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The Science of Happiness
This doesn’t feel like a normal academic conference. True, the three-day Positive Psychology Summit is a sellout, with 425 attendees thronging the meeting rooms in downtown Washington, D.C. But despite the familiar trappings, something seems different. …
Issue: January-February 2007
Reforming Social Security
The current discussion of ways to reform the U.S. Social Security retirement system is becoming increasingly polarized over the issue of "privatization." This divide unfortunately obscures the fact that the views of most Democrats and Republicans on the …
Issue: March-April 2005
Who Built the Pyramids?
The pyramids and the Great Sphinx rise inexplicably from the desert at Giza, relics of a vanished culture. They dwarf the approaching sprawl of modern Cairo, a city of 16 million. The largest pyramid, built for the Pharaoh Khufu around 2530 B.C. and …
Issue: July-August 2003
Harvard Inaugurates President Lawrence S. Bacow
In his 3,600-word address in Tercentenary Theatre on the afternoon of October 5, Harvard’s newly inaugurated twenty-ninth president, Lawrence S. Bacow, powerfully restated, and amplified, the University’s commitments to truth, excellence, and opportunity …
An Orphaned Sewing Machine
Every object tells a story, and most objects tell many stories. Some can help us transcend boundaries between people, cultures, and academic disciplines to discover crosscurrents in history. Allow me to make that argument by examining a common object, …
A Literary Chameleon
Colson Whitehead ’91 has written a zombie-apocalypse novel, a coming-of-age novel set in the world of the black elite, a satiric allegory following a nomenclature consultant, a sprawling epic tracing the legend of the African American folk hero John …
Issue: September-October 2016
Regional Culinary Specialties—Caribbean & Latin America
An article by Cassandra Lucca, Let’s Go Editor-in-Chief and Danielle Eisenman, Let’s Go Associate Editor Though the burrito is a mainstay of Mexican and Tex-Mex cuisine well-known in the US, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean offers other equally …
The Pragmatist
At Tufts university , Lawrence S. Bacow famously invited members of the community to join him on early-morning runs: a chance to get a word with the president while training for the Boston Marathon. And so this past April 16—a very wet and miserable …
Issue: September-October 2018
Faculty Air Governance Concerns
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) devoted most of its last meeting of the academic year, on May 7, to an unusual, wide-ranging discussion of FAS and University governance. The subject was introduced as a formal agenda item, docketed in advance of the …
Le Professeur
September 14, 2015: Buttenwieser University Professor emeritus Stanley Hoffmann, a renowned scholar of international relations, American foreign policy, and French and European politics who spent his early teens hiding from the Gestapo in Vichy France, …
Issue: July-August 2007
Deep into Sleep
Not long ago, a psychiatrist in private practice telephoned associate professor of psychiatry Robert Stickgold, a cognitive neuroscientist specializing in sleep research. He asked whether Stickgold knew of any reason not to prescribe modafinil, a new …
Issue: July-August 2005
The Historian-Autobiographers
Should Harvard be grateful to Henry Adams for establishing a tradition of Harvard-trained historians who have written about their own lives, including their experiences as students and faculty members at Harvard? The Education of Henry Adams has become a …
Issue: November-December 2004
Marcyliena Morgan: How Has Harvard Cultivated Hiphop?
What does hiphop culture—rap music, break dancing, and graffiti—have to do with Harvard? In this episode, Monrad professor of social sciences Marcyliena Morgan explains that hiphop began with the children of people who marched in the civil-rights …
Edward Glaeser: Should We All Be Living in Cities?
Cities are an integral part of Earth’s future: by 2050, 68 percent of the world’s population will be living in an urban area. Solutions to social problems , from climate change to poverty , will therefore be tied to the fates of cities. In this …
Staci Gruber: How Does Marijuana Affect the Brain?
WEED, ganja , pot, flower, dope, grass, bud: marijuana has many names, but an even greater number of chemical constituents, from THC, the psychoactive component, to cannabidiols such as CBD, often touted for its therapeutic potential. In this episode, …