Scarcity's Toll

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May-June 2015 • $4.95 Scarcity’s Toll

Sendhil Mullainathan probes poverty GO FURTHER THAN YOU EVER IMAGINED.

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features 38 The Science of Scarcity | by Cara Feinberg Behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan reinterprets the causes and effects of poverty

44 Vita: Thomas Nuttall | by John Nelson Brief life of a pioneering naturalist: 1786-1859

46 Altering Course | by Jonathan Shaw p. 46 Mara Prentiss on the science of American energy consumption now— and in a newly sustainable era

52 Line by Line | by Spencer Lenfield David Ferry’s poems and “renderings” of literary classics are mutually reinforcing

John Harvard’s Journal 17 Biomedical informatics and the advent of precision medicine, adept algorithmist, when tobacco stocks were tossed, studying sharia, climate-change currents and other Harvard headlines, the “new” in House renewal, a former governor as Commencement speaker, the Undergraduate’s electronic tethers, basketball’s rollercoaster season, hockey highlights, and heavyweight crew’s helmsman

p. 17 departments 2 Cambridge 02138 | Letters from our readers—and an observation on academic integrity and culture change 3 The View from Mass Hall 11 Right Now | Making mice nurturing, engineering a “bionic leaf,” decoding Vitamin D’s effects 2 lman 16A Harvard | Spring events, Mandy Patinkin at the A.R.T., mid-century he modern homes, building with branches, South End garden gala, and t Ec e Commencement-week highlights and cuisine an f J sy o sy e 57 Montage | Net artistry, composing contemporary operas, the Tao of vegetables, ourt multicultural jazz singer, the J.R.R. Tolkien-C.S. Lewis circle, on growing up, and more C r/ e t 68 Alumni | Using data to overhaul electric utilities, and Overseer and HAA director slates 72 The College Pump | Goalpost thievery, Harvard pickles, the flip-flop menace p. 57 80 Treasure | Pre-selfie class portraits

73 Crimson Classifieds On the cover: Photograph by Jim Harrison From top: istock; jim Harrison; Ema Pe

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letters

editor: John S. Rosenberg

senior editor: Jean Martin Cambridge  managing editor: Jonathan S. Shaw art director: Jennifer Carling Climate change, China’s gains, palliative care assistant editor-online: Laura Levis

assistant editor: Nell Porter Brown

staff writers: Stephanie Garlock, Athletics Angles occult cerebral injuries incurred by the Sophia Nguyen Anent the letter in the March-April players. They are inevitable by the nature berta greenwald ledecky issue (page 8) about football: should Har- of the game. undergraduate fellows vard not take the lead in banning this dan- Giulio J. D’Angio, M.D. ’45 Olivia Munk, Melanie Wang gerous sport? There is compelling evi- Philadelphia dence of lasting—and potentially lethal (suicide)—psychological/neurological Editor’s note: For other views and news, see contributing editors adverse sequelae following the repeated the next letter; the book review by for- John T. Bethell, John de Cuevas, Dick Friedman, Adam Goodheart, 7 Ware Street members to raise such issues in class—an Elizabeth Gudrais, Jim Harrison, On My Honor effort to alter the culture on campus. The Courtney Humphries, Christopher S. true aim of creating a code in an age of cut- Johnson, Adam Kirsch, Colleen Lannon, Harvard undergraduates now have and-paste and collaborative assignments, Christopher Reed, Stu Rosner, Deborah an honor code—spelling out expectations its proponents explain, is to prompt ex- Smullyan, Mark Steele of integrity in their academic work, as leg- plicit understanding of previously implicit islated by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences assumptions about norms within an aca- harvard magazine inc. (FAS) last spring. This fall, they will have demic community. president: Henry Rosovsky, JF ’57, to “affirm theirawareness ” (emphasis added) This is real progress. But the single best Ph.D. ’59, LL.D. ’98. directors: Suzanne of the code, but not take an oath to accept opportunity to foster those conversations Blier, Peter K. Bol, Jonathan L.S. Byrnes, the values it embodies or conform to its came during the lamentable events of 2012- D.B.A. ’80, Thomas F. Kelly, Ph.D. ’73, standards—see harvardmag.com/honor- 2013, when more than 100 students were Lars Peter Knoth Madsen, Margaret H. code-15. (Whatever their position on the ensnared in an Administrative Board in- Marshall, Ed.M. ’69, John P. Reardon Jr. code’s merits, students are bound by its vestigation of their behavior. At least one ’60, Bryan E. Simmons ’83 standards, much as they operate subject to House master held forums to air the is- civil and criminal law in the larger society.) sues; presumably resident tutors, depart- Entering freshmen and sophomores will also mental leaders, and others did, too. But no Board of Incorporators This magazine, at ﬁrst called the Harvard Bulletin, was write briefly about academic integrity. community conversations for freewheel- founded in 1898. Its Board of Incorporators was char- The honor code, in the making since ing discussion of academic expectations tered in 1924 and remains active in the magazine’s 2010 (and given greater urgency during the among professors and students were con- governance. The membership is as follows: Stephen J. Bailey, AMP ’94; Jeffrey S. Behrens ’89, William I. 2012-2013 academic-misconduct investiga- vened: by the administration, FAS, or even Bennett ’62, M.D. ’69; John T. Bethell ’54; Peter K. Bol; tion and ensuing punishment of dozens of students themselves or their Undergradu- Fox Butterﬁeld ’61, A.M. ’64; Sewell Chan ’98; Jona- than S. Cohn ’91; Philip M. Cronin ’53, J.D. ’56; John students for impermissible collaboration ate Council. de Cuevas ’52; James F. Dwinell III ’62; Anne Fadiman on a take-home fnal exam) was never go- In choosing to direct so much of the ’74; Benjamin M. Friedman ’66, Ph.D. ’71; Robert H. Giles, NF ’66; Richard H. Gilman, M.B.A. ’83; Owen ing to be punitive. For example, students discussion into formal channels (commit- Gingerich, Ph.D. ’62; Adam K. Goodheart ’92; Phil- will not be compelled, or asked, to report tee deliberations, faculty meetings, and ip C. Haughey ’57; Brian R. Hecht ’92; Sarah Blaffer Hrdy ’68, Ph.D. ’75; Ellen Hume ’68; Alex S. Jones, NF on apparent violations by their peers. The legislation), an important teaching mo- ’82; Bill Kovach, NF ’89; Florence Ladd, BI ’72; Jen- language about affirming awareness of the ment was lost. Such forums would have nifer 8 Lee ’99; Randolph C. Lindel ’66; Ann Marie code, delicately drafted during the past been risky, to be sure—but at worst, too Lipinski, NF ’90; Scott Malkin ’80, J.D.-M.B.A. ’83; Margaret H. Marshall, Ed.M. ’69, Ed ’77, L ’78; Lisa L. year in response to some professors’ objec- few people would have attended. At best, Martin, Ph.D. ’90; David McClintick ’62; Winthrop tions to any kind of oath, and questions the conversation could have been more L. McCormack ’67; M. Lee Pelton, Ph.D. ’84; John P. Reardon Jr. ’60; Christopher Reed; Harriet Ritvo ’68, about the efficacy of the measures en- organic, more vivid, and, in all likelihood, Ph.D. ’75; Henry Rosovsky, JF ’57, Ph.D. ’59, LL.D. ’98; acted (see harvardmag.com/honorcode), more meaningful for advancing a healthy Barbara Rudolph ’77; Robert N. Shapiro ’72, J.D. ’78; Theda Skocpol, Ph.D. ’75; Peter A. Spiers ’76; Scott makes the code, its student-faculty honor College academic culture. H. Stossel ’91; Sherry Turkle ’69, Ph.D. ’76; Robert H. board—and its encouragements to faculty v john s. rosenberg, Editor Weiss ’54; Jan Ziolkowski.

2 May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 The View from Mass Hall

An Extraordinary Season

egardless of your distance from greater Boston, you likely know that Harvard slogged through a semester of record-breaking—and patience-testing—winter weather. The type of meteorological event immortalized by RRalph Waldo Emerson in “The Snow-Storm” as “…myriad-handed, his wild work/So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he/For number or proportion” buffeted our campus month after month, totaling more than 108 inches of snow. Temperatures—often in the single digits—stayed below 40 degrees for 43 consecutive days stretching from January to March. The view from Mass Hall was akin to peer- ing out from inside of a snow globe and bracing for the next shake. Harvard cancelled classes and suspended most operations for three days this year, but there is no such thing as shutting down the University. We have more than 10,000 students to feed and house regardless of the weather—and efforts to keep up with Mother Na- ture were nothing short of remarkable. Staff members kept pantries open and patrol cars running, and made trekking and traveling across campus possible. The University depended on their skill more than ever this year, and I, like countless others, am deeply grateful for all their dedication and hard work. Snowstorms send us out and keep us in. True to form, the winter weather sent students sliding down the steps of Widener Library only from Harvard, but also from Cambridge and Boston. Ninety and warming up with comfort foods including some 1,500 gallons percent of the 11-acre property was covered in piles that came to of soup. Fortunately, every residential dining hall remained open resemble a small mountain range—complete with a 60-foot peak. regardless of the conditions thanks to intrepid dining services staff By the time the snowfall record was broken, an estimated 300,000 who volunteered to work multiple shifts—sometimes agreeing to tons of snow had been transported to the site. As you read this, it spend the night—to keep the kitchen humming. They found eager is likely still in the process of melting. students, tutors, resident deans, and Housemasters who helped with To mark a new entry in the record books, the Harvard community everything from swiping cards to washing dishes, and they received gathered on the Science Center Plaza in late March and toasted with rounds of applause and notes of appreciation for going above and hot chocolate and s’mores, celebrating resilience, the people who beyond their responsibilities. worked to keep Harvard running this year, and the early signs of a Other colleagues managed less visible, but no less essential, func- welcome spring. The snow was as careless and as savage as Emerson tions to keep the lights on and the temperature up for everyone who describes, but it was also as beautiful: calls campus home. Harvard police officers were on duty no matter Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, the weather, and shuttle services put vehicles on the road to ensure Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the felds, that students, faculty, and staff were able to travel safely. Landscape Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air services cleared and recleared more than a hundred miles of side- Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, walks and pathways, wielding shovels and snow blowers, pushing And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end. Bobcats and Bombardiers, and spreading sand and salt almost as The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet quickly as the flakes kept falling. If their equipment failed, colleagues Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit stood at the ready to make quick repairs—an absolute necessity as Around the radiant freplace, enclosed hours of work stretched into days of work. In a tumultuous privacy of storm. As inches rapidly piled into feet, the issue of where to go with the snow became more and more pressing. In late January, the Univer- Sincerely, sity opened what has become known as the Allston “snow farm.” For two and a half weeks, the site was open around the clock, and truck after truck—up to 1,700 in a single day—delivered snow not

Harvard Magazine 3 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746

Letters mer Harvard College dean for Green Buildings and Harry Lewis, page 65; and Cities as an approach to Brevia, page 27. fghting climate change. Such a center presumably w.C. Dowling’s letter and can’t hurt. But it certainly publisher: Irina Kuksin Dick Friedman’s “amplif- can’t help to have the most director of circulation and cation” about “walk-ons” prestigious educational fundraising: Felecia Carter prompts me to recount my institution in the country donor relations and stewardship own participation in Har- steadfastly sticking to a manager: Allison Kern vard basketball as an ex- course of investing in cli- director of advertising: treme case. mate-destroying fossil fuels Robert D. Fitta Though I had played the for proft. Faust has backed sport in city and YMCA this course and has stone- new england advertising manager: leagues in Racine, Wisconsin, I had never walled the students who will have to live in Abby Shepard even gone out for my high-school team. the world created by climate change, refus- classified advertising manager: When the call came for tryouts for the ing even to meet with them until it became Gretchen Bostrom Crimson freshman team in 1949 (fresh- a tactic to try to get them out of Massachu- designer and integrated marketing men were ineligible for varsity in those setts Hall. manager: Jennifer Beaumont days), I signed up just for the exercise. I Harvard and Faust are morally disgraced was baffled when I remained after each cut by this course. If the world behaves in a production and new media was made by Floyd Wilson, then freshman sane fashion and rapidly phases out fossil manager: Mark Felton (and later, varsity) coach. He apparently fuels, they will lose a lot of money as well. associate web developer: saw something in me that I was not aware Doug Burke ’67 Jeffrey Hudecek of—for I not only made frst string but in Oak Park, Ill. gift processor and office manager: our fnal game against the Yale freshmen I Robert Bonotto limited their star to 9 points and made 16 Alumni urging the University to divest ivy league magazine network as high scorer in our win. Although I let- fossil-fuel stocks have chosen the wrong director, sales and marketing: tered the next three years, that was the target. Eighty-seven percent of the world’s Ross Garnick, www.ivymags.com high point of my college basketball career. energy is derived today from fossil fuels and But subsequently I was a starter on a divestment will not alter that. The path to ef- editorial and business office European U.S. military all-star team for an fectively addressing climate change leads not 7 Ware Street international tournament in Cap d’Antibes to Cambridge but to Paris, where the global Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4037 (Dean Smith of North Carolina fame was climate conference will be held in November. Tel. 617-495-5746; fax: 617-495-0324 on the second fve), and then was player- Advocates claim that, regardless of Website: www.harvardmagazine.com coach for many years on college faculty global warming, retention of oil stocks is E-mail: [email protected] intramural teams. While I most value my an unwise investment. Harvard’s fnancial Harvard years for their intellectual stimu- managers (and many other investors) dis- @harvardmagazine lation, I remain grateful for that athletic agree. Advocates point to recent oil-price facebook.com/harvardmagazine nurturing as well. declines, but this did not derive from fall- Forest Hansen ’53 ing demand (quite the contrary), but rather Harvard Magazine (ISSN 0095-2427) is published bi- monthly by Harvard Magazine Inc., a nonprofit cor- Easton, Md. from additional production at shale forma- poration, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4037, tions in North Dakota and Texas. However, phone 617-495-5746; fax 617-495-0324. The magazine is Climate-Change Exchange supported by reader contributions and subscriptions, this additional production is unlikely to advertising revenue, and a subvention from Harvard While President Faust has wisely depress prices long term, since the addi- University. Its editorial content is the responsibility of elected to be politically correct by using tional three million barrels per day from the editors. Periodicals postage paid at Boston, Mass., and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send ad- the words “climate change,” rather than the U.S. shale is a tiny fraction of the 90 million dress changes to Circulation Department, Harvard Al Gore tag of “global warming” (The View barrels consumed daily worldwide. Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4037. Subscription rate $30 a year in U.S. and possessions, $55 from Mass Hall, March-April, page 3), I won- Advocates further claim that the South Canada and Mexico, $75 other foreign. (Allow up to der if she is displaying a lack of humility to African [divestment] experience is a use- 10 weeks for first delivery.) Subscription orders and Mother Nature in suggesting that, despite customer service inquiries should be sent to the Cir- ful precedent. However, the analogy is culation Department, Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, For the most critical questions. millions of years of highly variable climate inapposite. South Africa, with less than 1 Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4037, or call 617-495-5746 or 800-648-4499, or e-mail [email protected]. change, there is a “role that research univer- percent of the world’s population, was a Single copies $4.95, plus $2.50 for postage and han- No matter how complex your business questions, we have the sities can play in combating climate change.” rogue state conducting a violent racist re- dling. Manuscript submissions are welcome, but we capabilities and experience to deliver the answers you need to F. Gregg Bemis Jr., M.B.A. ’54 gime that necessarily yielded to accepted cannot assume responsibility for safekeeping. Include stamped, self-addressed envelope for manuscript re- move forward. As the world’s largest consulting fi rm, we can Santa Fe moral standards. By contrast, the produc- turn. Persons wishing to reprint any portion of Harvard help you take decisive action and achieve sustainable results. tion and consumption of oil is the world’s Magazine’s contents are required to write in advance for permission. Address inquiries to Irina Kuk- www.deloitte.com/answers I was bemused, but not surprised, to see largest enterprise, reaching into every sin, publisher, at the address given above. President Faust touting Harvard’s Center country in the planet, conducted daily by Copyright © 2015 Harvard Magazine Inc. Copyright © 2015 Deloitte Development LLC. All rights reserved.

4 May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 For the most critical questions.

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Copyright © 2015 Deloitte Development LLC. All rights reserved. Letters willing producers and willing buyers in a reduce the supply of labor in most devel- vation, and any qualifying comments. One peaceful manner. oping countries, so increased training and way or the other, let us know the response. The heart of the matter is that world education will be needed to improve pro- Bob Cook ’68 oil demand is on a steady upward trend. ductivity and maintain competitiveness. Director emeritus, Arnold Arboretum Divestment protestors will themselves ar- Finally, it is clearly true that China’s (1989-2009) rive in Cambridge by car or plane. A rural growing income and wealth inequality Brookline, Mass. Community brought us together. subsistence farmer in Myanmar owns only is causing some concern and resentment three tangible assets: the tin roof over his among the populace. President Xi Jin- Matters of Degrees Life here sets us apart. shed, a cow, and a motorcycle. World oil ping’s attack on corruption among the The squib regarding the Honorable Ruth production will push ahead to keep up elites is designed, in part, to defuse the is- Bader Ginsburg (“Brevia,” March-April, with increasing demand. Thus even if one sue. This is a delaying tactic that will do page 25) indicates that she graduated from assumes that all U.S. universities were little to correct the trend. China, like the Harvard Law School in 1959. That is not to dump all their fossil-fuel stocks, this United States, may need to tackle this is- true. Ginsburg dropped out in 1957, fol- would have no effect either on the world- sue more directly through tools such as lowing her frst year. [Editor’s note: She trans- wide oil supply/demand equation, or on taxation, but it may also be that demo- ferred to Columbia Law School, when her climate change itself. graphic trends will offer a correcting in- husband took a job in New York.] The answer lies in a technological shift fluence as labor becomes more scarce and Academies understandably like to pub- to global non-carbon energy sources with more valuable and, possibly, capital will licize luminaries among their graduates. a worldwide conservation policy in the earn lower returns. However, by misrepresenting such an ac- meantime. John Krafft, M.B.A. ’76 complishment, neither you nor Ginsburg William H. Nickerson ’61 Lone Tree, Colo. honors our institution. HLS has less need Greenwich, Conn. than perhaps any other law school for such Momentous Image aggrandizement, either false or true. Globalization Gains I have always considered the photo of Ernest M. Thayer, LL.B. ’59 Stephanie Garlock’s “How Globaliza- the occupiers of University Hall (included in San Francisco tion Begets Inequality” (March-April, page “His Own ‘Decisive Moment,’” March-April, 11) wrongly suggests that China’s poorest page 61) to be striking as well as historic. Editor’s note: Harvard records the class workers have not greatly benefted from glo- Thus I was interested to learn of the post- year of those who enroll in a degree pro- balization. Income inequality and the Gini 1969 career of Tim Carlson, the photogra- gram—hence Ginsburg, L ’59, or College index do not speak at all to the great im- pher. I’ll submit one minor correction: the dropout Bill Gates ’77. Those who com- provement in livelihoods brought about by police bust took place in the morning, not plete degrees are so designated—as Mr. more than two decades of real GDP growth in the nighttime. As a proctor in Weld Hall Thayer is (above). The magazine adheres above 10 percent annually. It has been re- at the time, I witnessed the bust. to this University standard. cently estimated that more than 300 mil- Joel Studebaker, Ph.D. ’71 lion people have been lifted out of poverty in Princeton, N.J. Thank you for another good read in the the last 30 years. My recent travels to China March-April issue. The magazine usually clearly reveal a much richer and more conf- Editor’s note: The police entered Harvard adds the Harvard degrees to the names men- dent populace than was the case in the 1980s. Yard just before sunrise—at 4:55 a.m. The tioned in articles, so I am wondering why no It may be that the article misunder- use of “predawn” might have avoided degrees were mentioned in “An Extra Layer stands or has over-interpreted the work causing confusion. of Care” (page 33). Joanne Wolfe, Andrew of professors Eric Maskin and Michael Billings, and Atul Gawande are all gradu- Kremer. They acknowledge that “grow- Building Budgets ates of Harvard Medical School. Joanne and ing average wages are proof of globaliza- Egads! The editorial in the March-April is- I celebrated our twenty-ffth reunion last tion’s benefts.” They focus on the need for sue (“Bricks and Mortar,” page 2) implied year, so in the article she should have been “Premier Resorts Platinum Medal Award Winner” – Golf Magazine education but it may be that market forces that the expansion of the Kennedy School listed as Joanne Wolfe, M.D. ’89. 80 miles east of Atlanta | 75 miles of shoreline | 37 Member-led social clubs will insure progress in this area. Demo- of Government, an institution dedicated to Edward Chen, M.D. ’89 21 miles of hiking and biking trails | 9 restaurants | 6 and ½ golf courses | 4 marinas graphic changes in upcoming decades will training our future public servants, will cost Needham, Mass. One extraordinary lifestyle an astounding $1,500 per square foot. Surely speak up, please there is no better argument for the need for a Editor’s note: We do not list degrees for fac- Find your community at ReynoldsPlantation.com/Ivy | 888-748-3943 Harvard Magazine welcomes letters scalpel-wielding dean. Perhaps the magazine ulty members; it seems overkill, and their Homesites under $100K to $1.5m+ | Residences from the $300’s to $4m+ on its contents. Please write to “Let- might solicit a future article from the appro- faculty affiliation is what matters most to ters,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, priate University official in charge of capital readers. For alumnae/i who are not fac- Cambridge 02138, send comments by e- projects to explain costs and fnancing in ulty members, we try always to list the de- Real estate and other amenities are owned by Oconee Land Development Company LLC and/or other subsidiaries and affi liates of MetLife, Inc. (collectively, “OLDC” or “Sponsor”) and by unrelated third parties. Reynolds Plantation Properties, LLC (“RPP”) is the exclusive listing agent for OLDC-owned properties in Reynolds Plantation. RPP also represents buyers and sellers of properties in Reynolds Plantation which OLDC does not own (“Resale Properties”). OLDC is not involved in the marketing or sale of Resale Properties. This is not intended to be an offer to sell nor a solicitation of offers mail to yourturn@harvard.edu, use our relation to scope and purpose, accompanied grees—their principal University affiliation. to buy OLDC-owned real estate in Reynolds Plantation by residents of HI, ID, OR, or any other jurisdiction where prohibited by law. As to such states, any offer to sell or solicitation of offers to buy applies only to Resale Properties. Access and rights to recreational amenities may be subject to fees, website, www.harvardmaga zine. com, by a table outlining recent and near-future membership dues, or other limitations. Information provided is believed accurate as of the date printed but may be subject to change from time to time. The Ritz-Carlton Lodge is a private commercial enterprise and use of the facilities is subject to the applicable fees and policies of the operator. or fax us at 617-495-0324. Letters may projects along with their costs per square Palliative Care For OLDC properties, obtain the Property Report required by Federal law and read it before signing anything. No Federal agency has judged the merits or value, if any, of this property. Void where prohibited by law. WARNING: THE CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF REAL ESTATE HAS NOT INSPECTED, EXAMINED, OR DISQUALIFIED THIS OFFERING. An offering statement has been fi led with the Iowa Real Estate be edited to fit the available space. foot (total and construction), size, type of In “An Extra Layer of Care,” by Debra Brad- Commission and a copy of such statement is available from OLDC upon request. OLDC properties have been registered with the Massachusetts Board of Registration of Real Estate Brokers and construction (office, lab, etc.), new or reno- ley Ruder, regarding “the progress of pal- Salesmen at 1000 Washington Street, Suite 710, Boston, Massachusetts 02118-6100 and the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection at 1700 G Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20552. Certain OLDC properties are registered with the Department of Law of the State of New York. THE COMPLETE OFFERING TERMS ARE IN AN OFFERING PLAN AVAILABLE FROM SPONSOR. FILE NO. H14-0001. 6 May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746

150516_Reynolds.indd 1 3/17/15 12:43 PM Community brought us together. Life here sets us apart.

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Real estate and other amenities are owned by Oconee Land Development Company LLC and/or other subsidiaries and afﬁ liates of MetLife, Inc. (collectively, “OLDC” or “Sponsor”) and by unrelated third parties. Reynolds Plantation Properties, LLC (“RPP”) is the exclusive listing agent for OLDC-owned properties in Reynolds Plantation. RPP also represents buyers and sellers of properties in Reynolds Plantation which OLDC does not own (“Resale Properties”). OLDC is not involved in the marketing or sale of Resale Properties. This is not intended to be an offer to sell nor a solicitation of offers to buy OLDC-owned real estate in Reynolds Plantation by residents of HI, ID, OR, or any other jurisdiction where prohibited by law. As to such states, any offer to sell or solicitation of offers to buy applies only to Resale Properties. Access and rights to recreational amenities may be subject to fees, membership dues, or other limitations. Information provided is believed accurate as of the date printed but may be subject to change from time to time. The Ritz-Carlton Lodge is a private commercial enterprise and use of the facilities is subject to the applicable fees and policies of the operator. For OLDC properties, obtain the Property Report required by Federal law and read it before signing anything. No Federal agency has judged the merits or value, if any, of this property. Void where prohibited by law. WARNING: THE CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF REAL ESTATE HAS NOT INSPECTED, EXAMINED, OR DISQUALIFIED THIS OFFERING. An offering statement has been ﬁ led with the Iowa Real Estate Commission and a copy of such statement is available from OLDC upon request. OLDC properties have been registered with the Massachusetts Board of Registration of Real Estate Brokers and Salesmen at 1000 Washington Street, Suite 710, Boston, Massachusetts 02118-6100 and the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection at 1700 G Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20552. Certain OLDC properties are registered with the Department of Law of the State of New York. THE COMPLETE OFFERING TERMS ARE IN AN OFFERING PLAN AVAILABLE FROM SPONSOR. FILE NO. H14-0001.

150516_Reynolds.indd 1 3/17/15 12:43 PM Letters liative medicine” at Massachusetts General there are other hospitals with much more medical and legal services to address so- Hospital, it was encouraging to read that progressive programs. Physicians are crucial determinants of health for vulnerable relief of suffering has become a focus of pa- cial for pain medication, and on some oc- populations. If a moldy apartment is not tient care. But I was left with many unan- casions to prescribe psychoactive drugs, up to code, a child’s asthma cannot im- swered questions. but many dimensions of suffering can only prove. As the co-founder of Terra Firma, The cancer patient Eric Buck is referred be treated by other professionals. the frst medical-legal partnership specif- by his physician “to specialists to address Gene Gall, M.Div. ’74 cally for released unaccompanied immi- his emotional and spiritual struggles.” It Cumberland, Md. grant children, we integrate mental health, was not clear whether these “specialists” pediatric, and immigration legal services (chaplains, social workers, psychologists?) The author responds: The palliative-care to promote resilience in child survivors are on the staff or out in the community; programs at all the Harvard Medical School of trauma. Recently, I spoke on a panel if they are not professionals on the staff at teaching hospitals do, indeed, include or about medical-legal partnerships with a MGH, the scope of treatment is sadly lack- work closely with staff chaplains, social palliative-care doc- ing—and hardly progressive. It was good workers, and other professionals to help tor. Though our pa- to read that there is a “staff harpist,” but in relieve patients’ physical, emotional, and tients and clients Visit harvardmag. general the approach seems far from holis- spiritual distress, although some patients were worlds apart, com/extras for tic. What about a music therapist, medita- may seek outside help. Integrative therapies the need to holisti- additional letters. tion (University of Massachusetts Medi- such as massage, acupuncture, stress man- cally address health cal Center has developed highly effective agement, and yoga are typically available at and legal problems collaboratively, rather treatments) and body workers (massage these hospitals, too; the staff harpist I men- than in silos, was resounding. and Reiki)? tioned is trained in therapeutic harp. Brett Stark, J.D. ’12 Some of these modalities are not cov- Brooklyn ered by third-party payers, but they are Palliative-care teams may include relatively small expenditures for a major “physicians, nurses, social workers, chap- Computing Duo teaching hospital. Perhaps all these other lains, and others.” Lawyers are an impor- “Computing in the Classroom” (by So- approaches are integrated into the patient tant component of that last, catch-all cate- phia Nguyen, March-April, page 48) might care and simply not mentioned. If not, gory. “Medical-legal partnerships” combine have included the efforts of graduates Ali

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Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 In the nearly five decades since he arrived at Harvard, Robert N. Shapiro ’72, JD ’78 has been president of the Harvard Alumni Association, president of the Harvard Law School Association, and a Harvard Overseer. His service spans the University. n “Radcliffe is a microcosm of the University at its best,” he says. “It’s an example of how Harvard can be more unified. Radcliffe catalyzes ideas, and that is the stuff of a great research university.” n A senior partner in the Private Client Group and Boston office of the global law firm Ropes & Gray, Shapiro is honoring his mother, who graduated from Radcliffe College in 1936, with a bequest to the Radcliffe Institute.n For more information about making a planned gift, contact John Christel, Radcliffe’s liaison at the University Planned Giving office, at (617) 384-8231 or [email protected].

www.radcliffe.harvard.edu

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Untitled-1 1 3/24/15 8:48 AM Letters and Hadi Partovi (both A.B. and S.M. ’94) School in the early 1980s, I was the recipient report that over 120 years later his institu- to encourage the teaching of computer of an award made possible by the William tion is still going strong. We’re still raising programming in public classrooms. Their Stoughton Bequest of 1701. resources from the more fortunate to help nonproft website, Code.org. [mentioned This assistance not only made my grad- the less fortunate. We’re still lending a hand! in the text], contains extensive resources uate study possible, but provided me with William T. Gregor ’66, M.B.A. ’73 for anyone interested in learning or teach- an opportunity to meet Seamus Malin, Boston ing computer programming. In addition, the who signed the letter notifying me of the Partovis created the annual “Hour of Code.” award [see “The Shots Heard Round the Military Motivations Judith E. Bevans, Ed.M. ’69 World,” May-June 1994, page 38]. In “Youthful Ardors” (The College Pump, Blacksburg, Va. I never get tired of telling people that I March-April, page 72), President Drew went to Harvard thanks to the generos- Faust is quoted as describing our Civil The author responds: The article was in- ity of someone who, if he did not himself War as “a military adventure undertaken tended to focus on those working more believe in witches, certainly lived in a time as an occasion for heroics and glory....” I directly with teachers and school systems when it was possible to do so. pray there’s a fuller context to this state- with an eye toward changing classroom Ned Daly, M.C.R.P. ’83 ment. Otherwise, it’s a reeking insult to the pedagogy, but I thank Judith Bevans for Needham, Mass. honorable motivations and brave actions of this chance to acknowledge the Partovi Northern soldiers intent on preserving our brothers. As she points out, their Code.org All Hail Hale! country and destroying slavery. Why must has been a major force behind the “Coding Once again the “Brief Life” series captures the intellectual community denigrate mili- for All” movement. the essence of a life well lived: the January- tary service even when absolutely necessary February issue offers a superlative example and painfully successful? Stoughton Scholar in Rev. Edward Everett Hale (Vita, page 54). Joel W. Johnson, M.B.A. ’67 Thanks for the reproduction of the por- His motto, “Look up and not down; Look Scottsdale, Ariz. trait of William Stoughton and the refer- forward and not back; Look out and not ences to him (Treasure, “Early BMOCs,” in; Lend a Hand!” is as motivating today as Primus V offers fuller context: “A war that March-April, page 80). When I was a grad- it was in the 1800s. As a board member of was expected to be short-lived instead ex- uate student in city planning at the Kennedy the Lend A Hand Society, I am pleased to tended for four (please turn to page 79)

