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My Families
I didn’t know what avocados were until I met my host parents. I mean, I’d kind of heard of them, but had never really been fully acquainted. I definitely didn’t know how or when to eat them—or even if you could eat them at all. I didn’t drink coffee, and …
Issue: May-June 2013
From Here to Timbuktu
How Father Columba Stewart ’79, a Benedictine monk from Minnesota, came to be hiding in a Timbuktu hotel during a jihadist attack last summer is a story that begins in the fifth century. But the short answer is: he had flown to the medieval center of …
Issue: January-February 2018
Harvard Imposes Single-Gender Social Club Sanctions
Harvard College will implement the sanctions on student membership in unrecognized single-gender social organizations (USGSOs: the final clubs, fraternities, and sororities) first announced by President Drew Faust and dean of Harvard College Rakesh …
A Perforating Doubt
I remember getting very worried during my freshman year. People seemed to care about grades and GPAs and extracurriculars an awful lot more than I did. I found myself getting stressed in spite of myself—stressing about not being stressed. I was worrying …
Issue: January-February 2013
Dropping Nothing: Expanding Time
In July I did the most un-Harvard of things: I dropped my summer-school class. And the moment I did so, I felt amazingly happy. Being a Harvard Summer School proctor, working two part-time jobs, and trying to get my independent philosophy reading done, …
Summer Reflections
Despite having spent countless hours on the Internet, there is only one Google search I distinctly remember making. One day, when I lived at home in Ireland, I was so utterly and completely fed up with school that I typed “summer abroad” into Google and …
Issue: September-October 2012
Hume, Heaney, Harvard—and Peace in Northern Ireland
If only because politicians frequently quote them, you’re likely familiar with poet Seamus Heaney’s stirring lines about the too-rare possibility that “justice can rise up, / And hope and history rhyme.” President Joe Biden, for one, has often cited the …
Ken’s Story
A “rapidly developing revolution in cancer treatment” has prompted David G. Nathan, M.D., president emeritus of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, to detail three patients’ experiences in a forthcoming book, to help nonscientific readers understand the promise …
Issue: January-February 2007
Cambridge 02138
Crime and Incarceration The article about Elizabeth Hinton ( “Color and Incarceration,” by Lydialyle Gibson, September-October, page 40) included an observation by Hinton when she visited a loved one inside a California prison and saw “all these black and …
Issue: November-December 2019
The Plastic Earth
Jerry Mitrovica is a solid-earth geophysicist, but the description is inapt. He spends much of his time demonstrating that the earth is not firm at all—it moves. His lab in Cambridge, for example, oscillates up and down by nearly eight inches twice a day. …
Issue: September-October 2016
A Science Is Born
Thirty veterans of Harvard’s Aiken Computation Lab reunited on January 19 , 2020, some 50 years after each of us had a role in creating today’s networked, information-rich, artificially intelligent world. Rip van Winkles who had never fallen asleep, we …
Issue: September-October 2020
Jobs and Jail
In the 1970s and ’80s, America’s cities were engulfed in crisis. It’s a familiar story: factories were closed, urban centers hollowed out, and fragile working-class communities ruined. Often, it’s told as a white working-class story, but sociologist …
Issue: May-June 2021
Museums in our Midst
Even with New England’s rich history, it may be surprising to learn that there are hundreds of small museums scattered across the region. “One story of our museums is a sort of a ‘tale of two cities,’” says Dan Yaeger, M.T.S. ’83, executive director of …
Issue: September-October 2012
The Happiness Revolutionary
On a misty morning in February 2020, President Donald Trump sat on one side of the dais and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the other. In the middle, at the podium, was the keynote speaker, Arthur C. Brooks, sporting his signature pink shirt and skinny tie. …
Issue: January-February 2023
Work in the Key of Life
“If anyone had told me that I was going to become a reiki master teacher,” says Cynthia Ann Piltch ’74, “I would have said, ‘There’s a better chance of the pope becoming Jewish.’ I am a scientist. The idea of healing arts was just so alien to me.” Most of …
Issue: January-February 2011