Year: 2013

  • Campus & Community

    A challenge from the deans

    Harvard’s deans and the University’s provost have announced a new competition, challenging students to propose sustainable ideas that would improve urban life by 2030.

  • Arts & Culture

    ‘Feminine Mystique’ at 50

    A revealing exhibit at the Schlesinger Library charts the evolution of Betty Friedan’s seminal work “The Feminine Mystique.” What began as a college reunion survey morphed into a treatise that looked deeply into gender, power, and sexuality.

  • Nation & World

    German central banker sees walls in need of mending

    In a Harvard talk the head of Germany’s central bank advocated steps to de-link failing governments and banks from the inflation-fighting monetary policy of central banks.

  • Nation & World

    New Frontier Awards honor two

    Jack Schlossberg, grandson of President John F. Kennedy, honored the founder of an online charity that supports public schools and a combat veteran who is now a congresswoman during the 2013 John F. Kennedy New Frontier Awards.

  • Nation & World

    Companies or coverage

    The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear challenges by some for-profit companies that have a religious objection to a mandate under the Affordable Care Act that employers must provide employees with health insurance that includes contraceptive coverage. In a question-and-answer session, Harvard Law Professor Mark Tushnet examines what’s at stake in the suits.

  • Campus & Community

    Tuning into the whistleblower

    Edward Snowden, who leaked classified documents to the press, was the subject of the Ed Portal’s mock trial, as local residents determined his fate.

  • Campus & Community

    The divine, online

    Harvard Divinity School has created its first online, interactive course, with help from HarvardX, to debut in January.

  • Science & Tech

    Probing how the past behaved

    Harvard faculty and graduate students lectured, organized, and moderated in big ways throughout a four-day annual meeting in Boston of the History of Science Society.

  • Campus & Community

    Serving, thanks, and giving

    The annual “Giving Thanks” open house was an opportunity for members of the Harvard community to write notes of gratitude to fellow staff members and provide support for community programs.

  • Science & Tech

    U.S. methane emissions exceed government estimates

    Emissions of methane from fossil fuel extraction and refining activities in the United States are nearly five times higher than previous estimates, according to researchers at Harvard University and seven other institutions.

  • Science & Tech

    ‘Deep pragmatism’ as a moral engine

    Professor Joshua Greene talks about his new book, “Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.” What makes an issue like abortion or Israeli-Palestinian relations seem insurmountable, he said, can be chalked up, in part, to brain wiring.

  • Campus & Community

    Harvard powers past Yale, 34-7

    In the 130th playing of The Game on Saturday, the Harvard football team —with the help of sophomore Paul Stanton Jr.’s four total touchdowns — out-muscled Yale, 34-7, to claim its seventh consecutive win against its archrival at the Yale Bowl.

  • Health

    Viral infections may have met their match

    A Massachusetts General Hospital-led research team of Harvard affiliates has identified an immune cell protein that is critical to setting off the body’s initial response against viral infection.

  • Campus & Community

    A new setting — Oxford — for bold visions

    Six Harvard undergraduates are among the 32 American men and women chosen as Rhodes Scholars Nov. 24. They will begin their studies at the University of Oxford in October 2014.

  • Arts & Culture

    Harvard in blue and gray

    At the Battle of Gettysburg, Harvard men faced Harvard men, as 11 Union soldiers and three Confederates were killed.

  • Arts & Culture

    A literary treasure, unveiled

    On the eve of a glamorous auction of a 1640 “Bay Psalm Book,” Harvard puts its own rare copy on view at Houghton Library.

  • Health

    21 million in slavery

    Experts on forced labor and sexual slavery outlined what remains a large-scale problem.

  • Nation & World

    Core objectives

    Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Paul Reville talks about the new national standards for K-12 education, known as the Common Core State Standards, and the recent controversy surrounding their implementation.

  • Health

    Nut consumption reduces risk of death

    In the largest study of its kind, people who ate a daily handful of nuts were found to be 20 percent less likely to die from any cause over a 30-year period than those who didn’t consume nuts, say Harvard researchers.

  • Health

    Malaria in 3-D

    Using an imaging technique known as high-speed holographic microscopy, Laurence Wilson, a fellow at Harvard’s Rowland Institute, worked with colleagues to produce detailed 3-D images of malaria sperm — the cells that reproduce inside infected mosquitoes — that shed new light on how the cells move.

  • Campus & Community

    Faculty Council meeting held Nov. 20

    On Nov. 20 the members of the Faculty Council approved the Harvard Summer School course list for 2014.

  • Nation & World

    The day the president died

    Five from Harvard remember where they were when President John F. Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, and what effect the shooting had on their lives.

  • Arts & Culture

    ‘Wonderful things,’ indeed

    Bob Brier of Long Island University traced the history of “Egyptomania” in a Harvard talk.

  • Nation & World

    Northern exposure

    Harvard Kennedy School Professor Michael Ignatieff talks about why he put aside academia to make an improbable and ill-fated foray into Canadian politics.

  • Campus & Community

    The fame of The Game

    Harvard heads to New Haven Saturday to play rival Yale in football in the 130th edition of The Game. The history of The Game is captured in photos and words.

  • Campus & Community

    Abbate named University Professor

    Carolyn Abbate, one of the world’s most accomplished and admired music historians, has been named a University Professor. Her appointment as the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor will take effect on Jan. 1, 2014.

  • Arts & Culture

    Gettysburg, addressed

    In the shadow of an old battlefield, three panelists recounted the July 1863 charnel house of Gettysburg, the November address that gave the death toll there a national purpose, and the need for “new birth of freedom” today.

  • Science & Tech

    Technically, you are what you wear

    The Google Glass and Warrior Web projects highlight the annual Radcliffe Science Symposium, which focused on the integration of technology with “smart clothes.”

  • Health

    Clues on generating muscles

    Harvard stem cell scientists have discovered that the same chemicals that stimulate muscle development in zebrafish can be used to differentiate human stem cells into muscle cells in the laboratory, which makes muscle cell therapy a more realistic clinical possibility.

  • Arts & Culture

    A Paris errand

    At a UNESCO ceremony in Paris, Harvard literary scholar Homi K. Bhabha underscored the global need for a “new humanism” that peacefully connects a culturally diverse world.