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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
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
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
From Law Books to Cookbooks
For her first vegan cookbook, published in 2019, Nisha Vora, J.D. ’12, had five and a half months to develop, test, and photograph all the recipes. After she cultivated a following on the vegan cooking blog Rainbow Plant Life , Penguin, Random House …
Issue: September-October 2024
Universities’ Financial Straits: A Moody’s Retrospective
In the credit-industry equivalent of a thriller, Moody’s Investors Service on June 14 released “Liquidity and Credit Risk at Endowed U.S. Universities and Not-for-Profits.” The report, by Moody's vice president Roger Goodman and analyst Stephanie Woeppel, …
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
Taking Teaching Seriously
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) has begun a effort to encourage innovative, effective teaching. A committee of nine senior professors, named on September 4, aims to bring preliminary recommendations to the full faculty for discussion by February 1. …
Issue: November-December 2006
Growth is Good
Economists have always been very good at detailing the material consequences of modern economic growth. It makes us taller: we are perhaps seven inches taller than our preindustrial ancestors. It makes us healthier: babies today have life expectancies in …
Issue: January-February 2006
Cambridge 02138
Charter Schools Paul Peterson’s call for school reform (September-October, page 37) is an exemplary display of the weaknesses of the charter-led education “reform” movement. Brimming with needless hostility to teacher’s unions (which have issues, to be …
Issue: November-December 2016
Stadium Stories
November 1903: Dartmouth scores the first Stadium touchdown. Note unfinished stands. Harvard University Sports Information INAUSPICIOUS START November 14, 1903. In the first game played in the newly completed Stadium, Dartmouth—winless in its 18 …
Issue: September-October 2003
Capitalism Campaign
Harvard Business School (HBS), established in 1908, on September 21 formally launched its first capital campaign. The timing might not seem propitious: the aftermath of the late 1990s stock-market bubble, recession, and widespread financial and accounting …
Issue: November-December 2002
Advancing Fields of Knowledge
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ (FAS) intellectual prowess was on display following its capital-campaign launch in Sanders Theatre on Saturday morning, October 26 . After campaign addresses by President Drew Faust and FAS dean Michael D. Smith, six …
Final Clubs: The Lingering Aftermath
As previously reported, the Harvard Corporation has adopted a policy that prohibits undergraduate members of unrecognized single-gender social organizations (USGSOs: final clubs, fraternities, and sororities) from holding leadership positions in …
The Call of the Creeks
Hudson Valley artist James Coe ’79 enjoys tromping through “mucky, smelly, low-tide salt marshes.” A 2011 visit to the one at Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary on Cape Cod spawned a series of studies and oil paintings, the latest of which, …
Issue: September-October 2017
“A Vast Slave Society”
Throughout last Friday’s daylong conference at the Radcliffe Institute on slavery and its historical ties to Harvard and other universities, the conversation kept coming back to something that writer Ta-Nehisi Coates had said during the morning’s keynote …