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RSS Creator Aaron Swartz Dead at 26
Aaron Swartz , the 26-year-old computer genius, activist, and technology innovator known as a hero of the open-access movement—which promotes use of the Internet to provide free and easy access to the world’s knowledge—committed suicide last Friday in New …
Digging Deep into Chinese History
Editor’s note: Hudson professor of archaeology Rowan K. Flad, a scholar of ancient China (read about his work in “ Chinese Pottery: The First Five Millennia ”), recently returned from Gansu Province, where he and colleagues undertook their first full …
Off the Shelf
Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness, by Roy Richard Grinker, Ph.D. ’89 (W.W. Norton, $30). The author, a professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington who studies mental health, writes at a moment …
Issue: January-February 2021
Harvard Finances: Strengths and Warning Signs
The University’s financial report for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2017 , released this morning, was full of the sorts of results that make budget officers happy: Revenue increased $222 million to nearly $5 billion (growth of 4.6 percent)—largely …
Run Backward, on a Mission
Norman Hayes likes rituals. At Tucker High School in Tucker, Georgia, he ate the same dinner—chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes—before each football game. Then the town got quiet: nearly everyone was in the stadium before the team even arrived. Under …
Issue: September-October 2014
Crows Know How to Have Fun
Long gone are the days when animal behaviorists, in the tradition of Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner, assumed animals were robotic stimulus-response machines. A wealth of recent evidence supports the idea that animals think and feel; corvids—a family of …
See Their Faces
The pictures are spectral, disorienting portals into the slave South. The 15 daguerreotypes of South Carolina slaves, taken by Joseph Zealy at the behest of Swiss-born Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz in 1850, have the eerie intimacy of mugshots. Today, …
Family History
For most Americans, Nazi Germany represents something from a history book: alien, remote, the stuff of nightmares. For Martin Puchner, Wien professor of drama and of English and comparative literature, who grew up in Nuremberg before moving to the United …
Issue: November-December 2020
“To Break Our Own Rules”
For years, Dan Chiasson, Ph.D. ’01, had been hearing their voices outside his office window, the frolic of high-schoolers attending summertime camps at Wellesley College, where he teaches creative writing. At first, he didn’t take much notice. “They just …
Issue: November-December 2020
A Lab for Contemporary Classical Music
A percussionist gracefully draws a violin bow vertically along the edge of a Himalayan singing bowl, producing a sound echoing that made by flicking a fine crystal goblet. He sets the bow aside and turns the bowl down, then up, swiveling it back and forth …
Battling Eating Disorders
When Amanda Moreno Garcia, M.D. ’26, joined an eating disorder awareness club as a freshman majoring in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, she did it to support a friend. “My friend had lived experience [of an eating disorder] and was really …
Issue: January-February 2024
Badminton’s Lightning Charm
In 1985, an astonishing time-motion study compared badminton with tennis. That year, Boris Becker defeated Kevin Curran in four sets for the Wimbledon tennis championship, and, amid far less fanfare, Han Jian of China bested Denmark’s Morten Frost in …
Issue: March-April 2010
The “Bilingual” G.M.
It’s not quite 10,000 men of Harvard, but scanning the Cleveland Browns organizational chart at times must feel like announcing the starting lineup for an alumni game at Harvard Stadium. The chief strategy officer is onetime Crimson wide receiver Paul …
Issue: September-October 2020
The Very Image
The work almost always begins, says writer Cynthia Zarin ’81, with an image she can’t let go of: a pair of gold earrings, a decaying woodpile full of mice and moths, a postcard of a painting by Delacroix. “I don’t start with an idea,” she explains. “I’m …
Issue: May-June 2024
Much Bigger Than the Police
“Policing, at present, is trapped in an intractable dilemma caused by the gap between a just society and the one we inhabit,” said Harvard political theorist Brandon Terry, leading off a Radcliffe Institute online conversation Monday afternoon on American …