Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Kenzie Greer
College Admits 4.5 Percent of Applicants to Class of 2023
The College has admitted 1,950 of 43,330 applicants to the class of 2023 (935 of whom were admitted through early actionin December). The 4.5 percent admit rate is Harvard’s lowest ever, down slightly from 4.6 percent last year; it reflects the largest number of applicants in the College’s history. First-generation college students represent 16.4 percent of the admitted class, down slightly from 17.3 percent last year, when the College admitted its highest share of low-income students.
| Harvard Magazine
STEM-CELL RESEARCH Poor Jack, or is it Jill, pictured sitting atop a needle on the cover of your July-August issue ("Stem-Cell Science," by Jonathan Shaw, page 36). Jack or Jill has no chance of surviving, has he/she? Let's hope his/her murderers come to swift justice. Embryonic stem cells, being pluripotent and as treated in the unnatural environment of a laboratory, give rise not so much to bright prospects as to terrifying risks.
Harvard Lowell House changes portraits display
Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the University’s president from 1909 to 1933, looms large in Harvard history, repeatedly championing academic freedom and helping to create the undergraduate House system. “Less heroic was Lowell’s role in two disputes that became public in 1922,” wrote John Bethell, former editor of Harvard Magazine, in Harvard Observed, his history of the institution during the twentieth century.
Sociologist Orlando Patterson does landmark work on slavery and freedom.
In the spring of 2012, Brown University hosted an extraordinary academic conference. “Being Nobody?” honored the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Slavery and Social Death by Orlando Patterson, Harvard’s Cowles professor of sociology. Giving a birthday party for a scholarly book is a rarity in itself. Even more unusual, the symposium’s 11 presenters were not sociologists.
Nathaniel Bowditch
In 1816, Harvard awarded Nathaniel Bowditch an honorary doctor of laws, a decade after its (unsuccessful) offer of the Hollis professorship of mathematics and natural philosophy. These were remarkable moves, considering that Bowditch was entirely self-taught. But Bowditch was no less remarkable.
Helen Vendler's collaboration with Arion Press
Many poems enact wild rides of the imagination, but John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” which announced a new kind of craft in 1974, is also vivid in concreteness and its emphasis on form. Referencing a Mannerist painting by Parmigianino, Ashbery carefully elaborates size, angle, light, texture, and time (a “peculiar slant / Of memory”) to tease out his poem’s intellectual shape—an approach that draws particular attention to the piece’s own materiality.
In Beijing, President Bacow Affirms Academic Freedom
President Lawrence S. Bacow—on an Asian itinerary including stops in Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and Tokyo—delivered an address last night at Peking University titled “The Pursuit of Truth and the Mission of the University.” His visit comes at a time of sharp strategic and trade differences between the United States and China, and of increased control of discourse and dissent within the People’s Republic.
Planning the Ivy League conference tournament
In late February, the Ivy League announced a pre-determined rotation of campus sites for its basketball tournaments, and the response on social media and in the press was swift and critical. Penn’s star, AJ Brodeur, tweeted, “Big yikes.” Dalen Cuff, an ESPN commentator who played at Columbia, deplored the “rotational charade” on Twitter.
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.
March-April 2019
News more News Research more Research Click on arrow at right to see full image gallery (1 of 9) Typography instructor Herbert Bayer’s design for a cinema (c. 1924-1925) is a stark contrast to the elaborate theaters of the 1920s.
Excerpt from “When Your Child Is Sick,” by Joanna Breyer
How do parents and their children cope when a child suffers a medical condition requiring extended hospitalization and treatment?
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.
A Courtyard centers Harvard Art Museums
There are the jewels—in most museums’ case, their artistic holdings—and in some instances, the equally attractive jewel boxes: the museum structures themselves. No one is about to confuse the capacious Calderwood Courtyard at the heart of the Harvard Art Museums, as recently extended upward and topped with an enormous light-admitting lantern, with anything so diminutive as a jewel box. But it is treasured space nonetheless.
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.
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?
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.
The continuing appeal of Rachel Ingalls
Rachel Ingalls’s 1983 novel Binstead’s Safari has been reissued by New Directions this February, and that is no surprise: her cult novella Mrs. Caliban (1982) attracted renewed interest and a reprint in 2017 when its plot—a lonely housewife named Dorothy falls in love with Larry, a scaly green frog-man—drew parallels to Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, winner of four Academy Awards that year, including Best Picture. Ingalls grew up in Cambridge and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1964.
Disadvantaged students in elite colleges
Earlier this decade, Anthony Abraham Jack posed a stern challenge to selective colleges that had begun to focus on attracting more students from lower-income families and communities.