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10 May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now The expanding Harvard universe

biology of behavior males became “perfect dads,” Dulac reports. The infanticidal instinct vanished; the males built nests and placed the pups in them, groomed the pups, and huddled The Mr. Mom Switch by them protectively. These findings, she says, suggest that there are “circuits in the male brain that underlie parental behav- n the mouse world, virgin male mice male or babies will nonetheless spring into ior,” but those behaviors are “normally re- are not known as nurturers. They’re ag- action if pups are placed in her cage. “She pressed.” gressive and infanticidal, regularly in- will immediately build a nest, retrieve the Previous research at another lab identi- I juring or killing newborn mice fathered pups, groom them, and crouch around fied one brief period in which male mice by other males. But research led by Cath- them,” Dulac explains. “This is very ro- do seem driven to care for pups: beginning erine Dulac, Higgins professor of molecu- bust, stereotyped behavior. If you do the exactly three weeks after mating. Dulac lar and cellular biology, reveals that these same experiment with virgin males, they replicated those findings and noted that murderous mice can be turned into doting will immediately attack the pups.” Yet it makes sense for infanticidal behavior dads simply by stimulating a set of neurons, when the researchers removed the VNO to switch off in males at shared by both males and females, that ap- of virgin male mice, changing the way a point when their own pears to drive parental behavior. they sensed the pups, the normally hostile progeny might be Dulac examines control of instinctive behavior in animal brains, particularly social actions such as courtship and parenting. Previous work in her lab revealed that mouse brains hold circuits that determine whether the animals adopt stereo- typical male or female behavior: Dulac discovered that the vomeronasal organ (VNO), a set of chemical- sensing receptors in the nasal septa of mice, dictates which of the two circuits is acti- vated. (Female mice lacking a functional VNO engaged in “very bizarre male-like behaviors,” Dulac reports, emitting ultrasonic vocaliza- tions normally sung by males to attract mates.) In the most recent research, first described in the journal Nature last year, the investigators set out to learn if male mice had a similar capacity to match females’ parenting abilities. A female mouse

that has never encountered a petrone valeria

Illustration by Michael Witte Harvard Magazine 11 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now born. The males remain protective until there are two groups of neurons—one that tion, and aggression. “Each time these neu- the pups reach typical weaning age, about drives parental behavior and one [still un- rons have been discovered in animals, their three weeks after birth; then the infantici- identified] that drives infanticidal behav- equivalent has been found in humans, dal instinct returns. ior—and somehow they inhibit each other.” with similar functions and generating sim- Seeking the specific brain structures that Her team then employed optogenetic ilar behavioral disorders when absent or underlie parenting instincts, Dulac’s team technology, using light to activate galanin impaired,” she notes. If galanin neurons in focused on the medial preoptic area of the neurons in the brains of virgin male the medial preoptic area do have a human analogue, she believes the discovery could “In fact, it seems like all you have to do lead to possible treatments for postpar- tum depression, which can make a mother is push the right button in the brain in both indifferent to her newborn. These findings are particularly compel- males and females and animals know how ling in an era when human parents often feel they must consult books and blogs to to take care of their young.” do their jobs properly. “In fact,” Dulac says, “it seems like all you have to do is push the hypothalamus (known to influence mater- mice—and the stimulation made previ- right button in the brain in both males and nal behavior), and identified neurons that ously infanticidal males behave like fa- females and animals know how to take express a neuropeptide known as galanin. thers. Their findings point to “these few care of their young.” Male colleagues with When the scientists destroyed the galanin hundred” galanin-expressing neurons as children, she adds, “are happy to know neurons in mouse brains, the nurturing “the command neurons that drive paren- that, at least from what is seen in mice, the instinct disappeared in both males and fe- tal behavior,” Dulac says. She suspects hu- male brain is also designed to care for the males. “The effect is very striking,” Dulac mans possess similar circuits; neurons that young.”verin o’donnell points out: previously mated males and fe- express neuropeptides such as galanin are males were largely indifferent to pups, and found in an area of the hypothalamus that catherine dulac website: virgin females became as infanticidal as vir- scientists know controls instinctive be- www.mcb.harvard.edu/mcb/faculty/ gin males. This suggests, she explains, “that haviors such as sleeping, eating, reproduc- profile/catherine-dulac

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Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 living machines The “Bionic Leaf ”

arvard scientists have created by No- a “bionic leaf” that converts so- cera: that lar energy into a liquid fuel. The invention, H work—a proof of concept in an widely known exciting new field that might be termed bio- as the artificial leaf, manufacturing—is the fruit of a collabora- converts solar energy into tion between the laboratories of Adams pro- hydrogen fuel. fessor of biochemistry and systems biology Nocera’s artificial leaf, which serves as Pamela Silver at Harvard Medical School the fuel source in the bionic leaf, works (HMS) and Patterson Rockwood profes- by sandwiching a photovoltaic cell be- agazine/jc sor of energy Daniel Nocera in the Faculty tween two thin metal oxide catalysts. of Arts and Sciences (FAS). The pair, who When submersed in a glass of water at began collaborating two years ago (Nocera room temperature and normal atmo- came to Harvard from MIT in 2012), share an spheric pressure, the artificial leaf mimics interest in developing energy sources that photosynthesis. Current from the silicon might someday have practical application solar wafer is fed to the catalysts, which fecting the artificial leaf since he first in remote locales in the developing world. split water molecules: oxygen bubbles off demonstrated it in 2011; today, it is far more Silver dubbed the system “bionic” because the catalyst on one side of the wafer, while efficient than a field-grown plant, which it joins a biological system to a clever piece hydrogen rises from the catalyst on the captures only 1 percent of sunlight’s en- mages istock; by illustration Harvard by M I of inorganic chemistry previously developed wafer’s other side. Nocera has been per- ergy. He says he can reach efficiencies of

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Harvard Magazine 13 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now

70 percent to 80 percent of the underlying (along with first authors Joseph Torella, a Ultimately, though, Silver’s goal is not solar-wafer technology, which is improving recent graduate of the department of sys- to create fuels from this work, but “high- constantly. tems biology, and Christopher Gagliardi, value commodities” in remote places. The hydrogen it produces is a versatile a postdoctoral fellow in FAS’s department Fuel, she notes wryly, is cheap “because fuel from a chemical standpoint, Nocera of chemistry and chemical biology). “Life we fight wars over it”—and developing reports, and could easily become the ba- has evolved for billions of years to produce a system that could make fuel at a price sis of a fuel cell, but it has not been widely catalysts capable of making chemical mod- lower than gasoline would therefore be adopted, in part because it is a gas. Liquid ifications on complicated molecules with very difficult, she says. Drugs, on the other fuels are much easier to handle and store, surgical precision, many times at room hand, are high-value commodities, so en- hence the new bionic leaf’s importance. temperature,” Colón explains. “If you can gineering a bacterium to produce not iso- In the bionic leaf, the hydrogen gas is use enzymes for building chemicals, you propanol but a vitamin or a drug may be fed to a metabolically engineered version open the door to making many of the natu- her next goal for this system. of a bacterium called Ralstonia eutropha. The ral compounds we rely on every day,” such Modern society, says Nocera, has cre- bacteria combine the hydrogen with car- as antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, fertil- ated an entire manufacturing economy bon dioxide as they divide to make more izer, and pharmaceuticals. based not only on burning fossil fuels, but cells, and then—through a trick of bioen- Members of Silver’s lab have been work- on using petroleum to make things such gineering pioneered by Anthony Sinskey, ing to perfect the tricky interface between as rubber and plastics. “A lot of chemistry professor of microbiology and of health the catalyst and the bacteria, so that they was done which set that up,” he notes. The sciences and technology at MIT—produce will thrive and grow optimally. In its first present system makes sense now because isopropanol (rubbing alcohol), which can iteration, the bionic leaf matched the ef- petroleum costs so little; a sustainable sys- be burned in an engine much like the gaso- ficiency of photosynthesis in plants, far tem like the artificial or bionic leaf can’t line additive ethanol. below the capabilities of Nocera’s un- compete with that. But when oil becomes “The advantage of interfacing the in- derlying artificial leaf. Now the team is scarce, he says, “We might want to redo organic catalyst with biology is you have working to surpass blue-green algae, everything in terms of manufacturing. In an unprecedented platform for chemical which—at 5 percent efficiency—do better the future, you might want to make every- synthesis that you don’t have with inor- at photosynthesis than plants. Colón has thing renewably.” vjonathan shaw ganic catalysts alone,” says Brendan Colón, been developing a strain of the bacterium a graduate student in systems biology in that grows well even at the lower voltages daniel nocera website: the Silver lab and a coauthor of the Proceed- that might be emitted by the solar wafer http://nocera.harvard.edu/Home ings of the National Academy of Sciences paper at the system’s core on a cloudy day, for pamela silver website: example; this could dramatically improve https://sysbio.med.harvard.edu/facul- overall efficiency. tys/pamela-a-silver-phd Explore More

For more online-only articles on the sunshine supplement research in progress, see:

Consciousness, and a Cure? Is Vitamin D A newly identified group of neurons that play a role in a Wonder Pill? consciousness may have implications for the treatment of schizophrenia. harvardmag. n the case of religion, we put York Times to declare in 2010 that “Vitamin D com/neurons-15 our faith in gods. And in nutrition, promises to be the most talked-about and we have vitamins,” writes journal- written-about supplement of the decade.” 2015 Dietary Recommendations ist Catherine Price in Vitamania, Some of the excitement seems warranted: Changes to guidelines for fats, “I in which she traces vitamin crazes from the drawing on previous research into vitamin cholesterol, meat, and sugar are among 1920s to the present. Today’s star is vitamin D, D’s immune and anti-inflammatory ben- the highlights. harvardmag.com/ nicknamed “the sunshine nutrient” because efits, two new epidemiological studies by diet-15 ultraviolet-B radiation prompts the body to scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute produce it. Long known to aid calcium ab- (DFCI) have found that it may also inhibit Battling Ebola, Back to Basics sorption and play an essential role in bone cancer. One study investigated the nutri- At Harvard Medical School, experts health, it’s often added to dairy products. ent’s effect on colorectal cancer survival; discussed lessons from the epidemic. More recent studies, linking low levels of the the other examined its impact on colorectal harvardmag.com/ebola-15 nutrient to conditions ranging from multiple cancer tumors and patient immune systems. sclerosis to high blood pressure, led The New In the first study, the largest to date of

14 May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 HARVARD IS BETTER BECAUSE OF YOU 1,307 7,448 HARVARD ALUMNI VOLUNTEERS GIFTS MADE BY ALUMNI DURING THEIR REUNION YEAR 9,171 11,741 REUNION ATTENDEES (ALUMNI AND GUESTS) STUDENTS AND FACULTY WHO BENEFIT

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15-022 May_June full pg 3-24DM.indd 1 3/30/15 10:58 AM Right Now metastatic colorectal cancer patients and min D’s benefits, but further study is needed vitamin D, researchers found that on aver- to determine whether supplementing with age, those with the highest blood plasma vitamins heightens the protective effect. levels of the vitamin saw a 35 percent de- Health authorities have defined healthy vi- crease in their risk of dying, and lived tamin D ranges according to levels known 33 percent longer than those with the to promote bone health, but the optimal lowest levels: 32.6 months, versus 24.5 ranges for nonskeletal benefits are still un- months. Previous studies had defined a known—prompting some experts to urge consistent, strong association between caution. “Clinical enthusiasm for supple- high levels of the vitamin and lower mental vitamin D has outpaced available colorectal cancer risk in healthy indi- evidence on its effectiveness,” Bell pro- viduals, explains the lead author, fessor of women’s health JoAnn Manson DFCI oncologist and assistant warned in an opinion paper published professor of medicine Kimmie in the Journal of the American Medical As- Ng, so she focused her research sociation last February. She has spear- on whether vitamin D levels headed a 26,000-person study, the Vi- matter for patients who al- tamin D and Omega-3 Trial (VITAL), ready have colon cancer. designed to test whether those nutri- Even after controlling ents reduce the risk of cancer and car- for different chemother- diovascular events such as heart at- apy regimens, and for diet tacks and strokes; ancillary studies and lifestyle factors (people will analyze whether these supple- with high vitamin D levels ments have an effect on diabetes, also tend to be less obese and depression, and cognitive decline, to exercise more, which can among other health conditions. complicate studies), Ng and her Supplement sales and colleagues found that higher levels screening rates have soared of the vitamin were associated with in recent years, Manson notes, significantly better survival. They even though lab definitions of are now pursuing randomized con- what constitutes a “normal” vita- trolled trials with early-stage colon- min D range vary dramatically. “It’s been cancer patients (collecting tumor tissue referred to as the wild, wild, West,” she to understand the biological mechanisms says, adding that “widespread screening behind this relationship), and with pa- is feeding into megadose supplementation tients in the late stage of the disease (test- possibility: that vitamin D boosts the im- because clinicians are chasing a number.” ing whether extra-high doses of vitamin mune system’s anti-cancer function, by When it comes to vitamins, she cautions, D, in addition to chemotherapy, might means of immune cells such as lympho- “It shouldn’t be assumed that more is auto- improve survival and slow the advance of cytes. The senior author, professor of pa- matically better.” Supplementation might the disease). thology Shuji Ogino, and his colleagues be merely ineffective, but extremely large They also found an association with analyzed tumor tissue samples to see if doses could be deleterious to health. delayed progression of the disease, Ng vitamin D had a stronger effect on some When results of Manson’s study are reports—which strongly suggests that types of cancer than on others; the re- available in late 2017, medical professionals vitamin D might have a direct effect on sults might give them a clearer sense of will have a better sense of whether recom- a tumor and its microenvironment, and the nutrient’s influence in the body. The mended daily allowances should be revised might make chemotherapy more effective. researchers determined that people with upward. In the meantime, her paper char- One possible explanation is that, with high levels of vitamin D reduced their risk acterized research and clinical practice as “more vitamin D around, perhaps there for the kind of tumor permeated by im- being “at a crossroads”: only when more would be less angiogenesis. Blood vessels mune cells; for cancers with fewer immune light is shed on the sunshine nutrient will wouldn’t form, tumors wouldn’t be able to cells, vitamin D status seemed to have it be known whether the vitamin D craze feed themselves as much.” Other theories little effect. This difference implied that rests on fact, or faith. vsophia nguyen are that the nutrient prevents the inflam- vitamin D affects the body’s ability to fight mation that promotes cancer growth, or cancer via the immune system, thus bol- kimmie ng website: stimulates immunity against the tumor. stering the hypothesis that immune cells http://doctors.dana-farber.org/ “All of these pathways are active in the cooperate with the nutrient to promote a directory/profile.asp?pict_id=8925287 tumor microenvironment,” Ng explains, process called differentiation, in which the shuji ogino laboratory website: “and may affect how patients do.” behavior of evolving tumor cells is altered. http://ogino-mpe-lab.dana-farber.org The second DFCI study, published These findings provide insight into the joann manson vitamin d clinical trial in the journal Gut, probed that third possible biological mechanism behind vita- website: http://www.vitalstudy.org

16 May - June 2015 Illustration by Stuart Bradford Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 16G Plus Bauhaus-inspired architects built their domestic visions in Lexington and on Cape Cod. Cod. Cape on and in Lexington visions domestic architects built their Bauhaus-inspired RevolutionThe Modern Harvard

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Commencement Harvard & Reunion Guide Cambridge, Boston, and beyond 2

H courtesy of the lexington historical society A.R.T.’s musical existential 16D Edibles beyond the Square the beyond Edibles 16R Afield arvard 16O Commencement for Harvard’sA schedule Boston’s greenscapes 16L stick structures fanciful Patrick 16H during May and June May and during off campus and on Events 16B

You’re With One Love the Festive Fare, Fare, Festive Eventful Week Others’ Labor of Fruit The Out Branching Extracurriculars Dougherty’s Dougherty’s M agazine 16A

Harvard Squared rchive ilm A and the singular sounds of clavichords, or- Extracurriculars gans, and medieval flutes. (June 7-14) arvard F Film useum; H

Events on and off campus during May and June rt M The Harvard Film Archive Seasonal Boston Early Music Festival www.hcl.harvard.edu/hfa arvard A Cambridge Arts River Festival www.bemf.org Ben Rivers’ Midnite Movies: The Witch-

www.cambridgema.gov/arts Music lovers and performers share their ing Hour Part 3, “Because You’ve Nev- useum; H

Join this community celebration of dance, passions for—among other things—Bach, er Known Fear Until It Stabs You In the rt M music, and art in Central Square. (June 6) Handel, Monteverdi, Renaissance dance, Eye With a Rusty Nail.” The experimental documentarian and Radcliffe Fellow (From left) Detail from Night Parade of a Hundred Demons/Kasha with DDT hand-picked this series of especially bizarre

(watercolor, 2010), by Moira Hahn, at the Worcester Art Museum; Study for Stacked Worcestereft: A Color 1 (1972), by Richard Tuttle, at the Harvard Art Museums; and a still from horror films from the 1970s and 1980s. rom L Night of the Comet (1984), at the Harvard Film Archive (Through May 30) F

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16B May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 R ond esid nd Res Re m en o nd sid t m o m e i m a n a m t l a m H i

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Cambridge...Conveniently located between Belmont...2008 Colonial-style residence features fi ve Belmont...Newly constructed in 2014, this twelve- Harvard and MIT. 1,021 square feet. Hardwood bedrooms, and four full and one half bathrooms. room, open-concept residence has over 7,000 oors. High ceilings. Deck. Lease in place Filled with light and abutting conservation land. square feet of nished living area. Conveniently through August 31st. $655,000 Three-car garage. $2,245,000 located to major roadways. $2,275,000

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150512_Hammond_v3.indd 1 4/8/15 9:21 AM Harvard Squared

Nature and science Staff Pick: Love the One You’re With The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics A slender man (Taylor Mac) arrives on stage in a lifeboat; his sturdy peer (Mandy www.cfa.harvard.edu/publicevents Patinkin) climbs out of a trunk. Strangers, they alone have survived a great flood. Science journalist Marcia Bartusiak discusses And for the next 90 minutes, the pair explore the realms of human existence, her new book, Black Hole: How an Idea Aban- seeking to commune and thrive, despite the enveloping bleakness—purely through doned by Newtonians, Hated By Einstein, and song and dance. The result is vaudeville entertainment at its Waiting for Godot best. Gambled on by Hawking Became Loved. (May 21) Viewers are given plenty to ponder, even as they giggle. Roles intertwine: sometimes Mac is the clown, or “Lear’s fool,” as Patinkin said in an A.R.T. interview. “But at The Arnold Arboretum times he’s Lear and I’m the fool. That’s what’s really fun about the relationship.” The www.arboretum.harvard.edu intimate project was directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, a veteran of In The Grove: A Summer Solstice Journey. big Broadway musicals, and debuted in 2013 in workshop form in lower Manhattan. Visitors meander through the landscape with Mac is a playwright, songwriter, and cabaret and drag performer— among the edgiest actors working today. He and the equally versatile stage and screen actor Patinkin are clearly kindred spirits. Their singing voices meld perfectly even as they exploit a yin/yang physical dynamic. A fluid, elastic presence, Mac can also beam beatifically. Patinkin, with his meaty forearms is, at least initially, more of a re- luctant rock. But he comes around. Who wouldn’t—when stranded with Mac and roused by a musical lineup from children’s ditties and Rodgers and Hammerstein to Gillian Welch, and, naturally, R.E.M.’s take on cultural chaos and new beginnings: “It’s the End of the American Repertory Theater

The Last Two People On Earth: ART / World as We Know It (And I An Apocalyptic Vaudeville | May 12-31 Feel Fine).” Do you? vn.p.b. http://americanrepertorytheater.org k Kolni Paul

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16D May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 150535_MassPort_v2.indd 1 3/27/15 10:04 AM Harvard Squared

storyteller Diane Edgecomb and Celtic harp- tion: Fifty Works for Fifty States features ist Margot Chamberlain. (June 19-20) conceptual and minimalist artwork from the 1970s and 1980s. (Opens May 23) to Our Valued Advertising Partners exhibitions & events Boston Ballet Harvard Art Museums The Radcliffe Institute for www.harvardartmuseums.org Advanced Study Brookhaven at Lexington The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collec- www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/event/2015-ro- Black Ink setta-s-elkin-exhibition Spotlight The exhibition Live Matter, by Harvard Cambridge, USA Graduate School of Design assistant professor of landscape architecture Rosetta S. Elkin, Cadbury Commons explores the literal roots of botanical studies The Charles Hotel and reveals the unique vibrancy of each specimen. (May 5-29) Barbara Currier/ Coldwell Banker Harvard Museum of Natural History Gail Roberts/ www.hmnh.harvard.edu The Half-Wild, Half-Captive Elephants Coldwell Banker of Burma (now Myanmar). Lecture and book signing by Vicki Constantine Croke, author

Nancy Lerner/ ICA RI Coldwell Banker of the best-selling Elephant Company: The In- Spotlight spiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Evelyn & Angel’s Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II. Fresh Pond Ballet Arlene Shechet: All At Once (June (May 7). Visitors get a close look at how bees 10-September 7) is the first survey of live and work together through an active Carol & Myra/Hammond works by the Rhode Island School of honeybee hive on display in Arthropods: Design-trained sculptor. Shechet often Creatures That Rule. (Opens May 15) Harvard Art Museums Shop explores the relationship between con- International School trolled and chance changes that occur as Fuller Craft Museum of Boston liquid becomes solid, using readily mu- www.fullercraft.org table materials like plaster, paper, glass, Haystack Components: Metals and Irving House and clay. These dynamic works offer sug- Jewelry. An array of ornamentation us- Goorin Bros. Hat Shop gestive corporeal forms, which she coats ing gems, plastics, wood, fiber, glass, and in novel color combinations and metallic even concrete by artists affiliated with the Leavitt & Peirce glazes. There are bulbous moonscapes, renowned Haystack Mountain School of Lux Bond & Green lava-like amalgamations, and squished Crafts in Maine. (Opens May 16) geometric shapes. Not long ago Shechet McLean Hospital completed a residency at the world-re- Worcester Art Museum nowned Meissen Porcelain Manufacturer www.worcesterart.org Nancy M. Dixon and in Germany, which has produced figurines Samurai! This multipart exhibit, which Lisa J. Drapkin/ and other items since the early 1700s. runs through September 6, explores Japa- Coldwell Banker Her resulting sculptures (many of which nese myth and tradition in the contempo- Rebekah Brooks Studio were on display at the RISD Museum rary imagination. Family events are planned, last year) merge traditional fine-boned such as Star Wars Day on May 17; visitors Settebello objects, such as dishware and vases that may also watch artists create wall murals she often lops off at angles, with other (May 5-9), or attend a Japanese flute con- St. Paul’s Choir School clay formations (animals, boxes, spouts, cert featuring composer Shirish Korde The Catered Affair protruding human arms and legs) and (May 21). incongruent patchwork and drippy glaz- Thompson Island OBP ing. As the magazine and art platform RISD Museum Welch & Forbes Ceramics Now sees it, “Shechet not only www.risdmuseum.org fractures the objects’ surfaces but also Golden Glamour: The Edith Stuyves- Support from these advertisers undermines any single association with ant Vanderbilt Gerry Collection spot- helps us produce the independent, nature.” vn.p.b. lights European haute couture from the high-quality publication Harvard alumni The Institute of Contemporary Art 1920s and 1930s. rely on for information about (ICA) the University and each other. www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/exhibit/ Events listings are also found at www. 88 arlene-shechet harvardmagazine.com. 16F May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Explorations The Modern Revolution Bauhaus-inspired architects built their domestic visions in Lexington and on Cape Cod. by nell porter brown

illed as “Lex- ington’s second revolution,” the B profusion of mid-century modern homes built by architects largely influenced by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius forms the center of Lextopia: Lexington’s Launch of Mid- Century Modern. It’s a multipronged exhibit, The society typically focuses on Lexing- Lexington’s modernist communities organized by the Lexington Historical So- ton’s pivotal importance to the early days include a Peacock Farm house by Henry Hoover (top images), and homes in ciety, that explores the town’s significant of the American Revolution: it manages Turning Mill/Middle Ridge (lower left) and pioneering role in the American modernist three museums that have all been restored Six Moon Hill (lower right). movement. A rare tour of four private dwell- within the last eight years—the Buckman ings designed by Henry B. Hoover, M.Arch. and Munroe Taverns and the Hancock- been a quiet, rural, farming community.” ’26, opens the show on May 31; the exhibit Clarke House—and runs related educa- Hoover and American architect Edwin starting on June 19 chronicles the origins of tional programs and events. This foray into Goodell were designing modern structures modern communities, such as Six Moon Hill modernism, explains Elaine C. Doran, the before Gropius fled Nazi Germany and and Five Fields, and highlights original fur- society’s curator and archivist, reflects a arrived in Cambridge in 1937 to chair the nishings and dishware, along with the work growing recognition that, “to our knowl- department of architecture at the Harvard of resident architects such as Hugh Stubbins, edge, there really is no other concentration Graduate School of Design. But the earliest M.Arch. ’35, Sally Harkness, and Benjamin C. of modernist neighborhoods of this size in of the town’s modernist cul-de-sacs, Six Thompson, who founded Design Research the country.” The “influx of professors and Moon Hill (1948) and Five Fields (1951), in Harvard Square. (Gallery discussions are engineers and mathematicians and scien- were planned as experimental utopian slated for this summer, and a second, larger tists,” she adds, also permanently altered communities by The Architects Collabora- house tour concludes the exhibit on October the town’s character. “We did not have tive (TAC), founded by Gropius and oth- 4; www.lexingtonhistory.org.) this kind of demographic before; we had ers, including Harkness and Thompson, in

Photographs courtesy of the Lexington Historical Society Harvard Magazine 16G Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared

1945. The firm would soon grow to take on CURIOSITIES: Branching Out many more who trained at Harvard, where Gropius and his Bauhaus colleague Marcel What it will be, nobody exactly knows: neither the 50 volunteers who will have Breuer were influential forces for years. happily trudged for hours through muddy woodlands north of Boston to gather Many of these designers, Doran says, were tractor-trailer loads of saplings—linden, beech, Norwegian maple, depending on drawn by Lexington’s proximity to Cam- what the thaw has yielded—nor the artist bridge and the availability of in- himself, Patrick Dougherty. Only during the expensive, open land. three weeks spent laying out those saplings, The two original neighbor- planting some, and then bending, twisting, and hoods were quickly followed by weaving them all together do the final, fan- others. Middle Ridge (1955) was tastical forms emerge. Dougherty, who hails developed by another Gropius from North Carolina and earned degrees in student, Carl Koch ’34, M.Arch. English and hospital administration before ’37, who also designed the 1950s pursuing art, has erected more than 250 such homes in the Conantum com- sapling-based structures across the country munity, in Concord. (Thou- and around the world during the last three sands of his Techbuilt homes, decades. Judging from these, what ends up on assembled from prefabricated the lawn of the colonial-era Crowninshield- elements, also appeared across Bentley House in Salem, Massachusetts, on Clockwise from above: Sortie de Cave the country.) Peacock Farm (1953), Rum- May 23, might feature turrets or Russian (Free At Last) 2008, in Chateau- field Road/Shaker Glen (1959-60), and Up- bourg, France; Summer Palace 2009, onion domes, or look like a condensed Mo- in Philadelphia; Patrick Dougherty per Turning Mill (1962-65) were based on roccan palace. It could resemble a softer, designs by MIT-trained architects Walter sway-backed version of Stonehenge, a clump of medieval thatched huts, or skinny Pierce and Danforth Compton. teepees pushed askew by the wind. Dougherty’s constructions tend to have doors Other custom-built modern homes and windows, but they are not homes. “Seussical” and civic-minded enclaves still exist in Peabody Essex Museum is too whimsical a description; the dreamscapes are Greater Boston—such as Kendall Com- Stickworth: Patrick Dougherty Opens May 23 more suited to a van Gogh landscape, or even The mon in Weston, Snake Hill in Belmont, and www.pem.org/exhibitions Scream. What might add another twist in Salem is Brown’s Wood in Lincoln—and are dot- whether, and how, Dougherty juxtaposes his instal- ted throughout New England. Their ini- lation with the symmetrical, squared-off Georgian- tial popularity coincided with the arrival style home and its formal front entrance. Built by of European designers and intellectuals fish merchant and sea captain John Crowninshield who fled World War II, a nascent Ameri- in 1727, the house is a historic site now owned by can push to modernism, and the postwar the Peabody Essex Museum, which commissioned “building boom and optimism about de- Dougherty’s work. Whatever the resulting forms, sign and technology’s roles in progress,” they are expected to stay up for two years—unless says Peter McMahon, founding director nature reclaims them first. vn.p.b. of the Cape Cod Modern House Trust, which has restored and now manages three homes in Wellfleet www.ccmht.org( ). As those houses have aged, he adds— with many already demolished and others under threat—local historical societies, preservation groups, and museums are increasingly apt to add modernism’s artifacts to their repertoires. Historic New England, for example, has long owned and managed the Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachu- setts, where Friends of Modern Architec- ture/Lincoln helps preserve and promote the eclectic array of modern homes in town. On October 9, the Concord Museum mounts its own Middlesex County Modernism show (www.concordmuseum.org). Of this surge in activity and interest, McMahon also notes, “Post-modernist structures have aged very badly, and nowadays architecture is just very chaotic.

