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The Physics of the Familiar
“Just because something is familiar doesn’t mean you understand it. That is the common fallacy that all adults make—and no child ever does,” says Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, England de Valpine professor of applied mathematics. Mahadevan enjoys explaining …
Issue: March-April 2008
Tuning In to Urban Noise
Bells ring at St. Paul Church. A car honks. Pigeons coo. During a walk through the soundscape of Harvard Square, noise researcher and activist Erica Walker, S.D. ’17, hears it all. Even footfalls on the brick sidewalk intrigue her: “Sometimes they’re …
Issue: March-April 2018
Is Pedagogy About Us?
During a history seminar in my sophomore year, we opened class with a question derived from an assigned reading: What civic and political ills had made certain regions of Chicago sites of gang violence? We mulled the question for a few directionless …
Issue: January-February 2024
Hello, Geotech
Take your geographic information system (GIS) for a spin around the block. Its easy. Sit at your computer, which you have loaded with GIS software, and call up on the monitor a street map of Greater Boston. Superimpose on it a second map showing the …
Issue: November-December 2006
Renegade Tastemakers
This winter , an exhibit of contemporary paintings in the basement of Davis Square’s Somerville Theatre features animals. Medusa Fries Fish, by Florida artist Christine House, is clearly symbolic—but of what? A wild-haired lass in a slinky red dress …
Issue: January-February 2018
Cambridge 02138
I believe Erin O’Donnell’s statement (“Twigs Bent Left or Right,” January-February, page 34)—that “people are much more purple than anything else. You don’t find nearly the polarization suggested by the media, or, frankly, by scholars”—to be a …
Issue: March-April 2006
The Fractured Faculty
Following the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) meeting on November 7—and a vote that rejected a motion opposing the College’s regulation of final clubs, fraternities, and sororities —the Harvard Crimson headlined “Sanctions Vote a Sigh of Relief for …
The Harvard Sophomore Aiming for City Council
Unfortunately for Nadya Okamoto ’20, a candidate in next month’s Cambridge City Council election, the height of campaign season happens to coincide with back-to-school season. These overlapping obligations pose a challenge to her campaign run for, by, and …
“Fake News” and the Post-Trump Media
In his 1997 essay “The Arc of the Moral Universe,” philosopher Joshua Cohen, Ph.D. ’79, asked whether the injustice of American slavery contributed to its demise. To anyone but a philosopher, his answer might sound underwhelming: it did, but its influence …
Art as Chattel
At base, works of art are chattel: the stuff of economic exchange. Historically, the British legal code forbade nobility from selling “settled land” and tangible property. Then in the 1870s, cheap grain from the United States and Canada caused a decline …
Issue: November-December 2008
Private Eye
While snooping for signs that a suburban salon was illegally shooting up its clients with Botox, Sarah Alcorn ’90 went undercover: “I wore too much makeup and acted like a ditz.” Searching Boston’s homeless shelters for a junkie who’d witnessed an armed …
Issue: September-October 2016
How Advertising Works
1. How to advertise 2. What makes an advertising campaign successful? 3. The benefits of advertising in print 4. Why advertising in Harvard Magazine is better than other publications 1. How to advertise a) Decide on a budget. No matter what the dollar …
Passions at Play
"A home is not a mere transient shelter," H.L. Mencken wrote in Prejudices: Fifth Series, "its essence lies in its permanence, in its capacity for accretion and solidification, in its quality of representing, in all its details, the personalities of the …
Issue: March-April 2005
Arts and Sciences Aspirations
The new academic structure created by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) in the summer of 2003 has yielded its twin first fruits. The divisional deans (for the humanities, social sciences, and physical and applied sciences) and the equivalent chair of …
Issue: January-February 2005
Brevia
Freshman to Freshmen William C. Kirby Justin Ide / Harvard News Office Welcoming his first College entering class as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, William C. Kirby played the historian he is in remarks to the '06ers on the evening of …
Issue: November-December 2002