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Creative Exposure
Tension crackled through the audience, which was clumped in a circle in the Frankfurt Conference Center. At the center of the group, Lena Chen ’09, an artist and writer, paced like a cat around a bed, scanning nervous faces for her next victim. A camera …
Issue: January-February 2020
Graduate Students Strike
A t press time, two days before the beginning of winter reading period, the Harvard Graduate Student Union-United Auto Workers (HGSU-UAW) began a strike, with day-long picket lines planned during the first week of December in Harvard Yard and at the …
Issue: January-February 2020
Harvard and Life Sciences Partners to Build a Center for Biological Therapies
A Harvard-led consortium of Boston-area healthcare, biotech, and biopharma institutions will open a $50-million nonprofit facility for the development of cell- and gene-based therapies, the University announced today. The hope is that the center will make …
Crimson “Bodice-Rippers”
“Of course their hook was ‘Harvard student writes bodice-ripper,’” says Lauren Willig, A.M. ’03, J.D. ’06. And of course it worked: the publisher’s strategy attracted “all sorts of media attention” to her novel The Secret History of the Pink Carnation. …
Issue: July-August 2015
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
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
Harvard’s 2016 Honorary-Degree Recipients
During the Morning Exercises of the 365rd Commencement, on May 26, Harvard planned to confer honorary degrees on six men and three women. Among them are: a lawyer who has pioneered cases ending discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (now also …
Comedy Is Magic
Harrison Greenbaum was five when his father pulled out a deck of cards and told him to pick one. Greenbaum did, and then watched his dad riffle the rest of the deck beside his own ear, saying the cards would tell him which one his son had chosen. With a …
Issue: November-December 2019
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 …
Arts and Sciences’ Inflection Point
Students of learning and teaching at Harvard will find two especially interesting disclosures in the new annual report from Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) dean Michael D. Smith , covering the 2013-2014 academic year: The number of undergraduates …
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
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 …
The Indispensable Power
Diplomacy has never been so important as now, when we are confronting the most serious crises since the Second World War: the global pandemic and economic collapse. When we emerge finally from the grip of the coronavirus, Americans will need to account …
Issue: July-August 2020
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