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Beneath Talk of Unity, an Untidy Truth
… The election violence in Kenya, which lasted for several … to restore the country’s reputation. By March 2009, tens of thousands of Kenyans were still living in refugee camps, but the …
Issue: November-December 2009
Springtime Antics at the Arnold Arboretum
… means Lilac Sunday—a 112-year-old annual celebration on Mother’s Day in honor of the delightfully fragrant, eye-catching flowers. The … 15,000 woody-plant specimens, is home to its fair share of these springtime stars. But as the too-long winter …
Issue: May-June 2022
Harvard Long Jump Record of 93 Years Broken
… The Harvard record in the long jump—25 feet, 3 inches—a … archives ), the scholar-athlete was hailed as “a breaker of barriers” because his achievements stretched beyond track … press comment” at the time. Taking up the mantle of Harvard record-holder in the long jump is freshman Elliot …
Making Art Work
… At Baltimore’s Johnston Square Elementary School, hundreds of students and staffers pour through the doors twice a day, braving intersections where cars … crashes involving pedestrians or cyclists, and a 27 percent rise in drivers yielding to pedestrians with the right of …
Issue: September-October 2022
Harvard Borrows $2.5 Billion: The Costs and Rationale
… Moving promptly to tap the credit markets for additional financial resources--as … bonds on December 10 (up from an initial projection of $600 million), Bloomberg also reported. Size and … income distributed from working-capital investments has risen more than income distributions from the endowment (an …
The 2008 Phi Beta Kappa Oration
… Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, formerly Higgins professor of physics at Harvard, delivers his Phi Beta Kappa Oration, … now Josey-Welch Foundation Regents Professor in science at the University of Texas at Austin. Text copyright (c) 2008 …
The Beauty Bounty
… well. Since 1994, numerous studies have found that workers of above- average beauty earn 5 to 15 percent more than those with below-average looks. Those differences are of a similar order of magnitude as the premiums we associate with race and gender, says …
Issue: November-December 2006
Four Freedoms Park Honors FDR, Class of 1904
… In 1972, Welfare Island in the East River was renamed Roosevelt Island; a year later, … Louis I. Kahn was charged with designing a park in honor of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, A.B. ’04, LL.D. ’29, … School 22 Chorus—gathered on the island on October 17 to officially open the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms …
Seeing Stars
… “We’ll be able to see the beginning of the universe as we know it today,” says … colleagues worldwide are also joined in a terrestrial enterprise: the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) , an extraordinary …
Issue: May-June 2013
Food Stamp Entrepreneurs
… unexpected advice for policymakers who want people to start their own businesses: give them welfare, including access to … their ability to save money for investment. “Most of the evidence we’ve seen so far says that the effects tend … is inherently perilous. “If you can guarantee some kind of a floor”—if the venture fails, “their kids will still …
Issue: July-August 2016
The Harvard Corporation Reports
… Two years after the Harvard Corporation enacted sweeping governance reforms … Nannerl O. Keohane, LL.D. '93, and William F. Lee '72 offered a briefing on December 4 on how its work—and the … decisions” of financial consequence to the larger enterprise. “We have to be all sailing in the same direction,” he …
Addressing a Decline in Humanities Enrollment
… Enrollment in the humanities is down at Harvard College—and nationally, the number of bachelor’s degrees in the field has fallen by half from 1966 to 2010, from 14 percent to 7 percent of all degrees taken. The news media periodically highlight …
“No Going Back to Normal”
… During much of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic forced closures throughout the country, Ibrahim Barry felt stuck in his head. A … available and no school to attend. Instead, he spent much of his time following the most sought-after basketball …
Issue: July-August 2022
Off the Shelf
… Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free: And Other Paradoxes of Our Broken Legal System, by Jed S. Rakoff, J.D. ’69 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27). A former …
Issue: March-April 2021
Always Leaning Into Wrongdoing
… foray into that question opens on Hawaii’s Big Island, in the midst of a volcanic eruption. “You can feel that you are present … truest self, perhaps—or merely something unformed? In The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, the Cogan University …
Issue: September-October 2017