16H May - June 2015 Photographs courtesy of Patrick Dougherty/Peabody Essex Museum Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 1730 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge, MA 02138 617 245-4044

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© 2015 Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage. All Rights Reserved. Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage fully supports the principles of the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Opportunity Act. Operated by a subsidiary of NRT LLC. Coldwell Banker® and the Coldwell Banker logo are registered service marks owned by Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC. If your property is currently listed for sale, this is not intended as a solicitation. If your property is listed with a real estate broker, please disregard. It is not our intention to solicit the offerings of other real estate brokers. We are happy to work with them and cooperate fully. Harvard Squared

This low-lying, woods-bound home is

located in the Peacock Farm enclave. ociety Twentieth-century modernism was, in ret-

rospect, a golden age.” istorical S Lextopia’s co-curator, the writer and

documentarian Rick Beyer, sees relevant, exington H L contemporary themes, such as “climate change and the environment and foster- ing community, that are making some of these houses very relevant to people Atlifecare Brookhaven living is as good as it looks. again.” Modernists incorporated their ide- als into their designs, emphasizing utility Brookhaven at Lexington offers an abundance of opportunities for intellectual growth, artistic expression and personal wellness. Our residents and affordability, as well as flexible pri- share your commitment to live a vibrant lifestyle in a lovely community. vate and public spaces. These were not McMansions, but human-scaled, tightly Call today to set up an appointment for a tour! constructed homes with built-ins, spare A Full-Service Lifecare Retirement Community furnishings, and a dearth of structural or- www.brookhavenatlexington.org namentation. “The practical, minimalist (781) 863-9660 • (800) 283-1114 aesthetics are appealing,” Beyer notes, and support current efforts to curb energy use. The open layouts promoted group gatherings, while bathrooms and bedrooms Step Outside with tended to be small and peripheral. At Six Moon Hill (where Benjamin Outward Bound Professional! Thompson lived for 16 years in a house he designed; his widow, Jane, will give a gallery talk this summer), much depended “Harvard has worked with OBP for 20+ years. OBP custom designs on group decisions and stewardship. “You our program to provide students the opportunity to examine their didn’t just buy a house, you bought a way team’s development and become aware of their leadership of life,” says Doran, who has recorded oral histories with former residents. “The neigh- assumptions. OBP masterfully provides this experience.” bors were like one big family. The kids all played together and you never knew which - David King, Faculty Chair, MPA Programs, Harvard Kennedy School of Government house they would end up in for dinner; you just accepted whoever came over.” Beyer is creating a video for the exhibit using clips from 8 mm home movies that reflect daily life in these communities—such as the annual pool clean-up day at Six Moon Hill. “I think some of the people who were designing these neighborhoods 50 years ago were thinking about the same things we are today: how do you bring people together and create positive interactions in a communi- Photo by: Tom Fitsimmons ty?” he adds. “Nowadays so many people live shut up and isolated.” THOMPSON ISLAND (617) 830-5114 Modernists, again presaging current OUTWARD BOUND PROFESSIONAL [email protected] concerns, also valued human connections BostonEVERY Harbor DA IslandsY A DIFFERENC National ParkE www.thompsonisland.org to the natural world. Residences were

16J May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared P P CLINTON ST, MID CAMBRIDGE

Providence, ri

A house in the Five Fields neighborhood ociety nestles against trees. carefully sited to blend in with the exist- istorical S ing rural landscapes. Often, plate-glass walls blurred boundaries between inside

exington H and outside; in some cases, as in a 1957 L Peacock Farm home designed by Henry 2 new townhouses. Exquisite attention to Exceptionally fine Federal period mansion set detail. Designer kitchens & baths. Off street amid lush gardens on 1.2 acres near Brown Hoover, “trees are growing up in the parking. 5 bedrooms & 5 ½ baths. 4 bedrooms University. Architecturally significant interior middle of the living room,” notes Doran. 3 ½ baths. Private fenced gardens. In the heart offers elegant rooms, handsome fireplaces of Cambridge convenient to the T, shops, and generous space. 6bedrooms/6baths. A woman who grew up in the house told Heated garage, guest cottage and additional restaurants & universities. family/rental area. $3,450,000 her that “staring out those windows in the Exclusively Offered - $2,400,000 & $1,995,000 winter when it was snowing was just like Nancy Lerner | C. 401.741.0301 BARBARA CURRIER being inside a snow globe.” THE CURRIER TEAM | FINE PROPERTIES 527 Main Street, East Greenwich, RI 02818 That property is on the May 31 tour, as Phone: 617-593-7070 CAMBRIDGE COLDWELLBANKERPREVIEWS.COM is the much earlier 1937 home that Hoover Email: [email protected] ©2015 Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage. All Rights Reserved. built for himself and his young family in Web: www.BarbaraCurrier.com Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage fully supports the principles of the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Opportunity Act. Operated by a subsidiary of NRT LLC. Coldwell Banker, the Coldwell Banker Logo, Coldwell Banker Lincoln, Massachusetts, which remains in 171 Huron Avenue Previews International, the Coldwell Banker Previews International logo and “Dedicated to Luxury Real Estate” are registered and unregistered the family, according to his children, Hen- Cambridge, Mass. service marks owned by Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC. 73199 3/15 02138 ry B. Hoover Jr. and Lucretia Hoover Giese. Proceeds from the tour will help support HARVARD SQUARE Hammond Residential their forthcoming book, Breaking Ground: 376 Harvard Street, Cambridge Real Estate Henry B. Hoover, New England Modern Architect. The structure, Giese notes in an e-mail to the historical society, reflects his “foremost concern with siting and spatial or-

ganization, which accentuated the house’s Rogers Dodge rey ©Je integration with the land. Overlooking the Cambridge Reservoir, the house remains eminently livable and beautiful.”

Modernism also migrated to Cape Cod, primarily Wellfleet and Truro, starting in the late 1930s. The Cape Cod Modern House JUNIPER ROAD Trust last year published the stunning Cape Belmont...Unique in its architecture is this sun- Queen Anne Victorian multi-family with fi lled, single family located in a highly desirable Cod Modern, coauthored by McMahon and 8 room Owner’s unit featuring 7 fireplaces, neighborhood abutting the 88 acres of Mass Christine Cipriani, on the history and range beautiful stained glass, deep moldings, pocket Audubon Habitat conservation land. On a lot of experimental homes on the outer Cape. doors and handsome period woodwork. A of over 28,000 SF this artfully renovated home free-standing exercise studio in rear could be The trust rents out its three restored homes, has fi ve bedrooms, two en-suite, including a converted back to a garage. Driveway fits 4 grand master bedroom with cathedral ceilings, sponsors an artist/scholar residency, and runs cars. Two rental units provide income or could a covered porch overlooking the expansive tours and events, including the symposium be combined to make a 4,400 sq ft gracious grounds, and a fi replace. ...$2,190,000 “Rural Communities Today,” on May 30-31. single family home. $2,600,000 CAROL KELLY & MYRA VON TURKOVICH Gropius, Breuer, and other artists, writ- Lisa J. Drapkin Nancy M. Dixon Vice Presidents, Hammond Residential Real Estate 617-930-1288 617-721-9755 carolandmyra.com | hammondre.com ers, and arts patrons (including Peggy Gug- www.TrueHomePartners.com 617.835.5008 & 617.834.0838 genheim), began renting cottages there— primarily at the behest of Jack Charles Phillips Jr. ’30, Ds ’39. Phillips, descended If you would like to list a property in our July-August issue, from the founders of Phillips Andover and contact Abby Shepard: 617.496.4032 Phillips Exeter academies, had recently returned from studying painting in France

Harvard Magazine 16K Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared and chose to settle on 800 acres he had in- the architecture department at Harvard in herited in Wellfleet. Even though Provinc- the 1950s and early 1960s, bought the cabin etown already had an art colony, much of he had rented from Phillips; it became an the outer Cape “was wilderness, a no-man’s informal think tank for the bohemian en- land,” at the time, McMahon says—and clave. Chermayeff eventually turned the Phillips built the first modernist house cabin into a connected series of right-angled there in 1938. Known as “The Paper Palace,” structures painted in primary colors. His it was made of pressed-paper wallboard. son, Cambridge architect Peter Chermayeff “He was the paterfamilias,” McMahon ’57, M.Arch. ’62, now summers there; he has

adds, for what soon became a close-knit been an active supporter of the trust and communal blend of the European archi- will host part of the May symposium. The Kugel/Gips House (1970) was restored od e C p tects and academics and another group of “The Cape Cod land was this blank slate by the Cape Cod Modern House Trust. a self-taught builders and artistic experi- and in the early days they all built stuff out had this very high-concept, low-budget T rust ouse

menters, such as Princeton graduate John there, mostly of found materials,” notes utopian community of people who also odern H “Jack” Hughes Hall and Hayden Walling, McMahon. With no commercial pressures, loved nature, fishing, and farming.” M who tended toward radical philosophies. In they “designed homes to suit themselves By 1961 the land under these creations be- courtesy of the C 1944, architect Serge Chermayeff, who was and their friends, often incorporating old came the Cape Cod National Seashore. Pre- friends with Gropius and Breuer and led shacks and a prefab army barracks. You 1959 structures were “grandfathered in,”

All in A Day: The Fruit of Others’ Labor Sue Greene, coordinator of The West Spring- field Community Garden in Boston’s South End, has a few simple rules. Don’t plant trees and shrubs that will someday cast unwanted shade. Grow what you want. Have fun. “I’ve tried to cultivate the idea that everyone’s garden is unique,” she says, laughing at her word choice. Creativity rules in these 35 (mostly) vegetable plots, as it does in the dozens of other urban Boston’s South End residents treasure green spaces that are also open to the public dur- their green spaces—which make urban life more vibrant for all. ing the annual South End Garden Tour on June 20. The self-guided tours run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; all proceeds green places for everyone benefit the volunteer-run South End & Lower Roxbury Com- to enjoy, and grow friend- munity Gardens. (The $20 ticket also includes a post-tour recep- ships that make neighbor- tion where paintings by professional local artists, created during hoods strong,” notes tour the day in some of the gardens on view, are displayed for sale.) chair Maryellen Hassell. Visitors can explore upward of 30 private oases, besides the Many West Springfield gar- West Springfield plots: shaded sunken patios; lush flower deners have grown food beds; rooftop container gardens; and compactly built havens that there since the first plots were established in 1976; others are may feature fountains, vine-covered walls, stonework, murals, energetic newcomers. Most of the gardens are tended together and al fresco dining spots. Also on tap are the neighborhood’s by families or friends. This year, Greene reports, a young Jamai- parks and community- can couple will attempt to grow greens to make callaloo, a tra- planted greenways. The ditional island dish. Others will pursue an okra that offers a variety of styles, grow- pinwheel-shaped white flower with a crimson center, even if ers, and multitude of harvesting the vegetable proves tricky. Greene’s husband, Mi- community gardens (16 chael F. Greene, A.M. ’12, and a friend grow hops to make beer, in all, but only a few are while she has had remarkable luck with tomatillos: green bulbs on this year’s tour) re- covered in papery husks native to Mexico and Central Amer- flect the South End’s ica. “It’s like they’re on steroids, the way they take over,” she historic diversity. These reports. “We only put in four plants and we get bushels of open spaces “are where them in September and October.” Luckily, salsa freezes—and residents come togeth- goes especially well with chips South End Garden Tour er to cultivate food and and a tall glass of her husband’s June 20 (rain or shine) flowers, create beautiful home brew. vn.p.b. www.southendgardentour.org

16L May - June 2015 Photographs courtesy of South End Garden Tour Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 OYSTER PERPETUAL MILGAUSS

rolex oyster perpetual and milgauss are trademarks.

150538_LuxBondGreen.indd 1 3/26/15 10:23 AM Harvard Squared e cod modern house trust p courtesy of the ca The simply decorated Weidlinger House (1953) on outer Cape Cod is now open for renters and scheduled public tours. but more than a hundred modern houses 100 NPS-owned buildings that were his- on a platform, it juts out in front atop con- built as the legislation was debated ulti- torically important. Of those, two have crete piers. A row of windows faces the mately became the property of the National been fixed up by the park service itself woods and water, offering views of the light, Park Service (NPS). They sat vacant, some- and three meticulously restored by the wind, trees, and skies rearranging the land- times for decades, and fell into disrepair; by trust, and are now protected as part of the scape into a constantly evolving painting. the 1990s most had been condemned. National Register of Historic Places. The As a movement, modernism’s emphasis McMahon, who grew up vacationing on trust holds long-term leases on the three on nature, form, and simplicity make it par- the Cape, moved there from Manhattan in homes: the Kugel/Gips House (1970, by ticularly agile. If McMahon is right—that 2003. He became fascinated by the history Charles Zehnder); the Hatch House (1961, “post-modernist structures have aged very and the homes, and focused on research- Jack Hughes Hall); and the Weidlinger badly”—the modernist aesthetics seem only ing, archiving—and then saving—what he House (1953; Paul Weidlinger, an engineer, to ripen. “There’s the sense that modern has could. He and others formed the nonprofit was a former Harvard faculty member). been classical, and now it’s modern again,” trust in 2007 and have worked closely with The Weidlinger home sits across the muses Lexington’s Rick Beyer. “It’s timeless: the park service to identify seven of the pond from Breuer’s cottage. A wooden box what’s old is new again.”

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16N May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Commencement & Reunion Guide The Week’s Events AC hanie M itchell/hP hanie p ste

OMMENCEMENT WEEK includes Law School Class Day, 2:30, featuring 2:30, with Intuit co-founder and chairman addresses by Harvard president former U.S. Representative from Arizona Scott Cook, M.B.A. ’76. Baker Lawn. Drew Gilpin Faust and former Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark Graduate School of Design Class Day, C Massachusetts governor Deval L. Kelly, a retired U.S. Navy pilot and NASA at 4, with a guest speaker. Gund Hall Patrick ’78, J.D. ’82. For details and updates astronaut. Holmes Field. lawn. on event speakers, visit www.harvardmag- Business School Class Day Ceremony, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Pub- azine.com/commencement. * * * Tuesday, May 26 A Special Notice Regarding Commencement Day Thursday, May 28, 2015 Phi Beta Kappa Exercises, at 11, with poet and novelist Laura Kasischke and orator Morning Exercises Allen Counter, director of The Harvard To accommodate the increasing number of people wishing to attend Harvard’s Foundation for Intercultural and Race Re- Commencement Exercises, the following guidelines are provided to facilitate admis- lations and professor of neurology. Sanders sion into Tercentenary Theatre on Commencement Morning: Theatre. • Degree candidates will receive a limited number of tickets to Commencement. Baccalaureate Service for the Class of Their parents and guests must have tickets, which must be shown at the gates in or- 2015, at 2, Memorial Church, followed by der to enter Tercentenary Theatre. Seating capacity is limited; there is standing room class photo, Widener steps. on the Widener steps and at the rear and sides of the Theatre. For details, visit the Class of 2015 Family Reception, at 5:30. Commencement office websitehttp://commencement.harvard.edu ( ). Tickets required. Science Center plaza. Note: A ticket allows admission, but does not guarantee a seat. Seats are on a Harvard Extension School Annual first-come basis and can not be reserved. The sale of Commencement tickets is Commencement Banquet, at 6. Tickets prohibited. required. Annenberg Hall. • A very limited supply of tickets is available to alumni and alumnae on a first-come, first-served basis (witha limit of one ticket per alumnus/alumna) through the Har- Wednesday, May 27 vard Alumni Association (http://alumni.harvard.edu/annualmeeting). Alumni/ae ROTC Commissioning Ceremony, at and guests may view the Morning Exercises over large-screen televisions in the Sci- 11:30, with President Faust and guest ence Center and at most of the undergraduate Houses and graduate and professional speaker General David G. Perkins, com- schools. These locations provide ample seating, and tickets are not required. manding general of the U.S. Army Train- • College Alumni/ae attending their twenty-fifth, thirty-fifth, and fiftieth reunions ing and Doctrine Command. Tercentenary will receive tickets at their reunions. Theatre. Harvard Kennedy School Commence- Afternoon Program ment Address, at 2, by David Miliband, The Harvard Alumni Association’s Annual Meeting, which includes remarks by its president and CEO of the International president, Overseer and HAA election results, the presentation of the Harvard Med- Rescue Committee. JFK Park. als, and remarks by President Drew Gilpin Faust and the Commencement Speaker, Senior Class Day Exercises, at 2, with convenes in Tercentenary Theatre on Commencement afternoon. For tickets (which the Harvard and Ivy Orations and a guest are required, but free) visit the HAA website or call 617-496-7001.

speaker, to be announced. Tickets re- vThe Commencement Office quired. Tercentenary Theatre.

Harvard Magazine 16O Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Commencement & Reunion Guide

Masters’ Receptions from 11:30 (time var- for seniors and guests, ies by school). The Signboard at 5. The Undergraduate GSAS Luncheon Visit harvardmagazine. Houses. and Reception, 11:30 com/commencement for Harvard University to 3. Tickets required. news of SIG gatherings. Band, Harvard Glee Behind Perkins Hall. Club, and Radcliffe College Diploma Presentation Cere Choral Society Con- monies and Luncheons, at noon. The Un- cert, at 8. Tercentenary dergraduate Houses. Theatre. Alumni Procession, 1:45. The Old Yard. The Annual Meeting of the Harvard Thursday, May 28 Alumni Association (HAA), 2:30, in- Commencement Day. cludes remarks by HAA president Cyn- Gates open at 6:45. thia A. Torres ’80, M.B.A. ’84, President

AC Academic Proces- Faust, and Commencement speaker De- sion, 8:50. The Old val L. Patrick; Overseer and HAA director Yard. election results; and Harvard Medal pre-

jon chase/hPjon The 364th Com- sentations. Tercentenary Theatre. lic Health Award Ceremony, 4-7. Kresge mencement Exercises, 9:45 (concluding Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Courtyard. at 11:45). Tickets required. Tercentenary Health Diploma Ceremony at 2, with guest Graduate School of Education Convo- Theatre. speaker Donald R. Hopkins, M.P.H. ’70, cation, 3-5, with a guest speaker. Radcliffe All Alumni Spread, 11:30. Tickets re- Sc.D. ’13, vice president of health programs Yard. quired. The Old Yard. of The Carter Center. Kresge Courtyard. Divinity School Multireligious Service The Tree Spread, for the College class- Medical and Dental Schools Class Day of Thanksgiving at 4. Memorial Church. es through 1964, 11:30. Tickets required. Ceremony. Ticketed luncheon at noon, fol- Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Holden Quadrangle. lowed by a speech, at 2, by Rajesh Panjabi, Dudley House Masters’ Reception, 4-6. Graduate School Diploma Ceremonies, co-founder and CEO of Last Mile Health;

Strengthen Your University Bonds Become a Member of the Harvard Faculty Club Featuring exquisite dining, overnight accommodations and event space just steps from Harvard Yard. Join today and enjoy: 10% o all restaurant meals, access to event and conference space, a personalized membership card, access to a network of a liated University clubs worldwide. A one-year membership is just $250 and rst-time members receive a $50 credit for use in the HARVARD restaurant, bar or overnight guest rooms. Visit hfc.harvard.edu to become a member today. Faculty Club e Harvard Faculty Club - Where the Harvard community comes together

16P May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Host your w at the HARVARDe Facultyin Club Harvard Commencement & Reunion Guide associate physician, division of global former chief justice of the health equity, at Brigham and Women’s Supreme Judicial Court Hospital; and HMS instructor in medicine. of Massachusetts and a senior research fellow and Friday, May 29 lecturer on law at Harvard Radcliffe Day, celebrating the institu- Law School. Panelists in- tion’s past, present, and future, includes clude: Linda Greenhouse a morning panel discussion followed by ’68, Knight distinguished a luncheon honoring the 2015 Radcliffe journalist-in-residence Medal recipient, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, L and Goldstein lecturer in ’59, LL.D. ’11, associate justice of the U.S. law at Yale Law School; Supreme Court. Lauren Sudeall Lucas, J.D. The discussion, “A Decade of Decisions ’05, assistant professor of and Dissents: The Roberts Court, from law at Georgia State Uni- AC

2005 to Today” (10:30 a.m.-noon), is moder- versity College of Law; H P ated by Margaret H. Marshall, Ed.M. ’69, and, from Harvard Law

School (HLS), Kirkland chase/jon and Ellis professor Michael Klarman and been distributed; no walk-in attendees Bromley professor John Manning. will be admitted. The events will be web- The luncheon, 12:30-2, will feature re- cast live at www.radcliffe.harvard.edu. marks by retired Supreme Court associate justice David H. Souter ’61, LL.B. ’66, For other Commencement week sched- LL.D. ’10; then, former HLS professor and ule updates, visit http://commencement.

AC former dean of Stanford Law School Kath- harvard.edu/events-schedule, or http:// leen M. Sullivan, J.D. ’81, will talk with alumni.harvard.edu/annualmeeting. Justice Ginsburg about her career. The Smith Campus Center is open daily, ris snibbe/hPris

k Tickets for the day’s events have already 9 to 5 (617-495-1573), except Sunday. Museums, © President and Fellows of Harvard College. of a 1964 Ektachromescan transparency, Harvard Art (ARS),Rights Society New York. Photo: Digitally restored © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko / Artists

November 16, 2014– July 26, 2015 harvardartmuseums.org/rothkomurals

Harvard Magazine 16Q Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Commencement & Reunion Guide Festive Fare, Afield Celebrating the graduates and their families, without the throng. ood .W. F .W. courtesy of T euxave courtesy of D of courtesy ommencement and reunion inspired by Old week draws tens of thousands of World beauty people to Harvard Square, where and early Holly- C there are plenty of restaurants wood glamour. suited to the ensuing celebrations—Alden The drinks are & Harlow, Harvest, Henrietta’s Table, Ri- just as jazzy. Try courtesy of cuchi cuchi cuchi of courtesy alto, and The Beat Hotel among them. Yet Salome’s Potion Worth the walk (or T): some families and their graduates may tire (with muddled Deuxave’s updated French of the crowds and traffic congestion. Here, blackberries and menu, detailed; at T. W. Food, then, are restaurants located just beyond the basil) or Let Me an ambitious tasting menu; and Cuchi Cuchi’s small plates collective hoopla that are easy to reach by Entertain You foot, bus, or subway. (a snappy twist on a mimosa). The “small Deuxave (371 Commonwealth Avenue, Central Square is a 15-minute walk (or plates” (not tapas), priced from $9 to $25, Boston, 617-517-5915; www.deuxave. shorter bus or Red Line ride) from Har- can be shared; they range from scallops com) serves exceptional French fare in a vard Square. The bustling commercial ceviche and baby back ribs with apple frit- chic, modernist setting that is nevertheless zone is packed with ethnic restaurants— ters to spaghetti alla carbonara and tsukune very comfortable. Think neutral shades of Indian, Middle Eastern, Korean, and Japa- (Japanese chicken meatballs). grays and browns, gleaming silverware, nese, among others—but we recommend Traveling farther down Massachusetts and neatly appointed leather upholstery. the “international” cuisine at Cuchi Cuchi Avenue, beyond MIT and just across the Try the kitchen’s signature nine-hour (795 Main Street, 617-864-2929; www. Charles River, are two vastly different French onion soup ($14), the Scituate lob- cuchicuchi.cc). Exuberant décor abounds, restaurants within a block of each other. ster with gnocchi and a mélange of green

16R May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Commencement & Reunion Guide

grapes, curried walnuts, and pearled on- ice-cold milk. (See Harvard Magazine’s re- has an urbane farmhouse feel that matches ions ($19), or the duck liver pâté with view at harvardmag.com/asta-15.) its cuisine: simple, farm-fresh regional in- vanilla poached pears ($13). By contrast, Back in Cambridge, the Kendall Square gredients cooked French-style. Sit inside Asta (47 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston, neighborhood—a biomedical and tech- or out, sipping novel cocktails—Conant’s 617-585-9575; www.astaboston.com), nology mini-mecca—is now loaded with Island (cucumber vodka, rice-wine vin- located in a small, raw-looking creative restaurants, most walkable from the Red egar, and green Tabasco) or Love and space, has no set offerings. Each night, Line’s Kendall Square station. The Blue Fear (gin, lemon, pineapple, fernet, and owner-chef Alex Crabb serves three tast- Room (One Kendall Square, 617-494- Aperol)—and order a series of sides, like ing menus (from $45 to $95) with original 9034. www.theblueroom.net) is a low- Brussels sprouts with macadamia nuts, options: a dish may emphasize onions, pre- lit dining room and bar, with exposed or a family-style dish to share. The rustic pared in five different ways; dessert may be brick and a subterranean appeal. It can be “chicken and jus” ($45), which comes with a rich, crunchy cereal served with fresh, packed with a lively crowd, especially at rutabaga, cabbage, lentils, and bacon-like the bar. Meals are a good step guanciale, serves three or four. up from pub food, with some T.W. Foods (377 Walden Street, 617- especially nice touches: the Ma- 864-4745; www.twfoodrestaurant.com) comber turnip soup ($9), made is easily worth the 1.1-mile jaunt northwest from southeastern Massachu- from Harvard Square. Proprietors Tim and setts produce, arrives with a Bronwyn Wiechmann (who also own a dollop of sumac-flavoredlabne terrific German and Austrian restaurant, (yogurt cheese), and the grilled Bronwyn, in Somerville’s Union Square) whole branzino (fish) is paired offer prix-fixe tasting menus ($55 to $85), with a refreshing salad of fennel, with optional wine pairings. It is among watercress, and radicchio ($28). the most meticulously prepared, subtly

est bridge Across the courtyard is West adorned cooking around. On a recent Bridge (617-945-0221; www. night, that meant house-made ricotta and West Bridge westbridgerestaurant.com). sunchoke agnolotti and a beet soup laced

courtesy of w Open and airy, this restaurant with horseradish and crème fraîche, fol-

The Catered Affair is the caterer for the Harvard Art Museums

thecateredaffair.com/venues/harvardartmuseums 781.763.1333

Harvard Magazine 16s Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Commencement & Reunion Guide

ipe” meatballs with melted mozzarella 2 ($12), or be dunked in the marinara Harvard SHOPPING GUIDE that comes with it. Down the street, The Painted Burro (219 Elm Street, 617-776-0005; www.paintedburro. com) offers imaginative Latin Ameri- can dishes. Start with the $10 hibiscus- flavored margarita—very strong and not too sweet—and the “cholo” corn- cob with garlic mayo, cotija cheese and a touch of cayenne ($6) or the corn masa griddle cakes with goat cheese

courtesy of blue room and sautéed apples ($12). The slow- The Blue Room in cooked short ribs come with roasted car- Cambridge’s rots, charred onions, red wine mole, and HARVARD SQUARE BUSINESS ASSOCIATION ADVERTISING SECTION Kendall Square— the technology and Oaxacan grits ($24), but the lighter fare, lowed by a delicate rhubarb gâteau Breton and trattoria,” and biotech center with such as the fresh mahi mahi tacos with a Document1Document1 11/20/03 11/20/03 11:51 11:51 AM AM Page Page 1 1 with lavender ice cream and lemon curd. is good for all ages. a Silicon Valley vibe serrano-spiced salsa ($7.50), is just as sat- (or the Boston More down-to-earth and moderately The 13 wood-fired, equivalent) isfying. For dessert, head to Mr. Crêpe priced are two places well suited for cel- thin-crust pizzas (51 Davis Square, 617-623-0661; www. ebratory extended-family gatherings in ($12-$21) come with white or red sauce and mrcrepe.com): everyone, no doubt, has Somerville’s nearby Davis Square. (Take well-paired toppings, such as the eggplant earned the right to indulge in the specialty the Red Line two stops outbound from with pine nuts, raisins, roasted peppers, of the house, the “Tiff and Tone” ($8.95): a Harvard Square.) Posto (187 Elm Street, and ricotta. For pastas, try the tagliatelle hot crêpe filled with strawberries, bananas, 617-625-0600; www.postoboston.com) with ragù Bolognese ($20), or combine a and melty Belgian chocolate, and topped aptly calls itself “a modern interpreta- few appetizers: the rosemary sea-salt bread with two scoops of vanilla ice cream. tion of a classic Italian pizzeria, enoteca, ($2.50) can envelop the classic “nonna’s rec- vnell porter brown

ASSISTEDASSISTEDLIVINGLIVINGRETIREMENTRETIREMENTCOMMUNITYCOMMUNITY PHOTO CREDITS: DEIVIDAS GAILEVICIUS & RITA JULIANA Independent and Assisted Living Here’sSpecializedHere’s what what Memory people people Care are are hroughout its long history, Whatsayingsaying do Harvard about about us. alumni us. SPRING & SUMMER EVENTS IN HARVARD SQUARE have in common? T Harvard Square has played Cadbury Commons a special role in the Harvard 5/3 32nd Annual MayFair (rain 5/17) A Remarkable Senior Residence community, and it continues to 5/5 Cinco de Mayo do so year after year. 5/10 Tory Row 5k Road Race Mother’s Day That is why each spring Name:Name:MiltonMilton R. R. 364th Harvard Commencement Occupation:Occupation:PostalPostal Supervisor, Supervisor, Retired Retired and fall Harvard Magazine 5/28 Hobbies:Hobbies:Reading,Reading, Walking, Walking, Exercising Exercising Lifestyle:Lifestyle:Independent,Independent, Active Active dedicates several advertising 6/1 Patios in Bloom Kicko ChoiceChoice of Senior/Assisted of Senior/Assisted Living: Living: CadburyCadbury Commons Commons pages to showcase the business 6/7 - 6/13 Jose Mateo Dance for World Community The Harvard alumni who chose “There“There is a is stable a stable and and gentle gentle atmosphere atmosphere 2015 Commencement & Reunion Guide members of the Harvard 6/7 Cambridge Riverfest of Cadbury helpof help and and Commons empathy empathy throughout throughoutmay have the the community.retiredcommunity. from I feel Iwork, feelassured assured but that not thatI am fromI partam part oflife. of Go to: harvardmagazine.com/commencement Square Business Association. 8th Annual Fete de la Musique/ others’others’ lives, lives, as they as they are ofare mine. of mine. For Formyself, myself, 6/20 I feelIMuseum feel that that Cadbury CadburyVisits Commons • CommonsPlay Reading provides provides a a for a complete schedule and live coverage of events. Make Music Harvard Square wellSymphonywell trained trained and andcaring Selections caring group group of •people ofLecture people who who are interestedare interested in my in welfare.”my welfare.” We invite you to support these Father’s Day Series • Yoga • Organic Gardening brought to you online by 6/21 CallCall (617) (617) 868-0575 868-0575 to arrange to arrange a personal a personal local businesses and family- tour,Calltour, (617) or visit or 868-0575 visit www.cadburycommons.com www.cadburycommons.com to arrange a personal tour, harvardsquare.com WhereWhereor visitThe www.cadburycommons.comThe Emphasis Emphasis Is On Is OnLiving Living owned retailers, to ensure that 66 Sherman6666 Sherman Sherman Street, Street, Street, Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge, EQUAL EQUAL the Square continues to thrive. MA 02140◆ ◆ (617) 868-0575 HOUSING HOUSING MAMA 02140 02140 (617)• (617)868-0575 868-0575 OPPTY OPPTY

16T May - June 2015 www.harvardmagazine.com/harvardsquare Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746

150501_HSBA_fin2.indd 1 3/27/15 11:09 AM Harvard2 SHOPPING GUIDE HARVARD SQUARE BUSINESS ASSOCIATION ADVERTISING SECTION

PHOTO CREDITS: DEIVIDAS GAILEVICIUS & RITA JULIANA

hroughout its long history, SPRING & SUMMER EVENTS IN HARVARD SQUARE T Harvard Square has played a special role in the Harvard 5/3 32nd Annual MayFair (rain 5/17) community, and it continues to 5/5 Cinco de Mayo do so year after year. 5/10 Tory Row 5k Road Race Mother’s Day That is why each spring and fall Harvard Magazine 5/28 364th Harvard Commencement dedicates several advertising 6/1 Patios in Bloom Kicko pages to showcase the business 6/7 - 6/13 Jose Mateo Dance for World Community members of the Harvard 6/7 Cambridge Riverfest Square Business Association. 6/20 8th Annual Fete de la Musique/ Make Music Harvard Square We invite you to support these 6/21 Father’s Day local businesses and family- harvardsquare.com owned retailers, to ensure that the Square continues to thrive.

