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Reload and Fire
In Tim Murphy’s 25 years as Harvard’s football coach, every four-year player has won or shared at least one Ivy League title. So far, this year’s seniors, the class of 2020, have been championship-less. The early part of the 2019 season—which featured a …
Issue: November-December 2019
Strategic Planning
Naomi Bashkansky ’25 could spend hours at a chessboard pondering the perfect move. But as a child playing in competitive tournaments with time limits, such painstaking deliberation wasn’t possible—often to her frustration. During one match when she was …
Issue: March-April 2024
Talking about Talking
As the spring semester began, Harvard faced the difficult challenge of clarifying its free speech policies and securing community adherence to them. After a tumultuous autumn with sharp campus divisions over Hamas’s terrorism and the resulting …
Issue: March-April 2024
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
When “Failure” Means Success
No one wants to talk about failing at Harvard—and it’s not because we haven’t experienced failures here. After four years at the school, most students, if we’re being honest, can recall a handful. There are classroom failures and relationship failures: …
Issue: March-April 2023
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, …
Admissions on Trial
Harvard’s undergraduate admissions process was on trial in October and November, in a federal case that could ultimately change the shape of college admissions nationwide. At issue is whether the College’s “holistic” admissions practices—which evaluate …
Issue: January-February 2019
Active Grandparenting, Costly Repair
Editors’ note: Love it or hate it, exercise is a vital component of health. Harvard Magazine has explored exercise from its epidemiological impacts and its basic biology at the level of mitochondria , to its potent anti-inflammatory effects . Several …
Issue: September-October 2020
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 …
The Picture of Freedom
The two photographic albums at the center of the Boston Athenaeum’s current exhibit, “ Framing Freedom ,” are deceptively humble: small and squat, with worn leather covers and heavy metal clasps. But the albums, which belonged to nineteenth-century …
Cambridge 02138
Communicating about Cures—and Cancer The Harvard community is richly peopled with leading biomedical researchers. A few of them are doubly gifted: as writers, they explain disease, medicine, and the quest for new therapies in unusually clear, human terms. …
Issue: January-February 2007
Finding Their Rhythm
At a pre-season press conference in October, Stemberg men’s basketball coach Tommy Amaker sat on a leather couch in the glass-encased lounge overlooking Lavietes Pavilion and spoke cautiously about the team’s prospects. Although the Crimson had …
Widening the College Pipeline
Soon after Jwahir Sundai started at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, she began searching for “any resources I could get that would help me get into a good college.” A visiting admissions recruiter told her about The Posse Foundation, an unusual …
Issue: July-August 2017
Commencement Confetti
Traditions New and Old Photographs by Jim Harrison In its tenth year of elevation from a division of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the cutting-edge School of Engineering and Applied Sciences got its own, very traditional, orange/gold crow’s-foot …
Issue: July-August 2017
“Invisible” No Longer
“You’re going to see a lot of diversity in the room,” Cassandra Fradera, A.L.M. ’17, co-president of the Harvard Latinx Student Alliance (HLSA), said on the phone last week. She was explaining what to expect on Tuesday at the third annual HLSA-sponsored …