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The Shape of Sound
During her junior year of college, Jessica Shand ’22 discovered topology—a branch of mathematics that studies how far shapes can stretch and morph before they lose their core properties. “I just thought it was so strange,” she says, “seeing these …
Issue: May-June 2025
The Dangers of Mirror Life
Synthetic biologists can alter the genes of microbes, plants, and animals to give them new abilities, with wide-ranging applications in medicine, agriculture, and manufacturing. But one advance in the field has raised special concern: that researchers …
Issue: May-June 2025
The Places You’ll Go
What links Friendly’s Ice Cream, the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and the Indian motorcycle? Where did the Game of Life, M1 rifle, and Dr. Seuss originate? Here’s a hint: it’s also where the game of basketball was invented during a harsh New England winter …
Issue: November-December 2021
The Rights of Nature
Happy is 54 years old , 8,500 pounds, and, notably, an elephant. Nonetheless, in 2018, a group called the Nonhuman Rights Project sued on Happy’s behalf, arguing that she is a legal person (like a corporation or a ship), and therefore should be able to …
A Sister’s Plea for Her Brother’s Freedom
Before he was placed in solitary confinement in January 2019, Ekpar Asat cut the nails of fellow detainees in a Xinjiang concentration camp for Uighurs, an ethnic minority based in Northwest China. The elderly prisoners’ hands shook too much to do it …
Painful Questions from Indigenous Leaders
At a Radcliffe Institute conference intended to launch the process of making amends for Harvard’s long history of injustice against indigenous communities—detailed in a 2022 University report —the biggest agenda item wasn’t listed in the official program: …
Harvard Football Great Performances: Colton Chapple ’13
Had the coronavirus not scrambled the Harvard gridiron season along with so much else in our lives, we would be embarking on Ivy League football in earnest, with the final five games of the 2020 campaign against rivals from the Ancient Eight. The first of …
FAS Dean’s Academic Priorities—and Financial Constraints
In presenting her annual report to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) this afternoon, during the first faculty meeting of the academic year, Dean Claudine Gay outlined her priorities within the context of the FAS’s intellectual and financial …
Gender Gains
In the wake of last year’s upheaval over appointing women to professorships in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and the challenges facing women in academic science and engineering (see “ Engineering Equity ,” July-August 2005, page 55), both …
Issue: May-June 2006
Gilbert and Sullivan, Today
ASher Chamoy ’25 tried multiple times, to no avail, to convince his high school to mount a work by the Victorian dramatist-composer duo W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. “I was always trying to get them to do The Pirates of Penzance or some other G&S …
Issue: November-December 2024
Fraught Fall
The scary thing was how normal everything had come to seem, in a little more than five months. First-year students and their families moved into an all-but-deserted Harvard Yard, with traffic officers routing lone cars and enforcing the 20-minute …
Issue: November-December 2020
Protesters Walk Out of Harvard Commencement
When Harvard announced that 13 students would not be allowed to graduate this spring due to their involvement in the pro-Palestine encampment, activists organized their own graduation. During the conferral of degrees Thursday morning, hundreds of …
Football: Harvard 34, Georgetown 3
In gridiron lore, Notre Dame has the Four Horsemen. Fordham boasts the Seven Blocks of Granite. Now, Harvard has the Five Road Graders. From tackle to tackle on the offensive line, left to right they are: Adam Redmond ’16, Mic Mancinelli ’15, Nic Easton …
Emerging Maine Artists
Maine-based art can sometimes exhibit tired tropes: lobster buoys piled on a wharf; sailboats dotting a sunny harbor; pine trees and craggy rocks along the ocean. There’s none of that, though, in As We Are. This show of works by 14 emerging Maine artists …
Issue: March-April 2025
A Presidency’s Early End
After five years of frequent controversy on matters of fundamental academic and intellectual substance, and the style in which those issues were pursued, the Harvard presidency of Lawrence H. Summers will end on June 30. Throughout his administration, …
Issue: May-June 2006