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Hertzberg of the New Yorker
… On a January evening in 1977, at the old New Yorker offices on West 43rd Street, a going-away … topics in his office, where stacks of books on the floor rise to desktop height. "He lives undergraduate hours," says …
Issue: January-February 2003
The Best of Times…
… Harvard’s annual financial report, for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2016 (released in late October), was full of good tidings: operating revenue up 5.6 percent (more than … For the current year, that distribution is budgeted to rise 4 percent—before being held to no growth in fiscal …
Issue: January-February 2017
On the Origins of the Arts
… Dear Reader: The text excerpted here was posted with permission of W.W. Norton, but that permission has since expired and … the text has been taken down. Read a Harvard Magazine profile of E.O. Wilson here . Thank you for visiting. … …
Issue: May-June 2012
The Seductions of Snooping
… gadgets from a James Bond movie were real-life instruments of espionage used by the Stasi—communist East Germany’s Ministry for State … about these devices and much more in her exploration of the Stasi archives, which were gradually declassified and …
Issue: July-August 2008
“The Excitement of Science”
… In the fall of 2003, Juliet Girard ’07 arrived at Harvard with … where she acquired a taste for the rhythms and methods of research. She thought she’d like to sustain this … the concentration he directs. “Other faculty were surprised by how open and not turf-oriented Rich was and is,” …
Issue: July-August 2006
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
Powers of the Pitch
… Deep into the second half of the NCAA soccer playoff game against SUNY Binghamton last fall, with the score …
Issue: September-October 2007
The End of Blackness?
… "Blackness has been shrugged off by the force of events," says Debra Dickerson, J.D. '95. "Things are not …
Issue: May-June 2004
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 …
Arts and Engineering
… substantive academic planning at Harvard is going on all the time, including curricular innovations and faculty … Harvard Magazine spoke in January with Martignetti professor of philosophy Sean Kelly, dean of arts and … Kelly’s home department—the number of concentrators has risen dramatically. “When I arrived in 2006,” he says, “we …
Issue: March-April 2025
Reinforcing Harvard’s Finances
… Just after placing $434 million of tax-exempt bonds to pay for capital projects , Harvard is returning to the market to borrow $750 million of taxable debt, fueling speculation about its uses for the …
The Children of Noah
… Hugh Broughton (1549-1612), an English theologian and Hebraist, brought out his first book, A Concent of Scripture, in 1588. “Concent” means “harmony,” and … Broughton laid out what he claimed was a correct chronology of biblical events, harmonizing jarring passages in the …
Issue: November-December 2008
The Context: Resurrecting the Woolly Mammoth
… This is the tenth post of "The Context"—a biweekly series of archival stories—offering our readers a useful background … reorganization. Its organisms are built to be biological machines, with DNA and proteins standing in for circuit …
The Chinese in America
… In the fall of 2016, writes Michael Luo ’98, “I was standing in the rain with my family and some friends, in front of a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side,” when a … history of earlier, often dismaying, confrontations and crises could not be more important. From the introduction, …
Issue: May-June 2025
“The Work of the Public Health Leader Is the Work of the Herdsman”
… Long before starting his current role at the World Bank, which now includes helping coordinate the … coronavirus pandemic, Doctor Muhammad Ali Pate grew up one of 10 children in a family of herdsmen in Nigeria—what “might seem like an unusual …