Nation & World

The worst U.S. housing downturn in generations continues to grind on, finds a study released today (June 22) by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Thousands of miles from his Harvard lab, Kevin Kit Parker is lugging a gun and his engineer’s sensibilities through the mountains south of Kabul, in Afghanistan’s Wardak and Logar Provinces.

Harvard Professor Michael Sandel, chosen by the BBC to deliver its Reith Lectures for 2009, can be heard on the BBC Web site.

Approximately half of the 886 graduating HBS students took the professors’ comments seriously enough to sign a managerial version of the Hippocratic oath.

While growing up in the Rift Valley Province in western Kenya, Kipyegon A. “Kip” Kitur milked goats and fed cattle before running to school. It was two miles away, uphill, past steep maize farms.

The two men sit close, knees almost touching, in a mud-walled hut in the Congolese village of Katokota.

Fifty years ago a simple lecture sparked a global debate with lasting implications. On May 7, 1959, British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow declared that the gap between “two cultures,” that of the sciences and the humanities, was a destructive divide hampering the effort to find solutions to the problems of the world.

In a series of presentations in Burden Auditorium, teams of students recently presented their ideas and dreams for entrepreneurial success at the final round of Harvard Business School’s (HBS) 13th annual Business Plan Contest.

As President Obama and his new administration seek to redirect U.S. foreign policy back toward more emphasis on diplomacy and less on the use of force, they should not overlook Orthodox Christianity as a resource.

Michael Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, has been chosen by the BBC to deliver its Reith Lectures for 2009. Sandel’s lectures, titled “A New Citizenship,” will address the prospect for a new politics of the common good.

Harvard gave Christie’s and Sotheby’s a run for their money at the first Harvard Student Art Show on Monday (May 4). The exhibit and sale, held in a bright yellow tent on the Science Center Lawn, featured 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography, and other media such as jewelry and clothing. Students from across the University submitted artwork ranging in price from $30 to $8,000.

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard will present the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism to current Nieman Fellow Fatima Tlisova Thursday (May 7).

What happens when a Buddhist monk visiting the United States is hospitalized, terminally ill with liver cancer? Does religion interfere with his medical care? What about his Buddhist brethren, unable to join him bedside? Who will provide the appropriate services and ceremonies? Well, says Wendy Cadge, that’s where hospital chaplains come in.

In Chinese culture, the 60th birthday is an auspicious event. At that age, it is said that a person is at ease.

The Paul Tillich Lecture, offered annually at Harvard since 1990, commemorates the memory of a public intellectual who was once “the largest theological figure in our orbit,” said The Rev. Peter J. Gomes.

With the passing of Barack Obama’s 100th day in office, journalists and pundits are posing a simple but all-important question: How is the president doing? Robert Kuttner, author and political commentator, gave his own evaluation of the Obama presidency for the 2009 Lowell Lecture on April 30 in Emerson Hall.

Aided by a wheel chair, his slight frame bent in part by a curvature of the spine since birth, in part by the passage of time, a man who endured unspeakable cruelty 70 years ago told his story of survival to a Harvard audience.

Imani was just 15 when soldiers from the rebel group Interahamwe found her on the road in a remote region in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

A troubled piece of Africa came to North Andover, Mass., last weekend (April 24-26) as more than 50 students from a collaborative, three-university humanitarian program took part in a hands-on outdoor field course that simulated an emergency on the border between Chad and Sudan’s troubled Darfur region.

The Dalai Lama addressed a capacity crowd at the Memorial Church on Thursday (April 30). With his trademark affable, down-to-earth style the religious leader counseled the audience about the important things in life in a talk titled “Educating the Heart.”

ECONOMIC RECOVERY: David S. Scharfstein, Edmund Cogswell Converse Professor of Finance and Banking, Harvard Business School

NUCLEAR TERRORISM: Graham Allison, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government, Harvard Kennedy School, director of Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

HUMAN RIGHTS: Jennifer Leaning, professor of the practice of global health, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard School of Public Health, co-director, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, associate professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School, director, Inter-University Initiative on Humanitarian Studies and Field Practice

THE ENVIRONMENT: William Clark, Harvey Brooks Professor of International Science, Public Policy and Human Development, Harvard Kennedy School

FOREIGN POLICY: Ernest May, Charles Warren Professor of American History, Harvard Kennedy School

RESEARCH FUNDING: Douglas A. Melton, Harvard College Professor, Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences, investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute

PUBLIC SERVICE: Evelynn Hammonds, dean of Harvard College, Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies

HEALTH CARE: Joseph Newhouse, John D. MacArthur Professor of Health Policy and Management, Harvard Kennedy School

ENERGY: Daniel P. Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences

EDUCATION REFORM: Kathleen McCartney, Gerald S. Lesser Professorship in Early Childhood Development, dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education