Search Results for: Harvard
The Plot to Turn On the World: The Leary/Ginsberg Acid Conspiracy
As the public faces of the psychedelic revolution, Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary made a dynamic duo. The charming, boyish, Irish Harvard professor and the ecstatic, boldly gay, Hebraically-bearded Jersey bard became the de facto gurus of the movement they’d helped create — father figures for a generation of lysergic pilgrims who temporarily jettisoned their own fathers in their quest for renewable revelation.
Where Does Good Come From?
What E.O. Wilson is trying to do, late in his influential career, is nothing less than overturn a central plank of established evolutionary theory: the origins of altruism. His position is provoking ferocious criticism from other scientists. Last month, the leading scientific journal Nature published five strongly worded letters saying, more or less, that Wilson has misunderstood the theory of evolution and generally doesn’t know what he’s talking about. One of these carried the signatures of an eye-popping 137 scientists, including two of Wilson’s colleagues at Harvard.
Johnson & Johnson’s Quality Catastrophe
After 50-plus product recalls in 15 months, the $60 billion company is fighting to clear its once-trusted name. “Not only is J&J bigger and more decentralized; it’s also much more profitable. Its operating margin in 1990 was 17.7 percent; in 2010 it was 26.8 percent. ‘Where did that increase in margin come from?’ asks Sucher, the Harvard business professor. When J&J acquired Pfizer’s consumer health-care division in 2006, it predicted cost savings of $500 million to $600 million. Sucher says numbers like that suggest cost-cutting may have gone too far.”
Our Universities: How Bad? How Good?
If crisis there is, it surely has something to do with the larger crisis in American society: the increasing gap between haves and have-nots, the retreat from any commitment to economic fairness, the sense that the system is rigged to benefit a tarnished elite that no longer justifies its existence. The affluence gap between Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, plus a few others, and the rest of the universities has indeed increased, and permits a degree of luxury to both students and faculty in those institutions that are the envy of the rest. (Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley—generally considered the greatest public university in the world—had their telephones removed from their offices last year, in a nicely symbolic gesture of their helplessness under the budget knife.)
Clayton Christensen: The Survivor
The Harvard Business School professor’s work took on new urgency the past few years as he suffered a heart attack followed by cancer followed by a stroke. For Christensen it was not a reason to get too upset. It was another opportunity, in a lifetime full of them, to gain insight into how to make the world work better. Because of his July stroke it took a long time for Christensen to be ready to sit down with Forbes. He was in intensive speech therapy, eight hours a day at the beginning. But he graciously agreed to tell his inspiring story in January, the same month he went back to teaching. Here it is in his words, along with those of his family, friends and close colleagues.
I Was Teenage Hockey Message Board Jailbait
If you Google hard enough, you can locate a thread deep within the Internet that was posted to the alt.sports.hockey.nhl.phila-flyers Usenet newsgroup on March 22, 2000. “Where oh where is Katie Baker??” reads the subject line. “What the hell happened to her?” says the post. The responses are mercifully cryptic. “Detention,” wrote one man. “Isn’t she trapped in Cambridge?” cracked another. “Harvard has a high school? :)” responded someone with the username Nastyflyersgirl. “Wow,” wrote one lady called Starr. “No one is safe with any secrets here. Like they say, the truth is bound to come out sooner or later.”
Marty Peretz in Exile
For decades, Martin Peretz taught at Harvard and presided over The New Republic—a fierce, if controversial, lion among American intellectuals and Zionists. Now, having been labeled a bigot, taunted at his alma mater, and stripped of his magazine, he has found peace in a place where there is little: Israel.
Generation Why?
How long is a generation these days? I must be in Mark Zuckerberg’s generation—there are only nine years between us—but somehow it doesn’t feel that way. This despite the fact that I can say (like everyone else on Harvard’s campus in the fall of 2003) that “I was there” at Facebook’s inception, and remember Facemash and the fuss it caused; also that tiny, exquisite movie star trailed by fan-boys through the snow wherever she went, and the awful snow itself, turning your toes gray, destroying your spirit, bringing a bloodless end to a squirrel on my block: frozen, inanimate, perfect—like the Blaschka glass flowers. Doubtless years from now I will misremember my closeness to Zuckerberg, in the same spirit that everyone in ’60s Liverpool met John Lennon.
Greg Giraldo Before He Was Greg Giraldo
Ten years ago, Esquire profiled several young professionals who, ten years before that, had graduated from Harvard Law School and thrown away their degrees. One of them was comedian Greg Giraldo, who died on Wednesday of a drug overdose. This is the obituary of his first life.
How to Survive in Vegas
Gary Loveman left a Harvard Business School professorship to join Harrah’s Entertainment. By putting his theories about customer service into practice, he built the world’s biggest gaming company. Then came the crash.
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