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Off the Shelf
Immigration Economics, by George J. Borjas , Scrivner professor of economics and social policy (Harvard, $49.95). A Kennedy School scholar’s technical synthesis of the theories and models used to analyze the flow of labor across boundaries. The …
Issue: September-October 2014
Avant-garde, Post-Romantic
There is nothing casual about the music of composer Hannah Lash, Ph.D. ’10. “I’m drawn to highly, highly pigmented emotions,” she says. “Things have to be the most fully realized they can possibly be.” That was certainly the case in 2010, when a thief …
Issue: January-February 2013
How Measles Destroys Immune Memories
The measles outbreak in Texas, which has now spread to New Mexico, has infected mainly unvaccinated children. Of 159 cases, all but five were in unvaccinated individuals. One child has died. Cases have also been reported in six other states, including New …
Ring of the Road
Currently, 94 million Americans own a cellular phone, and 90 percent of those owners make calls while driving. Although cell phones appeared on the U.S. market only in the mid 1980s, a majority of Americans will own one by the year 2005 if the trend …
News in Brief
Physician-Writers on the Podium A pair of prominent physician-authors will be the speakers at the 374th Commencement, on May 29, and on Alumni Day, June 6. Abraham Verghese, a physician and writer who is Meier and Lane provostial professor of medicine at …
Issue: May-June 2025
How Do Movies Use Music?
Midway through the 2001 jukebox musical film Moulin Rouge! , Ewan McGregor serenades Nicole Kidman on a rooftop. As McGregor woos Kidman, he cycles through a dozen popular love songs. While students in Music 22 (“Film Sound/Film Music”) recognized many …
Football: Harvard 28-New Hampshire 23
Harvard football fans might have been permitted a sinking feeling of déjà vu during the fourth quarter at the Stadium last Friday night. The opponent had just scored to cut the home team’s lead to 28-23 and now the Crimson offense was charged with running …
Diagnosis by Fiction
In 1968 , Stephen Bergman ’66, M.D. ’73, was driving through the desert in Morocco on a dead-straight road. At one point, he noticed the sun going down directly in front of him while the moon was rising behind. “I had never seen anything like that on …
Issue: March-April 2024
Poise, in Spite of Everything
“You have to get the eyes right,” says portrait artist Nina Skov Jensen ’25. “You can mess up a lot of other things and it won’t matter, but the eyes have to be right.” That was one of the first lessons Jensen absorbed when she began teaching herself to …
Issue: May-June 2024
Financial Update: Harvard Retains Triple-A Rating, Princeton Foresees Deeper Cuts
Moody's Investors Service , the credit-rating agency, has issued a review of Harvard's creditworthiness, and maintained its Aaa and associated ratings on $5.8 billion of outstanding debt, with a "stable" outlook for the future. Its evaluation, released on …
Harder Times
Abruptly, the financial challenges facing Harvard—whose programs, people, and physical plant have prospered from the seven-fold-plus appreciation of the endowment in the past 15 years—have attracted urgent attention. Late on December 2, the University …
Issue: January-February 2009
Moving On
Jonathan Gorham ’71 recently helped his mother move from a retirement community in Maine to an assisted-living apartment closer to where he and his family live, in Woodbridge, Connecticut. At 87, she has dementia and increasingly needs help taking …
Issue: July-August 2005
Is Harvard Antisemitic?
When Hamas terrorists attacked Israel last October 7, they unleashed death and destruction—and also inflamed American prejudice on ethnic and religious grounds. Within hours, allegations of such bias came to Harvard. A hasty October 7 student letter …
A Gene Therapy Breakthrough
As a young man, Sharif Tabebordbar remembers seeing his father struggling to play soccer, and then losing the ability to ride a bike. He could only watch as his father declined, his once healthy body ravaged by a degenerative muscle disease that …
Zakaria Shares Message of Hope in Commencement Speech
Journalist Fareed Zakaria , Ph.D. '93, LL.D. ’12, painted an upbeat picture of today’s world in his Commencement address on May 24. In summing up the world graduates are entering, many speakers focus on doom and gloom: degree candidates “are told they are …