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“A Step Up from the Usual Beautiful”
… Cliff Amero has led tours of the Essex River estuary for almost 30 years. The unique coastline, just north of Gloucester, with its snaking Great Marsh inlets, sand …
Issue: September-October 2020
Measuring the Other
… Physical anthropologist Henry Field led an expedition to southern Iraq in 1934 for an anthropometric study of the Marsh Arabs, or Ma'dan. Although the large bulk of material he brought back—photographs of men in …
Issue: January-February 2005
The State of Black America
… During a searching discussion Thursday evening at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) on the “State of Black America,” historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad opened … warning: “We are facing uncharted waters.” Surveying the rise of Trumpism and the past several years of proliferating …
“The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” at the ART Garners Mixed Reviews
… After composer Stephen Sondheim penned a scathing letter to the editor in the New York Times responding to Patrick … on The American Repertory Theater’s imminent revival of Porgy and Bess , theatergoers nationwide waited in … “are largely faithful to the spirit and the structure of the original.” And in Audra McDonald, he declares, the …
As Supreme Court Takes Up Gun Ban, Greenhouse Is Watching
… Did the framers of the Bill of Rights intend the "right to bear arms" to apply only for … Is the possibility that American citizens will need to rise up against a tyrannical government so remote that the …
The Players
… This November 17 marks the 135th iteration of The Game—and more vividly, the fiftieth anniversary of the titanic “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29” edition: a …
Issue: November-December 2018
AI and Adversarial Attacks
… The privacy and security issues surrounding big data, the lifeblood of artificial intelligence, are well known: large streams … change decisions. A credit score, for example, might rise significantly if one of the data points used to …
Issue: January-February 2019
Taking It to the Streets
… DaviD C. grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. With no father around and a drug-addicted mother, he moved through foster homes, gathering a fragile sense of worth from a gang of friends. “All I aspired to was being important on the …
Issue: January-February 2009
Class of ’63 Members Open a Time Capsule
… Twenty-five years ago, in the spring of 1988, six alums from the class of 1963 … conference room in Eliot House. (The group, originally comprised of 12, lived together in Eliot House as students, and …
The Case for Universities
… In a June 30 address to the Royal Irish Academy at Trinity College, Dublin, where … with alumni) , President Drew Faust reemphasized her vision of the place of research universities “in a changing and … both social and individual, she said—so it comes as no surprise that students and faculty members are increasingly …
Harvard Class of ’17 Yield Reaches 82 Percent
… Of the 2,029 students offered admission to the Harvard College class of 2017 (a mere 5.8 percent of the …
The Ultimate Blasts from the Past
… In the 1960s, the United States secretly launched several … During their orbits, the satellites observed bursts of gamma rays—flashes of extremely high … detect from ground-based telescopes. Much of Stanek's data arises from observing changes in the optical afterglow. …
Issue: November-December 2002
Chinese Pottery: The First Five Millennia
… Connoisseurs have long celebrated—and collectors craved—the beauty and technical brilliance of Chinese ceramics: the floral exuberance of Qing dynasty … the candlepower. Mysteries requiring further scholarship arise. Certain Majiayao vessels are masters of craftsmanship: …
The Brain in the Basement
… HouseZero , as the wood-shingled building at 20 Sumner Road in Cambridge is … for Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC), a unique example of sustainable retrofitting. But what really sets this sustainability project …
Issue: July-August 2018
Welcome to the Blogosphere
… At theissue.com , Matt Dalio ’06 compiles recent posts from various blogs and presents them in the format of an on-line newspaper. There are thousands of blogs out there; Dalio and his staff read them so the …