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Isaac Kohane

Toward Precision Medicine emerging discipline “reflects the dramatic Building scale in biomedical informatics development of large data sets in genetics, genomics, studies of proteins, the nervous Anticipating “radical transformations” ences and technology Isaac “Zak” Kohane system—all aspects of biomedical science in medicine in coming decades, the dean of will chair the new department. Since 2005, and ultimately patient care,” says Gilbert Harvard Medical School (HMS) has autho- he has co-directed HMS’s Center for Bio- Omenn, M.D. ’65, director of the Universi- rized a full-scale department of biomedical medical Informatics (CBMI); five of its as- ty of Michigan’s Center for Computational informatics, effective July 1. Jeffrey Flier’s sociates will become the department’s first Medicine and Bioinformatics, who chaired move recognizes the growing importance core faculty members, and Kohane has com- the external committee that reviewed the of data in the healthcare professions, and, mitted to recruit 10 more colleagues during proposal for the new department. But he said, builds on the school’s “outstanding the next five to seven years. much of this information is “heteroge- record of achievement” in the field. Hender- What is biomedical informatics, why neous,” he explains: the data range from son professor of pediatrics and health sci- does it matter, and why now at HMS? The the molecular and genetic to the behavioral and sociological. “All of it,” Omenn says, “has to come together to paint a complete In this Issue picture of the determinants of health and disease, as well as response to therapies 19 Harvard Portrait 25 Putting the “New” in House Renewal and general care.” Biomedical informatics 20 Yesterday’s News 27 Brevia aims to create an information commons 22 Debating Sharia Law, Digitally 29 The Undergraduate that will be useful to researchers, doctors, 24 University News Briefs 32 Sports and even their patients. Kohane’s experi-

Photograph by Jim Harrison Harvard Magazine 17 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal ence as director of informatics at Boston would be lucky if their providers knew skills. “The best predictor of a doctor or- Children’s Hospital, and at HMS’s Count- about similar patients in their own prac- dering a genetic test is knowing whether way Library (see “Gutenberg 2.0,” May- tices—let alone all patients with similar the patient asked for it,” Kohane contin- June 2010, page 36), is directly pertinent. histories—and about which drugs worked ues—usually because that patient has for different patient subgroups. This kind of searched on Google. But researchers have Lessons from Netflix precision medicine simply doesn’t exist yet. found that even “well-trained physicians “Medicine as a whole is a knowledge- (Kohane served on the National Academy are both uncomfortable and incompetent processing business that increasingly is tak- of Sciences committee that delivered a 2011 in interpreting these tests,” often because ing large amounts of data and then, in theo- report on the subject to President Obama; they lack numeracy skills. One of Kohane’s ry, bringing that information to the point of among his own projects is the creation of former students, Arjun Manrai ’08, asked care so that doctor and patient have a maxi- a central repository for information about doctors and residents at a Boston hospital mally informed visit,” says Kohane. He com- neurodevelopmental diseases, with a spe- a simple question: “If a test to detect a dis- pares this idealized patient experience, in a cial focus on autism spectrum disorder, in ease whose prevalence is one in a thousand sense, to Netflix or Amazon’s connection to which both genes and the environment are has a false positive rate of 5 percent, what consumers: they already know “your entire thought to play important roles.) is the chance that a person found to have prior purchase history…what other consum- Another goal of biomedical informatics a positive result actually has the disease?” ers with a similar history are going to buy is to improve diagnoses and treatments by The test will yield 50 false positives in a next, and what to recommend to you.” But removing some of the subjectivity of clini- population of 1,000, but only one patient in medicine, he points out, patients with cal interactions. For example, many doctors, will actually be ill—so a positive test re- chronic diseases must repeat some abbrevi- when listening to a patient’s heart through a sult would mean that a patient has only ated version of their entire medical history stethoscope, “will disagree about what they about a 2 percent chance of having the “again and again to every provider.” are hearing, and what it means,” says Ko- disease. More than three-quarters of the To enable precision movie-picking or hane. “Whereas you can attach a computer respondents in the study got this wrong; shopping, the titans of online commerce to a microphone, and get consistent, reliable the most common answer was 95 percent. take advantage of “knowing a lot about a diagnoses of which valve is affected.” As Kohane puts it, “In the era where population and a lot about you,” Kohane A related, pedagogical goal is enhanc- we’re beginning to take away pieces of says. Most patients, on the other hand, ing physicians’ search and numeracy your body, like a breast, based on a ge-

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harvardmag.com/mayotte-15 P under way at the College and Harvard’s graduate and profes- Crunching the Numbers on Voting Rights sional schools. Read about the in America speakers who will be addressing Why good data are essential to understanding the the new graduates at Class Day Voting Rights Act harvardmag.com/voting-15 and Commencement ceremo- kwise from kris top left: snibbe/H nies at harvardmag.com/tags/ c lo c visit harvardmagazine.com commencement-2015 Counter

18 May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 netic test, we’re going to have to better understand the meaning of probability.” harvard portrait That points to the department’s pedagogical mission: educating graduate students (who will become research scientists) and medical students in order to ensure that they know how to use the computational tools in increasingly wide use.

Grappling with Genomic Data This new approach is consistent with trends in medical education generally. “It’s now accepted that in medical school you’re only going to learn a tiny fraction of what you need to actually provide expert care for patients,” Kohane points out—even in a narrow subdiscipline. Genomics, he adds, has compounded the problem by several orders of magnitude: “There’s no way anyone, no matter how manic, is going to know what a million different [gene] variants mean for an individual.” Doctors therefore need a computational “decision support infrastructure” that interprets a patient’s medical history, family history, and genomic background to show what the risks are, as well as the pre- ferred therapies. Bringing individualized genomic information into the clinic will “accelerate the re- alization that we need just-in-time decision support,” Kohane continues. But “process automation”—such as digitizing medical records to streamline hospital operations and doctors’ offices—is nowhere near that capability, so tackling that problem is on the Jelani Nelson new department’s agenda, too. Such a system might do what Google Jelani Nelson lights up when he talks about algorithms. The soft-spoken assistant has done for maps: layer atop a location’s professor of computer science is a rising star in a field made vital as data proliferate geographical coordinates all kinds of other exponentially faster than the growth of computational power or storage. Algorithms, useful information, such as current weath- well-defined procedures for carrying out computational tasks, speed the way to an- er or crowd-sourced data on good places swers. Nelson has a knack for speed: online, where he is known as “minilek”—a to walk or dine. Imagine if environmen- handle chosen in youth when he was growing up on St. Thomas, and derived from the tal exposures, genetic makeup, lifestyle name of an early ruler of Ethiopia, whence his mother hails—he has won with equal habits, diet, and epigenetic information ease coding competitions and typing contests (topping out above 200 words per min- (about which genes are actually turned ute). Though he is a theorist now, solving real problems quickly “cements the concepts on or off) were “mapped” onto patient re- in your mind,” he says. Borne of that conviction, every homework assignment in his cords. “Stacking that all together,” he says, undergraduate course Computer Science 124, “Data Structures and Algorithms,” in- will provide “a better understanding of the cludes an algorithmic programming problem. His own student years were spent prac- patient as a whole” in order to predict, for tically next door, at MIT, where he majored in mathematics and computer science, and example, if someone is at risk for diabetes. remained to earn a Ph.D. in the latter field. He came to Harvard in 2013 after postdoctoral research at Berkeley and Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Nelson’s New Models of Diagnosis and Care specialty is “sketching,” an approach to dealing with problems in which there are “too Two years ago, Kohane and colleagues many data in the input.” He figures out how to create compressed, often exponen- demonstrated the power of integrating tially smaller, versions of datasets that nevertheless retain useful, accurate information. genetic data into diagnoses in a contest, His proofs defining the limits of such approaches have illuminated fundamental ques- the Clarity Challenge (see www.irdirc. tions, some of them unanswered for decades. Though he is humble and quiet, his org/?p=2892). Thirty teams of doctors colleagues are less reserved: they call him “simply brilliant.” vjonathan shaw around the world were given the histories

Photograph by Jim Harrison Harvard Magazine 19 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal

and genome sequences of three families, each with a sick child whose disease was Yesterday’s News believed to be genetic. Seven teams con- From the pages of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and Harvard Magazine verged on very useful diagnoses for two of the patients (including a case that had gone 11 years without one), a result that demon- 1925 The senior and freshman classes faced down the front with black velvet strated the potential utility of genomic data assemble on the Widener steps to have and with three black velvet bars on each in such cases. But there was an even more their respective pictures taken, and the wide bell-shaped sleeve. significant lesson, Kohane believes: one of freshmen, according to custom, contrib- the patients, he reports, “had already been ute to the seniors’ pre-Commencement 1980 Class Day speaker Walter evaluated in two of the hospitals that were celebration: the total is $244.24 and two Cronkite warns graduating seniors that home to winning teams,” but had remained cats, one alive and one dead. unless they come to grips with the “mega- undiagnosed. During the challenge, on the *** problems” of overpopulation, pollution, other hand, the teams successfully identi- Thirteen Harvard men gather on May 1 natural-resource depletion, and nuclear fied the problem. That means, he says, “that to organize the Harvard Club of Shang- proliferation—“our modern Four Horse- there is a better process, that does not look hai; Way Sung New, M.D. ’14, is elected men of the Apocalypse”—civilization as like the current process, of medical care that president. we know it cannot survive. is multidisciplinary, and involves the use of computational experts, as well as genetic 1940 After Germany invades the 1990 In mid May, President Derek experts, as well as clinicians, working as a Netherlands, President Conant argues on Bok makes public the Harvard Corpora- team to create qualitative—or quantum— national radio that “the changed military tion’s eight-month-old decision to re- differences in care.” situation in Europe threatens our way of move from the University’s portfolio all That experience persuades him that the life,” and student support for aid to the stock in firms that manufacture tobacco new department will generate “new mod- Allies increases. products. els of diagnosis.” The HMS biomedical informatics group has already been tapped as 1950 Harvard enjoys its “most amaz- 1995 Class Day speaker Hank Aaron the coordinating center for a new national ing financial year in history,” raising near- shares a story about a young man who network on undiagnosed diseases. This ly $26 million in gifts, bequests, and grants. went running up to his father, saying, program, based on a pilot developed at the “Look, Dad, I got it! I got my A.B. from National Institutes of Health that resulted 1955 The Corporation approves a Harvard.” To which the father replied, in successful diagnoses for rare diseases 30 new doctoral gown for Harvard degree “Son, that’s fine. We are all real proud. to 50 percent of the time, involves genome holders, “crimson silk Now it’s time for you to go to work and sequencing and then a referral for the pa- and worsted stuff” learn the rest of the alphabet.” tient to the leading specialist in the disease. Ultimately, Kohane says, such efforts will require both a new infrastructure that can encompass all kinds of, and lots of, data, and a new kind of caregiver: individuals who “want to make a difference in biology and medicine and yet are wizards in quantitative reasoning and computational methods.” In his estimation, such “quants” could probably have greater impact than any single doctor by identifying early signs of disease, finding new treatments, and warning about drugs that do not work.

A New Breed of Doctor Chirag Patel, a CBMI research associate in biomedical informatics who will become a faculty member in the new department

Illustration by Mark Steele

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 in July, is one role model for this new generation of student. After studying molecular biology and computing at the University of California, Berkeley, he began working as a software engineer at a biotechnology company focused on genome sequencing. Later, mentored by biomedical informaticist Atul Butte at Stanford, Patel “fell in love” with biomedical informatics because it combined genomics with computer science, statistics, and mathematics—“all my core interests.” After earning a Ph.D., he worked for a year with Stanford professor of medicine John Ioannidis (who is also an adjunct professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health), developing analytical methods to mine large, epidemiological data sets. One of Patel’s current projects is to develop software for environment-wide association studies that will allow researchers to study the relationship between genomes and exposomes (the totality of a person’s environmental exposures to such things as Chirag Patel drugs, diet, diseases, and pollutants). For example, type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune by other factors such as age, for example, His second focus, noted earlier, is iden- disease, arises spontaneously, typically in which is a huge risk factor for diabetes and tifying faculty members who can develop children and young adults. Researchers cardiovascular disease?” new tools and techniques for using data know that some people have a pre-existing Training students to ask the relevant to generate automated diagnoses more accurate genetic susceptibility, but also that the dis- questions, Patel believes, is one of the big- than those the current healthcare system ease is triggered by an environmental expo- gest challenges in biomedical informatics. provides. sure. Figuring out which exposures cause Students need to be just as adept in biology The third priority involves reimagining the the autoimmune response has proven chal- and patient care as in advanced computing clinical encounter: “How do we provide the lenging: an individual genome represents and data analysis. “The challenge is finding providers with all that just-in-time data a huge amount of data, but at least it is a folks who can bridge those worlds.” about the patient? How do we provide it discrete entity. A person’s exposome, on in a way that is useful in making decisions the other hand, encompasses data ranging Forming a Faculty about the patient? How do we allow them from electronic medical records, to mem- Recruiting additional faculty members to measure things quantitatively—through bership in epidemiological cohorts, to per- who can do that is Kohane’s responsibil- noninvasive imaging such as ultrasound— sonal exposure monitoring—a gigantic “big ity. He seeks expertise in three areas. The and integrate that into their assessment of data” problem (see “Why Big Data is a Big first involves creatinga patient-centered infor- the patient?” The kind of person who could Deal,” March-April 2014, page 30). mation commons that will bring together pa- successfully change the healthcare encoun- Fortunately, Patel “likes to look at ev- tient data of diverse kinds so that it can be ter will probably combine skills in systems erything at once. I try to hammer out con- incorporated into population-level research, engineering, human-productivity and ef- nections…and correlate everything with and make the findings useful in individu- fectiveness engineering, and a variety of everything else.” Then he tries to “fish out al care. Such a system will demand rapid real-time information technologies. the signals from the noise.” Correlations computation across millions of individuals These challenges are immense, but the will always emerge from enormous sets of and hundreds of thousands of data types, effort to put such knowledge back in the data; the challenge is figuring out which as well as privacy protections. Scientists hands of healthcare providers is overdue. exposures have a basis in biology—and working on this effort, including Patel, come As Kohane puts it, “For a variety of rea- merit further exploration. For example, from the medical and public-health schools sons—some out of reasonable caution, but Patel and other researchers have found a and the Harvard/MIT Health Sciences and some out of institutional inertia—medi- link between diabetes and such persistent Technology program (the training ground cine has been slower than other disciplines pollutants as the pesticide DDT and poly- for biomedical researchers). The aim is to to take advantage of the new insights and chlorinated biphenyls (PCBs, commonly enable precision medicine that could, say, the new productivity that you can get used as coolants in electrical apparatus combine data from a patient’s psychiatric through data science and process automa- and other applications). “But we still can’t history, genetic information, and records of tion.” His department aims to make a dif- pin down the biology behind these cor- environmental exposures to derive clinically ference throughout biomedical research— relations,” he explains. “Are they biased relevant information. and practice. vjonathan shaw

Photograph by Jim Harrison Harvard Magazine 21 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal

across the American legal academy. Intisar Debating Sharia (During the past decade, for ex- A. Rabb ample, a curricular reform at HLS Law, Digitally introduced a requirement in comparative or international law for all A simple google search for the word first-year students.) But inviting “sharia” illustrates the magnitude of the gap students and fellow scholars into Harvard Law School (HLS) professor Inti- conversations about Islamic legal sar A. Rabb wants to fill. Up top, there’s traditions has been difficult, Rabb a 2,000-word overview from the Council says: many people are unfamiliar on Foreign Relations, along with the usual with Islamic nations and their his- Wikipedia link. But even on that first page tories in general, and there is no of results, there’s also a far less neutral take reliable, easily digestible reference from a Christian missionary website, and source for Islamic law. She points Ra bb

an alarmist article on sharia law in Dear- to her own long career path—a J.D. A. r a

born, Michigan, that on further investiga- at Yale, a Ph.D. at Princeton, and re- ntis tion turns out to come from the satirical search conducted in Egypt, Syria, news site National Report. and Iran. “It shouldn’t be that you

More than a billion people globally have to have the specialized training I of c ourtesy live in countries that use legal systems to go into the archives just to say anything (Discussions are under way, in fact, about grounded in part or in whole in sharia—de- about Islamic law,” she says. “And it also what books in Harvard’s collection could fined quite broadly as the “divine word of shouldn’t be that we just don’t talk about be scanned and uploaded to the site. For God”—and its interpretation by Muslim Islamic law in law schools because we more on the changing digital landscape of jurists, or fiqh. Yet it can be hard for both don’t have that training.” libraries, see “Gutenberg 2.0,” May-June scholars and those outside academia, in- The development of SHARIASource, 2010, page 36.) Rabb sees even more of a cluding policymakers and journalists, to whose beta version is set to launch later model in SCOTUSblog, which offers com- easily access reliable information about this year, fits what Rabb sees as the guid- mentary on the work of the U.S. Supreme these legal traditions. As co-director of the ing mission of ILSP: promoting research Court. SHARIASource, she hopes, will simi- Law School’s Islamic Legal Studies Pro- in, and providing resources for, the study larly serve as a forum for interpretation and gram (ILSP), Rabb has set out to change of Islamic law. The site’s chief mandate is a space for scholars to make sense of the that. Her answer is SHARIASource, a web- scholarly, says ILSP deputy director Rashid connections they find among its sources. site that aims to serve as the go-to resource S. Alvi, a former corporate lawyer who “The big catch,” Rabb acknowledges, is that, on Islamic legal issues by gathering basic joined the program in January 2014 to orga- unlike the Supreme Court, Islamic law “is information, primary and secondary sourc- nize the launch of SHARIASource. “In the not one institution in one country.” She and es, and scholarly debates on topics span- long run, academic approaches to a sub- Alvi have “Google-like aspirations” for the ning dozens of countries and more than ject are the ones that are given the great- site’s content—a big project, “but that’s also 1,400 years of history. Though explicitly est credibility,” he reflects. Though the site part of the excitement of it.” designed for easy public consumption, the will, by virtue of credibility and accessibil- During the past year, ILSP has consulted site’s foundation will be in academic dis- ity, serve as a resource for journalists and with experts at the Berkman Center and cussions, with a strong emphasis on con- others outside the academy, Rabb and Alvi the MIT Media Lab while building the necting scholars from different disciplines agreed that they didn’t want “something SHARIASource site. The most concrete to new sources and to each other. As a that just put a Band-Aid on bad articles hurdle standing in the way of a launch is result, SHARIASource is part of a twenty- on Islamic law,” Alvi says. “I wanted to put ensuring that a public, open-access site first-century digitization revolution that something together that over 20 years, 50 tasked with hosting sources from around will change not only how knowledge is years, 100 years would pull together the the world respects copyright boundaries. collected, but also how it is created. best scholarship and thinking.” Berkman’s Cyberlaw Clinic has already The idea for the project grew from an conducted an intellectual-property analy- online resource for journalists that Rabb The models for the project are two sites sis for the United States; the ILSP team is worked on as a fellow at HLS’s Berkman that have become central to conversations working with experts at Berkman as well Center for Internet & Society from 2011 about American law for insiders as well as as collaborators abroad on guidelines to to 2013. Expanding this vision was one of observers. The first is Westlaw, an online analyze other countries’ systems. her major priorities when she joined the legal research platform that includes ex- The other serious challenge is creating HLS faculty in January 2014 as the ILSP’s haustive databases of case law, statutes, systems to populate the site with sources first permanent faculty director in nearly public records, and more. Making SHARIA- and commentary—an essential part of a decade (professor of law Kristen A. Stilt Source a similarly comprehensive database fulfilling Rabb’s vision of an ever-growing joined her as co-director in September). for Islamic law will provide critical access marketplace of ideas. Though just a few The rejuvenated ILSP is part of a wave of for those unable to travel to the few librar- hundred resources have been uploaded to increased interest in international law ies with extensive holdings on the subject. the portal thus far, the beta site’s extensive

22 May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Life after graduation is even more rewarding

As a Harvard alum, you have the opportunity to do great things. Help others achieve dreams by supporting Harvard financial aid their programs when you use your Harvard Alumni World MasterCard®. For information on this and other best-in-class rewards from the Harvard Alumni Card, or to apply for yours, please go to www.harvardcard.com. John Harvard's Journal

form for researchers to engage with few began the course as experts in Islamic their peers. Contributors will also be law, they’ve made connections between the responsible for thoughtfully adding theoretical areas that interest them and the tags on subjects and themes to the case studies they’ve found. One student, Rabb database’s ever-growing network says, applied her background in contempo- of sources from around the world rary U.S. intellectual-property law to what in order to help fellow researchers she found in the nineteenth-century Ottoman make connections among different law code. Bringing examples of Islamic law eras, regions, and areas of expertise. into larger debates in the legal academy is part A tenth-century manuscript, pre- of the site’s explicit goal, Rabb says. (Froem- sented as an original scan on one side ming, for example, sees the site’s potential to of the screen and an English transla- connect her work on Afghani finance law to tion on the other, will live comfort- that of other researchers who are interested ably alongside the latest decisions in the theories of law and development.) The on blasphemy laws in Pakistan. For platform aims to make Islamic law more ac- . Alvi d S

i the first time, scholars will be able to cessible and, in turn, Rabb says, help promote h s make connections between sources “the study of Islamic law as law, rather than Rashid of different types, eras, and geogra- purely as religion.” S. Alvi phies easily, says ILSP visiting fellow Above all, SHARIASource—like its

Courtesy of Ra Meagan Froemming, who holds a model, SCOTUSblog—is explicitly de- roadmap makes the scope of her ambitions master’s from Harvard’s Center for Middle signed as a user-friendly place for policy- clear. Documents can be sorted by type— Eastern Studies along with a law degree makers, the journalists who cover them, whether a primary source like a legal trea- from New York University. As Alvi puts it, and ordinary readers trying to make sense tise or fatwa (an advisory opinion), or a the first reactions of most professors who of what they find in the news each day. secondary source like a book review. Oth- hear about the project has been: “Why Right now, Rabb says, journalists may “do er menus array their contents by the typi- wasn’t this around when I was writing my a Google search and find thousands of hits cal topics taught in law schools (criminal latest book?” on any given topic of Islamic law, but have law, property law, and so on), or by themes no idea what’s credible, what’s not.” Rabb such as environmental law, apostasy and In another step to populate the site, Rabb hopes that SHARIASource—vested with blasphemy, and legal pluralism. Users will is running the Digital Islamic Law Lab this the authority of a university, and with en- also be able to search through the site’s spring, a class of 12 students who will each tries from legal scholars explaining what’s expansive map of space and time, access- research four articles for SHARIASource. happening “in plain English”—will being material by contemporary regions and The students’ experiences speak to the po- come a real, reliable search engine for such countries as well as by historical empires tential value of the online resource. Though questions. vstephanie garlock and eras, reaching back to the founding of Islam. So far, the beta site has collected sources in and translations from English, harvardmag.com/cities-15). Faust also Arabic, Persian, and Bahasa Indonesia, University News Briefs spoke at Tsinghua University, where she with plans to expand to Turkish next. highlighted academic partnerships, re- “There was never going to be a way to Climate-change Currents search, and training, drawing on examples cover all of that by having two people— The Climate Change Solutions Fund—an- from Harvard-Tsinghua collaborations or even 10 people—sitting at Harvard,” nounced in April 2014 by President Drew on air pollution, the atmosphere, and says Alvi. “We realized early on that this Faust, and intended to channel $20 million global warming (see harvardmag.com/cli- was going to be a worldwide collabora- into innovative research (see harvardmag. mates-15). tive project.” It will be crucial, he notes, com/climate-15)—has made its first seven On campus, Harvard’s environment to recruit contributors who align with grants, totaling $800,000, for projects rang- center has organized a series of climate- the site’s academic, apolitical mission. Al- ing from work on food waste (at the Law change events for the week of April 6-10, ready, professors from Australian Catho- School) and coping with extreme heat and the University convened an expert lic University have agreed to take charge events (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Pub- panel discussion on April 13 (see harvard- of developing content on Islamic law in lic Health) to work on energy and climate mag.com/divest-15); both were scheduled Southeast Asia, including major Muslim policy in China and India. to occur after this issue went to press. countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and In mid March, Faust focused on climate Separately, students campaigning for di- Brunei. issues during a capital-campaign “Your vestment of Harvard’s investment in fossil What scholars could get in return for Harvard” event in Beijing; among the fac- fuels staged a sit-in at Massachusetts Hall collaborating on SHARIASource high- ulty members who appeared was professor in mid February, and alumni supporters lights how new ways of cataloging knowl- of architectural technology Ali Malkawi, promised a more comprehensive action edge in the digital age will also create director of the Center for Green Build- there for “Harvard Heat Week,” sched- knowledge. The site is intended as a plat- ings and Cities (described more fully at uled for April 12-17. Among the support-

24 May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Putting the “New” in House Renewal

When students vacate Winthrop House after Commencement 2016, they will make way for something new in the program of undergraduate residences: not just stem-to-stern renovation, but significant fresh construction, in the form of a five-story addition to Gore Hall that will accommodate more than 50 students now living in overflow apartments on DeWolfe Street; a separate master’s residence; and enlarged dining facilities. The plans, unveiled in February, suggest the work to be under-

taken at the second House to be wholly redone. (Construction elle

is now under way at Dunster House, which is expected to receive renovations, including the overhaul of Quincy House’s Stone Hall er B d

its returning residents for this coming fall term.) “Winthrop East,” and the current work at Dunster.) The plan also includes a glass- lin

the addition to Gore Hall, will replace surface garages at the enclosed rooftop common room and open-air terrace with views eyer B corner of Plympton and Mill streets. In addition to student living of Cambridge, the Boston skyline, and the Charles River. by B d by re C a

J quarters, it will provide classroom and socializing spaces, for The design adapts a modern architectural idiom, rather than

zine/ which designs are incomplete. (Such features appear in the prior attempting to blend in with the existing façade. As Elizabeth a g Leber, a partner with project architects Beyer, Blinder, Belle, told Ma ering prep

d Winthrop House renovation plans include a five-story addition d a r to Gore Hall at Plympton and Mill streets (below). A house on the Harvard Gazette, “We felt that it was appropriate that a build- en R a rv

H Memorial Drive (above right) becomes the master’s residence. ing should be of its time, rather than trying to be what it’s not. Winthrop House has a number of wonderful entablatures that announce entries and provide a good deal of character and stat- ure to the building. What we’re proposing is a contemporary way of using similar traditional materials.” The master’s residence will be created by reconstructing a wood-frame building at the corner of Plympton Street and Me- morial Drive and linking it to Gore Hall. The expansion and improvement of the existing dining hall, to accommodate the enlarged number of House residents, encompasses lowering the adjacent outdoor terrace to make it accessible from the dining area. This will also admit more natural light into the two-story hall, where the lower story is below grade. During the 2016-2017 academic year, Winthrop House residents will relocate to the former Inn at Harvard and other nearby swing spaces; their House is to reopen in the fall of 2017. See harvardmag.com/winthrop-15 for additional details and images.

ers is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, LL.D. the proceeds “when the Harvard Corpo- graduates in May 2014, the Faculty of Arts ’79, a Nobel laureate and former member ration publicly commits to divesting from and Sciences discussed its implementation of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, whose fossil fuels.” If Harvard has not commit- (beginning this fall) at its meeting on March campaigning against apartheid in South ted to divestment by the end of 2025, the 3, and expressed hope of enacting the lan- Africa famously led to his support for Uni- funds would be directed to tax-exempt guage and procedures for use during a meet- versity divestment of investments in com- climate-change organizations. A law- ing later this spring. Incoming undergrad- panies that operated there—a step then- suit challenging Harvard’s investment in uates would be educated about the code, president Derek Bok declined to take. fossil-fuel companies, brought by student and would write a personal response to it The alumni advocates of divestment also divestment advocates last fall, was dis- upon matriculation, and students would announced a Fossil Free Alumni Fund, missed in mid March for lack of standing. affirm theirawareness of the code at regis- for donations to an investment vehicle de- tration (without having to actually pledge signed by the Natural Resources Defense On Your Honor their acceptance of it). For students’ signed Council. The University would receive Having adopted an honor code for under- affirmations for final exams, theses, and all

Harvard Magazine 25 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal other final papers and projects, the draft lan- has given his alma mater hundreds of mil- guage suggests that faculty members “may lions of dollars (including the lead gift for wish to use” this text: “I attest to the hon- its New York City technology campus), esty of my academic work and affirm that gave the University of California, San it conforms to the standards of the Harvard Francisco, $100 million for its hospitals and College Honor Code.” For details, see har- research on neuroscience and aging, bring- vardmag.com/hchonor-15. ing his support for UCSF to $394 million. Separately, on March 24, Stanford pro- Roberta Buffett Elliott (sister of Warren vost John Etchemendy wrote to faculty Buffett) gave her alma mater, Northwest- how online students learn most effectively; members and teaching staff there about ern, more than $100 million for global it hints as well about the use of the online “an unusually high number of troubling al- studies. A few weeks later, Northwestern materials and techniques in campus-based legations of academic dishonesty” report- alumnus and trustee Louis A. Simpson and classes—one of the initial aims of the edX ed during the winter quarter—one involv- his wife, Kimberly K. Querrey, gave $92 enterprise. For a detailed report and dis- ing “as many as 20 percent of the students million, the naming gift for a new biomed- cussion, see harvardmag.com/mooc-15. in one large introductory course.” He ical research center there; they earlier gave noted, “At the beginning of our students’ $25 million for medical research. Online Accessibility Stanford careers, they are introduced to As an indication of the pace of contem- The National Association of the Deaf and the Honor Code and agree to abide by it.” porary fundraising, less than four years af- four deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals ter concluding its $3.88-billion Yale Tomor- have filed suit against Harvard and MIT, Olympics Ambitions? row campaign, that institution announced alleging that their online content, includ- As 100 inches of snow buried Boston and a snap $200-million Access Yale drive for ing courses distributed through edX and Cambridge from late January to early March, financial aid, in part to support more un- recordings of speeches and presentations stranded commuters were not much focused dergraduates, who will be accommodated on campus, are not captioned, or are insuf- on the 2024 summer Olympics. But the orga- in two new residential colleges under con- ficiently accommodating, and thus are dis- nizing committee promoting the city’s bid struction. criminatory, in violation of the Americans to host the games suggested several Har- And Princeton announced a nonmon- with Disabilities Act and other laws. The vard venues for competitions: field hockey etary gift: the bequest of rare books and University, while declining to address the in the Stadium (indicated as seating 30,000, manuscripts, including a Gutenberg Bible, litigation per se, responded, “Expanding although renovation plans call for that to a first printing of the Declaration of Inde- access to knowledge and making online be reduced significantly), fencing in the pendence, a run of Shakespeare folios, and learning content accessible is of vital impor- Gordon Track, and aquatics, water polo, important musical manuscripts. The dona- tance to Harvard….We expect that the U.S. and tennis in temporary facilities at “Bea- tion, valued at $300 million, is the largest Department of Justice may issue proposed con Yards”—an area the University hopes it gift in the school’s history. rules in June 2015 to provide much-needed may, by then, develop as a commercial “en- guidance in this area. We look forward to terprise research campus” (see “A New Era More on MOOCs the establishment of those new standards in Allston,” March-April, page 18). Similar A two-year review of enrollments in and will, of course, fully comply once they plans are sketched for Paralympic venues, 68 HarvardX and MITx MOOCs (massive are finalized.” Separately, under a settlement including football, swimming, fencing, and open online courses) offered through their with the U.S. Department of Justice, edX tennis. In remarks to faculty members on joint edX venture refined earlier findings. It agreed to make its course offerings fully ac- March 3, President Drew Faust said that confirmed that about half the people who cessible to users with disabilities during the University interactions with local Olym- register for a course subsequently do not next 18 months. pics sponsors had been general and non- engage with it at all. Focusing on those who committal, and that Harvard would main- do participate (about 1 million people, who Stockholder Sentiments tain its academic, financial, and fundraising became involved with 1.7 million course The Corporation Committee on Sharehold- interests—and be mindful of impacts on its units through September 2014), researcher Responsibility’s annual report (http://me- campus neighbors—in any future discus- ers found a highly educated cohort (in ev- dia.www.harvard.edu/content/CCSR-Annu- sions, plans, or detailed submissions for a ery course, a majority of particpants had a al-Report-2014.pdf) details its decisions on Boston-based event. Sports fans, stay tuned. least a bachelor’s degree)—among them a 56 issues presented during the spring 2014 large number of teachers and instructors proxy season. In 51 cases, the committee con- Fundraising Facts, Near and Far who may be incorporating the online ma- curred with the recommendation of the Ad- The University announced that The Har- terials in their own classes, magnifying the visory Committee on Shareholder Respon- vard Campaign had tallied $5 billion in gifts reach of the MOOC contents and tech- sibility, a 12-member student, faculty, and and pledges (toward the $6.5-billion goal) niques. Computer-science classes contin- alumni body. In general, the Corporation as of December 31, up from $4.3 billion as of ue to be the most attractive subject area, committee favored shareholder proposals June 30, 2014. garnering far larger enrollments than those for corporate actions to reduce greenhouse- Not that other institutions are standing in other fields. The report also suggests a emissions; strengthen environmental plan- still: elsewhere on the fundraising circuit, transition from descriptive to experimental ning, monitoring, and reporting; and disclose Cornell alumnus Charles F. Feeney, who research that might begin to demonstrate political contributions and lobbying.

