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Sommersemester
It is week 3 of my Sommersemester at the Freie Universität in west Berlin and finally—finally—I am hitting my stride. “In The Good Person of Szechuan, Berthold Brecht has created what looks at first like a parable about virtue and vice,” I …
Issue: July-August 2005
Football 2018: Harvard 21, Princeton 29
Where had we seen this scenario before? Forty-some seconds remaining. Harvard scoring to cut the traditional rival’s lead to 29-21. Now comes the onside kick. If the Crimson recovers, takes it in for a touchdown and then adds the two-point conversion, the …
Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions Make Opening Arguments
In a packed Boston courtroom Monday, Harvard and the anti-affirmative-action group Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) presented arguments in the first day of trial of a four-year-old civil-rights lawsuit charging that the College’s admissions office …
America and Latin America
George W. Bush is not the first president to make Latin America a personal priority. Nor is he the first to drop the region from his agenda when more urgent issues arise. Latin Americans are not sure whether they prefer presidential attention or neglect. …
Issue: January-February 2002
Harvard’s Governing Boards Refreshed
It’s the changing of the University guard: as President Drew Faust conducts her last Commencement and president-elect Lawrence S. Bacow prepares to succeed her on July 1, Harvard’s two governing boards have new personnel, too. The Corporation had a …
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
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
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
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
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
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