Features
Harvard Commencement 2025
Harvard passes a test of its values, yet challenges loom.
Alexander Wheelock Thayer
As a pianist, conductor, and composer, Ludwig van Beethoven was the most famous musician in music-crazy early-nineteenth-century Europe. He also...
Ken’s Story
A “rapidly developing revolution in cancer treatment” has prompted David G. Nathan, M.D., president emeritus of Dana-Farber Cancer...
The Ethanol Illusion
Americans annual consumption of gasoline (for both private and commercial transportation) amounts to more than 140 billion gallonsclose to 500...
Ouch!
The social status of physicians rose in the eighteenth century as their understanding of disease grew apace. But effective new treatments or...
Zane Grey—profile of a novelist
Brief life of an American original: 1872-1939
Hello, Geotech
Take your geographic information system (GIS) for a spin around the block. Its easy. Sit at your computer, which you have loaded with GIS...
Seamus Heaney, profiled by Adam Kirsch
One of the most revealing questions you can ask about any poet has to do with his sense of responsibility. To whom or what does he hold himself...
by Adam Kirsch
History and Democracy
Editor’s note: Introducing himself as a Princeton professor wearing a Yale gown as he prepared to address a Harvard audience, historian...
Edwin Ginn
There will be no need of great national armies,” Edwin Ginn declaimed in 1901, once an international force controlled by a league of...
An Education in Ethics
Last January 13, in the amphitheater of Aldrich Hall 107, Henry B. Reiling began taking his students through the quaint details of a real-estate...