Search
The Egalitarian
At the moment , no book is more visible or abundant at the gift shop of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where more than a million visitors a year come to view the earliest copies of America’s founding documents, than Our Declaration —the most …
Issue: May-June 2016
A New Code of Conduct: Hacking Gender in Tech
Hackers hack for five main reasons, according to Parisa Tabriz, Google’s official “Security Princess”: They want security (in software). They enjoy the challenge (of breaking “unbreakable” defenses). They have something to say (and, perhaps, a point to …
A Family Farm
Three weeks before calving season at Keewaydin Ranch, two ranch hands yell and swat at the cows—“Hey! C’mon. Git. Git in there!”—ushering them out of a corral and into a squeeze shoot. The metal compartment holds the 1,200-pound creatures still enough for …
Issue: July-August 2018
The Undergraduate: Dear Younger Self
Since I was very young, I’ve routinely wished that my future self could give me advice. Despite having some doubts about how stable selves are over time, it’s something that I still wish for, from time to time—mostly when I’m anxious, upset, bored, or …
Issue: September-October 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 …
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 …