26 May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 The $60,000 Term Bill England to China, Japan, and Singapore. The College’s term bill—tuition, room, It aims to persuade foreign institutions to board, and student fees—will be $60,659 Brevia establish satellite locations on a 130-acre for 2015-2016, up 3.5 percent from $58,607 parcel just 10 miles away, where Berkeley this year. The bill first exceeded $50,000 and partner schools’ professors could cre- in 2010-2011; $40,000 in 2005-2006; and ate research and degree programs focusing $30,000 in 1997-98. Princeton on global governance, ethics, and Yale each imposed increas- political economy, and cultural es of approximately 4 per- and international relations.… cent, bringing their estimated Yale plans to renovate its Hall costs of attendance, including of Graduate Studies, home to books and personal expenses, student residences and faculty to more than $60,000 per year, offices, to build an interdepart- too. Separately, the College an- mental humanities center (like nounced on March 31 that it Harvard’s Barker Center), had granted admission to 1,990 while simultaneously con- candidates from a record pool structing new graduate-stu- of 37,307 applicants seeking a dent apartments nearby. Yale place in the class of 2019: an announced a $25-million gift admission rate of 5.3 percent. for the work from Lisbet Raus- Stanford admitted 5 percent of ing, Ph.D. ’93, a co-chair of The 42,487 applicants and Yale 6.5 Harvard Campaign, and her percent of 30,237 applicants. husband, Peter Baldwin, a Yale The two institutions said first- alumnus.…Following a partially generation college students online doctoral nursing degree represented 16 and 16.8 percent of those Commencement closer: launched in 2011, Yale School of Medicine admitted, respectively; Harvard’s figure Turning from national and interna- has unveiled a “blended” master’s degree tional leaders and celebrities (Michael was 14 to 15 percent. For further details, R. Bloomberg, M.B.A. ’66, LL.D. ’14, program for physician assistants, with see harvardmag.com/costs-15. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, M.P.A. ’71, LL.D. online courses and in-person, clinical ex- ’11, Oprah Winfrey, LL.D. ’13), the periences at field sites around the country Public-Affairs Post University has gone local. Deval L. selected by Yale faculty members. Patrick ’78, J.D. ’82, who completed Paul Andrew has been appointed vice his second term as Massachusetts president for public affairs and commu- governor in January, will be the guest Ratings Report nications, succeeding Christine Heenan, speaker at the Afternoon Exercises of The U.S. Department of Education’s the 364th Commencement, on May who has moved to the Bill & Melinda 28. Since leaving office, Patrick has (DOE) proposed ratings for university Gates Foundation (see Brevia, November- been a visiting fellow at MIT’s Innova- and college performance progressed in December 2014, page 33). Andrew, who tion Initiative. For more details, see late December, with the unveiling of like- came to Harvard in late 2012 as assistant harvardmag.com/patrick-15. ly metrics. The aim is to help the public vice president for communications—in assess access, affordability, and student time to work on the launch of The Har- School to conduct health studies, in the outcomes. Public institutions and com- vard Campaign—was previously execu- wake of wide concern about concussions munity colleges have been more favorable tive vice president at Weber Shandwick and other problems. Separately, the NFL toward the proposed ratings than have Worldwide, a public-relations firm. He retained Harvard Corporation member private institutions. Among the criteria recently served as acting vice president, Theodore V. Wells Jr., a lead litigator at the DOE outlined are the percentage of and now has responsibility for commu- Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garri- students enrolled at an institution who nications, media relations, government son, to investigate “Deflategate”: the ap- receive Pell Grants, their family income, affairs, and community relations. parent under-inflation of footballs used and first-generation college status; a during the New England Patriots-India- school’s average net price (after scholar- NFL Ties napolis Colts conference championship ships and grants); completion rates; and Professor of medicine Elizabeth Na- game in January. labor-market success (some measure bel, a cardiologist and president of the of graduates’ incomes). In a December Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Wom- On Other Campuses Washington Post interview, President Drew en’s Hospital, will advise the National Rather than building facilities abroad, the Faust said the ratings proposal “raises the Football League on health and medical University of California, Berkeley, has issue of what do you rate them for? It goes policies. The league’s players’ associa- announced plans for a nearby global edu- back to what is college worth.…Is it all go- tion earlier contracted with the Medical cation hub and approached schools from ing to be about how much more money an

Photograph by Jon Chase/Harvard Public Affairs and Communications Harvard Magazine 27 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal

individual makes with a college degree?” ter for Italian Renaissance Studies, at in historical scholar- She continued, “I think these should be Villa I Tatti, near Florence. She assumes ship, for Empire of Cotton: very complex portraits of institutions. her new responsibilities this summer, A Global History. He and ac

And not reduce an institution to a simple succeeding Pescosolido professor of Ro- the book were featured h p metric.” The DOE intends to release the mance languages and literatures Lino in “The New Histories” se/

initial ratings this coming autumn. Pertile, director since 2010. (November-December cha jon 2014, page 52). Read Sven Beckert Nota Bene Focus on food. Harvard University Din- more at harvardmag. Overseers leaders. Karen Nelson Moore ing Services, which has been composting com/beckert-15. ’70, J.D. ’73, a judge on the U.S. Court of excess fresh food, has now partnered with Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, will serve Food for Free to donate some 2,000 meals College chiefs. Clayton S. Rose, profes- as president of the Board of Overseers for per week to local families in need. (The sor of management practice at Harvard 2015-2016, succeeding intellectual-prop- dining halls purchase supplies sufficient to Business School (HBS) and a former vice erty lawyer Morgan Chu, J.D. ’76. Diana feed all undergraduates on meal plans, but chairman in investment banking at J.P. Nelson ’84 will be vice chair of the board’s not all of those ingredients are consumed.) Morgan, has been appointed president of executive committee, succeeding Walter Bowdoin College, effective in July.Clark Clair ’77, M.D. ’81, M.P.H. ’85, a cardiologist Innovation overseer. G. Gilbert, president and CEO of De- at Vanderbilt. Nelson, chair of Carlson, the Jodi Goldstein, M.B.A. seret News, has been named president of

travel and lodging company, and a long- ’96, director of the Har- ac Brigham Young University-Idaho; he was time University fundraiser, serves on The h p vard Innovation Lab se/ previously a professor in HBS’s entrepre- Harvard Campaign’s executive committee. since its inception in neurial-management unit. Gilbert suc-

2011, has been appointed cha jon ceeds Kim B. Clark, who was HBS dean Toward teaching theater. The Faculty managing director (the Jodi before assuming his BYU responsibilities of Art and Sciences (FAS) was expected senior leadership role), Goldstein in 2005. to approve the new undergraduate con- effective in June. She succeeds Gordon centration in theater, dance, and music Jones, who has accepted a decanal role at Miscellany. David Brion Davis, Ph.D. as this issue went to press—an impor- Boise State University (see Brevia, March- ’56, Sterling professor of history emeri- tant step toward effecting the recom- April, page 26). tus at Yale, won the National Book Crit- mendations of President Drew Faust’s ics Circle award for nonfiction forThe 2007-2008 arts task force, and increasing Computing at cornell. Cutting profes- Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, the role of performance and experien- sor of computer science Greg Morrisett, the third volume in his trilogy on slavery tial learning within the curriculum. See a Harvard College Professor whose re- around the world. A National Humanities http://harvardmagazine.com/2015/03/ search focuses on computer security, is Medalist in 2014, he received the Gradu- harvard-theater-major. departing the School of Engineering and ate School of Arts and Sciences’ Centen- Applied Sciences to become dean of Cor- nial Medal in 2009 (see harvardmag. Atop i tatti. Misheff professor of history nell’s Faculty of Computing and Infor- com/medalists-15).…The Harvard Crimson of art and architecture Alina A. Payne, mation Science, effective July 1. reported in February that all the under- who trained as an architect and teaches graduate Houses now offer mixed-gender about early modern and modern Euro- Bancroft honorand. Bell professor of suites; the FAS previously authorized al- pean architecture, has been appointed history Sven Beckert has won a 2015 lowing all upperclassmen to request such director of the Harvard University Cen- Bancroft Prize, the premiere recognition gender-neutral rooming options.…Zapol professor of anaesthesia Emery N. Brown has been elected a member of the National Academy of Engi- neering, the only Harvard faculty member so honored this year.

Changing Square scene: Harvard has released renderings of the pending conversion now that the former Holyoke Center has been renamed the Smith Campus Center. This illustration, presented to the Cambridge Historical Commission in March, depicts the remade Forbes Plaza and “welcome pavilion” facing Massachu- setts Avenue.

28 May - June 2015 Rendering courtesy of Hopkins Architects Partnership LLP and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 The Undergraduate stagram. I did manage to go several weeks without a smartphone during the summer, though not by choice: a skilled pickpocket in Germany is surely enjoying my collection of Simon & Garfunkel. My parents Outsmarting Our were not pleased with the loss, but it was understood that I needed a replacement— as a college student in 2015, not being connected is not really an option. Smartphones Being away from e-mails and text messages means missing out on things ranging by olivia munk ’16 from the purely social, such as deciding on dinnertime with blockmates, to academic, like receiving a last-minute assignment or ne sketch from the pilot epi- stores, urgent fellowship meetings, and notifications about University operations. sode of Portlandia, Carrie Brown- impending application deadlines. (I could During a February snow day that was pre- stein and Fred Armisen’s eclec- probably calculate how many minutes of ceded by another snow day, one of my room- tic homage to the niche (read: schoolwork I actually complete per hour, mates received an e-mail at 12:30 a.m., noti- Ohipster) culture of Portland, Oregon, has Gmailing aside, but I don’t want my par- fying her that she was to be present at her always resonated with me. Surrounded by ents to compare it to my tuition, so for computer by 10 a.m. to participate in an on- an iPad, Macbook, and iPhone, Armisen be- now I will mark this “important” and file line makeup class. Our shouts of glee about comes entrenched in what can only be de- it away for later.) another day off were replaced with cries of scribed as a technological Scylla and Cha- If this were Portlandia, a well-intentioned outrage: could she be held responsible for a rybdis: as soon as he checks one buzzing character might show me a picture of my- message sent at such an hour? We all agreed device, another one beeps. He watches a self from simpler times (though in reality, that it might be presumed she had gone to video on YouTube, proclaims that he is de- my online habits were probably worse in bed early and planned to sleep in, past the termined to get through his Netflix queue, high school—and I’d prefer not to remem- appointed hour. That may not have been the texts, tweets, sends e-mails, and snaps pho- ber any of my past hairstyles). During my most responsible decision, but when profes- tos until Brownstein finally jolts him out of sophomore year of college, I requested a sors and TFs begin to assume that students his trance by showing him a framed picture watch for Christmas with the hope that I are academically available 24/7, a line must of himself when he was in high school. “See could maintain my schedule while doing be drawn somewhere. how happy you were?” she cries, overlook- homework, without ever consulting my “There is no policy that mandates that ing his unfortunate, outdated hairstyle. They phone. In the year since, I’ve gone to the professors have to give a certain amount of decide to both go “off the grid” by installing library sans portable electronics exactly prior notice before posting assignments,” “Mind Fi,” an app that allows them to com- zero times, and probably posted between Dhruv Goyal ’16, vice president of the Un- municate telepathically. Even if you long for three and five photos of the watch on In- a technological purge, there’s an app for that. I can’t help but think of that scene whenever I sit down to complete my homework. I rarely crack open a book before spending at least 30 minutes respond- ing to e-mails about everything from meetings to TF office hours to scheduling time to see friends for meals. Then I must spend another 15 minutes making sure all these delicately planned events go into my physical planner and also a Google calendar, lest I have to burrow through hundreds of messages to rediscover the particulars of a nearly forgotten appointment. Often, I realize that many of my plans conflict, causing a new slew of messages and re-organization. Only then can I focus on actual school work—that is, until I get responses that I have learned I must reply to immediately, before they are buried by alerts from the Crimson, sales messages from nearby clothing

Illustration by Phil Marden Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal dergraduate Council told me (fittingly, in plug into a website where we answer quick dent life means being part of a network. You an e-mail). “It is up to their discretion and questions about material in the lecture, using are a hub, with your inbox as a crucial meet- most often they use it wisely and give stu- an Internet-connected device of our choosing ground. Given the ease and demands of dents enough time to prepare.” ing. In another large class, the lights often our current technological circumstances, we Allowing a 24-hour window seems en- stay off after the screening of videos or dem- truly are “on call” 24/7. tirely reasonable—how, then, did messages onstrations. For students who dutifully take The only thing that keeps me from feel- regarding classes and assignments sent at notes on glowing laptops or tablets, neither of ing totally overwhelmed is knowing that “witching hour” become the norm? “The these teaching styles poses a problem. But for at the end of the day, I will not succeed Networked Student,” a 1999 Undergradu- a shameless Internet addict like me, incorpo- at keeping up with it all. I will inevitably ate column by Jennifer 8. Lee ’99, provides rating a device into classroom teaching all but receive more messages than I can reply interesting insight on how students’ sched- sanctions my distraction. At the beginning of to. When I am in the library, staring at a ules, studies, and communication habits the semester, I firmly made a no-laptop-or- long night’s worth of homework that can have evolved due to the growing ubiquity cell-phone rule, and took notes by hand. But be put off no longer, the panic will prob- of laptops and cell phones. I am sure it was after several weeks of squinting in dim light ably steer my attention to a cat video on the proverbial “millennial” in me that audi- and squirming uncomfortably while everyone YouTube, at least for a few minutes. But bly scoffed when I read that “Libraries have around me tapped out an answer, I gave in and if this were 1999, and I were sitting in the signs gently admonishing students to use reintroduced my computer to class. library’s designated “no-typing zone,” I their computers in areas preapproved for Unchecked access to communication probably would be doodling. My habits, keyboard clicking”; what is Lamont today has undoubtedly transformed the under- for better or for worse, are not created by technology, but only magnified. My habits, for better or for worse, are not The true pressure is created when we feel as though our digital inadequacies created by technology, but only magnified. translate into disappointment and failure in real life—such as when we miss a mes- without its legions of the sleep-deprived graduate experience at Harvard. Being able sage regarding an important assignment— all tapping away on varying models of the to make and break plans with a few swift or feel guilty about sleeping in on a snow same sleek chrome device? Lee observed clicks makes our schedules more malleable day when we know we may be ignoring long lines forming around “e-mail kiosks” and subject to quick change. But these an e-mail about a 10 a.m. class online. It is where students could check their electronic changes come with related responsibility, important for us as students, and for our messages between classes. Today’s “kiosks,” and a mutual understanding: if I can ask for professors as our educators, to determine I suppose, are the miniature computers that an extension via e-mail the day before an as- what constitutes a healthy level of expec- 95.8 percent of the first-year students carry signment is due, a professor can call for an tation to demand of each other regarding in their pockets, according to The Harvard online class during a snow day; if I cancel online connectivity. Perhaps syllabi can Crimson’s Class of 2018 Freshman Survey. social plans with a text message, there’s no specify “e-mail office hours,” during which (Only 3.9 percent of students reported hav- reason a friend can’t or won’t do the same to both parties are expected to check for and ing a non-smartphone; only 0.3 percent— me at a moment’s notice. The sketch from respond to messages. that would be five members of the class— Portlandia rings so true to me because it is Maybe we can also be more honest with said they had no cellphone at all.) Although easy to get caught up in the idea that how our friends about what events we can make, these statistics reflect many things—the we conduct ourselves in front of a screen re- and learn not to rely on the opportunity to increasing affordability of devices once con- flects how we are seen in three-dimensional cancel plans or ask for a favor just because sidered a luxury, better technology that has life. When I am alone in a library, facing text messages can be exchanged almost in- made cell phones fast and efficient—the massive amounts of reading I can never get stantaneously. Everyone else’s calendar has biggest takeaway, to me, is that being con- done, I can still feel productive by replying been balanced just as delicately, and cancel- stantly connected is no longer an asset: it is promptly to e-mails and balancing a precari- ing or creating meetings at the last minute an expectation. ously loaded calendar, because—at least to inevitably affects several people, or even an the people I’m accommodating—it seems organization, perpetuating the culture of I noticed this semester just how deep the like my life is under control, even when it is frantic, time-sensitive messaging. And if we connection between academia and technolo- anything but. absolutely must alter schedules at the last gy has become, because many of my professors I could say I will take a Luddite approach minute, let’s do so in a timely manner, and have adopted an “If you can’t beat ’em, join to life: I’ll delete my Google calendar and be clear about our reasons—because unfor- ’em” mentality. If you give students a buzz- curl up with my Moleskine. I will check out tunately, or perhaps fortunately, Portlandia’s ing device, they will most likely check it dur- a library book instead of frantically search- imaginative Mind-Fi is not yet a reality. ing the course of a lecture; in that case, why ing for the text on Project Gutenberg on Methods of communication will only mul- not imbue that hotspot of connectivity with my tablet the day before a midterm. I could tiply as phones become smarter; we have to an academic purpose? In one of my classes, schedule specific times to check my e-mail become smarter along with them. “Pyramid Schemes: The Archaeological His- and use Internet applications to block dis- tory of Ancient Egypt,” we receive a code at tracting websites when I am in class. But in Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow the beginning of each class that allows us to college, being in sync with the flow of stu- Olivia Munk ’16 has not yet gone off the grid.

30 May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Seeking 37 great leaders...

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men’s program sustain—and ultimately build on—this success?

Early-Season Highs—and Lows After a narrow loss to Michigan State in the round of 32 in the 2014 NCAA tournament, many thought this year’s squad would be the first in program history to reach the second weekend of March Madness. The Crimson returned Saunders, the reign- ing Ivy League Player of the Year; All-Ivy point guard Siyani Chambers ’16; and a host of front court talent. As a result, Harvard was a unanimous pick to win the league in the pre-season media poll, and the squad cracked the Associated Press’s pre-season top-25, the first such recognition for an Ivy squad since 1974. It took just two games to deflate the hype. After defeating MIT, a Division III opponent, the Crimson fell 58-57 to Holy Cross, a middling program that would finish the season two games below .500. The loss immediately knocked Harvard from the national rankings—and raised real concerns. Other than Saunders, who Sports scored 24 points, no Crimson player tallied more than nine; in the past, the Crimson had won with a balanced attack, but this team seemed frighteningly one-dimen- How the Ball Bounced sional. More disturbing, as Saunders said, was that Holy Cross exhibited greater After a rollercoaster season, and another Ivy crown, “intensity”—a comment hinting at a leadership void. If the Crimson could not mus- whither men’s basketball? ter the desire to defend its top-25 ranking against a middling foe, how would the team compete in Ivy League play, let alone n a Saturday evening in early on that wall had long since been erased. the NCAA tournament? March 2011, Harvard men’s bas- But the sentiment they represented—that A six-game win streak temporarily al- ketball coach Tommy Amaker the players had an extraordinary opportu- layed these concerns, but the buoyant stood in the team’s locker room nity to leave their mark on Harvard bas- feeling evaporated during the holidays Opreparing to give one of the most impor- ketball—has endured. As Wesley Saun- when the University of Virginia, then tant speeches of his Crimson career. In just ders ’15 told The Boston Globe earlier this ranked fifth in the country, annihilated a few minutes, Harvard would take the floor year, the senior class in particular talked the Crimson 76-27, and Harvard suffered against Princeton, with a chance to capture about the importance of solidifying their closer losses to Arizona State and Boston at least a share of its first Ivy League cham- “legacy.” College. For the first time since the 2006- pionship, and Amaker wanted to impress Mission accomplished. After initially 2007 season, the team had failed to defeat a upon his players, seated before him, the grappling with offensive inconsistency, high-major opponent (a representative of a magnitude of the opportunity. To do so, he this year’s team—particularly its seven se- leading NCAA league such as the Atlantic referenced the white board behind him— niors—came together to lead the Crimson Coast Conference [ACC]). where earlier in the week he had asked each to its fifth straight conference champion- Meanwhile, the rest of the league was team member to sign his name and pledge ship and fourth consecutive NCAA tour- nationally competitive. Brown knocked his maximum effort. Now he narrowed their nament berth. But given the graduation off Providence, an NCAA tournament focus: they had worked hard to get here, but of so much talent, a season in which the team. Columbia led top-ranked Kentucky they needed to direct their entire focus to rest of the league demonstrated newfound in the second half. Most remarkably, Yale this one crucial moment. strength, and lingering uncertainty about defeated the University of Connecticut, When the current Harvard team con- Amaker’s trajectory and Harvard’s time- the defending national champion, on a vened for practice last fall, the signatures line for constructing a new arena, can the buzzer-beater in Storrs.

32 May - June 2015 Photograph by Steve Banineau Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 The Ivies to go. Fittingly, the Crimson (20-6, 10-2 The Tar Heel Test As conference competition began, these Ivy) hosted the Bulldogs (21-8, 10-2 Ivy) in When the NCAA field was announced, colliding forces yielded an excruciating the penultimate game of the season in a de the Crimson paid a price for its inconsis- loss. On a chilly January day, the Crimson facto championship game on March 6. tency. After receiving a 12-seed last year, hosted Dartmouth, a team it had beaten by With ESPN broadcasting live from Harvard received a 13-seed and an opening- double digits in Hanover two weeks ear- campus, and a raucous, sold-out Friday- round matchup with perennial power North lier. But after Harvard pulled ahead by 14 night crowd at Lavietes Pavilion, it was Carolina. Toppling the Tar Heels—a team points to start the second half, the Big Green the most hyped and significant Har- that had just beaten Virginia in the superb unleashed a 26-2 run and won 70-61. The vard basketball game since the Crimson ACC tournament—would be an exception- unnerving loss dropped the Crimson to 1-1 hosted Princeton in 2011. But in contrast ally tall task. in the league—a significant consideration to that cathartic victory, Harvard lost to Too tall, as it turns out, but by an im- because Ivy teams, lacking a championship Yale, 62-52. Most Harvard fans assumed pressively narrow margin: the Crimson tournament, have an extremely narrow mar- the team’s title hopes had vanished. overcame a 16-point second-half deficit gin of error to be selected for the NCAA or Among them was Tom Stemberg ’71, to take a two-point lead with just over other postseason opportunities. M.B.A. ’73, a longtime Harvard basketball a minute remaining. Then the Tar Heels Harvard’s play was even more alarm- supporter, who lamented that this squad pulled ahead, and Harvard’s magic ran ing. The offense was again anemic. Even lacked the firepower of last year’s team. out. Once again, the Crimson delivered the Saunders, who along with Chambers led “If you lose a Laurent Rivard and you ball to Saunders on a dribble handoff. The Harvard with 13 points, struggled to find lose a Brandyn Curry, that hurts,” said senior—who had been the best player on a rhythm—in part a byproduct of sound Stemberg. “And last night it showed. We the floor with 26 points and five assists— defense: Dartmouth packed the paint, es- couldn’t score.” first looked to pass to Miller. But with the sentially daring Harvard to make outside But Amaker (who became the Stem- Crimson’s sharpshooter guarded, Saun- shots; they didn’t. But the Crimson’s lapses berg Family head coach after an endow- ders hoisted a three-pointer. His class’s also suggested that Dartmouth, as Saun- ment gift, announced ders acknowledged, had played “harder.” at halftime during the In light of that admission, Harvard’s Princeton game on Feb- metamorphosis during the next four ruary 21) did not give weeks was remarkable: the Crimson won up. Instead, preparing eight consecutive games—the first four for Saturday’s game, he of them on the road. The highlight was a shared with his team an 52-50 victory over Yale in New Haven. The adage that he attributed Bulldogs had been undefeated in confer- to John F. Kennedy ’40, ence play and had an opportunity to take LL.D. ’56: “Never settle a two-game Ivy lead over the Crimson. But for second place when Harvard locked in on defense and did just first place is still avail- enough on offense, preserving the team’s able.” The advice proved chance for another conference title. apt. After the Crimson Across the board, the team was playing overcame a second-half better. The offense became more balanced. deficit to defeat Brown At Princeton, Corbin Miller ’15 (’17) nailed that evening, the Bull- five three-pointers to lead Harvard in scor- dogs squandered a five-point lead with At left: After an extraordinary collegiate ing. Against Columbia, Saunders led the less than 30 seconds remaining and fell to career, Wesley Saunders ’15 is seeking to join Jeremy Lin ’10 in the NBA. Above: Crimson with 18 points, but three team- Dartmouth. That gave the Crimson a share Next year’s Harvard team, meanwhile, will mates also scored in double figures. of its fifth-straight conference title—and be in the hands of his backcourt mate, After a series of players-only meetings, set up a one-game playoff at the University All-Ivy point guard Siyani Chambers ’16. the Crimson brought greater urgency to of Pennsylvania a week later to determine the court. As Jonah Travis ’15 observed, the whether Harvard or Yale would play in the last shot at history clanged off the rim, and team realized that it was suffering from NCAA tournament. Harvard fell 67-65. an embarrassment of riches: with seven The rematch came down to the final A win would have been thrilling, but seniors, it had many players who were basket. With less than 30 seconds remain- it is unfair to malign the Crimson for fail- capable of leading, but no one was assert- ing, and the score knotted at 51, Saunders ing to live up to unrealistic expectations. ing control. The seniors, Travis explained, received the ball on a dribble handoff, In retrospect, the graduation of Curry ’13 needed to meld their skills. drove, and drew the defense, just as he (’14), Rivard ’14, and Kyle Casey ’13 (’14) But after the Crimson’s win streak ended had at the end of the team’s loss to Holy left a leadership and offensive void that with a 57-49 loss at Cornell, none of that Cross, when his shot rimmed out. This was unlikely to be readily filled: that pre- guaranteed the Ivy championship. The time, Saunders passed to co-captain Steve season top-25 ranking was unwarranted. stumble dropped Harvard into a tie with Moundou-Missi ’15, who sank the game- What’s more, the Crimson’s performance Yale atop the conference with two games winner. Harvard was dancing again. during the past four seasons and down the

Photograph by Gil Talbot/Harvard Athletic Communications Harvard Magazine 33 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal

stretch this year has been extraordinary. As Amaker said less than a week after the NCAA tournament, the loss to North Carolina “still Travel the world with fellow hurts,” but he is nonetheless proud alumni and Harvard study of how his team played and believes leaders. Choose from more the squad should feel good about than 60 trips annually. what it accomplished.

