Arts & Culture
Explore Harvard’s vibrant arts scene—from campus exhibitions and theater to cultural analysis and literary reviews. Discover how creativity shapes the Harvard experience.
The True Cost of Grade Inflation at Harvard
How an abundance of A’s created “the most stressed-out world of all.”
Chapter & Verse
Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words
A Yodel for Help in the Modern World
Playwright Christopher Durang, a “native American absurdist,” writes black comedies that turn painful events into hilarity.
Fernando Zóbel de Ayala
A brief profile of the peripatetic painter and philanthropist
by John Seed
Pith Paper
On Tetrapanax papyriferum and Chinese art
Laughing at Slavery
In Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery, Glenda Carpio describes how slavery has provided a background and a source of raw material for African-American humor.
The Alcotts, Père and Fille
John Matteson, who left the law to pursue literature, won a Pulitzer Prize for Eden’s Outcasts, his double biography of Bronson and Louisa May Alcott.
From Literature to the Lab
In this excerpt from his new book, The Art and Politics of Science, Nobel laureate Harold Varmus reflects on his switch from graduate work in English to medical school.
On Judicial Interpretation
Paul M. Barrett reviews The Invisible Constitution, by Loeb University Professor Laurence H. Tribe.
Off the Shelf
Recent books with Harvard connections
Second-Life Photography
A profile of cultural photographer Lee Smith