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Rebooting Social Science
In the early 1930s, as a stock market crash spiraled into the Great Depression, the governors of the Federal Reserve frequently declined to provide emergency loans to banks, instead standing by as they failed. The prevailing economic orthodoxy held that …
Issue: July-August 2014
The Couple Who Lit Up “Lawn on D”
On weekend nights in summer, hundreds of Bostonians descend upon “Lawn on D,” a small park on South Boston’s D Street. They can be seen playing board games, enjoying a beer, attending a movie screening, or just relaxing with friends and family. But most …
Daniel Schrag and David Keith: Can Solar Geoengineering Help Fight Climate Change?
Climate changes now underway are occurring at a rate 100 times more rapid than at any time in Earth’s geological history. But in human terms, at this early stage of climate impacts such as rising seas, rampant wildfires, and intensifying storms, …
“Pugnacious” Poet and Pulitzer Prize-Winner at Phi Beta Kappa
Poet August Kleinzahler and orator Linda Greenhouse ’68, speaking in Sanders Theatre, launched the Memorial Day-shortened Commencement week at the 223rd Phi Beta Kappa literary exercises for the College on Tuesday morning, May 28. The much-honored …
Joseph S. Nye: How Do Past Presidents Rank in Foreign Policy?
How do presidents incorporate morality into decisions involving the national interest? Moral considerations explain why Truman, who authorized the use of nuclear weapons in Japan during World War II, later refused General MacArthur’s request to use …
Tony Horwitz Travels the Keystone XL Route
Few recent Harvard Magazine articles have attracted more passionate, deeply polarized letters than “The Keystone XL Pipeline,” a Forum opinion essay by Michael B. McElroy, Butler professor of environmental studies (November-December 2013; the exchange of …
Arts and Sciences Details Finances
Following publication of Harvard’s fiscal 2011 financial report , the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) has now released details of its financial operations during the year ended last June 30 , fleshing out the narrative that accompanied Dean Michael …
Street Doctor
Joe Meuse spent years drunk on the streets of Boston, sleeping under bridges, over grates, in train stations and tunnels—wherever he passed out. Occasionally he agreed to be driven to a shelter. Meuse was told he logged an astonishing 216 hospital …
Issue: January-February 2016
Powering Through
The buzz at the first postgame press conference wasn’t about the 66-yard breakaway that had locked up the football team’s 28-13 win over the University of San Diego, or about the 99-yard kick return that was nullified by a penalty, or about Harvard’s …
Issue: November-December 2012
Bringing Black History to Light
“These voices that exist in our collections, they’re always just waiting for us to listen to them.” That’s how Dorothy Berry, the digital collections program manager at Houghton Library, thinks about the African-American writers, thinkers, and ordinary …
Altering Course
Of the nearly 100 quadrillion British thermal units of energy (BTUs) used each year in the United States, 61 quads are wasted. That is not a moral judgment, or a commentary on insufficient conservation (poor insulation, idling cars, people failing to turn …
Issue: May-June 2015
The Education of a Harvard Lawyer
In the photograph here, taken on an overcast morning in the fall of 1956, you see the smartest Harvard Law School students in a student body of approximately 1,500. Each of these 58 students has been officially recognized by the Law School’s academic …
Issue: January-February 2021
Home of the Humanities
On a wintry Wednesday evening, Maria Mavroudi is delivering a lecture on Byzantine science. Using evidence from texts and artifacts, she sketches an alternate history, one that competes with the common account that the Byzantine empire’s inhabitants were …
Issue: May-June 2008
Off the Shelf
The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind, by Melvin Konner, Ph.D. ’73, M.D. ’84 ( Belknap Harvard, $39.95 ). In a truly monumental work (753 pages plus references, etc.), the Emory University anthropologist/ neuroscientist/ behavioral …
Issue: July-August 2010
Institutional, International
Undergraduates are traveling more these days because, well, they are traveling more. It’s more common today than ever before for students to go abroad for the first time while still in high school—and not just students from well-to-do families, says Nancy …
Issue: November-December 2009