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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
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 …
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 …
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, …
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
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
An Egyptian Archaeological Treasure
The discovery of a trove of diaries written by Egyptian workers in the early twentieth century has brought together Egyptologists across the globe in an effort to transcribe and study the rare primary sources, which lend a local perspective to a “golden …
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 …
Redefining Obesity
Alarmingly, the rate of obesity in the United States has tripled during the past six decades: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 42 percent of American adults are obese. Globally, more than a billion people live with the …
Issue: July-August 2024
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
Finishing with a Flourish
It’s the 135th playing of The Game, Fenway Park, midway through the third quarter. Yale has scored 10 unanswered points to take the lead for the first time, 24-21. Nevertheless, the Harvard sideline exudes confidence. “There was no ‘woe-is-me,’” Crimson …
Issue: January-February 2019
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
Harvard Borrows $2.5 Billion: The Costs and Rationale
Moving promptly to tap the credit markets for additional financial resources--as signaled in the strategy outlined by President Drew Faust and Executive Vice President Ed Forst on December 2--the University sold $1.5 billion in taxable bonds on December …