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Volatility Spikes
Investing in the stock market can seem like walking a tightrope above a financial chasm. But instead of balancing themselves against unforeseen risks, many investors fail to diversify their portfolios and wiggle onto that tightrope on just one foot. …
Issue: May-June 2002
Connecting the Harvard Dots
If graduating seniors wondered whether Commencement marked the end of all their Harvard fun and learning, Robert R. Bowie Jr. ’73 was there on Class Day to tell them, “Hell, no!” In fact, the new president of the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) promised, …
Issue: September-October 2010
Darkness Visible
On an August evening at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, having hiked past the lawn concert of dirgeful folk music—an audience of couples propped against each other as though they had renounced their spines—opera director Sarah Ina Meyers ’02, composer …
Issue: November-December 2018
A Lifetime of Sharing
In the late 1970s, I attended my first Class of 1960 luncheon, in those days held at the downtown Harvard Club of Boston. It quickly became clear that these gatherings were not just reunion-planning meetings composed of class officers, nor primarily …
Issue: May-June 2010
The Placebo Phenomenon
Two weeks into Ted Kaptchuk ’s first randomized clinical drug trial, nearly a third of his 270 subjects complained of awful side effects. All the patients had joined the study hoping to alleviate severe arm pain: carpal tunnel, tendinitis, chronic pain in …
Issue: January-February 2013
A Senior Makes It Back to Campus
The first time I moved to Harvard, I stuffed my suitcases with things I knew I’d never need: glittery lanyards, quill pens, a pack of Big League Chew bubblegum I’d been gifted by a friend as part of a Boston-themed high-school graduation present. My …
Ashbery Accepts Harvard Arts Medal
Fifty years ago, John Ashbery ’49 was living in Paris and short on cash. He needed money to continue writing poetry, so he took up a job translating cheap detective novels from French into English. One novel meant one month of creation. Ashbery’s work, …
Rick Lowe Questions the Concept of “Value” at GSD Class Day
As a young artist in the early 1990s, Rick Lowe had just completed a painting about police brutality when a high-school student stopped by his Houston studio. Lowe considered the work as an “exciting moment” in his career, but his visitor had a different …
Artist Rick Lowe to Headline Graduate School of Design Class Day
Rick Lowe, a pioneering public artist, will speak at the Harvard Graduate School of Design Class Day on May 27. Lowe, a 2002 Loeb Fellow at the GSD, is best known for his two decades of work with Project Row Houses (PRH). He founded the community arts and …
Scott Cook to Address HBS Graduating Class
The founder of Intuit Inc. —maker of finance software products including TurboTax, Quickbooks, and Quicken, that are used by an estimated 50 million individuals and small businesses worldwide—will speak at Harvard Business School’s Class Day ceremony on …
Arts and Science Transitions
The beginning of the end of a period of instability in the leadership of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) came on June 4, when President-elect Drew Gilpin Faust announced the appointment of Michael D. Smith as dean, effective July 15. Smith succeeds …
Issue: July-August 2007
“House-Poor”
An unusual “Dean’s Letter on the Finances of the Faculty,” presented to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) on October 17, during its first meeting of the year, details a significant “structural” deficit …
Issue: January-February 2007
Time in Space
Many who work in and around the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts have a weird relationship with the French modernist architect who designed it. Le Corbusier is a mythic figure for Harvard’s art students: his notoriety, when combined with the loudness …
Issue: March-April 2018
“I’m a Gambler with the Movies”
Some weeks after the news that his entire filmography, some 50 documentaries in 50 years , would finally be widely available via streaming services, the director Frederick Wiseman came to Harvard and explained what kept him going. “Documentary is fun!” he …
Love’s Labors
At age 47, with a solid academic career and a grown daughter, Mary Brown Parlee ’65 fell suddenly in love—with a man she’d known for decades. They had worked together in an MIT lab during the 1960s and spent summers on nearby Maine islands with their …
Issue: March-April 2009