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Articles by Clare O’Keefe
History of napalm origins at Harvard
Napalm, indelibly associated in modern memory with the horrors of civilians bombed during the Vietnam War, emerged from a Harvard laboratory as a lauded invention in an earlier conflict—and then was used to incinerate Japanese cities. Robert M. Neer Jr. ’86, an attorney and lecturer at Columbia, has written Napalm: An American Biography (Harvard University Press, $29.95). “Napalm was born a hero but lives a pariah,” he writes.
The perfect pitch of filmmaker Andrew Bujalski
If this interview with Andrew Bujalski—in a chichi Manhattan hotel, the morning of the theatrical release of his latest movie, Results—were a scene in one of his films, it might go something like this. The camera would measure every inch of awkward distance between the interlocutors, each seated on the edge of a high-backed leather chair.
| Harvard Magazine
The human brain rests in cupped hands as easily as a cantaloupe. It is softer and spongier to the touch, of course, and its surface is more deeply ridged and wrinkled than the melon's skin. Since the time of Hippocrates, physicians and scientists have contemplated the brain and wondered not only how it gives rise to everything we feel, know, accomplish, and create, but also how all this can be stolen by injury or disease.
Harvard Basketball's Unlikely MVP
In the summer of 2017, men’s basketball assistant coach Brian Eskildsen was on vacation in Rome, eating a gelato, when he heard someone shout, “Eski?” He looked up to see Justin Bassey ’20 smiling back at him. The encounter was pure coincidence—Eskildsen’s vacation with his fiancée had landed him on the same street where Bassey was sightseeing with his family—but it was also strangely familiar.
Small Companies Have an Innovation Edge, except perhaps in the energy space
Because she has spent decades writing about how businesses manage innovation, Rebecca Henderson calls it a fitting coincidence that, before moving to Harvard in 2009, she spent many years as the Eastman Kodak professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School. It was, after all, the monumental shift from film to digital photography that sent Kodak into bankruptcy. “I work with firms that are worried that they are going to be Kodak,” the McArthur University Professor explains.
Excavating 1968
“I’ve had many, many strange emails since publishing my book on Bob Dylan,” classicist Richard Thomas told a sold-out crowd at the Brattle Theater last Thursday evening, before the lights dimmed for the premiere screening of Underground 68—a film that emerged from one of those strange emails. After Thomas’s Why Bob Dylan Matters appeared in 2017, filmmaker Peter Coonradt ’68 got in touch.
Allston ArtLab Prepares to Open
Harvard’s new, $12.5-million ArtLab, envisioned as an interdisciplinary center for creativity and innovation on the University’s Allston campus, is undergoing “final preparation” to begin hosting activities in the next several months, according to a University statement today.
When opioids are needed
One minute, she was sitting at her desk writing a document for a court deadline the following morning, and the next minute she was on the floor, gasping for breath, her body curling in on itself as pain raced through her spine like an electric current. This was late 1994. Kate Nicholson, J.D. ’92, was a young lawyer, a year and a half into a job with the Justice Department’s civil-rights division. That pain—profound, searing, unimaginable—would dominate the next two decades of her life.
Excerpt from “How Art Works”
Prisoners rehearse and perform The Tempest behind walls. People reportedly queued on the New York docks in 1841 awaiting the ship bearing the final chapter of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop to find out Little Nell’s fate. A granddaughter churns out “abstract impressionist” paintings. What do these examples—arrayed by Boston College psychology professor Ellen Winner ’69, Ph.D. ’78, RI ’99—have in common, and how do they function?
Off the Shelf
The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865, by Mark Peterson ’83, Ph.D. ’93 (Princeton, $39.95). An immense, fresh history of the “city upon a hill” conceives of the place as an independent city-state that was absorbed into the new country that arose around it. Boston’s current moment—at once privileged and peculiar—suggests the value of considering its distinctive past in light of powerful, imaginative scholarship, in the deft hands of the author, now at Yale.
Harvard music department free concerts
Among the free performances sponsored by the Harvard music department this spring is “Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine” (May 3). Conceived by Peter Sellars ’80 and starring Julia Bullock, the luminous soprano and artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the production features music, songs, and texts that make contemporary the life and work of Josephine Baker.
Cass Sunstein on the constitution in the 21st century
Cass Sunstein ’75, J.D. ’78, has been regarded as one of the country’s most influential and adventurous legal scholars for a generation. His scholarly articles have been cited more often than those of any of his peers ever since he was a young professor. At 60, now Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, he publishes significant books as often as many productive academics publish scholarly articles—three of them last year.
Casey Cep reviews “These Truths: A History of the United States,” by Jill Lepore
Only the ampersand is still visible; Benjamin Franklin’s thick backslashes hide the words themselves. It was two weeks before the United States would declare its independence from Great Britain, and Thomas Jefferson, having finished tinkering with his draft of the declaration, asked Franklin to review it.
Profile of Lawrence S. Bacow, Harvard’s 29th president
Lawrence S. Bacow, a career educator, is schooled in making decisions. At Tufts university, Lawrence S. Bacow famously invited members of the community to join him on early-morning runs: a chance to get a word with the president while training for the Boston Marathon. And so this past April 16—a very wet and miserable Marathon Monday morning—enterprising Crimson reporter Luke W. Xu ’20 found himself splashing along Memorial Drive with Harvard’s president-elect.
Book review: “A Terrible Country” is a cold, welcome wind
Perusing social media in recent months, you get the sense that Russia once again looms as America’s great antagonist. Russians are meddling in our election and colluding with our president. The KGB is stealing our private data and spreading “fake news.” Anyone who says something controversial on social media can scapegoat a Russian bot. The Cold War is back, this time as farce: rather than a global contest between workers and capitalists, there are oligarchs and thugs on all sides.
The building blocks of how babies reason
What goes on in the minds of babies? A lot, it turns out: long gone are the days when psychologists believed infants couldn’t use abstract thought. Recent research from the lab of Elizabeth Spelke, Berkman professor of psychology, suggests that babies can understand things about social behavior, preferences—even about people’s objectives and values.
Death penalty critiqued by Carol and Jordan Steiker
Fifty years ago, American support for the death penalty was as low as it has ever been: more Americans opposed it than approved it. Violent crime in the country was low. The number of executions annually was a small fraction of the historical peak in the 1930s. These conditions set the stage for the modern era of the death penalty in the United States. In 1972, the Supreme Court struck down the penalty as it then existed, voiding statutes in about 40 states plus the District of Columbia.
Profile of political philosopher Nancy Rosenblum
It started with a bully. “The noise bully,” Nancy Rosenblum calls him, a man who lived in her Cambridge loft building years ago and tormented the family next door with a rooftop air conditioner whose roar and vibrations shook their apartment day and night. They couldn’t sleep. They tried earplugs and insulation; they tried moving their bed to the back of the room. Finally they tried selling their place. They received no offers.
Public Interest Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design
In June 1968, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) invited civil-rights leader Whitney Young Jr. to speak at its national convention. Just two months earlier, riots had devastated dozens of American downtowns in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. AIA members wanted to know what had happened, and how they could help. But Young, then the president of the National Urban League, offered far more condemnation than comfort.
Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson on the origins of the arts
Your independent source for Harvard news since 1898 Log-In | Register Search form Search Articles News more News Exterior of the ArtLab Photograph by Clare O’Keefe An “interdisciplinary laboratory devoted to creativity, innovation, collaboration, and connection” 2.25.19 Click on arrow at right to see full image gallery (1 of 4) Adams House, encompassing buildings ranging from Colonial America to Harvard’s Depression-era creation of the House system (and trisected by city streets), poses...
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