Featured series 
Tag: Lecture
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Nation & World
GPM tells you more than MPG, say management professors
“Miles per gallon” (mpg) is the most common measure of a car’s fuel efficiency. The typical U.S. consumer, in shopping for a car, uses mpg as a way of calculating gas consumption and carbon emissions.
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Nation & World
Israelite bread-making discussion at the Semitic Museum
On Thursday (April 23), the Semitic Museum will host half-hour discussions at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. (appropriate for grades three through six) on how ancient Israelites made bread — from planting to eating — and explore everyday life of the average villager 2,700 years ago. Students will also have the opportunity to handle original…
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Nation & World
Alexander McCall Smith to give Safra lecture today
Popular author and professor of medical law Alexander McCall Smith will give a lecture under the auspices of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics today (April 16).
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Nation & World
Energy policies: ‘Forty-year failure’
In 1973, four weeks after the Arab oil embargo, President Richard Nixon went on national television to talk about an energy crisis that had been mounting for two years. He asked Americans to turn off their Christmas lights.
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Nation & World
The pogrom that transformed 20th century Jewry
On April 8, 1903 — Easter Sunday — a mild disturbance against local Jews rattled Kishinev, a sleepy city on the southwestern border of imperial Russia.
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Nation & World
Frank calls for (re) regulation
U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, came to the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Monday (April 6) to lay out a four-point program for re-regulating the nation’s financial system.
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Nation & World
Climate change an ‘opportunity’ as well as a threat
Conservation pioneer Russell A. Mittermeier started this year’s Roger Tory Peterson Memorial Lecture (April 5) with a quiz. In front of several hundred listeners at Harvard’s Science Center he turned on a small recorder.
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Nation & World
Planning to save a changing world
Climate change is not only altering Alaska’s natural world, it’s also affecting how humans interact with it, particularly those whose culture and traditions have pointed the way for generations to survive in the sometimes inhospitable far north. Terry Chapin, a professor of ecology at the University of Alaska’s Institute of Arctic Biology, said that climate…
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Nation & World
Poet/critics and the state of the art
A triumvirate of prominent poet-critics – each with strong Harvard ties – took on the meaning of contemporary poetry last week. And despite a lively discussion, none of them provided a comprehensive definition.
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Nation & World
Gail Mazur reads at Radcliffe
After removing her soaked red sneakers, Radcliffe Fellow Gail Mazur read aloud from new poems Monday (April 6) in dry black socks. The poet was undeterred by the onslaught of gray rain that thrashed Radcliffe Gymnasium’s windows — a fitting backdrop for Mazur’s charged, emotional poems.
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Nation & World
Former prime minister of Spain explores ‘Role of Europe’
Jose Maria Aznar, the prime minister of Spain from 1996 to 2004, will deliver a lecture titled “The Role of Europe in the Geopolitical Context” at 5 p.m. Wednesday (April 15) in the Belfer Center’s Starr Auditorium at Harvard Kennedy School.
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Nation & World
Creativity through cerebration
Contemporary composer Kay Rhie hasn’t had many watershed musical moments. The romantic ideal of a composer “deeply entrenched in creative epiphanies,” she admitted on a recent damp spring afternoon, is “not my story.”
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Nation & World
Skin biology illuminates how stem cells operate
As a girl, Elaine Fuchs borrowed her mother’s old strainers and mixing bowls to collect polliwogs, an activity she credits for her present-day career as a biologist.
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Nation & World
Losick among Canada Gairdner International Award recipients
Richard Losick, the Maria Moors Cabot Professor of Biology, was recently named one of seven Canada Gairdner International Award winners by the Gairdner Foundation, and will receive a CA$100,000 as one of the world’s leading medical research scientists. The Gairdner award is among the most prestigious awards in biomedical science.
