Features

A silhouette of a person stands before glowing domes in a red, rocky landscape at sunset.

Getting to Mars (for Real)

Humans have been dreaming of living on the Red Planet for decades. Harvard researchers are on the case.

by Olivia Farrar

John Singleton Copley&rsquo;s <i>A Boy with a Flying Squirrel,</i> 1765

Harvard art historian Jennifer Roberts teaches the value of immersive attention

Teaching students the value of deceleration and immersive attention

by Jennifer L. Roberts

J.C. Buttre&rsquo;s portrait, probably drawn when Everett ran for vice president on the Constitutional Union Party ticket in 1860, links him to Harvard and George Washington, one of his favorite subjects. (His lectures raised more than $100,000 to help purchase Mount Vernon [see <a href="http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/05/granny-talk">“Granny Talk”</a>], and he wrote the entry on Washington for the 1860 <i>Encyclopaedia Britannica.</i>)

Brief life of statesman-orator Edward Everett, by Castle Freeman

Brief life of a statesman-orator: 1794-1865

Huge dump trucks lined up in 2012 to transport tar sand from a surface mine, Fort McMurray, Alberta

Harvard’s Michael McElroy has a scenario for approving the Keystone XL Pipeline

Should the president approve construction?

On Pier 1: Brooklyn Bridge Park&rsquo;s harbor-view lawn

Michael Van Valkenburgh, Harvard landscape architecture professor: a profile

Michael Van Valkenburgh helps lead a second great age of city-making.

by William S. Saunders

Rakesh and Stephanie Khurana of Cabot House, in front of their domain

Life in the Harvard Houses, now being renewed

The singular character of the College’s residences, now in renewal

by Craig Lambert

Henry Beston (in a Coast Guard uniform) on the Outer Beach, Cape Cod, in the early 1920s

Brief life of nature writer Henry Beston Sheahan, by John Nelson

Brief life of a nature writer in a machine age: 1888-1968

by John Nelson

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Self-Fashioning in Society and Solitude

On crafting a liberal-arts education by reading the classics and shaping one's life course

by Nannerl O. Keohane

Porter University Professor Helen Vendler in Houghton Library with a copy of the Arion Press edition of John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"

Helen Vendler's collaboration with Arion Press

The poetry critic, the publisher, and the art of bookmaking in a digital era

by Nathan Heller

Dimitar Sasselov, director of the Origins of Life Initiative, searches for planets around red dwarf stars. Because they are dimmer and smaller than our sun, red dwarfs make ideal targets for taking images of the extrasolar planets that orbit them.

The Origins of Life

Studying how life bloomed on Earth—and might emerge elsewhere

by Courtney Humphries

Antinuclear activist Albert Bigelow (second from left) with crew members William Huntington &rsquo;28, Orion Sherwood, and George Willoughby in Hawaii in 1958

Antinuclear and civil-rights activist Albert Bigelow, by Steven Slosberg

Brief life of an ardent pacifist: 1906-1993

by Steven Slosberg