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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
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
Leslie Jamison’s Many Selves
Leslie Jamison ’04 spent the summer after her freshman year at home in Los Angeles with her jaw wired shut. A 20-foot fall from a vine in Costa Rica broke her joint hinge; as she healed after surgery, the wire held her bones in place. For two months, she …
Issue: March-April 2025
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
The Science of Hurt
The Reverend Stephen Fulton falls a lot. Once he toppled into a freezer case at the grocery store. He has difficulty walking, and he can’t sit or stand for long periods. He can’t garden anymore, and had to retire early from his regular pastoral duties …
Issue: November-December 2005
New EPA Administrator Gives Inaugural Speech at Harvard Law School
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy affirmed the Obama administration’s commitment to fighting climate change in her first public address since assuming her new role. Her spirited remarks, delivered Tuesday at Harvard Law …
Focus on Faust
The memories may be fading, but Harvard roared into the new millennium. In the wake of the $2.6-billion University Campaign, Neil L. Rudenstine bequeathed to his successor a $165-million surplus—a huge cushion in an annual budget then totaling $2.1 …
Issue: July-August 2018
Finding Voices
Marilyn Booth ’77 is one of the world’s most prolific translators of Arabic fiction into English. For nearly four decades, she has collaborated with writers from across the Arabic-speaking world to introduce dozens of literary works from cultures that …
Issue: May-June 2021
Football: Harvard 52, Holy Cross 3
If college football had a mercy rule, Friday night’s game at the Stadium would have been called at halftime. In a driving rainstorm, Harvard scored on all of its first-half possessions and led Holy Cross, 49-3, at the close of the second quarter. Senior …
“From Neither Here Nor There”
The penultimate chapter of sociologist Roberto Gonzales’s book Lives in Limbo —the chapter he calls the most painful and gripping to read, the one that would be its climax, if the book were a work of fiction—opens with a story about two factory workers on …
Issue: July-August 2020
Alternatives to Policing
Amid the protests last summer that followed George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police, three Boston City Council members proposed an ordinance to divert nonviolent 911 calls away from the Boston Police Department. Those calls—often involving …
The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang
In the summer of 1895 , in the Indian Territory that became Oklahoma, a ragtag gang of five teenaged boys—all black, Native American, or of mixed race—went on a vicious two-week spree of robbery, rape, and murder. The apparently random violence terrified …
Issue: March-April 2012
Free to Fly
Inside the conservatory , it doesn’t take long for one of them to land on Kathy Fiore’s forearm. The large rice paper butterfly, a silvery yellow with black veined lines, hails from Southeast Asia. Although it flies in a gentle, floating manner and is now …
Issue: November-December 2023