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Nation & World
Playwright plumbs texts, ancient and modern
You know Noh, no? Chiori Miyagawa does. The Bard College playwright-in-residence, a Radcliffe Fellow this year, has steeped herself in Noh theater, a measured style of Japanese drama that dates back to the 14th century. It’s one of the many literary echoes — some old, some ancient — that she brings to her work. “I…
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Nation & World
Yu Hua reads work, participates in star-studded panel at Fairbank event
It’s strange to imagine your dentist as one of the most interesting and controversial novelists of the 21st century. But that’s just what Yu Hua is. Or was — the former dentist who admitted, more frighteningly, that he possessed little formal dental training, recently derided his former profession to a New York Times reporter, saying,…
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Nation & World
Fijian girls succumb to Western dysmorphia
In 1982, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Anne E. Becker was still an undergraduate at Radcliffe when she traveled to Fiji for a summer of anthropology fieldwork. What struck her about this South Pacific island nation — and has in many research trips since — was “the absolute preoccupation with food and eating,” she said. “Family…
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Nation & World
Walter Cardinal Kasper visits Harvard Catholic Chaplaincy
His Eminence Walter Cardinal Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity at the Vatican, will speak on March 25 at St. Paul Parish, home to the Harvard Catholic Chaplaincy.
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Nation & World
Wildlife biologist named Roger Tory Peterson Medal recipient, speaker
Russell Mittermeier, renowned wildlife biologist and president of Conservation International, has been selected to receive the 12th annual Roger Tory Peterson Medal presented by the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH). Mittermeier will deliver the Roger Tory Peterson Memorial Lecture on April 5.
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Nation & World
Culture skews human evolution
The rise of agriculture 10,000 years ago meant the end of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for which human beings had been optimized by millions of years of evolution and the beginning of an era where culture encourages habits unhealthy for us and for the world around, with uncertain evolutionary outcomes.
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Nation & World
The third chapter can be the best in the book
There may be something to the adage about growing older and wiser. A lot, in fact, according to the new book by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, “The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50,” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). The work explores the trend of learning and development for adults who are…
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Nation & World
In the ether of radio waves, indigenous talk finds its place
Amid the pop music countdowns, the nightly news, and the laugh-show programs, radio waves across the world crackle softly with the voices of indigenous peoples. Their stories — too often unheard — tell of struggles for recognition, enfranchisement, territory, and cultural preservation. For these communities, radio does far more than entertain.
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Nation & World
Scholar plucks composers out of the dark
Wielding a viola da gamba almost as tall as she, Laury Gutiérrez plays with the assurance and animation of a rock star. She is, after all, one in a select club of artists who hold a National Interest Waiver from the U.S. government, granted to noncitizens “who because of their exceptional ability in the sciences,…
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Nation & World
Vivid images, stern warnings mark Ice Age ‘rock’ star’s talk
Oohs and ahhs greeted slide after slide as English author and freelance scholar Paul G. Bahn presented “The Shock of the Old: New Discoveries in Ice Age Art” at the Yenching Institute Feb 26.
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Nation & World
Congressmen highlight challenges of mental illness, substance abuse
In 2008, 54 million Americans suffered with mental illness; 35,000 Americans committed suicide due to untreated depression; and 180,000 people died as a direct result of an untreated addiction. Congressmen Jim Ramstad (R-Minn.) and Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) spoke at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum Monday (March 2) on the truths and realities of mental…
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Nation & World
A tale of two presidents
If you had walked into the Adams House dining room on Saturday afternoon (Feb. 28), you might have thought you’d stumbled upon a Harvard Business School management lecture on good leadership qualities. You would have been mistaken. The speaker was Pulitzer Prize-winning author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, and she was discussing the management…
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Nation & World
U.K. anti-poverty strategy working, almost
In May 1997, Britain’s Labor Party won an election that ended nearly two decades of Conservative Party rule. The new liberal government, promising radical reform, took over a booming economy. But it also inherited an increase in poverty that had been rising steeply since the 1970s.
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Nation & World
Counteracting stress at work
Herbert Benson, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine, will deliver a lecture, “Counteracting stress at Harvard: The relaxation response,” in which he will discuss the harmful effects of stress, lead the audience through his Relaxation Response strategy, and explain how stress can…
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Nation & World
Philosophers expand meaning of ‘space’
Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher of science, published “The Poetics of Space” in 1958. It was a meditation on the intimate and resonant places that are the cradle of memory — things like a child’s first house, chests, drawers, nests, shells, and corners.
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Nation & World
Darwin’s empathy, imagination highlighted
On Feb. 12, the world celebrated the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Much was made of his key idea, natural selection, and how it still resonates and informs science in the 21st century.