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The Psyche on Automatic
Though snap judgments get no respect, they are not so much a bad habit as a fact of life. Our first impressions register far too quickly for any nuanced weighing of data: “Within less than a second, using facial features, people make what are called …
Issue: November-December 2010
The Mindfulness Chronicles
In 1981, early in her career at Harvard, Ellen Langer and her colleagues piled two groups of men in their seventies and eighties into vans, drove them two hours north to a sprawling old monastery in New Hampshire, and dropped them off 22 years earlier, in …
Issue: September-October 2010
Cambridge 02138
Multimedia Matters “ Professor Video ,” by Craig Lambert ( November-December 2009, page 34 ) left me mildly depressed. Not because I teach here, but because my college-bound daughter is considering applying here. When she was in public school, her parents …
Issue: January-February 2010
Harvard's Annual Financial Report Fully Details 2009 Losses
Updated The Harvard University Financial Report for fiscal year 2009 , published October 16, contains more than the usual amount of dramatic material, headlined by the $11-billion loss of endowment wealth —the most important factor driving budget …
Cambridge 02138
Elsa Dorfman With great joy I read “The Portraitist” (by Sophia Nguyen, September-October, page 30), on Elsa Dorfman. I clearly remember her coming to Mather House to be a tutor, her smile and her expertise. With amusement I remember her posting a notice …
Issue: November-December 2017
Making Credit Safer
It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance your home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting your family out on the …
Issue: May-June 2008
Lawrence Lessig: What Leads to Academic Corruption?
There’s a kind of academic corruption that most people have never considered. Not plagiarism. Not cheating on an exam. This is the kind of corruption that occurs when corporations and industry lobbying groups pay academics for expert testimony before …
A Higher Degree of Responsibility
Editor’s note: Amid rising concerns about economic inequality, climate change, and riven politics, the role of capitalist enterprise has come into question—at least when defined solely in terms of maximizing profitability. Even such modest notions as …
Issue: March-April 2023
Seamus Heaney, Digging with the Pen
One of the most revealing questions you can ask about any poet has to do with his sense of responsibility. To whom or what does he hold himself responsible in his writing? The poet who replies Nothingwho believes that the concept of responsibility is …
Issue: November-December 2006
Cambridge 02138
ONLY IN AMERICA "Simple Hosts" (January-February, page 48) was most enlightening.Author Patricia Thomas achieved a journalistic tour de force in dealingwith the complex subject of host defense mechanisms against infections.What also struck me was that the …
Issue: March-April 2003
Harvard's Financial Aid Failings
"For those moving from warmer climates, inexpensive winter clothing can be purchased at local second-hand clothing stores, consignment shops, and discount stores." So applicants to Harvard's School of Public Health (SPH) are prominently advised, in the …
Issue: July-August 2002
The Community Scholar
Ahhng...ahhng... that strange sound somewhere between a ring and a buzzer announces a fire drill at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. Lines of students slowly pour out onto the grounds of the large, comprehensive high school. It's a warm, sunny October …
Issue: January-February 2002
Native Modern
Conjure your image of a Native American. Modern Americans might first think of American Indians as relics of the past, their memory consigned to kindergarten Thanksgiving dress-up and Hollywood Westerns. But much as they are marginalized in the story of …
Issue: January-February 2019
Building RoboBees: How Harvard Engineers Are Revolutionizing Micro-Robotics
One day nearly a decade ago, Gu-Yeon Wei was walking the corridors of Harvard’s newly established School of Engineering and Applied Sciences when he passed the office of Robert Wood. Wood had just made a splash in the engineering world by successfully …
Issue: November-December 2017
The State of the Final-Club Debate
Last Friday, when members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) received their materials for the first faculty meeting of the year, held on the afternoon of October 3, they may have thought they’d been sent an old agenda. A report from the USGSO …