FEATURED TRIPS In Prospect So where does the program go from here? This spring, Harvard graduates one of the most talented classes in program history—and apart from Chambers, the dynamo point guard who earned All-Ivy honors for the third straight year, it does not return any stars. Meanwhile, the rest of the league continues to improve. To cite two ex- Tommy Amaker, shown here celebrating OCTOBER 1–14, 2015 amples, Penn just hired as its coach Steve Harvard’s playoff victory over Yale, has led A MOSAIC OF SIX BALKAN NATIONS the Crimson to unprecedented heights. Donahue, who led Cornell to the Sweet 16 Now fans are wondering how much higher in 2010; and Columbia, which nearly upset his teams can go. the Crimson in 2014, may have the stron- gest core of returning talent. As Kathy Or- lenge of playing basketball at Harvard. ton, a Washington Post reporter and the au- After the 2014 season, there was public thor of Outside the Limelight, a book about the speculation about whether he would move 2005-2006 Ivy League basketball season, to Boston College—a transfer across town recently observed, Harvard’s increased that would bring him into the ACC, in commitment to basketball has helped competition with his alma mater (Duke), spur a similar commitment throughout the and surely elevate him into the ranks of OCTOBER 17–NOVEMBER 8, 2015 league and “now you have…more parity much more highly paid basketball head EXPLORING AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND than I recall in the league ever.” coaches. Amaker has emphasized how STUDY LEADER: JOCK PHILLIPS How can Harvard remain the team to much he and his wife, Dr. Stephanie Pin- beat? For one thing, it needs to maintain der-Amaker, a clinical psychologist who its defensive prowess: the Crimson was directs the College Mental Health Pro- the only Ivy team to give up fewer than 60 gram at McLean Hospital and is an in- points per game. Its underclassmen also structor in psychology at Harvard Medical need to improve. When superstar Jeremy School, love being a part of the Harvard Lin ’10 graduated, Keith Wright ’12 became community. the focal point of the Harvard offense, en But he is young, with a strong record route to becoming Ivy League Player of in directing a competitive program at an the Year. The departure of Saunders leaves academically demanding university, and another big hole, but it also means that according to a longtime observer of Har- underclassmen like Zena Edosomwan ’17 vard athletics, retaining him has required have an opportunity to take on a much a “whole lot of talk with him” on topics OCTOBER 22–NOVEMBER 3, 2015 larger role. A SOUTHERN SOJOURN TO CHARLESTON Whether Harvard becomes a true na- & SAVANNAH tional power in men’s basketball hinges Harvard on whether Amaker stays—a perennial TO BOOK YOUR NEXT TRIP, source of anxiety for athletics administra- Hardwood CALL US AT 800-422-1636. tors and fans alike. During the past eight Read David Tannenwald’s FOR MORE TRIP OPTIONS, VISIT years, the coach has repeatedly attracted complete coverage of the ALUMNI.HARVARD.EDU/TRAVELS. to Cambridge some of the most talented basketball season academic and athletic recruits in the coun- harvardmag.com/ try, and then done an admirable job of ensuring that his players cohere and helping basketball-15. them manage the on- and off-campus chal-

34 May - June 2015 Photograph by Gil Talbot/Harvard Athletic Communications Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ranging from facilities improvements to the class that stepped into their shoes a possible second-round pick. The senior’s community engagement to support and is preparing to move on. The man who prospects will clarify through a series of encouragement from the administration. brought them to Cambridge has not. Just pre-draft workouts and camps he is ex- “It’s very meaningful,” the observer said, how far the next generation of Harvard pected to participate in this spring. “just to tell him that you’re glad he’s here.” basketball players goes depends in large The women’s basketball team finished There will always be offers, though, and part on what happens next. the season with four straight wins to even Harvard’s future basketball facilities re- its record at 14-14 overall and 7-7 in the main an open question. Several years ago, Tidbits Ivy League. The Crimson was led by Temi Harvard announced plans to build a new The Crimson has received a host of post- Fagbenle ’15, an All-Ivy Second Team se- basketball arena as part of its Allston de- season accolades: Moundou-Missi became lection; she averaged 14.4 points and 10.4 velopment, but it has yet to reveal a specif- the first Ivy League Defensive Player of rebounds per game. Erin McDonnell ’15, ic timeline for construction. Amaker said the Year in program history and was also who averaged 12.9 points per game and hit that the program has taken some “won- a Second Team All-Ivy selection (joined the game-winning three-pointer on senior derful growth steps” in terms of communi- by Chambers); Saunders was a unanimous night, and AnnMarie Healy ’16, who aver- ty support—but like any coach, he wants selection to the All-Ivy First Team. Mean- aged 13.4 points per game, were All-Ivy the program to get better across the board while, Amaker was selected as a finalist for honorable-mention designees. Head coach and, in particular, he would “most certain- the Hugh Durham and Ben Jobe Awards, Kathy Delaney-Smith lauded her team for ly like our facilities to improve.” Absent a which recognize the top mid-major and persevering through “adversity” (especial- new facility, or incremental improvements minority coaches in Division I, respectively. ly injuries to key players) and praised the to Lavietes Pavilion, which seats only 2,195 After leading the Crimson with 16.6 seniors, particularly co-captain Kaitlyn people and is the second-oldest Division I points per game, Saunders is being men- Dinkins, for their commitment. basketball arena in the country, it will be tioned as a top-level professional basket- vdavid l. tannenwald harder for the Crimson to attract and re- ball prospect. In a postseason news confer- tain top talent, across the board. ence, Amaker said he thinks the swingman David L. Tannenwald ’08 is a Cambridge-based The young men who autographed that is “definitely” an NBA-caliber player, and writer focused on the intersection of sports and white board in 2011 have graduated, and an ESPN analyst recently projected him as society.

boat lengths. Excepting the Intercollegiate new coach led the Harvard heavyweights A Feel for the Water Rowing Association national champion- for the first time in half a century. Char- Yale was determined. They were heart- ships, where the University of Washing- ley Butt, chief of the Crimson men’s light- ily sick of Harvard’s ownership of the annual ton earned its fourth consecutive title, weights since 1985, became Bolles-Parker Harvard-Yale crew race, where the Bulldogs’ Harvard went undefeated last spring. head coach for Harvard men’s heavyweight only win this century came in 2007. Indeed, As discouraging as such results must crew after Parker died in the summer of the late Harry Parker, arguably the great- have been for the Bulldogs, they were equal- 2013. His job was to fill the biggest shoes est rowing coach of all time, amassed a lop- ly heartening to the Crimson faithful, as a in college rowing—and he has, admirably. sided 44-7 record over Yale in the ancient boat race during his Harvard career, which Charley Butt began in 1963. The Elis took countermeasures. In 2010 they hired one of the nation’s premier crew coaches, Steve Gladstone, who, at 68, was extraordinarily well seasoned for a new hire. In 2012, Yale College abolished freshman crew (a program dating back to at least 1893; Harvard’s freshman program continues), allowing Gladstone to bring fresh recruits straight into his varsity eight. By last spring, the Elis were feeling their oats. Their undefeated varsity marched into the climactic Eastern Sprints regatta in May as the number-one seed. Alas, Yale finished a deflating sixth in the final. Har- vard won. Three weeks later, at New Lon- don, Harvard recorded its seventh straight sweep of Yale, annihilating a skilled, highly motivated Eli varsity by more than three

Photograph by Jim Harrison Harvard Magazine 35 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal

“It’s wonderful that we could accomplish Furthermore, Butt owns an impressive for whether the work you are doing is what we have this year, just for all the ob- track record in international competition. producing hull speed,” Butt explains. “Ev- vious reasons,” he told The Boston Globe after He coached single scullers Andrew Camp- erything is in rhythm and sync, and that the Yale race. “We moved on as we began, bell ’14 (to a gold medal in world compe- makes the hard work satisfying. There’s following the tenets that H. Parker estab- tition) and Michelle Guerette ’02 (to a no escaping the work, but it’s the quality lished, and it’s been a real pleasure.” silver medal at the 2008 Olympics). About of the work and the feeling of working to- Though Butt’s appointment was not Guerette’s win, Powers recalls, “Charley’s gether that make it enjoyable. You have to automatic, he was for many reasons the race plan in Beijing was brilliant, and ab- respect how a boat moves, and you cannot logical choice, having worked alongside solutely on the money. He knew all six go outside the lines of how a boat moves. Parker for a quarter-century and having women in that final, and told Michelle, Water doesn’t compress, but it does pile— built a record of success nearly as impres- ‘Row your race, and the field will come you’ll find a mound of water in front of an sive. In his 28 years at the helm, Butt’s back to you.’ And that’s exactly what hap- oar blade. You’re in a highly intense and lightweights logged 25 winning seasons, pened [late in the race, her opponents lost potentially chaotic situation, with no 15 Eastern Sprints titles, and nine national speed relative to her pace]. That kind of timeouts, so you want to stay smooth. And championships, monopolizing both the advice gives you confidence when the field you need a very strong sense of pace.” latter honors in 2012 and 2013. Decades in jumps out in front of you at the start.” Newell Boathouse mean that Butt “knows In 2004, Butt coached Henry Nuzum Butt began absorbing such knowledge the Harvard culture,” says John Powers ’70, ’99 and Aquil Abdullah, the first Ameri- from his father, Charles (“Charlie”) Butt the Boston Globe sportswriter whose chap- can men since 1984 to make an Olympic Sr., an MIT-trained engineer who is a leg- ter on lightweight rowing appears in the final in the double scull. “It was all due to end in the sport. Butt the Elder started a recently published Third H Book of Harvard Charley’s coaching,” Nuzum explains. “He crew at Washington & Lee High School in Athletics: 1963-2013. “He knows the kind of has an unbelievably keen technical eye. He northern Virginia in 1949 and coached this people you are dealing with, and what mo- notices seemingly small biomechanical el- public-school program to win the Princess tivates them. Like Harry, Charley has a gift ements that make a big difference in boat Elizabeth Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta for explaining to a rower, ‘You’re doing this, speed.” (In lightweight rowing, techni- in England in 1964 and 1969, for example. “I which makes you do that.’ Harvard athletes cal superiority can be crucial, because the remember the excitement,” his son recalls. want to know why—they want ‘news that weight limit removes the option of win- “In those days, the cup stayed in your home, stays news,’ the eternal essentials of mov- ning with bigger athletes.) and I remember what it felt like—it even ing a boat.” “You need a feel for the water and a feel had a distinctive odor.” Top rowing coaches

A Brief Postseason Hockey Highlights— The men’s hockey squad, for the most part healthier this year than in past campaigns, finished 21-13-3. The Crimson swept Brown in two games in first-round ECAC tournament competition, and and Heartache then dramatically defeated Yale in the second round by taking the third game in double overtime, 3-2. Subsequent victories over National Runners-Up Quinnipiac and Colgate at Lake Placid earned the Crimson the The women’s hockey team—under Landry Family head coach championship, and its first NCAA tournament appearance since Katey Stone for the twentieth season—finished 27-6-3: a tre- 2006, with a three seed in the Midwest region. mendous year marked by the Beanpot championship, Ivy League But the postseason was a one-and-done affair: Harvard fell title (8-2), and the Eastern College Athletic Conference season to Nebraska-Omaha, 4-1, in its first-round Midwest Regional and tournament titles (the former, tied with Clarkson; the latter, contest at South Bend, Indiana. Fittingly, the Crimson’s goal a 7-3 win over Cornell). Having reached was scored by junior Jimmy Vesey, the the NCAA national championship game, ECAC Player of the Year, who entered the Crimson fell 4-1 to Minnesota in the the game with 31 goals, leading the na- Gophers’ home arena on March 22. tion. A finalist for the Hobey Baker Seniors Hillary Crowe, Sarah Edney, Award, conferred on the top NCAA Lyndsey Fry, Marissa Gedman, Michelle men’s ice hockey player (the decision tions

Picard, Josephine Pucci, and Samantha was scheduled for April 10, after this ca Reber depart with a 97-29-11 record. issue went to press), Vesey, drafted

But junior goalkeeper Emerance Masch- by the Nashville Predators, decided ommuni c

meyer returns, as do offensive power- to return for his senior year—a big leti h houses Mary Parker, Miye D’Oench (both boost for the Crimson in 2015-16. Se- t d a r juniors), Sydney Daniels (a sophomore), nior goaltender Steve Michalek set the a rv

and Lexie Laing (a freshman): four of the Harvard record for saves in a season, ha lbot/

five team leaders in points. Jimmy Vesey finishing with 1,029. a gil t

36 May - June 2015 www.gocrimson.com Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard'sLeavitt Journal were always coming by the house and stay- Established 1883 ing overnight. (Harry Parker, in fact, once Leavitt stayed there& as a Penn Peirce undergraduate when Leavitt his crew was displaced by a flood.) Each winter, young Charley would help sand and Leavitt varnish the 1316school’s Massachusetts shells in the basement. Avenue &&Freshman PeircePeirce Smoker. Reprint of lithographer Former HarvardCambridge, coxswain MA 02138 Bill Leavitt Close, Graham & Scully’s 1911 depiction of Harvard “club life” and its “price to pay”. ’50 coached617-547-0576 Butt at Rutgers. He became Freshman smoker 13161316Reprinted MassachusettsMassachusetts on heavy matte AvenueAvenue stock. 34 1/16”& x Freshman Peirce Smoker. Reprint of lithographer Reprint of lithographer Close, Graham & Scully’s an outstanding oarsman who rowed for Cambridge,Cambridge,19 1/16”. Shipped MAMA tubed; 0213802138 $39.95 (plus $9.95 S&H).Close, Graham & Scully’s 1911 depiction the U.S. lightweight eight that finished 617-547-0576617-547-0576 1911of Harvard depiction “club of Harvard life” and “club its “pricelife” and to its pay”. “price Reprinted on heavy matte stock. 34 1/16”1 x fourth at the 1980 World Championships, [email protected] 1316to pay”.Massachusetts Reprinted on heavy Avenue matte stock. 34 /16Freshman" Smoker. Reprint of lithographer Cambridge,x19 19 1/16”. 1/16 Shipped". $39.95MA tubed; 02138(plus S&H).$39.95 (plusShipped $9.95 tubed. S&H).Close, Graham & Scully’s 1911 depiction and won a silver medal in the same event of Harvard “club life” and its “price to pay”. Harvard College John Harvard 617-547-0576 at the 1985 Worlds in Belgium. Meanwhile We’re now online at Reprinted on heavy matte stock. 34 1/16” x recaptured in Bookends. he graduated from Rutgers in 1983 with a 19 1/16”. Shipped tubed; $39.95 (plus $9.95 S&H). this famous www.leavitt-peirce.comU.S.A. – made major in history (which remains a passion; Harvard College John Harvard Tercentenary onlinerecapturedand shop,exclusively in store history and more Bookends. he devours audiobooks on the subjectmap by Edwin thisdesigned famous for U.S.A. – made J. Schruers ’28. Leavitt & Peirce. while commuting). After coaching at his Tercentenary Harvardand exclusively College John Harvard Painstakingly Antiqued brass harvard alma mater, he learned of the lightweight map by Edwin recaptureddesigned in for Bookends. reproduced on over zinc. 7” h x job opening in Cambridge and met with J. Schruers ’28. thistercentenaryLeavitt famous & Peirce. U.S.A. – made quality “antique” Painstakingly4”w x 6”d. Over Antiqued brass Tercentenarymap and exclusively Parker. “We talked a long, long time stockabout 33 5/8” x reproduced5 pounds each. on over zinc. 7” h x mapHarvard by Edwin recaptured designed for coaching, and I really enjoyed myself,”24 Butt 1/4”. Shipped quality $150.00 “antique” per 4”w x 6”d. Over J.in Schruers this famous ’28. Leavitt & Peirce. tubed; $39.95 stock statuette 33 5/8” x(plus 5 pounds each. says. “It was exciting because it meant that PainstakinglyTercentenary map Antiqued brass (plus $9.95 S&H). 24 $12.95 1/4”. Shipped S&H). $150.00 per I was going to work and learn with one of reproducedby Edwin J. on Schruers over zinc. 7” h x tubed; $39.95 statuette (plus John harvard Bookend quality’28. Painstakingly “antique” 4”w x 6”d. Over the best coaches of his generation. First- (plus $9.95 S&H). $12.95 S&H). hand, I could learn how to get it done.” Antiqued brass over zinc. 7" h x 4" w stockreproduced 33 5/8” on x quality 5 pounds each. x 6" d. Over 5 pounds each. $175 (plus 24“antique” 1/4”. Shipped stock 33 5/8" $150.00 per S&H). USA made, exclusively for tubed;x 24 1 /4$39.95". $39.95 (plus statuette (plus Last June, before the Yale race, there was Leavitt & Peirce. Price is per bookend. (plusS&H). $9.95 Shipped S&H). tubed. $12.95 S&H). a dedication ceremony for a memorial to Harry Parker at Red Top, Harvard’s rowing camp on the Thames River in Connecticut. Butt asked for 44 seconds of silence to honor Parker and his 44 victories over Yale on that course. “Over the years, I saw Harry use four or five different approaches,” he says, and he shares Parker’s open-minded philosophy. “The more you look at something, the more you find there is to learn,” he says. “Ultimate- ly, it’s about how effectively you can work with an individual. And if you’re both motivated, you can learn a lot from each other.” One of Butt’s former oarsmen, Tom Fal- lows ’97, describes his coach as “quiet, introspective, and then a little bit crazy. Each and every member of his crews Calling All Harvard Authors! would probably cite Charley as one of THE DEADLINE IS: MAY 14, 2015 their top role models, but the funny thing to showcase your book in Harvard Magazine and reach is that very few of us really know him 245,000 Harvard alumni, faculty, and staff. that well. Part of what makes him such a strong coach is keeping a little bit of dis- The July-August 2015 Harvard Magazine will feature the tance with the crew—he keeps you guess- —Summer Reading List, a special advertising ing, keeps you a little uncomfortable, so section for authors (adjacent to Montage coverage of books and the arts). you know you have to perform.” A tem- perament that sounds uncannily similar to Your ad includes: a full-color book jacket photo and 7 lines of text—and Parker’s. It’s been known to work. Harvardwill appear Authors’ in both Bookshelf the print and online editions of Harvard Magazine. vcraig lambert For more information about pricing and ad specifications, go to: Craig Lambert retired as the magazine’s deputy harvardmagazine.com/hauthors, contact Gretchen Bostrom editor last December. at 617-496-6686 or e-mail [email protected].

Harvard Magazine 37 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Sendhil Mullainathan The Science of Scarcity

oward the end of World War II, mental effects they hadn’t expected: ob- while thousands of Europeans were A behavioral sessions about cookbooks and recipes de- dying of hunger, 36 men at the Uni- economist’s fresh veloped; men with no previous interest in T versity of Minnesota volunteered for food thought—and talked—about noth- a study that would send them to the brink ing else. Overwhelming, uncontrollable of starvation. Allied troops advancing into perspectives thoughts had taken over, and as one partic- German-occupied territories with supplies ipant later recalled, “Food became the one and food were encountering droves of skel- on poverty central and only thing really in one’s life.” etal people they had no idea how to safely There was no room left for anything else. renourish, and researchers at the university by cara feinberg Though these odd behaviors were just a had designed a study they hoped might re- footnote in the original Minnesota study, veal the best methods of doing so. But first, to professor of economics Sendhil Mullain- their volunteers had to agree to starve. athan, who works on contemporary issues The physical toll on these men was alarming: their metabo- of poverty, they were among the most intriguing findings. Nearly lism slowed by 40 percent; sitting on atrophied muscles became 70 years after publication, that “footnote” showed something re- painful; though their limbs were skeletal, their fluid-filled bellies markable: scarcity had stolen more than flesh and muscle. It had looked curiously stout. But researchers also observed disturbing captured the starving men’s minds.

38 May - June 2015 Photograph by Jim Harrison Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Mullainathan is not a psychologist, but he has long been fas- for Mullainathan, anecdotes about time and its limits are a trust- cinated by how the mind works. As a behavioral economist, he ed Trojan Horse of sorts: a way to get into the minds of readers looks at how people’s mental states and social and physical en- and audiences at lectures who may never have experienced more vironments affect their economic actions. Research like the Min- extreme types of scarcity. “The cycle of poverty generally gets nesota study raised important questions: What happens to our talked about as a problem other people face,” he says. “Our hope is minds—and our decisions—when we feel we have too little of to get people to understand how easy it is to get caught in it, even something? Why, in the face of scarcity, do people so often make if they’ve never had the experience.” seemingly irrational, even counter-productive decisions? And if Though he spent much of his early life in “decently comfort- this is true in large populations, why do so few policies and pro- able” economic circumstances, Mullainathan has seen poverty grams take it into account? first-hand, and it seared itself deep in his psyche. Born in a small In 2008, Mullainathan joined Eldar Shafir, Tod professor of psy- South Indian sugarcane-farming village, he moved to Los Angeles chology and public affairs at Princeton, to write a book exploring at age seven with his family so his father could study, and later these questions. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013) work in, aerospace engineering. But, as he recalls it, in the 1980s, presented years of findings from the fields of psychology and eco- when new laws mandated heightened security clearances in de- nomics, as well as new empirical research of their own. Based on partments that had not previously required them, noncitizens their analysis of the data, they sought to show that, just as food like his father were suddenly out of a job with no chance of find- had possessed the minds of the starving volunteers in Minnesota, ing another one in the industry. scarcity steals mental capacity wherever it occurs—from the hun- “This was the first time I felt real economic insecurity,” Mul- gry, to the lonely, to the time-strapped, to the poor. lainathan remembers. It was also the first time he saw scarcity’s That’s a phenomenon well-documented by psychologists: if effects in action. The job loss “in some ways liberated him,” he the mind is focused on one thing, other abilities and skills—at- says of his father. Suddenly without a roadmap for the first time, tention, self-control, and long-term planning—often suffer. Like Mullainathan’s parents bought a video store, which, through cre- a computer running multiple programs, Mullainathan and Shafir ative strategies—like developing a computer program they sold explain, our mental processors begin to slow down. We don’t lose to other stores—became in time a successful endeavor. But those any inherent capacities, just the ability to access the full comple- initial years were also packed with tensions and insecurity that ment ordinarily available for use. set the family on edge. “Overnight,” he says, “I saw my parents But what’s most striking—and in some circles, controver- change”: suddenly, they were much more stressed out and short- sial—about their work is not what they reveal about the effects tempered, as if part of their personalities was different. of scarcity. It’s their assertion that scarcity affects anyone in its Years later, as a behavioral economist, Mullainathan saw this grip. Their argument: qualities often considered part of some- phenomenon at work in impoverished people around the world. one’s basic character—impulsive behavior, poor performance in “The evidence is everywhere,” he says. “We just had to find ways school, poor financial decisions—may in fact be the products of to gather it scientifically.” But like any science in the making— a pervasive feeling of scarcity. And when that feeling is constant, as Mullainathan and Shafir describe work like theirs—the path as it is for people mired in poverty, it captures and compromises had to be blazed. Early on, for instance, as the authors recount the mind. in the introduction to their book, “When we told an economist This is one of scarcity’s most insidious effects, they argue: cre- colleague that we were studying scarcity, he remarked, ‘There is ating mindsets that rarely consider long-term best interests. “To already a science of scarcity…. It’s called economics.’” put it bluntly,” says Mullainathan, “if I made you poor tomorrow, The colleague, of course, was right, Mullainathan concedes; you’d probably start behaving in many of the same ways we asso- economics is the study of how people manage physical scarcity. ciate with poor people.” And just like many poor people, he adds, But even though actual scarcity is ubiquitous—there are always you’d likely get stuck in the scarcity trap. limits to time, food, and money—the feeling of scarcity is not, he explains. This overpowering mindset was what he and Shafir Poverty Taxes the Mind were interested in studying, and it had effects, they argued, that Mullainathan is the first to admit he’s no stranger to the could be quantified and explored empirically. scarcity cycle—particularly when it comes to time. A self-con- In 2010, the authors and their colleagues set out to do that— fessed over-committer with endless energy for exploring new setting up scientific trials in what Mullainathan jokingly calls passions, he is “quite familiar” with tardiness and missed dead- “the best lab in the world”: a shopping mall in New Jersey. The lines. Though he’s no slouch at juggling tasks—at age 42, he’s a group hoped to show in an experiment that poverty imposed a tenured professor, a MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and a rising kind of “bandwidth tax” that impaired people’s ability to per- star in behavioral economics—things are still always piling up, he form. “To put it crudely,” he explains, “poverty—no matter who says during an interview, pointing to actual piles of papers around you are—can make you dumber.” his office desk. To prove it, they planned to administer Raven’s Progressive Ma- No one ever has enough time—making it an excellent way to trices tests (essentially IQ tests that measure skills without requir- understand how scarcity works, he explains. A time crunch can ing experience or expertise) to their subjects. Just before taking the be useful; deadlines often increase motivation and concentration. test, subjects were asked to consider a hypothetical scenario: But there are prices to pay for that amplified focus: anything that Imagine you’ve got car trouble and repairs cost $300. Your falls outside the scope of that time-limited task gets slighted, ig- auto insurance will cover half the cost. You need to decide nored, or put off to a later date. While this isn’t breaking news, whether to go ahead and get the car fixed,or take a chance

Harvard Magazine 39 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 and hope that it lasts for a while longer. How would you social scientists: psychologists like Roy Baumeister of the University make this decision? Financially, would it be easy or hard? of Florida (formerly of Case Western Reserve University) have done Using self-reported household income, the researchers split the extensive work on willpower and mental depletion, for example, subjects into groups of “rich” and “poor.” When they tallied their showing that people who had forced themselves to eat radishes in- scores on the Raven’s Matrices, there was no statistically signifi- stead of tempting chocolates quit working on unsolvable puzzles cant difference in the groups’ performance. sooner than those who had not. At Stanford, another study on de- But in a second version of the test, researchers raised the price cisionmaking found that subjects asked to memorize long strings tag for the repairs to $3,000. Although rich people’s test scores of numbers had a harder time choosing healthy snacks over sweets showed no significant difference, the poor people’s scores dropped than subjects asked to remember just two or three digits. the equivalent of about 14 IQ points: the difference between the It’s a phenomenon scientists can see even in the chemistry of categories of “superior” and “average” intelligence—or more the brain: during periods of stress and tough self-control tasks, pointedly, from “average” to “borderline deficient.” That’s a greater glucose levels plummet in the frontal cortex (the region associated deficit than subjects in sleep studies typically show after staying with attention, planning, and motivation). Low blood sugar can awake for 24 hours, Mullainathan and Shafir highlight. “Simply deplete physical capacities; a struggling mind can create similar raising monetary concerns for the poor,” they explain, “erodes cog- chemistry in the brain, and trigger the same debilitating results. nitive performance even more than being seriously sleep deprived.” But despite these advances in psychology and neuroscience, the They attribute this result to the maelstrom of problems poor idea that behavioral findings could beget insight intoeconomic de- people must suddenly confront in the face of a large unexpected cisions is relatively new. For years, neoclassical economics main- expense: how will I pay the rent, buy food, take care of my kids? tained that people were rational, selfish actors who consistently This round of mental juggling depletes the amount of mental made decisions in their own best interests. But in 1979, a break- bandwidth available for everything else. Such problems simply through paper on decisionmaking by Princeton psychologist Dan- don’t arise for the rich. iel Kahneman, LL.D. ’04, and Amos Tversky of Stanford, began to Low blood sugar can deplete physical capacities; a struggling mind can create similar chemistry in the brain— and trigger the same debilitating results. To rule out other factors, the researchers posed nonfinancial chip away at that idea. Their study asserted that the way choices questions with small and large numbers; they even tried versions are presented has as much effect on decisions as the actual value where they paid people for correct answers to questions. In each of the things people choose. In the following decades, their pa- case, there was no difference in performance. per became one of the most widely cited studies in economics; 23 But the real test lay in the real world, Mullainathan continues. years later, after Tversky’s death, Kahneman won a Nobel Prize. If just thinking about scarcity preoccupied subjects, what effect Today, behavioral economics is a mainstream endeavor (see would real scarcity have? “The Marketplace of Perceptions,” March-April 2006, page 50), The answer came from fieldwork he and his colleagues were and to Kahneman, work like Mullainathan and Shafir’s repre- already conducting in India. Sugarcane farmers, they discovered, sents the field’s next logical steps. “Clearly there is a psychology get their income in one lump sum at harvest time, just once or of scarcity,” Kahneman said in an interview, “and this idea that twice a year. That meant farmers were poor during one part of the scarcity itself produces its own decisions is a new—and very in- year, and flush with cash during another. Because harvests took teresting—one.” The pair’s work inverts the long-held thinking place at different times for different farmers, researchers could that the poor are poor because they make bad decisions, he added. rule out seasonal weather, events, and their accompanying obli- “Instead, people make bad decisions because they are poor.” gations as bandwidth-usurping factors. And when the research- And, as Mullainathan explains, those bad decisions abound. ers conducted a study there similar to the New Jersey mall ex- Though he doesn’t place all of the problems that poor people face periment, the results mirrored their original findings: the Indian on scarcity’s shoulders, he believes scarcity can explain a men- farmers performed worse on Raven’s Matrices tests before their tality that people in its grip face. “We’re not just talking about harvest, and better after they’d been paid. shorter patience or less willpower,” he says. In the poor, “We’re The conclusion was clear, Mullainathan explains: poverty itself often talking about short-term financial fixes that can have disas- taxes the mind. And in the case of the Indian farmers, he adds, trous long-term effects.” the data were even more convincing: unlike the New Jersey “lab” Take payday loans, for instance: high-interest loans that provide study, where subjects were compared to other people, the farmers cash on demand, to be paid back when the borrower’s paycheck were compared to themselves. The only variables that had changed arrives. According to Mullainathan and Shafir, in 2006, there were were their financial circumstances. more than 23,000 payday lender branches in the United States— more than all the McDonald’s (12,000) and Starbucks (nearly Scarcity Begets Scarcity 9,000) locations combined. It’s a popular way to get money today, During the last half-century, the effects of stress and dis- particularly for those without bank accounts. But for people with- traction on attention and self-control have been well explored by out reliable incomes, debts must often roll over into the follow-

40 May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ing month, incurring exorbitant fees. “This type of high-risk borrowing seems ridiculous,” Mullainathan says, but “we wanted to prove that thinking like this doesn’t come from a lack of financial understanding or foolish- ness—it comes from putting out fires.” In 2011, in collaboration with Anuj Shah, now assistant professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (then a graduate student at Prince- ton), they devised a study that they hoped would prove their point, induc- ing that same high-risk borrowing behavior in Princeton undergraduates by having them play a version of the American TV game show Family Feud. In the show, contestants are asked to name things that belong to categories—for instance, “Things you might find in a professor’s office.” Unlike regular trivia games that have right Sugarcane farmers, like Typically, he explains, when the poor remain stuck in the grip and wrong answers, there are no right this one near Ahmed- of poverty, policymakers tend to ask what’s wrong with them, abad, suffer seasonal responses in Family Feud, just popular scarcity—and the distor- pointing to a lack of personal motivation or ability. Rarely, he con- ones (the list of answers is gathered tions from deprivation. tinues, do we as policymakers ask, “What is it about this situa- from a survey of 100 people prior to tion that is enabling this failure?” the show). Because contestants must think through an array of This is the question we should be asking, says Mullainathan—a options before answering, time pressure limits the number of point he and Shafir make quite memorably in their book by tell- paths they can explore before hazarding a guess, so scarcity’s ef- ing a story about a spate of plane crashes that occurred during fects are in full bloom. World War II. During that era, the authors recount, the United At Princeton, contestants were randomly split into “rich” and States military experienced an inordinate number of “wheels-up” “poor” groups—the rich having more time to guess than the poor. crashes; after planes had landed, pilots would inexplicably retract All were given the option to borrow time: each additional second the wheels instead of the wing flaps, sending the planes crashing borrowed would cost them two seconds of “interest” deducted to the runways on their bellies. At first, the blame fell squarely on from their total time. the pilots, the authors explain: why were they so careless? Were “The results mimicked everything we see in the real world,” they fatigued? But when the military began to look more closely, Mullainathan reports. At first, the poor performedbetter than the they realized the problem was limited to two particular plane rich did; scarcity made them focus more intently on the task. But models: B-17s and B-25s. Instead of looking inside the heads of the when, in the next round, the subjects were allowed to roll over pilots, Mullainathan and Shafir write, the military looked inside their loans and “repay” in subsequent rounds (thus making future the cockpits of those specific planes; there investigators discov- rounds shorter), things quickly fell apart for the poor contestants. ered that the wheel controls and flap controls were placed right Early borrowing created a vicious circle for the poor; pressed for next to each other and looked nearly identical—a design specific time, they needed to borrow more seconds, and borrowing more only to the crashing planes. After identifying the problem and made them more pressed for time. By the final rounds, most of implementing a minor change in design (a small rubber wheel their time went to paying back loans, and the poor lost rounds was placed on the end of the landing-gear lever), the number of that the rich won handily. wheels-up crashes declined. These students were randomly assigned to “poverty,” Mul- “Error is inevitable, but accidents are not,” Mullainathan and lainathan explains, so there could be nothing substantially differ- Shafir explain. It’s not that pilots don’t bear responsibility for ent between them and those fellow students labeled “rich.” “The their training and alertness, but “a good cockpit design should study shows the intimate link between success and failure under not facilitate mistakes.” scarcity,” he and Shafir write inScarcity. And scarcity, no matter The same should be true, they argue, for programs and policies whom it menaces, inevitably leads to more scarcity. that address poverty. Just as well-trained World War II pilots made seemingly silly errors in poorly designed cockpits, well- Escaping the Scarcity Trap intentioned social programs such as low-income job-training So how can people escape the scarcity trap? And why does courses, subsidized vaccination programs, and bank programs such research matter? The answer, says Mullainathan, isn’t nec- designed to help people save money, sometimes fail to attract—or essarily a shift in policy, but a shift in policymakers’ perspective. retain—the people they are designed to serve.

