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Affording a Harvard Graduation
Graduation is a rite of passage when families are united, tears are shed, and memories are shared. But for some students, it is also a time when belts are tightened. “I can go to this event that costs $40, or I can eat for the day,” Lenica …
Amartya Sen, a Memoir
Home in the World , Amartya Sen’s memoir of his years in the U.K, was published there July 8. Below, Gardiner professor of oceanic history and affairs Sugata Bose previews for North American readers a few highlights of the book, which covers the first 30 …
The Conservative
“It’s a strange moment to have written a book where part of the argument is that things are changing less than you think,” said Ross Douthat ’02 on a sunny weekday afternoon in July. He was sitting on the back deck of his home in New Haven, Connecticut, …
Issue: November-December 2020
The Gravity of Groups
One evening during graduate school, Mina Cikara was chatting with her future husband and another friend, who was wearing a baseball cap backward. At first, she recalls, it was a very civil conversation. But then her friend turned around, revealing a New …
Issue: May-June 2024
Greg Stone, An Emerging Novelist at 70
Greg Stone ’75 was in a hospital bed four years ago when the idea came to him for the murder mystery he’d always wanted to write. After a major back surgery, complications had landed him in the ICU, where he spent a week recovering in a medicated haze, …
Issue: January-February 2024
Significant Contributors to Society and Scholarship
Since 1989, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) has awarded its Centennial Medal to alumni who have made significant contributions to society and scholarship. This year’s medalists include an art historian who encouraged viewers to simply look …
Crimson Campaign Consultants
Like many Harvard students in their senior spring, Nathán Goldberg ’18 and William Long ’18 had big ideas for their future as they prepared for graduation. Both had a background in Big Data. Both were brought deeper into national politics as the 2016 …
Off the Shelf: Recent Books with Harvard Connections
Glass Half-Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work, by Colleen Ammerman and Boris Groysberg (Harvard Business Review Press, $30). The director of the Business School’s Gender Initiative and the Chapman professor of business …
Issue: July-August 2021
Dumbarton Oaks Fêtes New Programs and Spaces
The music of Roomful of Teeth , the Grammy-winning vocal ensemble who performed at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection on Sunday, serves as perhaps an apt metaphor for how discrete disciplines come together at the University’s Washington, D.C.- …
The Humanities Village People
Rachel Gibian ’15 will spend a considerable part of her summer in the stacks of the Schlesinger and Houghton libraries, digging up primary documents about women who were active abolitionists during the American Civil War. Her archival work will help …
Joseph Conrad’s Crystal Ball
Many call Rudyard Kipling the scribe of the British Empire, but novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) may have best rendered its waning years and foreshadowed its demise. Around the turn of the last century, Conrad’s books portrayed terrorism in Europe, …
Issue: May-June 2014
Reports from the “New America”
The pioneering media site LatinoRebels.com, founded in 2011 by Julio Ricardo Varela ’90, criticized a Coors Brewing Company advertising campaign for linking Puerto Ricans to drunkenness; the ads were pulled. It published video of Puerto Rican independence …
Issue: January-February 2017
How to Make a Mammal
“What a mess ,” Sharad Ramanathan thinks, contemplating a group of cells growing in a glass dish. There are different cell types everywhere, the random “daughter cells” produced by a stem cell population. A mathematician and physicist by training, he …
Issue: January-February 2024
Radical Reviewing
In 1979 , a voice on the radio attracted the attention of George Scialabba ’69. It was “gentle and earnest, logical, persuasive, politically astute,” he recalls. “I was surprised to hear it was Noam Chomsky, whom I knew only as a linguist.” Scialabba ( …
Issue: November-December 2013
Simple Headlines Are Better
A study released today has found empirical evidence behind an old rule for effective writing—the simpler, the better. Weatherhead professor of public policy Todd Rogers , with fellow researchers Hillary Shulman and David Markowitz, looked at how readers …