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The Missing Middle
… rightly concerned about free speech at this University and others, but the current national discussion has overlooked the harmful effects of its own presence. A disproportionate focus on our campus can exacerbate the effects of echo chambers. When Harvard is used to score points in …
Issue: July-August 2024
The Editors Need Your Input!
… Fill out my online form . … The Editors Need Your Input! … The Editors Need Your Input! … page …
Can Pseudonyms Make Better Online Citizens?
… joking about politics on Twitter, and sharing reviews of everything from hotels to running shoes. Judith Donath, a … and Society , argues against using real names for most of these Internet interactions and relying instead on …
Issue: September-October 2014
A Cautionary Tale
… Robert J. Samuelson ’67 had the bad luck to send The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence to the printer the spring before the … Republican state senator named Scott Brown surprised everyone by winning the Senate seat that Edward M. …
Issue: May-June 2010
DNA as Data
… George McDonald Church arrived at Harvard in 1977, nine out of 10 biologists did research without touching a computer. They wrote journal articles on IBM typewriters, not word … DNA and engineer genes, was artisanal. The small coterie of computer-savvy biologists were x-ray crystallographers, …
Issue: January-February 2004
Healing the Whole Patient
… at Edendale Hospital, in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, the traditional healers tell their story. It used to be that … issues—the remedies passed down through generations of traditional healers—didn’t work. The healers realized … they were dealing with a new disease, one no amount of making peace with one’s forebears would cure. Across …
The Arts as Essential Goods
… “No man is an island; every book is a world.” The motto, adapted from John Donne, appears on a weathered … Novelist Gabrielle Zevin ’00 wrote The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (2014) while worrying about Amazon’s widening … nature of perceptions alter over time. Time itself often rises to the level of character for Zevin; at once a …
Issue: July-August 2020
At the Core
… Unveiling his strategy for Tufts University in early 2003, then-president Lawrence S. Bacow spelled out both the … business.” Amplifying his message about the most prominent of those resources, he continued, “[W]e have to be much more … way for a university to go broke is to take 50 percent of the money to underwrite a project or program that is not …
Issue: November-December 2018
From Egypt to the Ether Dome
… For nearly 200 years, the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has housed an unusual patient. Padihershef, one of the first complete Egyptian mummies to reach the United States, arrived in 1823 as a gift from the City of Boston. For well over a century, the mummy and its inner …
Gene Editing and Ethics
… The gene-editing technology CRISPR/Cas9 has been described … for DNA, but Kevin Eggan says it has all the finesse of a thermonuclear explosion. The professor of stem cell and regenerative biology has spent his …
Issue: March-April 2019
Puck Stop
… On New Year’s Eve, the Harvard women’s hockey team suited up for a … long-anticipated rematch. Last February, in the first round of the 2019 Beanpot Tournament, the Crimson had stunned … the game, and then never again. That was partly the work of Harvard’s rookie goalie, a lanky then-freshman named …
Issue: March-April 2020
Elbow Room
… No outward sign sets the pale yellow house at 31 Inman Street apart from its … in the attic; then westward still, to the final residence of Robert Frost ’01, Litt.D. ’37 , at 35 Brewster … in Central Square, that anonymous Victorian was the cradle of the Dark Room Collective. There, in the late 1980s, a …
Issue: March-April 2016
Winthrop Bell: Harvard Philosopher, MI6 Spy, and Early Forecaster of the Holocaust
… was a handsome, blond, blue-eyed philosopher, prisoner of war, and MI6 spy. An athletic outdoorsman, he had survived arduous employment as a surveyor in the wilds of northern Canada before coming to Harvard. But … fighting communism, while others worked to block America’s rise to power. Still, Bell succeeded in showing important …
Issue: March-April 2024
At Home with Harvard: Night at the Museum
… This is the fourth installment in Harvard Magazine ’s new series, … libraries, and diverse academic units are a rich source of carefully curated, eye-opening, mind-expanding, and … associated with the community. We bring together here some of our favorite articles about some of them, with guides, …
A True Believer
… But first, a word about the Florida scrub jay. “Before the invention of the air conditioner, Florida was a spectacular … are remnants of sand-dune formations left by a sea-level rise of a couple of million years ago.” Today’s jays have to …
Issue: March-April 2007