Photograph © Reuters/Amit Dave/Corbis Harvard Magazine 41 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 It’s natural to look at the intended clients and blame a lack of “pilot” to “cockpit” does not necessarily require expensive monu- personal responsibility, the authors explain. But, as Mullainathan mental changes in existing policy. Rather, they argue, just as the and Shafir have shown through their own work, all individuals addition of the small rubber wheel to the landing-gear lever in the stuck in a cycle of scarcity will inevitably find themselves plagued World War II planes reduced pilot error, these social programs with similar slips in performance; focus often suffers, long-term might achieve greater success through small tweaks to their de- planning gives way to immediate financial fire-fighting, follow- sign. through on commitments often becomes sporadic. So why not design social programs that make room for this Designing for Scarcity scarcity-induced behavior? the authors ask. Why not look at the Small changes can have huge effects, Mullainathan explains— “cockpit” instead of the “pilot”? an approach to policy that has gained traction during the last Take job-assistance programs, for instance, where absentee- decade, in particular through the work of Richard Thaler, Wal- ism and non-completion are a regular problem. The clients these green Distinguished Service Professor of behavioral science and programs serve are often mentally depleted by the time they ar- economics at Chicago’s Booth School, and Walmsley University rive for classes, the authors explain: out-of-work clients struggle Professor Cass Sunstein, of Harvard Law School (see “The Legal to make ends meet and often must arrange transportation and Olympian,” January-February, page 43). Their 2008 book, Nudge: child care in order to attend a session. If a client misses a class—a Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, presented years likely occurrence—the authors explain, attending the next one of research and insight on “choice architecture”—methods of in- becomes much more difficult, and dropping out becomes increas- fluencing decisions by changing which choices are offered, with- ingly likely. out taking away people’s freedom to choose. But what if the class had a less rigid curriculum? Instead of of- This type of decision manipulation is well known—and widely fering more classes or changing the curriculum, Mullainathan and used—in the world of marketing, and like any tool, Mullaina- Shafir suggest, existing classes could be altered to start at differ- than says, “It can be used for evil.” But in the world of behavioral ent times and proceed in parallel. Then, if clients miss a class, the economics, the idea is to help people do the things they already authors argue, they could simply show up the following week to a want to do: ironically, to make the rational, healthy, self-benefiting parallel session running a week or two behind. choices that traditional economic models (wrongly) assumed Although this type of accommodating approach is often criti- they already consistently did. cized as coddling or paternalistic, Mullainathan and Shafir argue In certain circumstances, he explains, “nudging” people into that it’s just the opposite. This is not a substitute for personal re- better choices can be as easy as changing the wording on a page. sponsibility, the authors claim; rather, “fault tolerance is a way to For instance, when workers start a new job in the United States, ensure that when the poor do take on [responsibility] themselves, they are given a form asking them they can improve—as many do. It is a way to ensure that small The payday-loan industry to check a box if they want to en- (Advance America has 2,400 slipups—an inevitable consequence of bandwidth [depletion]— branches) might be different roll in a 401(k) retirement plan. In do not undo hard work.” if borrowers were nudged a 2001 study by Brigitte Madrian Most importantly, the authors explain, this shift in focus from before their needs arose. and Denis F. Shea (both then at Chicago; Madrian is now Aetna professor of public policy and corporate management at the Har- vard Kennedy School), researchers gave new employees at certain businesses slightly altered forms, instructing them to check the box if they did not want to enroll. The results were striking, notes Mul- lainathan: at companies where employees had to opt out, more than 80 percent enrolled; at companies where they had to opt in, only 45 percent checked the box. But in other circumstances— for example in the case of payday loans—the solutions are much less straightforward. Poor people take on these predatory loans because they have to, Mullainathan explains; bills must be paid now. Any nudging—or even outright pushing—at that moment will likely have little effect. But what if

Photograph © David Woo/Corbis Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 the nudges occurred long before the payday loan was necessary? (called SBST, though many in the field refer to it as the “Nudge What if people who are consumed by financial pressures in the Unit”), and other governments around the world have shown in- present got help in planning for the future? terest in doing the same. Mullainathan and Shafir present pages of suggested solutions, Perhaps the best indication of growing awareness of the value citing successful programs like Save More Tomorrow, a retire- of these behavioral insights came this past December, when the ment-savings plan designed by Thaler and behavioral economist World Bank released its 2015 annual World Development Report, Shlomo Benartzi, a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of which for the first time was devoted entirely to behavioral ap- Management. The program asks people to commit to savings de- proaches to policy. The chapter on poverty was heavily influenced ductions whenever their salary increases in the future; instead of by Mullainathan and Shafir’s work on scarcity, according to one asking them to sacrifice during times of scarcity, Mullainathan of the report’s authors, the Bank’s Alaka Holla. “Evidence of these explains, it’s done during times of (relative) abundance. The re- programs’ success has been building for a while,” she said in an sults were encouraging across the board, and in one firm, more interview. “It was time to take this to the policy world.” than 75 percent of those offered the plan chose to enroll. By the For Mullainathan, it’s been thrilling to see the spotlight widen third pay raise, those who had opted in had more than tripled from its traditional focus on people’s decisions to the circum- their savings rates. stances shaping those choices. Mounting evidence of experimen- “Bandwidth is a core resource”—one just as powerful, limited, and influential in decisionmaking as the dollars in people’s bank accounts. To effect such changes, behavioral economists must first shift tal programs’ successes and increased attention from reputable people’s thinking—and the only way to do that, says Mullaina- organizations has spurred real interest from policymakers in ex- than, is to provide more evidence that their approaches to policy ploring behavioral economic solutions. But interest and full-scale work in the real world. adoption are two very different things, he points out, and the big- Many scientists and nonprofit organizations are already an- gest hurdle to widespread implementation is the problem of pov- swering that call, running experiments around the globe to test erty itself. “Our solutions always struggle because the underlying proposed changes in policy. In 2008, Mullainathan and Shafir problem is so complicated,” Mullainathan explains. What might themselves joined with several other colleagues to co-found work for one population might completely fail for another. Ideas42, a nonprofit that collaborates with organizations and Although social scientists know a lot about the economics of businesses worldwide to test behavioral approaches to problems. poverty, they know much less about the psychology it creates in A 2013 collaboration with the Cleveland Housing Network, for in- individual populations, and this social science, Mullainathan ar- stance, yielded a 20 percent improvement in timely rent payment gues, is just as important as the technological sciences policymakers simply by sending postcard reminders and creating a monthly rely on to solve problems. Scientists spend vast resources devel- raffle for tenants who paid on time. Even changes as simple as oping medications, water-purifying technologies, financial prod- new wording on a bank statement, converting interest percent- ucts, and social services designed to help people in need, he ex- ages to “dollars owed,” or telling people how their gas and elec- plains. But getting people to use these technologies also requires tricity usage compares to their neighbors’, have affected people’s understanding the psychology of the people using them. Policy- choices for the better, Mullainathan explains. “The idea is to en- makers, he says, must make this type of research a priority. courage people to do things just by making things easier. And the “Bandwidth is a core resource,” Mullainathan and Shafir argue— best part is…it often costs policymakers nothing.” one just as powerful, limited, and influential in people’s decision- To Nudge author Richard Thaler, work like this marks the next making process as the dollars in their bank account. If we begin to step in the evolution of behavioral economics. Mullainathan and look at bandwidth and the factors affecting it in the same way we Shafir “are part of a generation of economists and social scientists measure economic circumstances, the authors claim, we can design changing the way we think about development economics,” he and evaluate social programs based on how people actually act— said in an interview. “They have taken seriously the idea that we not simply how numbers and statistics tell us they should. have to do things that are not just interesting to other academics, “The mistake we make in managing scarcity is that we focus on but that have the possibility of being scaled up.” one side of the calculus,” they write at the conclusion of their book. The cost of making changes to existing policies is easy to measure, Scaling Up the Science of Scarcity but the cost of not doing so is much harder to quantify. This is what For policymakers, it’s that potential to effect change broadly the science of scarcity attempts to gauge, Mullainathan and Shafir that matters—and the evidence of success from the behavioral maintain: how situations, programs, and policies can deplete, tax, or sciences has begun to catch their attention. In 2010, the British build up psychological resources that are every bit as important as government formed the Behavioural Insights Team, intended to the physical ones that fill—or empty—our coffers. spread understanding of behavioral approaches and to implement trial programs in several areas of social policy. In 2014, the White Cara Feinberg is a journalist working in print and documentary television. She House formed its own Social and Behavioral Sciences Team can be reached through her website at www.CaraFeinberg.com.

Harvard Magazine 43 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Vita Thomas Nuttall Brief life of a pioneering naturalist: 1786-1859 by john nelson

n 1808, a day after landing in Philadelphia, Yorkshireman Hanley, “Harvard was a veritable desert for a biologist.” Thomas Nuttall found a common greenbrier, a plant new to In 1832 he published a pioneering guide: a two-volume Manual of Ihim. The apprentice printer and aspiring naturalist took it to the Ornithology of the United States and Canada. Despite some errors, it Benjamin Smith Barton of the University of Pennsylvania, who— was accurate enough that readers often assumed he was a trained struck by this fervor for botany—became Nuttall’s mentor, and ornithologist. Birds, he wrote, “play around us like fairy spirits”; in 1810 sent him on a major collecting expedition: to the Great he believed them capable of conjugal fidelity, education, and even Lakes, northwest to Winnipeg, and down the Missouri and Mis- “reflection.” His call to end their “wanton destruction” has been sissippi rivers. Nuttall, realizing he’d be welcome neither to the echoed by American conservationists ever since. British in Canada nor the Plains Indians, eventually joined one of He left Harvard in 1833, and in 1834 joined the Wyeth Expedition John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading parties. In prairies and woodlands to the Columbia River, which entered lands “no naturalist had ever he found plants new to science and collected species that had been traversed.” Ornithologist John Kirk Townsend marveled at his old- discovered, but lost in transit, by the Lewis and Clark Expedition. er colleague’s energetic collecting (though he once found Nuttall Washington Irving’s historical account Astoria describes him as a eating an owl he had saved as a specimen). They sent “bird skins” “zealous botanist…groping and stumbling along a wilderness of to the Academy of Natural Sciences and their friend John James sweets, forgetful of everything but his immediate pursuit.” In other Audubon, who used them as models for Birds of America. “Such beau- first-hand stories, his use of his rifle to store seeds illustrates his ties!” Audubon exclaimed. “Such rarities! Such Novelties!” obliviousness to peril in his single-minded quest to further science. Nuttall continued on from Fort Vancouver to Hawaii and then At journey’s end in 1812, with war looming, Nuttall sailed from to the virgin scientific territory of California. In 1836 a young sail- New Orleans to London, but soon returned to Philadelphia. In or, Richard Henry Dana ’37, was amazed to find his old professor 1816, he undertook a second major journey: down the Ohio River, barefoot on a San Diego beach, gathering shells. To transport his to walk alone through Kentucky and Tennessee to the Carolinas. barrels of specimens east, Nuttall had gained passage on Dana’s On his return he published The Genera of North American Plants and a vessel, which was carrying hides to Boston. (The crew, bemused by Catalogue of the Species, to the Year 1817, which, American botanist John Nuttall’s “zeal for curiosities,” called him “Old Curious.”) During Torrey declared, “contributed more than any other work to the ad- the harrowing gales around Cape Horn, Dana wrote in Two Years vance of accurate knowledge of the plants of this country.” before the Mast, Nuttall stayed below, but once past Tierra del Fuego Next he financed his own expedition of some 5,000 miles down he came on deck “hopping around as bright as a bird.” He begged the Ohio and Mississippi into what is now Arkansas and Okla the captain to let him explore an island “which probably no human homa, and published A Journal of Travels into the Arkansas Territory in being had ever set foot upon,” but the ship sailed on. 1821, partly to share “the wisdom and beauty of creation.” The book In Philadelphia he learned that an uncle had left him an estate blends many discoveries of new plants with vivid accounts of his in England, provided he stay there nine months each year. He trials in finding them: drunken boatmen, river pirates, treacherous lived out his days in Lancashire, but wrote, “I prefer the wilds of sandbars, and unmapped, mosquito-infested swamps. At his low- America a thousand times over” and returned once, for six months est, in “miseries of sickness, delirium, and despondence,” he had in 1847-48. The preeminent naturalist of his adopted country re- to flee through a stormy night, into quicksand and across a frigid mained proud of the work he’d done “not in the closet but in the field.” river, from Indians trying to steal his horse. Yet he also told of Indi- That work lives on through the common and scientific names of ans who rescued him when lost, and tried to arouse compassion for Western shrubs and trees like the Pacific dogwood Cornus( nuttal- “the unfortunate aborigines…so rapidly dwindling into oblivion.” lii), 44 marine genera and species, and three birds, including Nut- Three appendices, with linguistic notes on Southwestern tribes, tall’s woodpecker. And the first U.S. ornithological society, found- would, he hoped, rectify the dismissal of Indian languages as “bar- ed in 1873, bears his name. Members of the Nuttall Ornithological baric” and “create a new era in the history of primitive language.” Club have included Theodore Roosevelt, Ernst Mayr, and Roger Nuttall was invited to Harvard in 1822 as a lecturer in natural Tory Peterson. “Nuttall” still publishes ornithological research, history and curator of the botanical garden. He was popular with building on its namesake’s groundwork, and meets monthly for students, guiding them on woodland “rambles,” and the College al- lectures at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. lowed him botanizing absences, yet he grew restless, feeling that he was “vegetating” in Cambridge. “In that era,” writes historian Wayne John Nelson ’68, of Gloucester, Massachusetts, is a freelance writer.

44 May - June 2015 Opposite: Nuttall during his time at Harvard (the circa 1828 portrait is attributed to J. Whitfield ). Above: Nuttall’s woodpecker, from a U.S. Department of the Interior boundary survey report’s volume on birds, dated between 1857 and 1859 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard University Portrait Collection, Gift of Professor Edward Tuckerman to Harvard Magazine 45 Asa Gray for the University, 1865. Image © President and Fellows of Harvard College Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Altering Course Why the United States may be on the cusp of an energy revolution by jonathan shaw

Of the nearly 100 quadrillion British thermal units of energy (BTUs) used each year in the United States, 61 quads are wasted. That is not a moral judgment, or a commentary on insufficient conservation (poor insulation, idling cars, people failing to turn off lights when they leave a room). It is, as Mara Prentiss notes, predominantly fundamental physics: the fuel is burned, but less than 50 percent performs useful work. That is because the American economy depends on heat engines—such as fossil-fuel-burning electric power plants and gasoline-powered cars—that cycle to convert heat energy into mechanical work. Their efficiency, the Mallinckrodt professor of physics explains, is limited by the laws of thermodynamics. An electric power plant’s theoretical maximum efficiency (its “Carnot limit”) is approximately 50 percent; a car engine tops out roughly 10 percent lower. In practice, of course, actual efficiencies can be much worse (although modern gas-fired power plants approach the theoretical efficiency limit). What this means is that the energy economy of the United States, as currently structured, can never be much more than 50 percent efficient: the laws of physics won’t permit it. Prentiss sees in this fundamental limit to efficiency not an obstacle, but an opportunity. In her new book, Energy Revo- lution: The Physics and the Promise of Efficient Technology (Harvard University Press), she probes the most basic of questions: where energy comes from, how it is distributed, how it is consumed, and—critically—how it is wasted. Prentiss is a specialist in the manipulation of matter by light, who now focuses principally on using the tools of physics to answer knotty biological questions. She decided to write her book for a wider audience, given the urgency of the energy problem, the relevance of fundamental principles of physics, and the opportunity to apply her skills to U.S. energy challenges. She aims to show what choices the country really has, and how realistic the path to a sustainable future might be.

Mara Prentiss Photograph by Stu Rosner

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Why theUnitedStatesmaybeoncuspofanenergy revolution by jonathan

shaw

istock supply, storage and over demand, areas.” large geographical that poolenergy storage, grids “smart and approach to energy efficiency, and toadjustments improve comfort both broader a technologies, advances computing system that constant enable revolution involves energy-efficiency adoption ofexisting wide social change, butalsoarevolution thought in practice. and That and political not only require renewable with wide will sources demand nationing for sound decisions. But meeting peak energy - someground with consumers and policymakers at leastprovide physics, conclusion, basedonthe underlying energy—a that may for the 50years, next shesays, wasted eliminating even without the newable ofenergy. sources Windsolarpower and meet could one on earth, if only we only have if one onearth, the courage to seizethe opportunity.” revolution, which improvelives the mightsignificantly of every impossible,”shesays.previously “We areonthe cusp energy ofan things that were “New lifestyle. technologiesareallowing cans’ renewableswithout- nowalreadyAmeri exists— right to sacrifices Most surprisingly, to to shift sheconcludesthat the opportunity dams)electric appliances,orcars). lighting, (in consumption and to hydro turbines wind ofpowerthe (from mechanics generation economy inefficiently. grossly interact—often, ergy explains She ofthe U.S. howthe components to the task ofexplaining skills - en policy. Thus,knowledge she scientific appliesher analyticaland public use to and inform making decisions about personal energy sweeping changes? lifestyle tiny ofconsumption? fraction Wouldand thatsacrifices, require waterand to became a replace fossil fuels, so that they gradually enoughwind, then? powersun, generate from Couldhumanity so,and inevitably, eventually, “We will isfinite, onearth offossilfuel the total quantity starkreality: er monoxides,carbon pollution), ozone, particulate and - anoth lies mercury,lead, emissions (including sulfur, and oxides of nitrogen energy, impact environmental offossil-fuel the immediate and the change use and climate of long-term connection between one of the biggest single problems facing humanity. Beyond the perspective offersauniquely scientific onPrentiss whatshecalls Achieving those goalsAchieving may improbable given seem“highly hu Prentiss envisions economy an Prentiss onre entirely basedalmost basisfor afactual aims to both provide In Prentiss the book, debates, energy-policy into current Without directly plunging average - the in sen first writes toman resistance change,” Prentiss , “but an examination an of historical Revolution, “but of Energy tence

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 total energy demand in the demandin United Statesnowand total energy energy use indicates that humanity has already that un- humanity use indicates energy dergone several energy consumption revolutions.”dergone several energy An age of wood throughout the colonial gave era run out,” shesays. out,” run What - - - - - probable.” possible,but only renewable with generated “not sources—is useto electricity offossilfuels from ashift formation—entailing of80 U.S. percent comes fossil from fuels.Another trans energy gashave Today, importance. in increased natural approximately asmuchcoalever,fact, the United Statesburns though oiland economy: Both wood in coal remainand of out. the a part energy twentieth, shepointsin the sources energy age ofdiversified way toage century, an the ofcoalin nineteenth to then an and H A Renewable-EnergyThoughtExperiment transmission costs.) transmission and maintenance, as high,reflecting highconstruction, twice is wind farms by offshore generated of electricity says speeds, ofwind the butPrentiss standpoint the cost the most efficient. (Offshore sites are suitable from locations in windy are largesupporting turbines bigtowers that, practice, in height, mean really the with factspeedsincrease with that wind rules, combined but these refinements, ther power There output. are fur quadruples rotor the radius, rotor lengthso doubling the also increases with square of the turbine 8 x=512).The ofawind power output (5x5=125versus much electricity as times four morethan generate site can age eight mph is substantial: the latter onewhere and hour miles per they aver- potential betweena site where the averageenergy winds five in sothe difference speed, the cubeofthe with increases wind tion, location,location.The turbine power by awind generated third ofthe nation. thecovering middle,windiest, vertical stripe in a north-to-south would turbines need to install alone,the country demandusing wind power allenergy to satisfy enough to generate ofelectricity—so the in consumed form ergy heating transportation) and is equivalent to seven times the en costs). Total forexample, U.S. (including, consumption energy relatedhealth donotinclude numbers orclimate-impact two ter gas(notably, kWh per fornatural proximately 6.6cents the lat the than ap- coal,butmoreexpensive for power from generated (kWh) the than 9.6 cheaper kWh per fornewinstallations: cents power. using wind a thought experiment renewablewith To sources? answer, find the undertakes Prentiss ow difficul As with real estate, the key to wind turbines’ value isloca- As turbines’ realestate,the keyto with wind kilowatt per hour 8cents costs onshorewind from Energy t would it be to replace fossil-fuel consumption would itbeto replace fossil-fuel H

arvard - M agazine 47 - - - But covering one-third of the nation in wind turbines sounds ing cattle, or even raising biofuel. Turbines take up very little draconian. It could have a harmful impact on predatory birds; it space on the ground, she points out, so on nonarable land, own- might also affect weather, Prentiss notes, and that should be stud- ers could produce even more power by co-locating solar panels ied. But if those turbines were built, landholding ranchers and farm- among them. (Existing estimates of the land area needed for re- ers become the oil barons of the twenty-first century. In an electri- newables, she says, generally don’t consider dual-use possibilities, fied economy, people would drive electric cars, which would raise and therefore overestimate the acreage required.) demand for electricity and lower demand for gasoline; fossil-fuel power plants would slowly be phased out. Existing plants would Challenges to a Renewable-Energy Economy not be required to shut down prematurely, so electricity providers Prentiss identifies three considerable challenges to this vi- would not be hurt. A decrease in U.S. demand for petroleum would sion of a national renewable-power system: the long-distance allow Americans to reduce petroleum imports, and might even en- transport of electricity; the intermittency of the wind and sun; able substantial petroleum exports. Above all, the country would and the limited capacity to store renewably generated energy need only half as much energy as it uses today—because replacing for later use. fossil-fuel-dependent cars and power plants with renewably gener- Transporting electricity from the nation’s heartland to the ated electricity would immediately reduce total energy demand by coasts, or from north to south, or from one coast to the other, Electric power generation more than half (by eliminating that fundamental Carnot limit on ef- would require building a national power grid, a substantial infra- and transportation dominate ficiency). That means that instead of covering a third of the country, structure investment. But science demonstrates that electricity energy consumption (in quads)… wind turbines would need to cover less than a sixth of the nation’s travels well, Prentiss explains, especially in the form of direct cur- land area to meet average demand with wind power alone. Such a rent (as opposed to the alternating current that utilities deliver system would also dramatically reduce emissions associated with to customers). The U.S. Energy Information Agency estimates burning fuel. total transmission losses at approximately 6 percent, with long- The necessary land area would shrink further if contributions distance losses around 5 percent per 1,000 miles for high voltage from solar, hydroelectric, biofuels, and nuclear energy were fac- direct current. Such a loss in income might drive an accountant tored in, and still further with increased adoption of energy-effi- (like her spouse) crazy, Prentiss acknowledges, but “scientists ciency technologies. (Prentiss notes that solar power alone could, talk in factors of two and 10”: thus, losses from distribution of like wind, in theory supply all of the nation’s energy needs, albeit electricity across thousands of miles are not big when compared more expensively.) Furthermore, land that hosts wind turbines with the orders-of-magnitude differences in generating capacity can still be used for other purposes, such as growing crops, graz- between the country’s most and least windy locations. The intermittency of wind and solar power is a bigger prob- Biomass lem, she admits. Solar panels can’t make electricity when the sun Wind 5% Primary Sources doesn’t shine, whether at night or during cloudy weather. And 1% on windless days, turbines stand idle. Today, regional utilities Hydro cope with this problem by maintaining conventional, fossil-fu- 3% of U.S. Energy el-powered electric plants with sufficient capacity to cover any Nuclear renewable-source fluctuations. As of 2012, wind power repre- 8% sented just 1 percent of U.S. energy sources, but Iowa and South Coal Dakota both generate more than 20 percent of their electricity 18% from wind (as does Germany), demonstrating that fluctuations in supply and demand can be managed. As the role of renewable energy grows, of course, the intermittency problem becomes more challenging. Supply fluctuations are potentially more dramatic when there are more renewables Natural Gas in the energy mix, and could thus require more fossil-fuel back- Petroleum 28% 37%

Source: 2012 data from U.S. Energy Information Administration

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Electric power generation Transport …and are also the least efficient sectors and transportation dominate 27 energy consumption (in quads)… Electric Power 40 80% 65% 32% 21% ups to compensate. The Electric Transport simplest solution would Industrial Residental/ Power be a breakthrough in stor- Industrial Commercial age technology, but Prentiss 20 believes the challenge can be Residental/ managed even without such an Commerical lem with renewables. For example, the sun sets almost four advance by combining existing stor- 11 hours earlier on the East Coast than on the West (not three, age solutions with a “smart grid.” Hydro- as the time difference would suggest). Solar power generated in electric power, she says, provides today’s best the West could be sold to customers in the East. Likewise, power large-scale means of storing energy generated from the wind and demand changes seasonally, and according to different patterns in sun. Water stored in reservoirs and behind dams can be released the South than in the North, creating opportunities for transfer- to generate electricity as needed—and excess intermittent renew- ring electricity among states at different latitudes. Finally, the variable power could be used to pump water up into reser- ability of wind averages out over distances of 1,000 kilometers or voirs, to be released later when demand exceeds supply. more, so a smart grid that stretched across the entire continental Given that hydroelectric power is itself a renewable, United States would be able to deliver a steadier flow of electricity why doesn’t the United States make it the center of a re- from wind by managing long-distance transfers of power. Smart newable energy policy? In her book, Prentiss addresses this grids can also take advantage of distributed energy storage. Exist- question as another thought experiment. First, she calcu- ing battery packs for electric cars can store approximately three lates how much rain falls across the entire country, and then times the electrical energy consumed by a household in a day. If asks how much power all that water could generate, if every every household had such a battery pack, the energy storage would drop could be captured and stored for use. The answer, she approach the total daily U.S. electricity consumption. says, is 7 percent of total U.S. energy demand: “Not enough.” In fact, hydroelectric capacity in the United States has re- Toward a Renewable-Energy Economy mained steady since 1970, because development of new generat- What is a sensible path forward? Prentiss says she wrote Energy ing facilities has been offset by the removal of dams, principally Revolution out of a conviction that information is a powerful way due to environmental concerns. As the nation’s energy use has to help people make decisions about energy use, whether as citi- grown, therefore, hydroelectric’s contribution to the total supply zens or consumers. has gradually dwindled. In order to effect change, then, her decision to focus on the larg- Because the nation’s pumped-storage hydroelectricity is lim- est, most inefficient sectors of the U.S. economy is pragmatic. Us- ited, Prentiss suggests that, barring a tech- ing government data, she divides consumption into four sectors nological breakthrough, meeting total U.S. and ranks their efficiency: industry, 80 percent efficient; residen- power needs during the next 50 years will tial/commercial, 65 percent efficient; electric-power generation, 32 require combining existing storage capacity percent efficient; and transport, 20 percent efficient. The data also with a national smart grid. reveal that the most efficient sectors are the smallest. Of the nearly A smart grid that uses computers to man- 100 quads of energy used in the United States annually, 20 quads age electricity could take advantage of re- are consumed by industry, and 11 go to commercial/residential gional differences in power supply and uses. Transportation, the most inefficient sector by far, consumes demand, thereby decreasing the need for 27 quads of energy, more than a quarter of total U.S. use, while energy storage, that third big prob- electric- power generation uses 40 quads.

Source: (top left) 2011 data from U.S. Energy Information Administration, in quadrillions of British thermal units Source: (top right) 2012 data from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Harvard Magazine 49 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 The largest, most inefficient sectors thus represent more grows over time) by building new renewable energy plants, with- than two-thirds of total energy consumption, and are the logi- out decommissioning fossil-fuel plants before the end of their lives, cal focus for moving the economy toward a sustainable future. leads to the smoothest transition to a sustainable economy. The most wasteful example is a gasoline-powered car driven in the city. The inefficiency begins with the engine itself, subject Shaping the Path Ahead to the Carnot limit (the thermal engine loss exceeds 65 percent Prentiss is realistic about the potential for change. Jets of the energy in the fuel burned), and mounts from there: drive- would still need to run on liquid fuel; doubling production of train losses, 4 percent; parasitic (frictional) losses, 6 percent; and ethanol, a biofuel, could meet that need, she suggests. And even if other engine losses, 11 percent. In the final analysis, says Prentiss, the contiguous 48 states were to be linked by a single electric grid just 16 percent of the energy actually moves the wheels. Of every optimally combining wind, solar, hydroelectric, and geothermal six gallons of gasoline burned, in other words, only one moves power, she says that it would be more economical, in the near fu- the car. (In more efficient highway use, one gallon in four goes to ture at least, to burn some natural gas as part of that mix. turn the wheels—a yield of 25 percent.) A shift to renewable energy is already under way in the United Electric cars are far more efficient. Their motors waste a neg- States. In 2012, renewables passed nuclear power in the amount ligible amount of power (efficiencies can approach 99 percent), of electricity generated. Most of that new power came from wind and regenerative brakes allow them to recapture and reuse much and biofuels, the fastest-growing contributors to the the nation’s of the energy that propels the car. Overall, existing electric cars have renewable sector. In addition, society is on the verge of benefit- total efficiencies that can exceed 60 percent. Thus, if gasoline-pow- ing from new kinds of efficiency gains. Computing advances, for ered cars were completely replaced by electric cars, the electrical example, could enable real-time modulation of supply and de- energy required to fuel them would be less than one-third the en- mand: imagine a hot summer day when air conditioning causes ergy previously supplied by gasoline. But Prentiss is not advocating the demand for electricity to spike—and the batteries in electric that everyone buy an electric car now. That would cause demand for cars provide a buffer during peak power use. Consumers could electricity to spike, and force utilities to burn more fossil fuels. agree to run certain “smart” appliances such as dishwashers or Getting to efficient electric vehicles, in other words, also re- dryers only when power demand for the day has ebbed. (Read quires system change. The efficiency of the car (and its impact on about two alumni applying these technologies with utilities to- emissions) is only as good as the efficiency of the plant that gen- day on page 68.) Though Prentiss’s calculations don’t encompass erates the power used to charge the battery. If the power to run this type of efficiency gain, nor the “socially wasted energy” ex- those cars comes from a wind turbine or a solar panel on the roof pended heating and lighting empty rooms, idling in traffic jams, of a home, then the electric car makes sense. or driving around looking for a parking space, she points out, for An energy economy based on electricity, including electric cars, example, that “smart” meters that signal whether parking spaces must therefore grow gradually, Prentiss argues, with sources of are occupied would be a win for everyone. supply and demand expanding in tandem in order to capture the “Most people aren’t aware of the enormous positive opportuni- efficiencies gained by eliminating heat engines. Furthermore, utilities for change” right now, Prentiss says. “I wrote the book to en- ties must carry the capital costs of fossil-fuel-burning power plants courage people to embrace some of those changes.” To make good on their books even as new renewable-power plants come on line. decisions, she continues, “it helps to be aware, Her data show that meeting growth not just of the obvious, but of the slightly in demand for electricity (energy use Drivetrain less obvious. And in the end, I make Power to some suggestions that have a factual Loss Wheels basis, but it’s my hope that people Energy Losses in 4% 16% decide things for themselves. My goal is that you don’t go on faith, Frictional and that in fact, you think about City Driving Loss Thermal it for yourself.” Engine Loss Only one-sixth of the fuel energy 6% Other Engine Loss Jonathan Shaw ’89 is managing editor expended in a gasoline-powered 11% 63% of this magazine. car actually turns the wheels.

