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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
Beyond Wages in the Workplace
… The terms of employment Harvard offers its lowest-paid and part-time workers would change significantly if the recommendations of a faculty and administrative …
Design in Layers
… Robert Pillsbury ’61, M.Arch. ’65, devoted himself to the pleasures of creation and construction, often in the form of large-scale industrial water and sewer …
Issue: March-April 2014
Harry Parker Honored on the Charles
… Rowers of many generations reunited at Harvard on Saturday morning, … into racing shells and row past Newell Boathouse in honor of their mentor, the late Harry Parker. Many were wearing the …
Love the One You’re With
… in a lifeboat; his sturdy peer (Mandy Patinkin) climbs out of a trunk. Strangers, they alone have survived a great flood. And for the next 90 minutes, the pair explore the realms of human existence, seeking to commune and thrive, despite …
Issue: May-June 2015
Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?
… The title of Alexander Keyssar’s new book— Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? —is also, he says, the question … Americans ask themselves every four years. The Stirling professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy …
Writing, Blocked
… that if you want to take every class at Harvard, work at the Writing Center. Think of it as scholarship meets improv: you’re sitting in a … their problems have little to do with writing. I was surprised at how many of us had similar stories. As we picked at …
Issue: November-December 2017
An Art Laboratory for the Twenty-first Century
… Sitting in the Calderwood Courtyard this past Sunday, beneath a luminous glass roof designed by Renzo Piano, members of the Harvard community and Cambridge residents officially …
Facebook’s Failures
… Jeff Horwitz began asking Facebook for information about the inner workings of its complex recommendation system, which pushes … Public Policy, and moderated by Latanya Sweeney , Paul professor of the practice of government and technology, the …
Are Mushrooms the New Meat?
… On the western side of Martha’s Vineyard, a dirt road winds past secluded summer homes with ocean views and then dead-ends at an eerie sight: 45,000 oak logs stacked in crosshatch formations under a canopy of trees. In the nearby lot, young men with chainsaws and a …
Issue: July-August 2019
India’s Sacred Geography
… Three decades ago, Diana L. Eck—master of Lowell House and Wertham professor of law and psychiatry … has become ever more expansive, as she has explored the interconnected pilgrimage sites throughout India. Now … that may also help to explain to Western readers the rise of place-based Hindu nationalism in Indian politics. …
Issue: March-April 2012
Debating School Choice
… During the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976, Boston Herald American … photographer Stanley Forman, NF ’80, snapped a spot photo of a white man assailing a black man with a pole bearing the … Boston in the 1970s was undergoing a different kind of revolution. “The Soiling of Old Glory,” as the image was …
Issue: March-April 2016
Phi Beta Kappa Oration: "The Anglo-American Scholar?"
… President Summers, President Friedman, fellow members of the Chapter (old and new), ladies and gentlemen: It is a … to address this, the oldest continuously existing chapter of the most venerable honor society in the United States. My …
From the Blog Cave
… much daily writing as hourly writing. And with that level of timeliness, the provisionality of every word is even more pressing—and the risk of error or …
Issue: May-June 2011
Saturday Afternoon Improv
… Though the Harvard football team runs one of the most sophisticated offensive sets in the country, the team also likes to play …
Issue: September-October 2004