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How the Lines Get Bent
Maps of coronavirus infections have for months filled the front pages of newspapers and media websites, becoming a crucial way to visualize and understand the pandemic. These maps do not just convey information: they may be used as tools of persuasion, …
From Title IX to Riot Grrrls
Today’s American girls and young women may be the daughters of feminism, but their world isn’t always the one envisioned by their foremothers. “Little girls dress in pink and they’re princesses, but at the same time they’re going to grow up to wear …
Issue: January-February 2008
A New Dean Designs without Borders
Expect bold ideas from Mohsen Mostafavi when he begins his term as dean of the Graduate School of Design (GSD). On a late September visit to Harvard, Mostafavi—the current dean of the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University—asked …
Issue: November-December 2007
Savant of Screens
Not long ago, Virginia Heffernan, Ph.D. ’02, who writes about television and on-line media for the New York Times, got an e-mail from her boss, culture editor Sam Sifton ’88. Heffernan had submitted a draft that contained the word chthonic, a term from …
Issue: September-October 2007
Vogue Meets Veritas
Though the early April night is freezing cold at 10 p.m., a line of 600 people, mostly students, waits more than 40 minutes to enter Annenberg Hall. They are another sellout audience for the annual Identities fashion show at Harvard. Four thousand more …
Issue: January-February 2013
Uneasy Neighbors: A Brief History of Mexican-U.S. Migration
The recent political sparring over immigration reform has included scant mention of cross-border diplomacy. Despite the growing interdependence of the U.S. and Mexican economies over the past few decades, the governments of the two nations have shown …
Issue: May-June 2007
Toward Top-Tier Teaching
A task force on teaching proposed in late January that members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) enter into a “compact” to enhance teaching and student learning, and to consider them as important as excellence in scholarship. To effect this change …
Issue: March-April 2007
“Out of the Ashes”
In the middle of Shin Sang-ok’s 1958 film The Flower in Hell , a Korean woman dances for a group of American soldiers on a U.S. Army base in Seoul. Behind her, a band plays a cheery mambo. The camera seems to adopt the gaze of the soldiers, panning down …
Up Three Times
It’s one of the least understood, and most difficult, events in a track and field meet. Yet the essence of the triple jump is simple: jump three times. The rules, however, have some stringent specifications on how you jump. It starts like a long jump: the …
Issue: May-June 2006
Off the Shelf
Inside the Hot Zone, by Mark G. Kortepeter ’83, M.P.H. ’95 (Potomac Books/University of Nebraska, $34.95). Now a public-health professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, the author is a retired army colonel with long experience in defense …
Issue: May-June 2020
Resolving Inflammation
Of all the human immune system’s extraordinary capabilities, its capacity to regenerate and restore normal physiological function after an injury or infection is probably the least well understood. The process that resolves inflammation is separate from …
Personal Information in the Digital Age
Do people behave differently when they think they are being watched? When former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed the mass surveillance of American citizens in June 2013, the question suddenly grew in importance. Can the …
Issue: January-February 2017
Football: Harvard 31, Yale 24
Invariably, it seems to come down to this: the players of one ancient rival driving down the field, desperately seeking the tying or even winning points; the players of the other just as desperately trying to hold them off; the fans of both waiting to …
Harvard Endowment Rises $4.4 Billion to $32 Billion
Highlights: Endowment valued at $32 billion as of June 30, up $4.4 billion (16 percent) from $27.6 billion a year earlier. Harvard Management Company records 21.4 percent investment return on endowment assets during fiscal year 2011. All asset categories …
Yearning for “Big Humanities”
Many of Harvard's leading humanities scholars convened on October 22 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Humanities Center—and to plot their course through a changing academic landscape—by joining across disciplines for "20/20: Looking …
Issue: January-February 2005