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Making Credit Safer
It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance your home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting your family out on the …
Issue: May-June 2008
Cambridge 02138
Elsa Dorfman With great joy I read “The Portraitist” (by Sophia Nguyen, September-October, page 30), on Elsa Dorfman. I clearly remember her coming to Mather House to be a tutor, her smile and her expertise. With amusement I remember her posting a notice …
Issue: November-December 2017
Seamus Heaney, Digging with the Pen
One of the most revealing questions you can ask about any poet has to do with his sense of responsibility. To whom or what does he hold himself responsible in his writing? The poet who replies Nothingwho believes that the concept of responsibility is …
Issue: November-December 2006
Cities and Suburbs
Can our cities be made livable for all kinds of citizens, or are they condemned to be office ghettoes and entertainment zones used by suburban commuters? What has attracted the majority of Americans to the suburbs--and can those attractive qualities …
Harvard's Financial Aid Failings
"For those moving from warmer climates, inexpensive winter clothing can be purchased at local second-hand clothing stores, consignment shops, and discount stores." So applicants to Harvard's School of Public Health (SPH) are prominently advised, in the …
Issue: July-August 2002
The Community Scholar
Ahhng...ahhng... that strange sound somewhere between a ring and a buzzer announces a fire drill at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. Lines of students slowly pour out onto the grounds of the large, comprehensive high school. It's a warm, sunny October …
Issue: January-February 2002
Cambridge 02138
ONLY IN AMERICA "Simple Hosts" (January-February, page 48) was most enlightening.Author Patricia Thomas achieved a journalistic tour de force in dealingwith the complex subject of host defense mechanisms against infections.What also struck me was that the …
Issue: March-April 2003
Native Modern
Conjure your image of a Native American. Modern Americans might first think of American Indians as relics of the past, their memory consigned to kindergarten Thanksgiving dress-up and Hollywood Westerns. But much as they are marginalized in the story of …
Issue: January-February 2019
Building RoboBees: How Harvard Engineers Are Revolutionizing Micro-Robotics
One day nearly a decade ago, Gu-Yeon Wei was walking the corridors of Harvard’s newly established School of Engineering and Applied Sciences when he passed the office of Robert Wood. Wood had just made a splash in the engineering world by successfully …
Issue: November-December 2017
The State of the Final-Club Debate
Last Friday, when members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) received their materials for the first faculty meeting of the year, held on the afternoon of October 3, they may have thought they’d been sent an old agenda. A report from the USGSO …
From the Archives: The Millennial Class
Later today, the nearly 40,000 applicants to Harvard College’s class of 2021 will receive their decisions. Only a small fraction of them will be admitted. How do successful candidates pull it off? For a look inside the admissions process, Harvard Magazine …
Cambridge 02138
Harvard and Slavery While the new stone tablet on Wadsworth House acknowledging four slaves by name who worked there in the eighteenth century is on first glance praiseworthy as a first step (Brevia, “Spotlight on Slavery,” July-August, page 29), it is on …
Issue: September-October 2016
Is Small Beautiful?
In May 2012 , edX president Anant Agarwal introduced Harvard and MIT’s joint venture in massive open online courses (MOOCs)with a bold promise: “Online education will change the world.” In the years since, the hype surrounding MOOCs has oscillated between …
Issue: July-August 2015
Black, White, and Many Shades of Gray
In The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama , David Remnick relates a story from Obama’s first year at Harvard Law School, when he registered for “Race, Racism, and American Law,” a course taught by Randall Kennedy, now Klein professor of law. …
Issue: May-June 2013
Harvard’s Sober Annual Financial Report
Shaped as it is by the conventions of accounting, an institution’s annual financial report rarely reads like a novel. But the University’s financial report for fiscal year 2012 (ended last June 30), released today, manages to read like two novels—or at …