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How Same-Sex Marriage Came to Be
Fifty years ago, every state criminalized homosexual sex, and even the American Civil Liberties Union did not object. The federal government would not hire people who were openly gay or permit them to serve in the military. Police routinely raided gay …
Issue: March-April 2013
Cambridge 02138
Fie on Al Franken Your fawning feature article on the aggressive and obnoxious Al Franken was extremely ill taken (" Al Franken: You Can Call Me Senator "). Franken, whose ideas and value system are comprehensively wrong, is an embarrassment to everyone, …
Issue: May-June 2012
Cambridge 02138
The Death Penalty I am not familiar with the Steikers’ work, other than through the comprehensive article in the November-December 2016 issue (“ Death Throes ,” by Lincoln Caplan, page 56). However, over the years (I suppose like most lawyers), I have …
Issue: January-February 2017
Investing vs. Harvesting
Pforzheimer professor of teaching and learning Richard J. Light likely knows about more American colleges and universities—small and large, public and private—than any other scholar of higher education. He has met with the leaders, trustees, faculty and …
Richard J. Light , Allison Jegla
Issue: July-August 2022
The Way of the Critic
In 2012, New York Times film critic Anthony “Tony” Scott ’87 (writing under his byline, A.O. Scott) reviewed a big Hollywood release, The Avengers . He praised some aspects of the movie and bemoaned others, specifically “its sacrifice of originality on …
Issue: November-December 2019
The Science of Sex
The “Sins of the Mother,” trumpets a headline in the journal Science , warning of a “maternal assault” against children. Another headline calls mothers “smoking guns,” the source of incalculable harm. What wrongs have these mothers committed? Not any sort …
Issue: November-December 2019
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
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 …
Issue: March-April 2000
Lord Mayor for a Day
Recently , a news story caught my eye: an old friend and Dunster classmate, Michael Mainelli, was elected the 695 th Lord Mayor of London. While we both graduated from Harvard in 1984, Michael began as class of 1981, interrupting his undergraduate studies …
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
The Unruly Academy
One fall day in 1967, Neil L. Rudenstine, Ph.D. ’64, a “recently minted assistant professor,” found himself walking by Mallinckrodt Hall, where a crowd of students had blocked the entry to impede the work of a Dow Chemical Company recruiter, on campus to …
Issue: March-April 2025
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 …
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 …
“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