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Commencement Confetti
Musical Notes Joshuah Brian Campbell ’16 did double duty— nailing his Senior English Address during the Morning Exercises but also, literally, singing for his dinner the night before. At the honorands’ banquet in Annenberg Hall, accompanied by guitarist …
Issue: July-August 2016
“Design Is Not an Intellectual Exercise”
Standing before a graduating class of soon-to-be architects and designers and urban planners at the Graduate School of Design’s Class Day, Teju Cole—the Vidal professor of the practice of creative writing—wanted to talk about doors. Real doors, but also …
In the Eye of the Storm
Regularly the dismal news streams in from Japan. The "lost decade"--dating from the early 1990s, when the country's seemingly invincible economy began to derail--shows no sign of ending. The high public-approval ratings for wavy-haired maverick prime …
Issue: November-December 2001
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
Banned in Sparta
Think words and music: Rogers and Hammerstein, Gilbert and Sullivan, the brothers Gershwin. Sometimes, collaborators might not even have met. For example, works by Greek poets of the Archaic period (800-500 B.C.E.)—centuries before the Classical era of …
Issue: March-April 2025
The Post-Roe World
“Clarity is power,” said Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) dean Michelle Williams, at the school’s panel last week on the post- Roe United States. “American people need a clear understanding of the science and consequences of depriving …
Football: Harvard 14, Dartmouth 13
At game’s end last Friday night at Harvard Stadium, a reporter from The Harvard Crimson turned to her colleagues in the press box and held up her hands. “How,” she asked, “did we win this game?” The young lady may be forgiven her partisanship, usually …
Controversial Reunioner
The urbane Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl '09 was Hitler's crony and foreign press chief during the Führer's ascendancy, and played the piano for him soothingly. He later fell out of favor and fled to the United States, where he worked against the Nazis for …
Issue: September-October 2004
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
The Quiet Campaign
The contested election for Harvard’s Board of Overseers seems anomalous in this noisy U.S. presidential election year. There are no airport rallies, no televised attack commercials or Super PACs, no polls. The voters—Harvard degree-holders—are dispersed …
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 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 …
Inhaling Distress
After 40 years of scientific and news reports on tobacco's hazards, smoking today may be a fundamentally irrational act. But is it linked with genuine psychological disturbance? Perhaps so, according to a new study that asserts that mentally ill smokers …
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
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