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Decoding the Deep
… or a spitting log as it burns, end in a crescendo of sound resembling a rapidly spinning cog rattle, followed … final extra click. “Dive,” one sperm whale is saying to another. This is the first word in the language of sperm whales that humans have learned. These creatures, …
Issue: July-August 2024
The Diverse “Symphony of Harvard”
… President Drew Faust compared the Harvard community to a symphony orchestra—beautiful in … an annual presidential tradition that marks the first day of classes. She began by cataloging the diversity of the … the choir’s singing of the day’s anthem (“Awake My Heart; Arise My Tongue”). The hymn, which the congregation sang …
A Cathedral of Sweat
… Moments after Harvard lost to Yale 97-85 in the Ivy League tournament championship, Stemberg coach Tommy … pawmarks were everywhere: the walls adorned with portraits of famous alumni (including baseball player George H.W. … rivalry. There was even Yale-branded bottled water in front of the coach and point guard Bryce Aiken ’20, who looked …
Issue: May-June 2019
The Pump Overflows
… delving into Sanskrit, Avestan, Hittite, Old Irish, and the other early languages of the Indo-European family. It was an unusual turn for an … his Ph.D. in linguistics in 1959 and, after an accelerated rise through the junior ranks, found himself, at the age of …
Issue: May-June 2015
“Bodies of Knowledge”
… The title page of Andreas Vesalius’s monumental 1543 anatomy textbook, De humani corporis fabrica ( On the Fabric of the Human Body ), depicts a public dissection. In an …
Off the Shelf
… canvas), by G. Dell Bridgeman Images Summer brings thoughts of seasides and sailing. For landlubbers, some beach reading. Barons of the Sea, by Steven Ujifusa ’01 (Simon & Schuster, $29.99), … age of technological innovation, sharp competition, and the rise of new fortunes: the nineteenth-century scrum to build …
Issue: July-August 2018
"The rule of law and foreign law in our Supreme Court"
… Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University School of Law explores the Bill of Rights in the context of the …
The Science of Scarcity
… Toward the end of World War II, while thousands of Europeans were dying of hunger, 36 men at the University … available for everything else. Such problems simply don’t arise for the rich. To rule out other factors, the …
Issue: May-June 2015
The Business of Turning 375
… celebrate Harvard’s 375 th birthday on October 14. Members of the HBS community gathered to decorate themselves with … flair. In 2008, there was a neoclassical replica cake of the iconic Baker Library; this year, when HBS affiliates …
Blades of Yore
… Here we see the skates and stick (blade left) of Leverett Saltonstall … LL.B. ’17, LL.D. ’42, who made at least one notable use of them before he became a Republican governor of …
Issue: March-April 2007
The New Little Magazines
… were surrounded by taxidermied peacocks and monkeys in the lounge of New York’s Jane Hotel. That evening this spring, they … it; and streaming platforms are responsible for the rise of the bland maximalism of today’s most influential pop …
Issue: September-October 2023
A Course for the Commercial Space Age
… leaps for mankind, Harvard Business School is making a leap of its own. Last week, the school launched its first course devoted to outer space, … “Space: Public and Commercial Economics,” led by Elbling professor of business administration Matthew C. Weinzierl. To …
Turning Green into Gold
… Developed by two twenty-somethings in a garage in Berkeley, the device “has the ability to transform the entire … vending-machine industry,” he asserts, “taking trucks off the road and saving enormous amounts of energy.” This … and economics—in the context of the 1970s energy crises. He was impressed as a freshman when President Richard …
Issue: March-April 2009
A Grammar of Pain
… As Of Men and War opens, a trumpet moans and won’t resolve into taps, and a van traps men who let it bounce them. They rarely come to town, they say. They are quick to … myself.” The scene ends then, and then the music of flutes rises behind a desert highway that speeds past the camera. …
The Air of Contentment
… 1636 (now Dedham, Massachusetts), it was likely to make use of his crucial skill: spinning-wheel maker. Every family … weaving cloth, says Leslie Griesmer, business manager at the Fairbanks House historic site —“the oldest wood-frame … the dark, low-ceilinged dwelling that includes a warren of rooms added over time, it’s easy to imagine hunkering …
Issue: September-October 2019