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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 …
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
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
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
A Fictional Century
In the opening pages of his new book, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel , Edwin Frank ’82 tries to explain exactly what he’s up to. This turns out to be a slippery task. Stranger Than Fiction is a book about books, but it’s not a …
Issue: November-December 2024
Harvard, H.H.R., Houghton
Henry Hobson Richardson , A.B. 1859, the leading nineteenth-century American architect—Boston’s Trinity Church, a major role in the design of the New York State Capitol, libraries, important commercial buildings, sumptuous homes—happily left his mark on …
Issue: November-December 2024
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
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
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
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
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 …
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