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Top Billing for Two Bills Kristie Bull / Associated Press William H. Gates III Charlie Riedel / Associated Press William J. Clinton Former U.S. president Bill Clinton will be the class of 2007’s Class Day speaker on June 6. Of late he has …
Issue: May-June 2007
Study Abroad, Honors at Home
The faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) has made it easier for Harvard College students to study abroad, and more difficult to earn academic honors. FAS also adopted a new grading scale which, in concert with jawboning, may slow or even reverse grade …
Issue: July-August 2002
Harvard Great Performances: Terence Patterson ’00
Had events not dictated otherwise, this week the Crimson football team would have been battling Brown at Providence. Instead we are taking another trip down memory lane. (As is Bloomberg News Radio, which on Saturdays this fall will rebroadcast classic …
'60s Generation Confronts '90s Protest
When David Illingworth ’71 and Allan Ryan went to college, the causes of the day were civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. Now, campus progressive groups are rallying to oppose sweatshop labor and support a “living wage” for University …
Sweets for All
People are picky about pastries. One lady’s scone is another’s scorn. A gentleman’s prized honey-glazed donut is another’s adamant do not. What follows is a very short list of bakeries that rose above derision during an impromptu office taste-test. A …
Issue: March-April 2016
Why the Grad Student Union Election Is Still Contested
Harvard’s graduate-student union election ended inconclusively last December. Although 1,456 students voted against unionization, and 1,272 voted in favor, more than 300 additional ballots—larger than the voting margin—remain under challenge. During the …
The Fire in “A Burning”
In early June, as the pandemic’s disproportionate toll on racial minorities and the poor came into sharper focus and protests roiled the country in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, Megha Majumdar ’10 released her first novel, A Burning . Set in India, …
Issue: September-October 2020
Emily Broad Leib: What Can be Done About Food Waste?
What Can be Done About Food Waste? Emily Broad Leib, founder and director of Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, discusses how to reduce food waste in the United States and abroad. Topics include the confusion caused by misleading date labels, the …
The Art of Protest
Before you get to any of the poems in Clint Smith’s new book, Counting Descent —some with titles like “How to Fight,” and “No More Elegies Today,” and “Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class”—you’ll find an epigraph from Ralph Ellison’s interview with the …
Issue: January-February 2017
Harvard Reports Budget Surplus of $77 Million
For the third year in a row, Harvard reported a modest budget surplus, expressing cautious optimism about its future financial performance. Operating revenue for fiscal year 2016 exceeded operating expenses by $77 million, up from last year’s surplus of …
Apollo 17 Turns 50
The photograph is 50 years old now, a black-and-white image of two Harvard alumni meeting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. One of them, Jonathan Smart ’69, wears a diver’s wetsuit with the hood pulled back. The other, Harrison Schmitt, Ph.D. ’64, has …
Issue: November-December 2022
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 …
Men and Their Castles
Architect Ogden Codman Jr. grew up in the shadow of two men: his great grandfather John and his “bad uncle Richard.” John Codman III embodied ideals of the English aristocracy, and dutifully expanded the family’s gracious Codman Estate in Lincoln, …
Issue: September-October 2024
Mapping the Human Brain
Might memories and habitual actions be hardwired into the brain’s physical structure? Knowles professor of molecular and cellular biology Jeff Lichtman thinks it’s likely. He and colleagues spent the past decade analyzing one cubic millimeter of cerebral …
Issue: September-October 2024
The Fiction of Limbo
M y fiction is constantly in transit,” says novelist and Briggs-Copeland Lecturer Paul Yoon. “If I were to self-analyze it, my guess is that it probably comes from the fact that my history is one of transit, of being in limbo.” For Yoon—whose most recent …
Issue: May-June 2020