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The College within the University
… D. Ronald Daniel : There’s a very special governance issue at Harvard. That is the role of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences [FAS] in the whole University. Henry …
Issue: May-June 2006
A Multiverse of Might-Have-Beens
… There’s something otherworldly about watching a plane land at Boston Logan Airport. The wheels graze the coast of Boston, mere inches from the cobalt Atlantic Ocean, … the tarmac. In daylight, the blood-orange sunbeams bounce off the water. The plane growls to a halt. When I touched …
Boston in Motion
… Imagine running the Boston Marathon in 1635, a few years after the city was … ending in a swim through the swampy waters to the west of the Boston Neck—then a rail-thin strip of land connecting … looked to the right during your swim, tall hills would have risen from the water. Cattle would have meandered through …
Stories of a Not-So-Distant War
… Ganeshananthan ’s first novel, Love Marriage , came out in the early spring of 2008, Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war—the conflict at the heart of the book’s plot—seemed to have ossified into something …
Issue: May-June 2023
The Great Refractor
… On a commanding hillock less than a mile northwest of Harvard Square sits the Harvard College Observatory and the Great Refractor, … lowered. The telescope is firmly grounded: a granite pier rises 43 feet to the observing floor from a 22-foot-diameter …
Issue: May-June 2004
From the Basket to the Beach
… In June , Christine Mansour ’15 stepped onto the sand for Team USA at the beach handball world … moment in her improbable, decade-long journey to become one of the best beach handball players in the world. Mansour … with American handball, or wallball) blends elements of water polo and basketball, with players dribbling, …
Understanding Ebola
… 2013, Ebola slowly began spreading in West Africa, killing the majority of people it infected. The disease, caused by a filovirus, … disparage the tools and skills of critical care—‘Dialysis machines? Ventilators? Infusion pumps?’—even well after some …
Vita: Ann Petry
… move to New York, Ann (Lane) Petry did not come in search of celebrity or fame. She left her hometown of Old Saybrook, … Harlem in 1938 to join her new husband, George, to escape the expectations of her middle-class family, and to pursue … grew and as the specter of a second Red Scare began to rise, Petry and her husband returned to Old Saybrook in …
Issue: January-February 2014
Rose-Colored Passes
… The translation of Neil Rose from benchwarmer to record-breaking passer was completed in a span of less than 13 minutes. In that interval, quarterback Rose … bungled extra-point snap and running it back 85 yards. Surprise! Harvard's first touchdown in the Brown game came on a …
Harvard Resists Government Demands
… rejecting new, sweeping, and “unprecedented” demands from the federal government concerning Harvard’s internal … under “review,” and on April 3 it presented a sweeping list of broad requirements for Harvard to fulfill , extending to … changes in admissions and hiring, and abandonment of all policies and programs pertaining to diversity, …
Color and Incarceration
… In 2005, during her first year of graduate school, Elizabeth Hinton traveled from New York … out of jail, caught up in drugs and addiction and poverty. Their experience was a large part of why, as a little girl, … Harlem residents confront police in 1970; the drastic rise of police presence in black neighborhoods often led to …
Issue: September-October 2019
America the Politically Unequal
… Recent events have focused attention on two of the most consequential phenomena of our time: growing … important finding by the authors is that when voter turnout rises, it is mostly because of increased turnout among …
Issue: September-October 2012
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
Harvard College Applications Increase
… College today reported receiving 35,022 applications for the class of 2017—a total more than 2 percent above the number of … from the 774 admitted early last year. … Applications rise slightly more than 2 percent from last year. … Harvard …
Setting the Stage
… L ondon’s Chelsea Theatre can be found off a main road in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, a neighborhood where household …
Issue: May-June 2020