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In Defense of Liberal Arts
I didn’t fully realize the value of a liberal arts education until I was removed from it. Though even as a high schooler I knew that I wanted to go to a “liberal arts school,” that was mostly because I didn’t yet know what I wanted to do with my life. I’d …
Issue: September-October 2023
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 …
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
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 …
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 …
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
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
Men and Their Castles
Architect Ogden Codman Jr. grew up in the shadow of two men: his great grandfather John and his “bad uncle Richard.” John Codman III embodied ideals of the English aristocracy, and dutifully expanded the family’s gracious Codman Estate in Lincoln, …
Issue: September-October 2024
Mapping the Human Brain
Might memories and habitual actions be hardwired into the brain’s physical structure? Knowles professor of molecular and cellular biology Jeff Lichtman thinks it’s likely. He and colleagues spent the past decade analyzing one cubic millimeter of cerebral …
Issue: September-October 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 …
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, …