Arts & Culture

Panel says higher education is freshened, expanded, and challenged in a networked age.

Musician Fred Ho received the Harvard Arts Medal and performed the premiere of his piece, “Take the Zen Train,” with the Harvard Jazz Bands.

A sobering book, sure to draw ire: This psychologist posits that addiction is voluntary.By analyzing buckets of research, Heyman offers insight on how we make choices, and how we can stop ourselves from going too far.

Goldsmith and Kettl edit a posse of policy practitioners who argue for network-driven government practices. Presenting case studies from across the nation, these authors reveal how work gets done when forces join together.

This is Zurita’s harrowing chronicle of General Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile, along with the writer’s subsequent arrest and torture. It’s a visually stunning book of unforgettable poems.

Artist Sanford Biggers completes his work “Constellation: Stranger Fruit,” which recalls the horrors of slavery even as it celebrates the stars above.

Harvard authors who met years ago through social networking produce the book “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.”

Musician Fred Ho’s new work, a commission from Harvard’s Office for the Arts and the Harvard Jazz Bands, chronicles the composer’s successful three-year battle with cancer.

Nancy Rappaport reads from “In Her Wake,” a book written about the exploration of her mother’s suicide.

While Harvard the institution is picking up the pace on supporting the arts, Harvard the students — as ever — are busy making the arts their “irreplaceable instruments of knowledge.”

A timeline of the arts at Harvard begins in 1636, when Harvard was founded, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had barely 10,000 settlers, and wolves howled at the edge of the endless forests.

“Street Scene” is performed in Harvard Yard by a group of A.R.T. students.

The Lab, a three-year experiment orchestrated by David Edwards, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering, offers a “forum to help catalyze ideas” across many fields. Stemming from his course “Idea Translation” (ES 147), the exhibition of student-based experiments is designed to morph into an ongoing series of events and “idea nights” open to anyone at Harvard with something to show or say.

Philosopher and classicist Jonathan Lear, this year’s Tanner lecturer, begins his two-lecture look at irony and identity.

Students display results from a semester-long dig in Harvard Yard, including a musket ball, a slate pencil, and a piece of print type with the letter “o.”

Radcliffe Fellow and anthropologist Heather Paxson is studying small artisanal cheese operations as “ecologies of production” that are both commercial and moral.

In the fast pace of our daily lives we may overlook the details that, collectively, create a stunning backdrop for all that happens within the University. See the inner workings of Harvard’s pianos up close, while enjoying a melodic feast for the ears.

Who says the government doesn’t need to work better? After Hurricane Katrina, intelligence failures, and security lapses, Bilmes and Gould argue that hiring a capable federal workforce is central to serving the nation properly.

Thornber whisks us to Asia at the turn of the 20th century, where she documents how Japan’s literature interacted with China, Korea, and Taiwan, thus challenging Japan’s cultural authority.

A new teaching model inspired by medical rounds performed by physicians? Check. These authors dissect education and offer up their pioneering and pain-free prescription.

The Memorial Church welcomed opera virtuoso Dominique Labelle last week, who was described as genuine and gracious during her master class, proving that divas can be divas without diva behavior.

Nobel laureate in literature Orhan Pamuk nears the end of his six-lecture Norton series on the novel’s durable attractions.

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma examines the educational value of indigo through a number of disciplines.

Alison Knowles, a pioneering independent artist, takes listeners back to the early days of Fluxus, a group still making art through improvisational performance.

Radcliffe Fellow Godfried Toussaint taps computer science in a search for the evolutionary development of world music’s basic rhythms.

At a Harvard panel, curators of both the fictional and the real explore the museum’s place in culture and literature.

Sunstein breaks down the Constitution by looking at the diverse ways and methods it is interpreted. A heady book on America’s revered — and debated — political blueprint.

Goldin and Katz discuss the U.S. educational and technological meltdown circa 1980, and examine the glory days of the 20th century when the country’s educational system made it the richest in the nation.

Conley translates this French anthropologist’s spellbinding narrative on his love affair with film and how our memories closely connect to the cinematic. Here’s lookin’ at you, kids.

A new permanent art installation in Weld Boathouse is turning heads. Artist Ellen Kennelly ’85 took a crash course in flameworking and began these masterpieces in glass.