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You Are What (Your Microbes) Eat
In the late 2000s, Rachel Carmody was spending a lot of time counting calories. An anthropology graduate student at Harvard, she was studying whether cooking changed the number of calories the gut can extract from food. When humans invented cooking …
Issue: November-December 2023
A World of Literature
The résumé of Harvard’s Bernbaum professor of comparative literature might create the impression that “comp lit” means “the study of any literature from anywhere, ever.” At various points in his career, David Damrosch has written about the epic of …
Issue: September-October 2019
A Shakespearean Romance
Although I entered Harvard’s graduate program in English in 1974 believing I’d focus my attention on Romantic poetry, I soon gravitated to Widener X, the oddly signified office of Cabot professor of English literature G. Blakemore Evans in the main …
The Eugenic Temptation
The full-page advertisement in the Harvard Crimson a year ago came as no surprise. The text was straightforward: Intelligent, Athletic Egg Donor Needed For Loving Family. You must be at least 5´ 10´´ / Have a 1400+ SAT score / Possess no major family …
Plants on a Changing Planet
Maryville , Tennessee, lies near the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, a range home to more tree species than exist in all of Europe. Benton Taylor grew up amidst this abundance, but as a boy, he barely noticed the plants. In the nearby national …
Issue: May-June 2024
Getting Close, in Selma
Drew Gilpin Faust , then dean of the Radcliffe Institute, turned her historian’s lens on herself in “Living History” (May-June 2003), an account of her Virginia girlhood in the 1950s, amid intense resistance to implementing the Supreme Court’s ruling in …
Issue: September-October 2023
Further Undisclosed E-mail Investigations Revealed at Harvard
In a tense Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) meeting this afternoon, Michael D. Smith, the dean, revealed that additional “concerning actions”—further investigations of e-mail accounts—had been undertaken last fall during the Administrative Board (AB) …
Final Clubs: Toward a Vote
This afternoon, at its second meeting of the semester, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) continued the protracted debate over unrecognized single-gender social organizations (USGSOs)—namely, proposals by Harvard College to regulate final clubs (and …
William C. Kirby: Is China Ready for Leadership on the Global Stage?
China is the most populous country on Earth , and until a few hundred years ago, it was also the most economically powerful. Today, China is ascendant on the world stage . What does its government seek in its relationship with the United States? Do …
“Feelings Ought to Be Investigated”
“Jane Austen’s Fiction and Fans” is a class so well-liked that its instructor has been forced to put it on pause. “It grew so much in my first two years at Harvard that it has almost become too big to do it anymore,” says Deidre Lynch, Bernbaum professor …
Issue: January-February 2017
Harvard Faculty Debate Final Club Sanctions
Yesterday's regular meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) took up a contentious topic: whether undergraduates have a right to join single-gender social organizations, including final clubs, sororities and fraternities, without penalty. At …
The American Exception
Historian R.H. Tawney famously explored the ties between Protestantism and economic development in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). Now, nearly a century later, in a new book under the same title, Maier professor of political economy Benjamin …
Issue: January-February 2021
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 …
The Campaign Co-Chairs
The University-level leadership of The Harvard Campaign (which was unveiled during campus events at Memorial Church, Sanders Theatre, and Harvard Stadium on September 21) includes nine co-chairs and three honorary co-chairs. Each Harvard school’s …
Picture-Perfect
Commencements, the sages say, are beginnings . About to receive diplomas certifying that the world is now their oyster, the joyful graduates-to-be agree, mostly. But they also lament the endings : the loss of liberty that comes with student life, the …