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From the Archives: Image and the Arc of Feeling
… Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory Jorie Graham is a preeminent contemporary poet. From the archives, here is Craig Lambert’s portrait, published … A good poem is always a reaction, a moment of acute surprise that occurred in the soul of the speaker.” The literary …
Wisdom of the Sages
… The spring of 1933 was a trying time: the depths of the … for its adoption”—as opposed to trashing the public enterprise outright. In the fiercely partisan present, it is rare … origins in his new book, The Triumph of the Amateurs: The Rise, Ruin, and Banishment of Professional Rowing in the …
Issue: May-June 2021
The Marketplace of Perceptions
… began with anomalies, strange facts, odd observations that the prevailing wisdom could not explain. Casino gamblers, … perverse facts are a direct affront to the standard model of the human actor—Economic Man—that classical and … the course of their lifetimes.” Such problems should not arise, according to standard economic theory, which holds …
Issue: March-April 2006
At Home with Harvard: The Art of the Profile
… Profiles are one of Harvard Magazine ’s most often written … profiles of Harvard faculty and alumni, covering how they became who they are, their interests, what makes them … the admission of women, the Harvard-Radcliffe merger, the rise of women in the faculty ranks, Harvard’s first woman …
Enablers of the Unethical
… Elizabeth Holmes. Bernie Madoff. Harvey Weinstein. These are people known for unethical and illegal behaviors, … on a single villain downplays or ignores the network of dozens or even hundreds of people—the personal …
Issue: May-June 2023
As Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Rises, Nutrient Content of Rice Falls
… Rising levels of atmospheric CO 2 don’t just warm the planet, they lower the levels of beneficial vitamins and … CO2 … 1514 … 8465 … 1516 … As Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Rises, Nutrient Content of Rice Falls … article …
"The Grandfather of Black Basketball"
… The matchup this Sunday between the Harvard and Howard men’s … century Harvard student and Howard alumnus named Edwin Bancroft Henderson. Known as “the Grandfather of Black Basketball,” Henderson learned the sport at a …
Icon of the Life of the Mind
… sometimes, and call C.E.N. publicly and without apology the infernal old sinner and sham that he is," wrote William … A.B. 1846, LL.D. '87, "was the most influential progenitor of the humanities in American education and scholarship," writes James Turner '68, Ph.D. '75, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, in his …
“The Ingenuity of an Architect”
… had an epiphany. She remembers walking downtown one day in the early 1990s amid abandoned buildings, graffiti, and … “The place felt unhealthy in a way.” She stopped in front of the massive Hudson’s department store, a ghost of what it had been. Completed in 1911, the 32-floor …
Issue: July-August 2024
The Causes of Long COVID
… Although Americans have survived more than 93 million cases of COVID-19, the disease is not yet fully understood. And for an … Whether the relative risk of developing long-term symptoms rises with each subsequent infection is not yet known. …
Issue: September-October 2022
The Poet of Old Age
… When poets die young, youthfulness comes to seem like the essence of their work, the thing they were born to write about. If … after Eliot’s masterpiece “The Waste Land.” Hall is surprised to realize that Eliot “was not being ignorant; he was …
Issue: January-February 2022
“The Heart of Teaching”
… walked through Radcliffe Yard, where he today addressed the Graduate School of Education’s class of 2024, as a College freshman in 1961. … with technology. “Perhaps, working together with ‘smart machines,’” Gardner said, “we can accomplish what not even …
Mechanical Intelligence and Counterfeit Humanity
… late at night and all alone, I sat down to take control of the PDP-4 computer in the Center for Cognitive Studies on … humans could treat other humans as subhuman and electronic machines as human. Weizenbaum spent the rest of his career, …
Issue: July-August 2024
Financing Climate Adaptation—and Deciding What to Let Go
… What will happen when sea-level rise, wildfires, droughts, and floods begin to erode the tax base that cities and towns will use to pay for … markets have already begun to price in the probability of such disasters, and that will make future adaptation …
The Physics of the Familiar
… is familiar doesn’t mean you understand it. That is the common fallacy that all adults make—and no child ever … says Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, England de Valpine professor of applied mathematics. Mahadevan enjoys explaining … ideas. Newly formed hot crust is buoyant, which is why it rises. As it surfaces, it begins to cool and becomes …
Issue: March-April 2008