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Plants on a Changing Planet
Maryville , Tennessee, lies near the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, a range home to more tree species than exist in all of Europe. Benton Taylor grew up amidst this abundance, but as a boy, he barely noticed the plants. In the nearby national …
Issue: May-June 2024
Cambridge 02138
Charter Schools Paul Peterson’s call for school reform (September-October, page 37) is an exemplary display of the weaknesses of the charter-led education “reform” movement. Brimming with needless hostility to teacher’s unions (which have issues, to be …
Issue: November-December 2016
You Are What (Your Microbes) Eat
In the late 2000s, Rachel Carmody was spending a lot of time counting calories. An anthropology graduate student at Harvard, she was studying whether cooking changed the number of calories the gut can extract from food. When humans invented cooking …
Issue: November-December 2023
Advancing Fields of Knowledge
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ (FAS) intellectual prowess was on display following its capital-campaign launch in Sanders Theatre on Saturday morning, October 26 . After campaign addresses by President Drew Faust and FAS dean Michael D. Smith, six …
Final Clubs: The Lingering Aftermath
As previously reported, the Harvard Corporation has adopted a policy that prohibits undergraduate members of unrecognized single-gender social organizations (USGSOs: final clubs, fraternities, and sororities) from holding leadership positions in …
The Call of the Creeks
Hudson Valley artist James Coe ’79 enjoys tromping through “mucky, smelly, low-tide salt marshes.” A 2011 visit to the one at Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary on Cape Cod spawned a series of studies and oil paintings, the latest of which, …
Issue: September-October 2017
“A Vast Slave Society”
Throughout last Friday’s daylong conference at the Radcliffe Institute on slavery and its historical ties to Harvard and other universities, the conversation kept coming back to something that writer Ta-Nehisi Coates had said during the morning’s keynote …
Colossal Blossom
The largest flower in the world, Rafflesia arnoldii, is more than three feet across. With no roots, shoots, stems, or leaves, this parasitic plant is stealthy, visually undetectable until it prepares to bloom. Buds erupt without warning from an infected …
Issue: March-April 2017
Larry Summers Reflects
In the decade since Lawrence H. Summers departed Massachusetts Hall, the former Harvard president, now Eliot University Professor, took a sabbatical; resumed teaching; joined President Barack Obama’s administration to help secure recovery from the …
The Harvard Remarks of the Aga Khan
During his Jodidi Lecture at Harvard’s Memorial Church, co-sponsored by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Prince Alwaleed Islamic Studies Program, on November 12, His Highness the Aga Khan, Imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims (and a …
The Road to Romance
"I'm at that age where I'm crossing the threshold from high-school-fantasy concepts of romance to the brutal, painful, hopeless world of adult dating." ~ Sophia Chang '01 SEE ALSO • "I don't want to be stereotyped." • "We tend to …
Issue: March-April 2003
Medicine by Model
It's a troubling area, the economics of saving lives. Take cervical cancer, for example. In the United States we have spent enormous sums for the prevention and treatment of the disease and have even—unlike the case with most cancers—learned …
Issue: July-August 2002
Stem-cell Science
Portraits by Stu Rosner The next time you look in a mirror, reflect on this: the face staring back at you is literally not the same one you saw two months ago. Your skin is constantly renewing itself. Like most specialized cells in your body, skin cells …
Issue: July-August 2004
Life’s Beginnings
Are the inhabitants of Earth the only life forms in the universe, or could life exist elsewhere? As astronomers rapidly identify exoplanets—those beyond our solar system—the question has been transformed from a science-fiction trope to one discussed in …
Issue: September-October 2013
From the Archives: Animal Research
The volume of biomedical research, and of trials of new therapies, has increased dramatically in recent decades, fueled by advances in understanding of the genome and how to manipulate it, methods of processing huge data sets, and fundamental discoveries …