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Fantastic!
The recent announcement that Lene Vestergaard Hau had successfully changed light to matter, and then back into light, evokes the magic of carrying moonbeams home in a jar. That the general public might harbor doubts about the success of such research is …
Issue: July-August 2007
Should AI Be Scaled Down?
A driving force of the competition between AI companies is the belief that bigger is better. GPT-4, the model that powers the most advanced version of ChatGPT, contains an estimated 1.8 trillion parameters, or variables that determine how it responds to …
Summers in Summary
Lawrence H. Summers brought to the Harvard presidency prodigious energy and a penchant for framing the University’s future in visionary terms. Taking the long view forward from a millennium just begun, Summers discerned an “inflection point” in the …
Issue: September-October 2006
Making Art behind Bars
“We are not the exception to the norm—we are actually the norm,” said formerly incarcerated artist Jesse Krimes during a panel discussion at the Harvard Art Museums March 22 that followed the screening of a documentary about his life and work. “There are …
Football 2017: Harvard 38, Lafayette 10
Nothing like having your superstar return a punt 85 yards to get you back on track. Ignited by Justice Shelton-Mosley ’19, the Harvard football team cruised to a relatively stress-free 38-10 victory over Patriot League foe Lafayette in the seven-hundredth …
Off the Shelf
Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals, by William Wright ( St. Martin’s Press, $25.95 ). A student’s suicide in 1920 led administrators to identify a group of gay or presumed gay undergraduates. A secret court of deans and …
Issue: November-December 2005
Harvard Names Online Education Leadership
Updated Friday, March 1, at 9:45 a.m. with membership of HarvardX research committee and guiding principles for HarvardX courses (see below). The University has populated some of the administrative and faculty committees that oversee and manage HarvardX …
The Community’s Conversations
To a striking degree, the speeches and welcoming messages to students at the beginning of the fall semester touched on a common theme: the importance of civil discourse and the centrality to the University’s mission of open debate in search of …
Issue: November-December 2019
Off the Shelf
Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome, by Cammy Brothers ’91, Ph.D. ’99 (Princeton, $75). The author, associate professor of architecture at Northeastern, returns to the subject of her dissertation: a Florentine architect (1443-1516) whose meticulous …
Issue: May-June 2022
Catalyzing Bioengineering
With his $131-million gift in support of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, announced by the University on June 7, Hansjörg Wyss, M.B.A. ’65, has now made three gifts to the eponymous institute, totalling $381 million, which bring …
Issue: September-October 2019
Outdoor Smorgasbord
If your gustatory expectations are low, try Au Bon Pain for an outdoor lunch with sideshow. Taking up lots of Forbes Plaza, on the Massachusetts Avenue side of Holyoke Center, its tables afford a peerless vantage point on the Square and its folk. Sidewalk …
Football: 9-0
After a pair of 5-5 seasons sullied by inopportune turnovers and second-half meltdowns, head football coach Tim Murphy took a new pedagogical tack. "You can talk about a hundred things to your team during the preseason, but I only talked about two," he …
Issue: January-February 2002
Cambridge 02138
Contemporary Cuba Thank you for the customarily thoughtful piece by Jorge Domínguez on today’s Cuba (“ Hello from Havana ,” July-August, page 24). My work has taken me there about a dozen times over the last few years, and every note struck by Domínguez …
Issue: September-October 2009
An “Older Sister” to Combat Anemia
It looks like the kind of applesauce squeeze bottle one would find in a child’s lunch box. Twist the top off Kiikter’s cheerful pastel pouch (complete with a rhinoceros mascot), take a sip, and consider the contents: the texture of Jello shortly after …
Issue: November-December 2023
What’s Up Comes Down, and Vice Versa
On January 10, state transportation secretary Stephanie Pollack, J.D. ’85, announced that the state will rebuild the Massachusetts Turnpike at ground level where it passes through Allston, rather than maintain it on the existing elevated viaduct, which is …