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“A More Perfect Heaven”
… By his thirties , Nicolaus Copernicus had developed a theory that would turn the universe inside out, but for … that placed the sun, rather than the earth, at the center of the solar system. To friends and colleagues, he promised … his revolutionary ideas, yet decades later, perhaps wary of how those ideas would be received, he had published only …
The Fingerprints of Diabetes…and Other Diseases
… If exercise is such a bellwether of health, and one’s metabolic profile reflects fitness and well-being, might the opposite …
Issue: May-June 2011
Flavors of Latin America & the Caribbean
… So you have come to Latin America? Welcome to the land of some of the best food in the world! Although rice and beans are …
The Language of Emotion
… feeling “angry” or “distressed” or “dejected,” what do they really mean? Psychologists vigorously debate whether … concepts mean, and how people understand them, is part of Nook’s work with Leah Somerville, an associate professor … as a function of age, “was almost a complete surprise to us,” Somerville says. Nook had expected …
Issue: July-August 2018
“The Future of Knowledge”
… During the September 21 launch of The Harvard Campaign , five … in Memorial Church for a panel discussion on “The Future of Knowledge.” An interdisciplinary lot, weighted more …
The Annotated Falcon
… Falconry is the hunting of wild quarry using a trained bird of prey. Its … report on the institute’s website points out, because “the rise of digital technology has made the encounter between …
Issue: March-April 2013
The Health Benefits of Owning a Pet
… Today is National Pet Day , and pet owners have another reason to celebrate: their pets are helping them live … to die,” said Harvard Medical School clinical assistant professor Beth Frates, citing the American Heart Association’s … In a talk yesterday at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Frates and Megan Mueller, associate …
Arts and Engineering
… substantive academic planning at Harvard is going on all the time, including curricular innovations and faculty … Harvard Magazine spoke in January with Martignetti professor of philosophy Sean Kelly, dean of arts and … Kelly’s home department—the number of concentrators has risen dramatically. “When I arrived in 2006,” he says, “we …
Issue: March-April 2025
The Future of the Research University
… do research universities perform in our society? How can they reconcile the tension between liberal education and … be sorted out as information technologies enable new forms of teaching? Will residential research universities retain … Their appearance was not inevitable. Perhaps one is not surprised that state universities were started to do …
The Origins of Egg Shape
… THE COMMON MURRE , a slender, northern-dwelling bird that … conical, a structure that, according to a popular theory of egg shape, might have evolved as an adaptation to the … spin in a tight circle, making them less likely to roll off a cliff and shatter. Other hypotheses link egg shape to …
The State of the Libraries
… Editor's note: Pforzheimer University Professor Robert Darnton, the Harvard University Librarian since 2007, is retiring at … Archives of North America, as this collective enterprise is known, provides another example of how Harvard can …
The Early Days of the H-bomb
… If we build it, we lay the groundwork for acts of mass destruction and violence … don't build it, we leave ourselves vulnerable, at the mercy of less scrupulous nations and their acts of mass …
Issue: September-October 2001
“The Wise Person Learns from All People”
… seniors, President Lawrence S. Bacow recalled that in the fall of 2019, he had told this class at their freshman convocation that “Anyone who is thinking of the next four years as a series of stepping stones to a …
Harvard Reflects on the “Meanings of Mandela”
… Standing at the podium in Sanders Theatre yesterday, Nobel laureate and … Soyinka, Litt.D. ’93, recalled learning about the passing of former South African president and anti-apartheid hero … “When I was asked for my reaction, I said, ‘The soul of Africa has departed, and there is nothing miraculous left …
Title IX and the Critique of the Neoliberal University
… The debate around sexual-assault policy, at Harvard and … a more limited role for universities in the private lives of students, and worry, during a moment of national outrage at college sexual violence, that …