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In Esteemed Company
Ten men and women were awarded honorary degrees from Harvard this year. Besides the Commencement speaker, U.S. Secretary of Energy (and Nobel laureate in physics) Steven Chu, the group includes a filmmaker, a jazz musician, a novelist and New Yorker …
Art-Making in Allston
“Artists, of course , need a room of our own,” Claire Chase , a flutist and professor of the practice of music, was saying to the audience gathered Thursday night to celebrate the opening of the $12.5-million Harvard ArtLab , a creative space in Allston …
Rarely Seen Rothkos Highlight Harvard Art Museums’ Reopening
Mark Rothko’s Harvard Murals , a five-panel series that the University commissioned from the expressionist painter in 1962, will star in the Harvard Art Museums’ inaugural exhibition this November, the museums announced today. The paintings, installed in …
Greening China
Three decades of rapid economic growth in China have been accompanied by severe environmental degradation. In July 2007, the Financial Times headlined an article about a World Bank report on this problem, “750,000 a year killed by Chinese pollution.” Our …
Issue: September-October 2008
Creating a Scene
Elizabeth Mak ’12, a theater set and lighting designer, doesn’t feel threatened by the era of computer-generated effects and green screens, Avengers and Game of Thrones. In fact, she thinks the rise of television and blockbuster films has been good for …
Issue: September-October 2019
To Russia, with Gloves
The Harvard pipeline to the Winter Olympics this February goes straight through Bedford, Massachusetts. That’s where the U.S. women’s national hockey team set up its training facility: 25 athletes, including five who have played at Harvard, took up …
Issue: January-February 2014
Long Innings
Action in cricket , as in baseball, starts with a ball thrown to a batter. But in cricket, everything else happens faster: the bowler—cricket’s version of a pitcher—gets a running start, and even in recreational games the ball often heads toward the …
Issue: July-August 2013
Long-Term Investing, Short-Term Thinking
Roads, bridges, and high-speed telecommunications equipment have something in common: they are in constant need of repair and upgrade. But who wants to plan and pay for such critical workaday infrastructure projects? Likewise, the slow but inexorable pace …
Issue: July-August 2019
Thinner Ice
The revolting late-winter reports about wealthy parents paying to cheat on their children’s standardized tests and bribing coaches to get their high-schoolers listed as athletic recruits—and thus into institutions such as the University of Southern …
Issue: July-August 2019
“If You Believe That It Is Possible to Break, Believe That It Is Possible to Repair”
T his year’s Harvard Law School Class Day had many firsts: Roberta “Robbie” Kaplan ’88 was the first openly gay person to speak at the occasion, addressing the school’s first majority-woman graduating class, whose members had performed a record-breaking …
Princess Not-So-Charming
“Fairy tales have always tapped into the subconscious, bringing to light children’s deepest fears,” says Soman Chainani ’01. In his new fantasy-adventure novel, The School for Good and Evil, he has brought that tenet into the twenty-first century. The …
Issue: May-June 2013
Divest Harvard Makes Case for Dropping Fossil Fuels
A group of University community members—faculty, alumni, and the student group Divest Harvard—urged the University to divest its endowment from fossil fuels at a press conference in the Charles Hotel yesterday. The event marked the start of this year’s …
A Modest Generation
So what do we call ourselves? As labels for a generation go, The Silent Generation always struck me as singularly stupid; I don’t think we were any more silent or noisy than most generations. Our formative years were neither easy nor affluent ones: if our …
Issue: May-June 2005
Off the Shelf
Interop, by John Palfrey ’94, J.D. ’01, and Urs Gasser, LL.M. ’03 (Basic Books, $28.99). Palfrey, formerly of the Law School and now headmaster of Phillips Academy Andover, and Gasser, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, …
Issue: September-October 2012
Of Dumplings, Bok Choy, and the Politics of Emoji
In 2015, inspiration struck Jennifer 8. Lee ’99 like an apple from Newton’s tree. In her case, though, it was a dumpling. Lee and her friend Yiying Lu were texting about upcoming dinner plans. Lee sent over a picture of dumplings, and Lu went to her …