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Twigs Bent Left or Right
How did Franklin Delano Roosevelt ’04, born in 1882 to a privileged, aristocratic life in New York’s Hudson River Valley, become a liberal reformer? Historians have proposed several possibilities. It may have been the example of his father, who stood …
Issue: January-February 2006
Intelligent Evolution
Pellegrino University professor emeritus Edward O. Wilson, a scholarly giant of biodiversity and sociobiology, remains at heart a teacher. His latest lesson concerns the continuing consequences of Charles Darwin’s “timeless and consistently inspirational” …
Issue: November-December 2005
The New Ancient Trend in Medicine
In the 1950s American Cancer Society had a Committee on Quackery. Later that turned into a committee on "unproven methods of cancer management," superseded by one on "questionable methods." The names indicate a gradual acceptance of the unconventional; …
Issue: March-April 2002
The Sesquicentennial All-Crimson Team
Harvard is celebrating the 150th anniversary of Crimson football. To commemorate the occasion, we have undertaken the daunting task of choosing the greatest players in the program’s history. (A tough job, but someone had to do it.) Our panel includes four …
Issue: November-December 2023
Cambridge 02138
A Too-Political Madison? In his review of a book about James Madison ( “America’s Little Giant,” January-February, page 56), Lincoln Caplan makes the statement that the Electoral College is “obsolete.” I suggest that it is not. The United “States” is just …
Issue: March-April 2018
Color and Incarceration
In 2005, during her first year of graduate school, Elizabeth Hinton traveled from New York to California to visit her cousin in prison. In some ways, she understood what to expect: for most of her childhood, she’d known family members who cycled in and …
Issue: September-October 2019
The Trilemma
If scholars’ intellectual interests emerge from their underlying worries, then economist Dani Rodrik’s lifelong preoccupation with the fate of developing countries grew out of his early life in Istanbul. Turkish government trade protections enabled his …
Issue: July-August 2019
The Opioids Emergency
“We are trying to get the house of medicine back in order.” That’s how one emergency-department doctor describes his efforts to rethink his work amid the still-mounting opioid epidemic. The scale of the crisis is almost unimaginable—70,000 lives lost to …
Issue: March-April 2019
Artificial Intelligence and Ethics
On March 18, 2018, at around 10 p.m. , Elaine Herzberg was wheeling her bicycle across a street in Tempe, Arizona, when she was struck and killed by a self-driving car. Although there was a human operator behind the wheel, an autonomous system—artificial …
Issue: January-February 2019
Continuity and Change
Lawrence S. Bacow , J.D.-M.P.P. ’76, Ph.D. ’78, will become the twenty-ninth president of Harvard on July 1. He was elected on Sunday, February 11, by the Corporation, the University’s senior governing board, with the consent of the Board of Overseers, …
Issue: May-June 2018
Cambridge 02138
THE STADIUM'S CENTENNIAL I was initially intrigued by the sidebar "Little Red Flag" in Craig Lambert and John Bethell's " First and 100 " (September-October, page 42). The sidebar listed previous carriers of the flag, this somewhat arcane snippet of …
Issue: November-December 2003
The Provost Meets the Press...
Harvey v. Fineberg '67, M.D. '71, M.P.P. '72, Ph.D. '80, who had served as dean of the School of Public Health since 1984, was appointed University provost in April 1997. He met with editors of Harvard Magazine at Massachusetts Hall late in October to …
The New Histories
In May 1968 , the university’s students wanted to change the world. Left-thinking ideologies like Maoism and socialism were in their minds, and “Vietnam” was on their lips. They went on strike, skipping classes and exams. They rioted and clashed with …
Issue: November-December 2014
Sowing Seeds
An early-November walk along an earthen path in Wakouktaw led around the edge of a paddy—the monsoon rice heavy and ready for harvest—to the small, trig plot where U Win Hlaing and his wife, Daw Than Than Sein, have grown cash crops for the past 22 years: …
Issue: January-February 2014
Popular Science
For thousands of ordinary people around the world, one of biology’s hardest problems is just a game. Both scientists and supercomputers have long struggled to predict the three-dimensional structures of the biological molecules called proteins. These …
Issue: January-February 2014