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A Yardstick of Service
… to just how limited my worldview was when I studied there, and how little I knew about the terrible problems and … more focused on the wider world beyond the confines of Cambridge. More faculty members are concentrating on … the inexpensive “lab-on-a-chip” medical diagnostic devices of George Whitesides, are leading to breakthroughs in …
Issue: September-October 2011
Music, Taken Personally
… ago , composer John Adams '69, A.M. '72, was conductor of the undergraduate Bach Society Orchestra. A Crimson critic … marriage, for example, is brief and reticent. We view his rise to his current eminence obliquely, as a progress from …
Issue: May-June 2009
New Museum on Fast Track
… in December that a new, permanent art museum would rise at 224 Western Avenue, a prime site in the University’s incipient Allston campus. Some facility is needed urgently in which to put a quarter of a million art objects, and the staff who look after them, …
Issue: March-April 2007
A Matter of Place
… build a library and information center in what used to be the town of Purysburg, South Carolina, settled by 600 poor Swiss … is not just another job for an architect who divides his professional attention between his own practice and the …
Issue: September-October 2001
Off the Shelf
… The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was … Schermerhorn, M.T. S. ’00 (Yale, $30). An Arizona State professor of history addresses an abstraction—why so many … mill workers, and others together with music. Among the surprises is that the initiative was directed by Charles Seeger, …
Issue: July-August 2025
The Horror and the Beauty
… A glaring anomaly stares out from the curriculum vitae of Maria Tatar, whose 10 scholarly … from words on the page, an admittedly speculative enterprise. This approach has led her to consider magical thinking …
Issue: November-December 2007
Where the Girls Are
… Brearley, Chapin, and Spence, but she had no desire to join their ranks. "The whole girls' school thing seemed kind of precious," recalls DeBare, who now lives in Oakland, … the publication of her book, Where Girls Come First: The Rise, Fall, and Surprising Revival of Girls' Schools (J.P. …
Issue: May-June 2004
Taking Stock of Harvard’s Athletics Culture
… L. Scalise, who arrived at Harvard in 1974 as head coach of the men’s lacrosse team, announced that he would retire at the end of this academic year . In an interview with Harvard …
Off the Shelf
… The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865, by Mark Peterson ’83, Ph.D. …
Issue: March-April 2019
Historian of Ices
… game: pick a famous person and guess which combination of gelato and toppings would have been his or her favorite. Sigmund Freud, they agreed, would have chosen “a cup of black coffee with a … puts in an appearance as the inventor of Omelette Surprise: ice cream enclosed in meringue. In another chapter, …
Issue: July-August 2006
A Fitter FAS
… With the pandemic’s worst effects in the past, Dean Claudine Gay painted an upbeat picture of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ (FAS) prospects when … percent to 33 percent. A new section detailed the dramatic rise in non-ladder faculty, to 356 full-time equivalents, …
Issue: January-February 2023
Love’s Labors
… fell suddenly in love—with a man she’d known for decades. They had worked together in an MIT lab during the 1960s and … respective families. But by the time they took serious note of each other’s romantic appeal, in 1990, both were … thanks to a steady divorce rate, increasing longevity, the rise of financially independent women, and waning stigmas …
Issue: March-April 2009
Advancing the Science and Art of Teaching
… The 2013 Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) … pedagogy. Ever since HILT was launched in the fall of 2011 , during Harvard’s 375 th -anniversary celebration, … essay, “The Aims of Education,” on the change from an enterprise “alive with a ferment of genius” to mere “pedantry and …
The Portraitist
… All family snapshots look alike, except to the people in them—and except, perhaps, to Elsa Dorfman, BI … tall and 20 wide, produced by a 200-pound camera that’s one of only six of its kind in the world. Then there’s their … the photo. When he graduated from residency, his wife surprised him with it—all with Dorfman’s aid and abetment. For …
Issue: September-October 2017
Lines of Support
… I always use the same stall in the women’s bathroom near the superintendent’s office on the first floor of Adams House—the last one on the right. It’s strange to …
Issue: March-April 2013