Search
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 …
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
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 …
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
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 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
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 …
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
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