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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 …
A Model City
‘‘ Homo sapiens tends to fall in love with miniatures,” says Fred Gevalt ’72, M.Arch. ’76. In his case, over the past eight years, in the basement of his home in Arlington, Massachusetts, Gevalt has painstakingly built a complex diorama depicting an …
Issue: January-February 2025
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
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 …
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
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 …
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
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
Harvard Sculptor Justin Peyser
Near the woods behind Justin Peyser’s Long Island home sits a sculpture he built from cedar planks and giant metal rings. Titled Sanctuary, the work is massive, almost like an open-air room, or a stand of trees. It invites visitors to step inside, but …
Issue: March-April 2025
Tobacco Smoke and Tuberculosis
Smoking is one of the largest risk factors for contracting or dying from tuberculosis (TB), and in a study published today , Harvard researchers described a mechanism that may finally explain why. They also identified two types of existing drugs that may …