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Harvard’s Nobel Prize Incubator
A striking phenomenon in the biomedical sciences is that great scientists sometimes arise in clusters at a particular time and place that fosters outstanding scientific achievement. Certain institutions, indeed certain places within institutions, succeed …
Writing Crime into Race
“You should have a record.” That sentence dropped like a hammer inside the meeting room where Khalil Gibran Muhammad, then 21 years old, was sitting across the table from a Philadelphia police-union lawyer, answering questions about the day he’d briefly …
Issue: July-August 2018
Surprise Endings
It was the championship season that wasn’t. Heavily favored to retain the Ivy League title, the football team rolled over its first five opponents, outscoring them 205-67. Then came the October Surprise. In a calamitous fourth quarter at Princeton, …
Issue: January-February 2013
An Authentic Act
It seemed an inconsequential moment on what had been a momentous day: late on a Saturday in mid January, women’s basketball coach Kathy Delaney-Smith ( profiled here ) stood outside her team’s locker room in Lavietes Pavilion with a basketball in her …
Code Is Law
Every age has its potential regulator, its threat to liberty. Our founders feared a newly empowered federal government; the Constitution is written against that fear. John Stuart Mill worried about the regulation by social norms in nineteenth-century …
Tracy K. Smith's Speech
(Speech published as prepared for delivery) Good afternoon, and thank you. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be present with you here today. One week after Commencement, at the end of a season when so much work has been completed, and presented and …
What It Means to Be OK
The doctor asked the man to tell her what he remembered, and so he took a breath and began to speak. In the months since he’d left the intensive-care unit where he nearly died, he had been over these events again and again, searching his own memory and …
Issue: January-February 2019
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern Commencement Address
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern Harvard Commencement Speech, May 26, 2022 (As prepared for delivery) E oku manukura, nga pou haemata o te ngahere. Te Piko o Te Mahuri, tera te tipu o te rakau. E tipu, e rea, ka puta, ka ora. Tena koutou katoa. …
President Maia Sandu's Speech
Dear Dean Elmendorf, Distinguished faculty, Dear graduates, It’s a big honor for me to address you at the end of this amazing Kennedy School experience and at the start of your next fascinating journey. Fourteen years ago, when I got my …
Football 2018: Harvard 45, Yale 27
The 135th playing of The Game on Saturday at Fenway Park had a flyover, fireworks, memories, controversy, second-guessing, at least one dignitary, a dastardly digit, trickeration, inspiration, heartbreak and (probably) the first mass chorus of “Sweet …
Self-Fashioning in Society and Solitude
Editor’s note: Each spring term since 2008, Hobbs professor of cognition and education Howard E. Gardner and Pforzheimer professor of teaching and learning Richard J. Light —in cooperation with the Freshman Dean’s Office and a group of facilitators—have …
Issue: September-October 2013
Bryan Stevenson on the Shadow of White Supremacy
The audience could sense where the story was going almost as soon as Bryan Stevenson began telling it. Two black children in the barely desegregated South, hurtling with giddy, unguarded elation toward their first swim in a pool that until recently had …
Psychiatry by Prescription
By the time he reached his early thirties, James was a promising scientist who had all the makings of an academic star. He had earned a stream of fellowships and was on the path to tenure at one of Boston’s preeminent universities. But James had a …
Issue: July-August 2006
News Briefs
Preventing Sexual Assault The final report of the University’s task force on the prevention of sexual assault, chaired by former provost Steven E. Hyman, recommended that each Harvard school institute mandatory, annual assault-prevention training for all …
John S. Rosenberg , Jonathan Shaw , Marina N. Bolotnikova , Laura Levis
Issue: May-June 2016
Faculty Diversity
When alumni, after a long absence, stroll through Harvard Yard or return to any other university campus, two questions usually come to mind: "What's different?" and "What's the same?" Even a casual observer visiting alma mater for the first time in 30 …
Issue: March-April 2002