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A More Generous, Capacious America
When Werner Sollors was a boy, growing up among the ruins of postwar Germany, he had at best an indistinct idea of the distant country he would spend his adult life trying to understand. There was no sign yet that he would, decades later, become one of …
Issue: January-February 2025
Off the Shelf
City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present, by Alex Krieger, professor in practice of urban design (Harvard, $35). Americans romanticize the pastoral countryside and clustering in suburbs, but cities—and visions of better …
Issue: January-February 2020
Debtor Nation
Consumerism is as American as cherry pie. Plasma TVs, iPods, granite countertops: you name it, we’ll buy it. To finance the national pastime, Americans have been borrowing from abroad on an increasingly stunning scale. In 2006, the infusion of foreign …
Issue: July-August 2007
“A Melodic Being”
“The drums are calling out your name,” Ali Sethi ’06 exhorted the gyrating audience in Sanders Theatre, as he and his bandmates wound toward the climax of the night’s final number, a song with roots stretching back to the medieval period in what is now …
Issue: November-December 2019
Is Climate Change Ruining Fall?
New England displays some of the most dramatic fall color in the world. The crowds of leaf-peepers who come here to see color in the mountains also show up to take in Harvard’s yellowwoods, maples, oaks, and honey locusts. But foliage hunters may have …
Superbug: An Epidemic Begins
Less than a century ago, the age-old evolutionary relationship between humans and microbes was transformed not by a gene, but by an idea. The antibiotic revolution inaugurated the era of modern medicine, trivializing once-deadly infections and paving the …
Issue: May-June 2014
A Love Affair with Haiti
It was probably Graham Greene’s The Comedians that sealed the fate of Amy Wilentz ’76. Set in midcentury Haiti, the 1966 novel paints a scorching portrait of the dictatorial regime of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his secret police, the Tonton …
Issue: January-February 2015
Educating Educators
Bridget Terry Long had the good timing to become dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) on July 1, 2018—the same day that the education-minded Lawrence S. Bacow assumed the University presidency, making for a powerful potential …
Issue: July-August 2019
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
Aging Gracefully at Home
As board president of Staying Put in New Canaan, Tom Towers, M.B.A. ’64, believes in self-reliance. The Connecticut organization, modeled after Boston’s Beacon Hill Village, provides practical services, classes, and community connections for town …
Issue: January-February 2008
Harvard’s Undergraduate Council Kerfuffle
After 40 years, the Undergraduate Council (UC)—the Harvard College student government—is dead. During a four-day referendum voting period that concluded in late March, 76 percent of nearly 4,000 voting students decided to dismantle their current …
Weezer Releases New EP, "SZNZ: Spring"
Whether you love or hate Weezer’s new EP, SZNZ: Spring , might come down to whether drinking three cups of coffee and then taking some Benadryl sounds like a ball or a nightmare. If it seems fun, you might agree with AV Club’s Tatiana Tenreyro that …
The Press Professor
Nicholas Lemann ’76 seems an unlikely candidate for the role of higher-education reformer. Best known as a columnist and Washington correspondent for the New Yorker, he doesn’t hold a graduate degree. He has taught occasional journalism classes, but has …
Issue: September-October 2005
Speaking Pheromone
P ellegrino University Professor emeritus E.O. (Edward Osborne) Wilson has been acclaimed for work across an astonishing range of life sciences: study of individual ant genera; explicating biodiversity and sociobiology; and, of late, increasingly urgent …
Issue: November-December 2021
Place-Making with Plastic Tubes
To the passing observer , Autumn (...Nothing Personal) is merely a cluster of tall plastic yellow and orange tubes mounted on simple wooden benches in the middle of Harvard’s Tercentenary Theatre. Artist Teresita Fern á ndez, a first-generation Cuban …