Features
The Year a Beat Poet Squatted at Harvard
In 1954, Gregory Corso moved into Eliot House. How he stayed there is a literary legend.
Girl Power
When Dan Kindlon watches the Tigers play softball, he sees the legacy of feminism for girls. “My daughter’s concentrating on...
"...In My Mind I Am Perplexed"
The Civil War transformed American society and institutions. It brought about the formal end of slavery (but not of racial discrimination). It...
Two Women, Two Histories
As the second world war drew to a close, two women thought about applying to Harvard Law School. The first was an African-American native of...
White marble sculptures of antiquity
The English essayist and critic William Hazlitt gazed on the white marble sculptures of antiquity and thought them cold. “[T]he finest...
The Horror and the Beauty
Maria Tatar explores the dazzle and the “dark side” in fairy tales—and why we read them.
Brief life of ornithologist and writer William Brewster, by Alan Emmet
William Brewster was too frail, his eyesight too poor, said his parents and doctors, for him to attend Harvard. Instead, early each morning, he...
The Undiscovered Planet
All images courtesy of Roberto Kolter, unless otherwise noted Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton—these are familiar names. During a...
Honorable Forester
Peter Shaw Ashton stepped into his first Asian tropical forest 50 years ago last March. For what he has accomplished in those steamy reaches, he...
Writing as Performance
The first and perhaps the most important requirement for a successful writing performance—and writing is a performance, like singing an...
Gordon McKay
Brief life of an inventor with a lasting Harvard legacy: 1821-1903