A.J. Melczko, hockey champion and broadcaster
Hockey champion A.J. Mleczko in the broadcast booth A.J. Mleczko ’97 (’99) could always see the ice. As a player, that was one thing she counted on, even more than the goals and assists (although there were plenty of those, too).
Launching Gen Ed, rethinking shopping week
I. Gen Ed in the Offing When she became dean of undergraduate education last July 1, Amanda Claybaugh, Zemurray Stone Radcliffe professor of English, immediately inherited the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ (FAS) longest-running, most pressing curricular challenge: launching the College’s re-reformed, required General Education courses successfully, effective this coming fall semester.
A winter’s trip to Portland, Maine
Forget lounging on the beach, and suit up instead to explore Portland, Maine, this winter. This dining haven and creative hub might be a lot quieter—and a lot colder—admits longtime resident John Robinson ’90, a novelist and author of A Concise History of Portland, Maine (2008), but the arts and culinary scenes are thriving. Theaters, museums, and music halls are all open, as are downtown’s boutiques, cafés, and night clubs.
How physical appearance influences authority
Most Fortune 500 CEOs—roughly 95 percent of them, in fact—are white men. Line up headshots of these leaders and plenty of pronounced chins, square jaws, salt-and-pepper hair, and other physical features suggesting maturity, masculinity, and gravitas are also readily apparent. But for the handful of African-American CEOs at Fortune 500 firms, portraits reveal something very different in play, says social psychologist Robert Livingston, a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School.
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.
Harvard president Drew Faust in perspective
The memories may be fading, but Harvard roared into the new millennium. In the wake of the $2.6-billion University Campaign, Neil L. Rudenstine bequeathed to his successor a $165-million surplus—a huge cushion in an annual budget then totaling $2.1 billion.
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.
Our Towns
Heading west by small plane from the East Coast, writes James Fallows ’70, “you have a sense of going uphill, and into drier air. Mile by mile you leave behind the forested hollows of the Appalachian slopes, the farms and gently hilly pastures of southern Ohio and Indiana, the flatlands and sweeping corn and soybean fields of Illinois, which are broken at regular rectangular intervals by north-south and east-west roads laid out when the land was being distributed to nineteenth-century settlers.
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.
Summer Education & Enrichment
Summer Education & Enrichment Vox Cambridge College Consulting, LLC. We help students navigate the college process. Vox Cambridge provides highly personalized, custom college consulting with sensitivity and warmth. We help students gain insight into their true personality and character, then express it in a way that turns Admissions Officers' heads. Contact Kathleen Moore, 617-320-2724. www.voxcambridge.co (Click photo to view this ad at full size) St. Paul's Choir School. Soaring.
Alec Karakatsanis fights for criminal-justice reform
Alec Karakatsanis puts “human caging” and “wealth-based detention” in America on trial. In early 2014, Alec Karakatsansis, J.D. ’08, used some of the money that he and a law-school classmate had recently received from the school’s Public Service Venture Fund seed grant to buy a plane ticket to Birmingham, Alabama, and rent a car. He planned to visit the judge he had clerked for in Montgomery after graduating, as well as other people he’d met during his time as a clerk and federal defender.
How U.S. Companies Stole American Jobs
Thirty or 40 years ago, companies like General Motors and Chase Manhattan Bank hired their own janitors and clerical staff, not just top executives and engineers. Today, low-skilled jobs are often outsourced, with effects that are rippling across the American workforce. Throughout the 2016 election cycle, immigrants and globalization proved politically popular scapegoats for the disappearance of American jobs. But according to Allison professor of economics Lawrence F.
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.
The animal law conundrum: when are creatures "things”?
Jeremy and Kathryn Medlen have two children, but with eight-year-old Avery around, it often felt like three. A beloved mixed-breed mutt with flopped-forward Labrador ears, Avery was a member of the family, welcome on the couch, included on vacations, a fixture in family photos. But in June 2009, the dog spooked at a thunderclap and fled the Medlens’ Fort Worth, Texas, backyard. He ended up at a nearby shelter, where his overjoyed owners found him the following day.
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 sociologist Matthew Desmond on evictions
The sheriffs announced their arrival with a loud knock. If nobody was inside, they’d have to kick the door in—but at this house, someone was home. The second-floor apartment was home to Danielle Shaw and her partner, Jerry Allen. On this Wednesday morning in August, Shaw and Allen were at home with young relatives, the children enjoying the last days of summer break.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Kenzie
Contact Kenzie, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack