic pastiche of medieval and Renaissance European architecture, a passionate testament to the past where John Hays Hammond Jr. foresaw the technological future. The prolific inventor built the massive dwelling, with its …
Issue: November-December 2020
Lapp Letter
Note to readers: this is an accessible version of an original letter February 23, 2022 Dear Mayor Wu, Councilor Breadon, Representative Moran, Representative Honan, and Harvard Allston Task Force Members, In his letter to the Harvard …
Can Infrastructure Remedy Social Ills?
At a time when Americans are divided by politics and algorithms, public spaces have the potential to bring people together. Libraries and town squares can be drab and uninspiring, or they can transform atomized strangers into neighbors, and those …
Issue: July-August 2022
FAS: Faculty and Fisc
At a November 8 reception in University Hall, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) celebrated Michael D. Smith for his 11 years of service as dean, concluded last August, conferring on him an amusing rendering of all the faculty’s leaders, from the …
Issue: January-February 2019
A Quantum Science Initiative
Quantum science—the physics and engineering of the world at sub-microscopic scales—got a boost today as Harvard formally announced an initiative that will combine basic and applied research into the realm of the very small, as well as foster …
Laughing at Slavery
In his 1997 book Rock This! the black comedian Chris Rock sends up the “Uncle Tom” stereotype of a subservient African American who kowtows to the majority culture. Rock affectionately describes his gay uncle, whose name is Tom. “We call him Aunt Tom,” he …
Issue: March-April 2009
The Urban Jobs Crisis
Editor’s note: Background information on the charts accompanying this article (Figures 1 , 2 , and 3 ) appears in the text below. In his State of the Union Address on February 13, President Barack Obama urged that young people be given the opportunity …
James M. Quane , William Julius ... , Jackelyn Hwang
Issue: May-June 2013
Raiders Rehabilitated
Gordon gekko, the antihero of the 1987 movie Wall Street , epitomizes the excesses of the U.S. financial sector in the 1980s. Gekko embraces insider trading and the strip-and-flip model of the hostile takeover—buy a company, ruthlessly lay off workers, …
Issue: July-August 2008
Well Done
The Harvard Alumni Association Awards were established in 1990 to recognize outstanding service to Harvard University through alumni activities. This year’s recipients were to be honored on October 18, during the Harvard Alumni Association’s board of …
Issue: November-December 2007
Directing Development
Tamara Elliott Rogers ’74 has been appointed the University’s vice president for alumni affairs and development, President Drew Faust announced on September 7. The appointment, concluding an extended nationwide search, fills the vacancy left by the …
Issue: November-December 2007