Researchers are studying the residents of the island of Ikaria to figure out why so many of them live well into their 90s and beyond: “Following the report by Pes and Poulain, Dr. Christina Chrysohoou, a cardiologist at the University of Athens School of Medicine, teamed up with half a dozen scientists to organize the […]
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Growing Up Romney
A profile of Gov. Mitt Romney’s eldest son Tagg, and his family’s “myth of self-reliance”: “Not long after graduating from Harvard Business School, he turned down offers from several prominent firms to join an obscure start-up called eGrad, whose meager resources gave it a kind of grunge aesthetic: secondhand furniture and heating so erratic he […]
How to Fix America from Below
A Yale law professor argues that we’re not doing enough to empower the minority voices in America—and change should start at the local level: “The ideas Gerken is known for first took shape, appropriately enough, as a disagreement. Several years ago, not long after she’d been hired as a young professor at Harvard, she sat […]
The Inside Story of a Controversial New Text About Jesus
Inside Harvard historian Karen King’s discovery of an ancient papyrus fragment that includes the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife’”: “What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife. And not […]
Schmooze or Lose
President Obama is less skilled than Presidents Clinton and Bush when it comes to buttering up campaign donors. Is this a good thing? “As the Washington fund-raiser sees it, the White House social secretary must spend the first year of an Administration saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ Instead, the fund-raiser says, Obama’s first […]
Hypochondria: The Impossible Illness
A man with hypochondria attempts to understand his disorder: “Eleven years ago, when he was still a medical resident at Columbia University, Fallon was asked to help a man who was convinced, despite medical results to the contrary, that he was saddled with a brain tumor. ‘He tried Prozac, and it made a dramatic change,’ […]
Future TechStars, Step Forward
What does it take to get a tech startup funded? Inside the competitive selection process for one incubator in New York City: “The date is January 24, one day after applications were due for TechStars, a three-month mentorship program that is part boot camp, part investment fund. Some 1,480 young companies have filled out a […]
Where American Criminal Justice Went Wrong
William Stuntz, a conservative law professor at Harvard, was suffering from colon cancer and spent the last three years of his life working on a book that aimed to rethink how our justice system has failed: “Stuntz submitted his completed manuscript to his editor at Harvard University Press in January 2011, about three months before […]
Disgrace
A history of scientific misconduct and the investigation of Harvard scientist Marc Hauser: “Three years after the seizure of materials from Hauser’s lab, theBoston Globe leaked news of a secret investigating committee at Harvard that had found Hauser ‘solely responsible’ for ‘eight counts of scientific misconduct.’ Michael Smith, Harvard’s dean of the Faculty of Arts […]
The Code of the Winklevii
More people now recognized the Winklevosses as either themselves or a recently cloned Armie Hammer, and Felipe assumed the proprietary grandeur of a Victorian circus impresario before some engagingly deformed beast. “These are the ones who came up with the idea for the Facebook, but had it stolen from them,” he explained to one and […]
