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Housing in the Climate Crosshairs
… America’s critical housing affordability crisis . The U.S. home price index jumped 46 percent from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to last year. Add to that a budding … with unprecedented housing availability and affordability crises like Los Angeles.” Spending on disaster repairs has …
The Price of Parity
… The data—or at least some data—are now in on the effects of Harvard's new Wage and Benefits Parity Policy (WBPP) for … fraction of wage and benefit costs attributable to the WBPP rises steadily from the 2002 fiscal year's $2 million to …
Issue: July-August 2003
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
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
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 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
“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
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 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 …
Off the Shelf
… Loomis, sometime in the 1930s Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II, by … of New York, Maritime College, Wosk examines how women with machines have been portrayed during the past two centuries, …
Issue: May-June 2002
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
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
Women of the Year
… Concluding the year in which Harvard transitioned from its first woman president to its twenty-eighth man to hold the office, the University showcased a dazzling array of female … month when several states (including some with unaddressed crises in maternal health and infant mortality) acted to …
Issue: July-August 2019
The Science of Happiness
… This doesn’t feel like a normal academic conference. True, the three-day Positive Psychology Summit is a sellout, with … at breaks, and the conference’s organizer, Shane Lopez of the University of Kansas, walks around smiling and … they had to do. “In our time, depression is on the rise,” Ben-Shahar says. “More and more students experience …
Issue: January-February 2007
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