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Commencement Confetti
NOBLE BEAST Professional bomb-sniffer Tara, a two-year-old golden/lab/vizsla from Holland, made organizers breathe easier by checking out Memorial Hall just before the dinner there for honorands on June 8 (scallop-and-shrimp salad, then …
Issue: July-August 2005
Botanical Bounty
Twenty miles from Boston, amid suburban sprawl, lies a 45-acre haven called Garden in the Woods. This “living museum” offers refreshing excursions through New England’s diverse flora and landscapes: visitors may roam woodland paths; explore a lily pond …
Issue: May-June 2019
Networked
If a campaign volunteer shows up at your door, urging you to vote in an upcoming election, you are 10 percent more likely to go to the polls--and others in your household are 6 percent more likely to vote. When you try to recall an unfamiliar word, the …
Issue: May-June 2010
Football 2018: Harvard 29, Penn 7
Harvard football coach Tim Murphy is fond of saying, “It’s what up front that counts.” On Saturday at Franklin Field against longtime Ivy rival Penn, there was much for Murphy to be fond of as his Crimson offensive and defensive lines—the latter pulling …
Reasoned Debate, Free Speech, and Service
President Lawrence S. Bacow, speaking at Morning Prayers in Memorial Church this morning at the start of the new academic year, expressed concern about the community’s commitment to civil discourse at a contentious time in the larger society. “I have …
Football 2018: Harvard 52, Columbia 18
Because Saturday’s clash with Ivy League rival Columbia was the Harvard football team’s final game at Harvard Stadium this season, it was designated Senior Day, the afternoon on which the players from the class of 2019 were honored. (The final home game, …
The Devil and Philip Johnson
Philip Johnson ’ 27 (’30), B.Arch.’43—the celebrated architect of the former Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan’s Seagram Building, the AT&T Building (now 550 Madison Avenue), and his own Glass House residence—grew obsessed as an undergraduate by …
Issue: November-December 2018
Spellbound on Stage
“If you want me to, you know, pretend to be a raccoon, I can do that really well,” says actor, singer, and author Aislinn Brophy ’17. “Anything that involves music and movement. That’s kind of an odd, specific theater thing. But I find that I get cast a …
Issue: March-April 2024
Lewis on Leadership; Faust’s Farewell
Before the two main speeches of the afternoon exercises—officially the annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA)—HAA president Susan Morris Novick ’85 told the newly minted members in the class of 2018: “It is my pleasure to welcome you home …
$10 Million for a More Inclusive Faculty
The Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, set up by President Drew Faust in 2016, released its final report this morning, with a broad, University-wide set of recommendations to ensure that Harvard “integrate[s] all members of the University into …
Talking About Tipping Points
While climate change is frequently discussed as a problem of gradual warming, numerous features in the global climate system are thought to be at risk of flipping suddenly from one stable state to another. Scientists worry that a few of these tipping …
Shopping Week R.I.P.?
At its monthly meeting on March 6, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) strongly indicated that it will discard the traditional undergraduate shopping week for course selection each semester in favor of some form of preregistration. In an anticlimactic …
“Disappointing” Endowment Returns-and a Protracted Restructuring
On September 19 , Harvard Management Company (HMC) CEO N.V. Narvekar reported an 8.1 percent investment return on endowment assets during fiscal year 2017, ended last June 30, observing bluntly, “Our performance is disappointing and not where it needs to …
Issue: November-December 2017
Quantum Leaps
In the fall of 2009, between matinée and evening performances in The Nutcracker at the Boston Opera House , Merritt Moore ’11 would decompress in the basement of Harvard’s Jefferson Laboratory. “I’d take off the tutu and the pointe shoes and the crown, …
Issue: May-June 2024
A Long Night's Journey in Palestine
WHEN WILLIAM TAMPLIN, Ph.D. ’20, first came across Cry in a Long Night , the 1955 Arabic novel for which his English translation was published earlier this year, he was searching for something else entirely. As a graduate student in comparative …