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Gathering Strings
When she was six years old, a harp was the most beautiful thing Elisabeth Remy Johnson had ever encountered. That year, her mother took her to a solo concert near their home on Cape Cod, where young Remy Johnson sat in the front row, motionless and …
Issue: January-February 2025
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
Benjamin Sachs and Sharon Block: When Did Labor Law Stop Working?
Why would it take an Amazon worker, employed full time, more than a million years to earn what its CEO, Jeff Bezos now possesses? Why do the richest 400 Americans own more wealth than all African-American households combined? And how are these …
Reading the Winds
When Sophia Montgomery first sailed, she hated it. Then eight years old, she disliked the waves and felt seasick. She kept getting hit by the boom—the long metal pole at the bottom of the sail. And she didn’t even know how to turn her boat around, so she …
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 …
Decoding the Deep
Click, click, click. Sharp staccato reports, like firecrackers, or a spitting log as it burns, end in a crescendo of sound resembling a rapidly spinning cog rattle, followed by a final extra click. “Dive,” one sperm whale is saying to another. This is the …
Issue: July-August 2024
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, …
Raising Her Voice
For many years, Reid Parsons ’15 didn’t think of her voice as something to be trained. It was always just there, a natural part of growing up with her musical family in Vermont’s Mad River Valley: singing “little ditties” with her grandmother, learning as …
Issue: January-February 2023
The War in Europe
Ukraine has proved to be a different kind of emergency. Unlike Afghan scholars, for whom the threat is so dire that the only choice is to evacuate as many as possible, many Ukrainians prefer, at least for now, Jane Unrue says, to remain in their own …
Issue: January-February 2023
Raising the Ante
In the wake of Harvard’s December announcement, a host of other institutions—Haverford, Penn, Pomona, and Swarthmore among them—said they would replace loans with grant aid. (All such programs are tracked at the Project on Student Debt, …
Issue: March-April 2008
Harvard Corporation Rules Thirteen Students Cannot Graduate
On Monday, during the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ meeting on students’ eligibility to receive their degrees, members voted that 13 students found by the College’s Administrative Board to have violated University policies during their pro-Palestinian …
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 …
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