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At Home with Harvard: Nature Walks
This is the fifth installment in Harvard Magazine’ s new series, “At Home with Harvard,” a guide to what to read, watch, listen to, and do while social distancing. Read the prior pieces, featuring stories about Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum and spring …
Sequestering Carbon Dioxide in Diamonds
As a child, Robert C. “Bob” Hagemann, M.B.A. ’11, would go out into his garage and break the Styrofoam in the trash into little pieces. “My mom would come out into the garage and ask, ‘What are you doing?’ And I looked at her and I said, ‘I’m starting the …
What Harvard’s Senior Executives Earned Last Year
The University today released its tax return for nonprofit organizations (Form 990) for 2014 (covering the tax year from July 1, 2014, to June 30, 2015— Harvard’s fiscal year 2015 ). As is its practice, Harvard has simultaneously disseminated information …
Popping the Harvard Bubble
I’m celebrating my virtual Commencement from Harvard while living on another college campus: Arizona State University. There’s a faint irony to driving around the Phoenix suburbs and seeing roadside maroon-and-gold banners congratulating the Sun Devil …
New University Appointments
A new CEO at the Harvard Management Company; plus a new director at the Center for International Development. On the Harvard Management Company (which invests the endowment): See “ Stellar Swan Song ,” November-December 2005. University news release: New …
Commencement Address by John Lithgow ’67: “An Actor's Own Words”
by John Lithgow '67, Ar.D. '05 Mr. President, faculty, graduates, families, and friends, good afternoon and thank you for the honor of addressing you all today. This speech is a major event in my own personal history but an interesting little footnote …
Studying ChatGPT Like a Psychologist
Ask GPT-4 , the most advanced model of ChatGPT, to decode a string of text written in ROT13—a cipher that involves shifting each letter 13 places forward in the alphabet—and it will successfully complete the task. But ask it to decode a string written in …
Diagnosing the “Skills Gap”
The problem : There’s a “skills gap” in the American workforce. Employers searching for skilled candidates can’t find them—even as candidates applying to hundreds of jobs can’t get hired. The diagnosis: an underperforming partnership between community …
A Life in Harmonica
It was the night before a final exam and Scott Albert Johnson ’92 had some studying to do. Only he wasn’t studying. A suitemate who came to ask Johnson a question heard through the door an instructional cassette tape and a small, reedy instrument. “What …
Issue: May-June 2021
Fiction in Counterpoint
In 2005, while waiting to pay in the Bob Slate stationery store in Harvard Square, Thomas P. Wolf ’05 spotted a Moleskine composer’s notebook with gray-lined staves on the pages. “It was something I wanted to mess around with,” he says. He bought it. …
Issue: September-October 2012
The Faculty’s New Faces
Harvard’s faculty ranks have, gradually, become increasingly diverse. The intersection of lifetime tenured appointments; no mandatory retirement age; a decade of very constrained growth; and the long time it takes students to progress from studying a …
Issue: May-June 2019
Protesters Surround Mass. Hall in “Heat Week” Action
Two dozen students from the activist group Divest Harvard blockaded the doors of Massachusetts Hall early on Sunday evening, kicking off a weeklong protest of the University endowment’s continued investment in fossil-fuel companies. Harvard Heat Week …
Sasha
When Sasha joined Harvard’s staff in August 2022, she became the first non-human to receive a University ID. The Labrador Retriever recently graduated from Puppies Behind Bars, a nonprofit that trains incarcerated people to raise service dogs for veterans …
Issue: May-June 2024
A Dogged Observer
Daniel Mason ’98 got his idea for his 2023 novel North Woods while walking in a frozen forest, wondering what his dog was sniffing. During a yearlong retreat to Western Massachusetts, he’d wandered the woods, visually researching his book. At first, he …
Issue: March-April 2024
New Digs
New digs: Claudine Gay settles in at Massachusetts Hall—just across the Old Yard from her former Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean’s office in University Hall—on July 5, the first (post-holiday) workday in the thirtieth president’s new administration. A …
Issue: September-October 2023