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Hopkinson Smith, Beyond the Instrument
… J.S. Bach as a musical ecologist. “He recycled so many of his own works,” Smith explains. “He never stopped trying … what he’d written.” It was an accepted musical practice at the time, but one imagines the composer was driven at least in part by pragmatism: his posts in a number of German cities required him to produce new compositions at …
Issue: May-June 2016
The Philosopher of the Real World
… a teenager, two political events shook her world. One was the Nicaraguan Revolution. As a 15-year-old living in … public high school she attended—“a bottom-up kind of place, with a focus on social justice”—and Siegel and her … the patterns of obtuse reactions that racial attitudes give rise to, and the incomprehension that occurs alongside their …
Issue: January-February 2024
Faculty Members Call for Divestment
… climate change , nearly 100 faculty members called on the president and the Harvard Corporation to do more. The signers of an open letter calling for divestment include leading … of the Earth’s surface, a melting of ice the world over, a rise in sea levels, acidification of the oceans, and an …
Off the Shelf
… accent … Recent books with a Harvard accent … 1007 … Off the Shelf … Off the Shelf … article …
How Life Began
… On a young, rocky planet, how might chemicals have come together in just the right way to form the very first cells? How … on advantageous traits to the next generation? The origins of life are especially murky because the geological record—the layers of rock and embedded fossils that hold clues about the …
Issue: July-August 2019
375th Anniversary “Festival” of Friendship and Food
… bright and sunny skies on Tuesday, October 11, Tercentenary Theatre was a frenzy of carpenters, electricians, and riggers making ready for a Harvard Big Event—but not the customary formalities of Commencement, with its rows of chairs for 30,000 seated …
Off the Shelf
… Owen M. Fiss, LL.B. ’64 (Oxford, $27.95). Yale’s Sterling Professor of Law emeritus argues that the commitment to democracy is embedded within the … aspirations of the Constitution.” New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend …
Issue: May-June 2024
Paid to Play
… in 1975, Jack R. Schylling '72 was supposed to be working the phones and organizing classmates for the Harvard College … Instead he was staring, bored and restless, out the window of his office in Holyoke Center. Suddenly a strange creature … he was mechanically inclined. He enjoyed taking apart small machines, bikes, and cars. Boats and aircraft, especially …
“To Break Our Own Rules”
… For years, Dan Chiasson, Ph.D. ’01, had been hearing their voices outside his office window, the frolic of high-schoolers attending … Chiasson last spring. His dual writing life in part gave rise to the stunning long poem “Must We Mean What We Say?” …
Issue: November-December 2020
How the Brain Replays Actions During Sleep
… or a teenager memorize his locker combination at the start of the semester? A good night’s sleep may play a … time in humans—that during sleep the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movements, replays skills that it …
Issue: November-December 2022
Chiseled Farewells
… In Rome's placid Protestant Cemetery, the remains of poet John Keats rest in a nameless grave that … the dead, rather than to pray for their souls. But with the rise of humanism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, …
Issue: November-December 2002
Off the Shelf
… Reputation and Power, by Daniel Carpenter, Freed professor of government (Princeton, $29.95 paper). At a time … over government and regulation (oil spills or financial crises, anyone?), the director of Harvard’s Center for American Political …
Issue: September-October 2010
Corporation Fellows Pass the Baton
… Reischauer ’63 will conclude his service as senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, the University’s senior governing … becoming involved with specific issues as they arise. During the controversy over the privacy of electronic …
Brenda Tindal Named Inaugural Chief Campus Curator
… After a national search, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has appointed Brenda Tindal … February 13. Tindal—who has been the executive director of the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture (HMSC) since May …
Encouraging Harvard to Resist
… has been updated to include reactions to Harvard declining the federal government's demands. This spring , federal … University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-Palestine campus protests who holds permanent U.S. … hospitals. Throughout the past month, several groups of Harvard alumni and faculty members have written and …