Source: www.fueleconomy.gov

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150534_House-Fund_full.indd 1 4/1/15 10:51 AM Line by

e is the opposite of a glasses perched on his nose. He is tall, child prodigy—a writer only barely bowed by age, and it is easy Hwho has reached his cre- Line to imagine a younger, swifter version, ative and intellectual zenith in his bookish and lanky, crossing a New ninth and now tenth decades of life. Poet and translator England college quad. His voice is grav- When David Ferry, Ph.D. ’55, won the elly and confident; he speaks slowly National Book Award for Poetry in and measures out his thoughts with 2012 for his collection Bewilderment at care—it’s a voice born for poetry read- 88, he was almost 30 years the elder of David Ferry ings. The kitchen, where he offers toast the four other nominees. Three years and tea, seems new; he hasn’t been here after that award, he is now finish- long. He lived in Cambridge for almost ing his translation of the Aeneid. In Spencer Lenfield half a century with his wife, Anne, until fact, Ferry said on a chilly, snowless by she passed away in 2006; now he lives January morning, he finally finished next door to the family of his daughter, reading the Aeneid—for the first time—just a few weeks earlier. Elizabeth, an anthropologist at Brandeis. The walls are decorated That Ferry—who has translated Horace’s Odes and Epistles, and with large prints of pictures taken by his son, Stephen, a photojour- Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics—doesn’t read these works before sit- nalist working in South America and New York City. ting down to render them into English often surprises his readers. Bewilderment is a book of elegies, many for the loss of Anne. In it, He had only a passing acquaintance with Horace before tackling Ferry has raided all his past translations of master poets, as well as the Odes, and had never read the Eclogues or the Georgics. He’s quick some of his own past poems, to set alongside the poems that came to insist that he’s not really a Latinist—by which he seems to in the wake of his wife’s death—to find company in the afterlife. mean it’s not his field (his dissertation was on Wordsworth) and He casts himself as a mythological adventurer through the under- he doesn’t read the language fluently, though he appears far more world, channeling the voices of poets past (including the ancients, comfortable with Latin than he lets on. Maybe having less Latin but also the Anglo-Saxons and Wyatt, Rilke, Cavafy, Montale) un- makes him more attuned to English flow—less preoccupied with til their translated voices blend into his own. The wall between fussy literalism, and capable of drawing a sinuous and simple mu- translation and composition breaks down: “I can’t clearly tell the sic out of ancient verse: difference between translating and writing a poem of my own,” Time takes all we have away from us; he explains, “because in a way, I’m writing a poem of my own when I remember when I was a boy I used to sing I’m translating. Everybody is.” But even though legions of poets, Every long day of summer down to darkness, as far back as Catullus, have woven translations into their books, And now I am forgetting all my songs; the passages Ferry curates come together with a fierce expressive My voice grows hoarse; I must have been seen by a wolf urgency: finding in another poet, writing in a different language, Virgil, Eclogue 9 a text that voices what he most needs to say himself, the way a But he rejects this notion. “[John] Dryden obviously knew musician might need to play a certain score, or a dancer perform Latin extremely well,” he points out, referring to the seven- certain steps. Alan Shapiro, a poet and close friend who teaches at teenth-century English poet’s celebrated translation. (Apart from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says Bewilderment Dryden’s Aeneid, he has tried to avoid reading others’ translations “deals with the most devastating losses. So the challenge of the of the Latin poets; thus, he hasn’t read their works in full until he losses he had to deal with forced him to up his game, so to speak. has finished translating them himself.) He always did this, but never quite to the same extent: it’s like he’s A professor emeritus at Wellesley, Ferry answers the door at calling in all the forces of the past to help him come to terms with his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, looking the part: he wears the loss of his wife and the way that she died.” a tweed jacket over a turtleneck sweater and corduroy trousers, “What am I doing inside this old man’s body?” Ferry asks in

52 May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 David Ferry

“Soul,” early in Bewilderment. “I feel like I’m the insides of a lobster, about him at length in big magazines, and PBS NewsHour inter- / All thought, and all digestion, and pornographic / Inquiry, and viewed him after the National Book Award was announced. getting about, and bewilderment….” It’s a poem where he seems Still, many casual readers of contemporary poetry might not have to speak as himself, but also as many others: if there is a Latin pre- recognized his name before Bewilderment. It’s easy to forget that Fer- decessor to this poem, it would be some passage from Ovid—age ry—born in 1924, he turned 91 this past March—is a contemporary as metamorphosis into some strange creature, sloughing off one’s of Maxine Kumin ’46, RI ’61 (born in 1925), James Merrill and W.D. armor as the tender inner life hardens into one last enormous exo- Snodgrass (both born in 1926), John Ashbery ’49, Litt.D. ’01, and skeleton. His poetry seems almost too soft to touch; his biogra- W.S. Merwin (both born in 1927), and Anne Sexton, BF ’62 (born phy, too. “I’m aware of and embarrassed by my ways / Of getting in 1928). In part, this is because those writers published their most around, and my protective shell,” he writes: celebrated books in the 1960s and ’70s, at a point when Ferry was a Where is it that she I loved has gone to, as working professor focused principally on teaching. But Ferry may This cold sea water’s washing over my back? also have been less talked about because he’s hard to fit into the schools, trends, and preoccupations of contemporary poetry. (He erry has long had the respect of colleagues and poets: professes to be uninterested in these matters.) “David has always the Poetry Foundation awarded him its lifetime achieve- marched to the beat of his own drummer,” says Jonathan Galassi ’71, Fment award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the year before president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), which Bewilderment was published. He has published in all the best jour- has published all his book-length translations. nals; his Latin translations earned no small praise; and his 1999 Ferry has spent much of his career perfecting an ability to write collection Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations in colloquial iambic pentameter, leavened with a sprinkling of ana- won multiple prizes and distinctions. People are finally writing pests (as in the lines from “Soul” above); the diction can come out

Photograph by Stephen Ferry Harvard Magazine 53 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 sounding a bit like Robert Frost, whose influence he cites gladly. ning trade associations. His wife, Elsie Russell, grew up in Nor- But he is quick to point out that he does write in free verse some- folk, Virginia. She met Robert when he was sent South on textile times, and he insists, “I’m not some kind of neoformalist.” He dis- business. “She always claimed she fell in love with him when he likes being tagged as conservative just because he often writes in was playing Schumann’s ‘Träumerei’ on the piano,” Ferry recalls. meter. He has seldom rhymed since his first book, published in 1960. The house was filled with music as he grew up; Robert took on Still, he feels he has lived his life as an apprentice to what he extra work as a church musician during the Depression, and often calls “the measured line”: one line following another, unspooling rehearsed singers from New York, desperate for work, through on the page. “It’s so much like what you experience in Beethoven full oratorios at home. Ferry describes his father as a kind but not and Mozart: the measure, then the line,” he explains. “The game openly emotive man—a taciturnity that he evokes in his poem is to keep it continuous. But your experience of it has to be an “Ancestral Lines,” remembering his father playing Schumann’s experience of line endings, measured.” That discipline has made enigmatic song “War um?”: him a perfect translator of the classical Latin hexameter verses of And the nearest my father could come to saying what Virgil’s works and Horace’s letters. Poet and critic Dan Chiasson He made of that was lamely to say he didn’t, credits those translations with “teaching American poets (I’m Schumann didn’t, my father didn’t, know why. one of them) the Horatian tones—the modesty, civility, and gos- Ferry was not especially literary or bookish as a child. He went sip; the swift, fly-by urbanity—that went missing from much of to a good public high school, on the track leading to college. He the best American poetry of the seventies and eighties.” insists, “I wasn’t a jock,” but was not yet writing or reading at “My criterion is that [the accuracy of a translation] should length. He took only a little Latin, focusing mainly on French, always be arguable in some way,” Ferry says. “But they can never which he still reads fluently. He remembers occasional encoun- be the same music.” FSG has published Ferry’s Virgil and Horace ters with poetry at official church and town occasions: how in translations with the Latin en face, like the Loeb Classical Library Maplewood in the 1930s, they read William Cullen Bryant’s elegy texts. The effect, for a reader who knows Latin, “Thanatopsis” aloud every Armistice Day. (Ferry is probably one is to turn the translation into a performance, of the last poets alive for whom a civic reading of “Thanatopsis” Visit harvardmag.com/ highlighting how Ferry chooses to render a was a formative event, and who can quote from it by heart. At one extras to hear David phrase, smooth out syntax, hem a metaphor. point, he also recites at length from Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.) Ferry read two of his The Latin language fosters involuted sentences But it was as a freshman at Amherst that Ferry experienced “a poems. whose multiple nestings of subordinate claus- perfectly clear vocation” to poetry as he was working on an essay es can weigh down overly literal translations; part of Ferry’s skill for an expository writing class taught by Reuben Brower, whom he lies in unknotting those, working oxygen into the rich earth of calls “vocationally, the most important person in my life.” (Brower Horace and Virgil. When Virgil writes about beekeeping at the would become Cabot professor of English literature at Harvard in beginning of Georgics 4, a less deft translator might render the Lat- 1953.) The assignment was simple: to write about two poems by in too literally, ending up with something like: “At first, a place Robert Frost, “Once By the Pacific” and “Spring Pools.” Ferry was and station must be sought for the bees, where there is neither looking at them carefully, reading the lines of iambic pentameter an approach for the winds, because the winds prevent them from aloud, when he stumbled over a line that sounded different: carrying food back home, nor….” Ferry’s English shares the grace …it looked as if / The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff… of the Latin, but he creates it by departing intelligently from the “Lucky in”: the two words step out of the meter, an anapest tak- original Latin grammar: ing the place of an iamb for the first time in the poem—like a quick First of all, find a protected place for the bees apprehensive shudder, as if the speaker were looking nervously To make their home, a place that’s safe from the wind back to the safety of land in the face of the crashing ocean waves. That might prevent them from getting back with their That a writer could use the sound of words and the structure of food… meter to make a point, to evoke a feeling—that was the moment Robert Frost once said that poetry is what gets lost in transla- when he realized, This is what I want to do! “I’m really surprised by it,” tion, but Ferry shows that a translation can illuminate a poem Ferry recalls. like an interpretation. He brings out the patience, sensuality, and At the end of his freshman year in 1942, he was drafted into the affection for detail in Virgil, doing more than any number of jour- army. He spent the war in northern England; those years gave him nal articles to counter among lay readers a received notion of the time to read. He wrote a note to Brower from overseas thanking Roman as merely a bombastic, militaristic epic bard. him for changing his life; decades later, Brower—by then an old friend—returned the note. Ferry was touched. He returned to Ferry does not like to make too much of himself. He has an Amherst after the war and finished his English degree; he wrote endearing habit of stopping to worry about whether he is talking his senior thesis on Wallace Stevens. too much about himself in interviews— “Because you get invited He then enrolled in the doctoral program at Harvard, where he inadvertently to brag, and I don’t like that,” he explains. He’d found that the coursework and research mattered less to him than rather speak impersonally: “I’m always trying—as in poems—to the colleagues and the teaching. There were a few memorable cours- say things that are true for everybody insofar as I can.” es—he studied eighteenth-century literature with Walter Jackson Still, the story of his life starts to unfold eventually. He was Bate—but Ferry found just as much to learn from teaching, which raised in Maplewood, New Jersey, a suburb west of Newark, with gave him a chance to read, reread, and think through poems, one his father’s extended family scattered across neighboring towns. line at a time. He almost ended up writing his dissertation about Robert Ferry was a businessman, first in textiles and later run- William Congreve’s verse dramas—“It was all about sentences, all

54 May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 about lines”—but switched to Wordsworth, a Teaching poems A long interval fell between Ferry’s first book project that eventually turned into his first and and his second, Strangers, published in 1983. He only book of criticism, The Limits of Mortality. kept giving was young, he was married, and when On the Way By 1952, three years before completing his to the Island appeared, so did the couple’s son and doctorate, Ferry had begun teaching English at him more small then daughter. They lived in a house in Cam- Wellesley. As the resident Romanticist, he was bridge on Ellery Street that they bought after able to teach and read Wordsworth, Coleridge, realizations about Anne left Wellesley; Margaret Fuller had been and the others at length; he had the freedom its first renter, and Emerson once came to chat to teach Shakespeare, Milton, and twentieth- the machinery in the living room. Ferry was writing during century poetry as well. Most important was these years, but very slowly—a poem or two a the introductory poetry class. “I mainly wanted of syllable and year, he reckons. But he always thought of him- to turn people on about lines of poems!” he self as a poet by vocation. “I don’t know what says—to create for others that moment of in- syntax, making else to say except that I was busy,” he says. “A sight he’d had writing about Frost at Amherst lot of the writing I was doing was commenting under Brower. Teaching the poems kept giving meaning in on papers. And that was a terrific part of my life, him more of those moments, too—small realiza- writing comments on people’s papers about po- tions about the machinery of syllable and syn- Wordsworth, in ems.” tax at work in making meaning, line by line, in Both books included a few translations of Wordsworth, in Shakespeare, in Stevens. He was Shakespeare, others’ lyric poems. But it wasn’t until he was at work on revising his dissertation, and also on in Stevens. approached by William Moran, Harvard’s long- the poems that would turn into his first collec- time professor of Assyriology, that he consid- tion, On the Way to the Island. The Kenyon Review published his very first ered translating anything longer. Their children knew each other poems in 1955, another group in 1957, and the book appeared in 1960. as teenagers; the Ferrys and the Morans ended up close friends. Ferry now says he thinks only about half the poems are any good (He writes about Moran’s health troubles in old age, wracked by (“and that half is very good!” he says, laughing); still, writing in Po- Parkinson’s, in the poem “Brunswick, Maine, Early Winter, 2000.”) etry in 1961, James Wright described it as “light lyric which suddenly Moran wanted to see if Ferry might be able to make poetic English flares with poetry because of the depths of feeling which are deftly, out of the Epic of Gilgamesh. He gave Ferry a word-for-word transla- and yet inevitably, exposed.” tion of the opening passage of the epic—“where the goddess Ishtar hits on Gilgamesh and Gilgamesh turns her down”—and the poet erry met Anne davidson when she arrived at Welles- started to smooth it out, to turn it into real English. It felt stilted ley’s English department to teach in 1956. Born a New at first. But he realized that breaking it up into two-line stanzas FYorker, she had graduated from Vassar in 1951 and studied of iambic pentameter—a kind of marriage of blank verse with he- for her Ph.D. in English at Columbia under the seventeenth-cen- roic couplets—gave it life and drive. It isn’t quite translation, he tury specialist Marjorie Hope Nicolson; she wrote on John Milton disclaims: “I call it a really dodgy word: a rendering.” The render- (the dissertation would become a book, Milton’s Epic Voice, in 1963). ing ended up being published by FSG after Ferry’s Wellesley col- She and Ferry married in 1958; beginning that year, she taught league Frank Bidart, A.M. ’67, introduced him to Jonathan Galassi; sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature at Harvard it appeared just before Ferry’s third book of poems, Dwelling Places. for eight years, but spent the majority of her career as a profes- He might have stopped translating there, but his Gilgamesh sor of English at Boston College. She wrote seven ambitious and caught the eye of the classicist Donald Carne-Ross, then at Bos- engaging books, all on poetry, including The Inward Language, on the ton University; he asked if Ferry would be interested in translat- Renaissance sonnet; The Title to the Poem; and By Design: Intention in ing a few of Horace’s odes—and eventually, the poet decided to Poetry, released posthumously. Anne Ferry’s poetic scholarship translate them all. He asked for help from Wendell Clausen, Pope complemented and furthered her husband’s poetic practice: “Like professor of the Latin language and literature and professor of mine,” he says, “her work is almost always in one way or another comparative literature emeritus; by the time Ferry was nearing about lines.” They had a literary marriage, a working marriage— the end of the Odes, Clausen suggested that he might enjoy trans- both teachers, both writers, he a poet, she a critic. Anne appears lating Virgil’s Eclogues. Knowing them only secondhand through in some of his poems—quietly, to the side, as if in cameo—and English pastoral, Ferry said yes. Then, with the Eclogues done, his always in his dedications, often with epigrams. In dedicating his curiosity brought him to the Georgics. He contacted Lane professor collection Of No Country I Know, he writes simply, “For Anne,” and of the classics Richard Thomas for help, and Thomas—who had then translates a brief excerpt from the sixteenth-century collec- just finished a two-volume commentary on theGeorgics —obliged. tion of Scottish poetry known as the Bannatyne Manuscript: The help of all the consulting classicists shows in the translations My married heart shall never turn from her themselves, which often reflect the most recent academic under- Unto another so long as my five wits standing of the poetry. His genially erudite introductions also Shall last, whose whole consent is given to her manage to condense a good deal of scholarship into a small space. Until death’s rage shall cleave me to the root. Thus within just a decade, Ferry found that he had wandered So shall I love her ever, in spite of what- into translating some of the most substantial texts in Latin lit- Soever circumstance can do to us. erature—texts that had badly needed a poetic rather than liter- God grant I go to the grave before she goes. al-minded hand attending to them. Fellow poet Peter Campion

Harvard Magazine 55 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 praised Ferry’s Georgics in a review for Poetry: “Hearing such genuine The lines look like iambic pentameter, but they’re actually poetry through our current drone of Translationese feels like [a] more flexible (it’s hard to scan “Or rather… lake” without six shock...It’s alive!” At Harvard, Richard Thomas now uses Ferry’s stresses); they gently undulate and bend, first straining at what version of the Georgics as readings in his General Education course the meter will allow (“At the lake | through a tall | screen of | ever on translation: “I’ve found the way he uses his own poetic brilliance | greens”), then snapping back to regularity (“As if | it were | a to give a version of the original [is] a good way of talking about the shim | mering | of heat”). Pastoral tranquility is undermined by difficulty of translation,” he writes in an e-mail. “That poetry is the sense that there is something subtly wrong because it is out of untranslatable is of course a truism, but a poetic version gets you season, as the speaker goes on to say: talking about the ways in which that might not be entirely true.” Yesterday, when I sat here, it was the same, Ferry describes the process as “the English itself inventing ways of The same displaced out-of-season effect. reading, as best it can, the original.” He cites an example from one Seen twice it seemed a truth was being told. of his German translations, of Rilke’s “Song of the Drunkard.” The The poem, read in full, goes on eloquently, unhurriedly tracing poem ends in German with “Ich Narr”—which Ferry translates as a the features of the day: the breeze, the rhythm of the waves, the single blunt word: “Asshole.” “That, I take it, is a close translation,” flicker of cloud. The scene is too unsettling to become sentimen- he insists. “It could also be argued that it’s not…But I think it comes tal. The speaker keeps noticing strange disturbances: despite its closer to the tone of the Rilke than a literal ‘I, fool.’” small size, the lake seems almost to have a tide; the sunlight on The weave of translations and original poems in Ferry’s col- the water is like “emotions / That had been dispersed and scat- lections—which began in Dwelling Places and flowers fully inBe - tered and now were not.” wilderment—creates a sense of wandering among the dead with Suddenly a single analogy extends dramatically, and the poem the help of a channeler, all the more so because he does not switch starts to speak of itself: voice drastically to become Horace or Virgil, Baudelaire or Rilke. … The surface of the page is like lake water, Themes from other poems slide into his own: in Bewilderment’s “ To That takes back what is written on the surface, Where,” after presenting a translated excerpt from the Aeneid, he And all my language about the lake and its casts himself as a kind of Aeneas, carrying his mother and father Emotions or its sweet obliviousness, on his back, searching for Anne. Elsewhere, he writes: “Orpheus, Or even its being like an origination, I, stepped back in nameless fear,” echoing against the Orpheus Is all erased with the changing of the breeze myth that he translates just pages earlier: Or because of the heedless passing of a cloud. Alone he roamed the Hyperborean North The allusions grow denser; the poem calls to mind Catul- And wandered along the snowy banks of the Don lus (“one ought to write it in running water”), Keats (“Here lies Or through the barren frozen fields on the sides one whose name was writ in water”), Matthew Arnold’s sea of Of Riphaean mountains, in grief for his lost wife faith, Yeats’s troubled stream. But even apart from that invoca- And Hades’ empty promise… tion of literary heritage, this long comparison suddenly explains Virgil, Georgics 4 the sense that there is something not right in the day’s being so The book follows logically from all his earlier work, and yet warm. That warmth is at odds with the poet’s state of mind. He somehow surpasses it. Rather than an impulse merely to invoke has been inscribing his feelings on the lake as he watched it—the a favorite poem, there is an ache to speak through what has been lake that is too calm, too unrippled to preserve emotion or mean- said by others once before; poetic ego dissolves. ing on its surface. It is an elaborate turn of thought: it’s the failure of the lake to hold a memory stable that makes it an appropri- Gradually, it emerges that Ferry still keeps a busy schedule. ate metaphor for his current troubled state of mind. Everything is Earlier this spring, he went to Ireland to give a talk and a reading painfully temporary, vulnerable to the lightest of touches—that at a Dublin literary festival; he continues to make the circuit around “heedless passing of a cloud.” the Boston area, and is of course working on his translation of the On the walls of the pub, the poem ends there. But the published Aeneid. From the conversation at his home, he proceeds to lunch with version adds one final stanza. It describes the loss of life as a loss his daughter and son at Matt Murphy’s, a self-consciously Irish pub of meaning, a kind of erasure: in Brookline Village. Ferry’s poem “Lake Water” is stenciled around When, moments after she died, I looked into her face, the pub’s walls in a single continuous line, tracing a ring around ev- It was as untelling as something natural, eryone inside. This is an old Irish tradition, he says: paint your local A lake, say, the surface of it unreadable, poet’s verses on the walls of your local pub. Its sources of meaning unfindable anymore. “Lake Water” was first published inThe New Yorker in 2008; it’s Her mouth was open as if she had something to say; also one of the poems in Bewilderment. The lake of the title is Lake But maybe my saying so is a figure of speech. Waban, on the Wellesley campus, where the weather is wrong for What Ferry says about verse at large comes back to mind: “The its dramatic time of year: game is to keep it continuous. But your experience of it has to be an It is a summer afternoon in October. experience of line endings, measured.” It’s just as he says about his I am sitting on a wooden bench, looking out own life: writing poetry has been a matter of one line after another, At the lake through a tall screen of evergreens, meaning unfolding bit by bit, even as it also disappears behind him. Or rather, looking out across the plane of the lake, Seeing the light shaking upon the water Spencer Lenfield ’12, a former Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow at this magazine, As if it were a shimmering of heat. … is a Rhodes Scholar studying classics and philosophy at Oxford.

56 May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage Art, books, diverse creations

60 “Wrestling at Every Moment” 61 Off the Shelf 62 Visas and Visions 63 Open Book 65 Grow Up! 67 Chapter & Verse

Net Effects Janet Echelman’s urban sculptures take to the skies. Skies Painted With neuvering com- Unnumbered Sparks puter-generated (2014), in Vancouver, by olivia schwob allowed viewers to models in digital- choreograph its ly rendered space. lighting using their They are part of he works of Janet Echelman might imagine themselves at the center of mobile devices. an international ’87 tend to take on lives of their a distant galaxy. team that includes dozens of others: struc- own. Installed in public spaces Echelman herself is remarkably ground- tural engineers, lacework artisans, fabrica- T from Amsterdam to Sydney, her ed: she speaks in full sentences; her desk tors at a net factory in Washington state sculptures are essentially massive fishing is very neat. To make nebulae out of string who produce the sculptures from digital nets that float high in the air, somewhere is, she says, “damn hard.” That’s why no- plans. Each work has two major compo- between taking off and coming in to land. body had tried it before—the technology nents: the top, a web made of triple-braid- Tucking and weaving into themselves, they has evolved as Echelman has required it ed ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethyl- reveal organic forms; projected colored light to. The completed pieces that reach her in ene (a lightweight fiber 15 times stronger makes them appear internally luminescent. wooden shipping crates are the result of a than steel), gives shape and support to They have a biological essence, but seem finessed industrial-design process. In her the bottom, hanging net panels spun from more expansive than any organism. Gaz- studio in Brookline, Massachusetts, four polytetrafluorethylene (ensuring color ing up through the bright, rippling screen young designers tap away at customized quality and ultraviolet resistance). The of one of Echelman’s installations, viewers state-of-the-art software programs, ma- two halves are then hand-spliced for

Photographs by Ema Peter/Courtesy of Janet Echelman Harvard Magazine 57 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage strength; the whole is carefully calibrated for extreme wind loads and weather conditions. If the Department of Defense starts producing fishing nets or abstract art, it will look to Stu- dio Echelman for pointers. Paradoxically, perhaps, Echel- man’s route has been charted by chance and adaptation. Suffer- ing an eye condition that made reading difficult, she took up Echelman and another 2014 painting at Harvard as a break work, Allegory, that hangs in the University of from paper-heavy government Oregon’s basketball arena. classes. She became enamored Its five distinct forms are of a story about Henri Matisse, meant to suggest the who, unable to hold a brush teamwork between players on the court. in his old age, came up with a cut-paper technique that produced some Echelman ac- of his most radical and lasting work. The knowledges this limitation of her process: rope and textile sculptures evoked the hu- origin myth of Echelman’s current method “I’m no longer the hands; I can’t be,” she man body. Indeed, Echelman’s handmade echoes that story—a painter deprived of says. (A new commission in Boston will mock-ups look like the work of a more joy- paints. While she was stationed in the involve nearly half a million knots.) But to ful Hesse: magnified, manufactured, and Indian village of Mahabalipuram on a her, this development fits within a broader buffeted by wind, they become gestural. Fulbright fellowship, a shipment of her history of public structures: “I think of ca- Echelman’s nets draw energy from the art supplies was lost en route from Cam- thedrals,” she explains: “the multiple gen- tension between these two inspirations: chelman E chelman of Janet courtesy both rikson; upper right: E ma P eter upper right: odd E rikson;

bridge. Pressured by the ticking clock to erations of workers collaborating to create structure and body. “Point and counter- T finish pieces for an exhibition, she looked something bigger than themselves.” point,” she explains. “Without the city, it to the village’s fishing industry for inspi- Dynamism is found elsewhere: once becomes less interesting to me.” ration, and began to fashion volumetric, installed in its site, and juxtaposed with Their flexibility and physicality allow the upper left: contemporary forms with traditional net- unyielding urban architecture, her work nets to respond to forces of wind and other making techniques. comes to life. Echelman wants to create weather—sometimes even changing col- Those first sculptures were fabricated by improbably soft forms that challenge the or—but just as important, their design re- a group of local fishermen, and rigged up monoliths surrounding them. In scale, her flects social context. The commission due to with rope pulleys. In the move to machine- work reflects the influence of artists she hang above Boston’s Rose Kennedy Green- fabrication, Studio Echelman’s signature characterizes as “the big boys from the way for six months, starting in May, draws style loses the artist’s literal, physical touch. ’60s”: a “punch you in the face” school of on the site’s specific history: the Green- public intervention that includes Richard way fills part of the crater left by the Big Dig, Day and night renderings of the sculpture Serra, whose minimalist sheet-metal mon- which sought to reverse the damage of ear- that will hang over Boston’s Greenway from uments seem more at home on a city block lier urban renewal but disrupted city life for May to October 2015. Its colored banding evokes the lanes of traffic that ran through than her own nets do. Echelman’s tone is a decade. Critics remain skeptical about the the neighborhood before the Big Dig. closer to that of Eva Hesse, whose intimate Greenway’s ability to reactivate the area as a human environment, but Echelman is giving it her best shot. She hopes, through the net’s design, both to acknowledge that history and to “knit the city back together,” providing a landmark around which the healing process can organize itself. Ultimately, Echelman is driven by what she calls a work’s “social potential.” She is always looking out for new ways to make her installations interactive: Vancouver’s Skies Painted With Unnumbered Sparks (2014) incorporated software that gave viewers control over the light projections via their mobile devices; another recent collaboration used dancers’ bodies to control the

chelman E chelman of Janet courtesy nets’ movements, opening up future kin-

58 May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 “The Murty Classical Library is uncovering India’s dazzling literary history . . . It illuminates lost things, brings back to recognition texts that were once crucial.” —Neel Mukherjee, New Statesman Photography and the The Ocean, the Bird, and The Poetry of John Milton Art of Chance the Scholar Gordon Teskey Robin Kelsey Essays on Poets and Poetry “We feel by the end that the critic “With great originality, Kelsey Helen Vendler too has revealed himself as shows that photography’s history “In this triumphant collection, artist, and that the reading itself is entangled with the history of Vendler reminds us why she is has declared its own liberating chance, and he complicates our one of the most important living power. This book has that kind of understanding of the medium in a scholars of poetry.” aesthetic energy.” refreshing way.” —Publishers Weekly —Nigel Smith, —Douglas R. Nickel, (starred review) Princeton University Brown University New in cloth New in cloth Belknap Press | new in cloth PAPERBACKS

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esthetic possibilities. Only when viewers called—depending on whom you ask—the on the grass underneath: pedestrians dart- make a work their own does she consider “Anemone”, the “Fishermen’s Monument”, ed across three lanes of traffic just to lie unit a success. One early installation, a per- or the “Patron Saint” of Porto. Echelman’s der it and look up at the sky. “The work’s manent red and white vortex billowing favorite photograph of the installation fea- not alive in the white box of a gallery,” she over a traffic circle in Porto, Portugal, is tures men in dark business suits sprawling says. “The public completes it.”

ative thesis in poetry, while maintaining Matthew Aucoin an active presence on the extracurricular music scene. Afterward, he matriculated in Juilliard’s composition program, but was by his own estimate “a derelict grad student.” Opportunities beckoned beyond the classroom—assistant conducting at the Metropolitan Opera and the Rome Opera, an apprenticeship with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—and so, feeling confined by conservatory culture after four years of the liberal arts, he says, “I ran away screaming.” (He still managed to complete a graduate diploma.) Composing opera allows him to pursue both language and sound, but he takes them one at a time. Aucoin always starts with the libretto: “I want to approach it as a stranger, who slowly becomes intimate with how the language works.” He hopes to upend a few commonly held beliefs— that English is a bad language for opera; that lyrics should act as “the subservient wife” to music—and cites the example “Wrestling at of W.H. Auden and Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. In it, he says, “There are two rhythms, and two kinds of music, wres- Every Moment” tling at every moment. A lesser composer might have said, ‘Give me something A young composer, finding his next notes sweet, and flowing, and easy,’ and that’s what a lesser poet would have done. And by sophia nguyen a lesser composer would have done what the words want.” Aucoin has been drawn to American atthew Aucoin ’12 is unspar- of wood and metal, it pushes back at me. poets as operatic subjects: in Hart Crane, ing toward his past work, espe- If I’m just sitting at my desk composing, the protagonist duets with his lover on the cially the operas. Half-kidding, I’m doing what I want rather than what Brooklyn Bridge; in the one-act From Sando- M he claims, “I’d love to just burn the music wants,” Aucoin explains. “I don’t ver, James Merrill and his partner listen to all of it.” He has youthful assurance that he’ll think I would be able to honestly discover a ghostly voice through a Ouija board. The write more and better pieces, but also more a new space without engaging physically.” American Repertory Theater will premiere fuel for the flames than most people his age: Within a single conversation, he will Crossing, about Walt Whitman, at Boston’s he’s composed music since childhood, and alternate between describing music as Shubert Theatre in May. During a Harvard his pieces have been performed in venues something to “wrestle” with, and as some- lecture and recital to introduce the work, from Zurich to Salem, Massachusetts; he’s thing elusive, even delicate, vulnerable to Aucoin spoke of how, in his senior year, also conducted orchestras across America injury through carelessness. Casually de- “I was very much in love with someone. and in Europe. fying the old truism “Writing about mu- Worried that my feelings would be unre- Already he knows his creative rhythms: sic is like dancing about architecture,” he quited, I came to see music as unrequitable “I compose in the morning, and I go until would reject its premise that the world love, and to see that it gains power by its I’m dry.” He tries to write every day, and of literature and the world of sound are very unrequitability.” His opera imagines always at the piano. “I find that if I’m en- essentially separate. At Harvard, Aucoin Whitman in the midst of a midlife crisis, gaging physically with this box, this hunk concentrated in English and wrote a cre- writing mostly journal entries or letters on

60 May - June 2015 Photograph by Jim Harrison Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage

on the job, she finds, but also the my own learning,” and then engages with demands placed on intimate rela- W. B. Yeats, Jorie Graham, Allen Gins- Off the Shelf tionships—deepening insecurity berg, Seamus Heaney, Wallace Stevens, Recent books with Harvard connections and tensions. A.R. Ammons, and many others. New readers of her reviews will discover a firm Matters of faith: How to Read guide in an era when American culture re- After a punishing winter, time for spring the Bible, by Harvey Cox, Hollis mains “as yet too young to prize poetry.” themes: Baseball Maverick, by Steve research professor of divinity (Harper- Kettmann (Atlantic Monthly Press, $25), One, $26.99), combines literary, historical- Speak Now: Marriage Equality on a portrait of the New York Mets’ general scholarly, and activist lenses to engage with Trial, by Kenji Yoshino ’91 (Crown, $26). manager, Richard (“Sandy”) Alderson, the foundational text. Kevin J. Madigan, The author (Warren professor of con- J.D. ’76. It would be fun to eavesdrop Winn professor of ecclesiastical history, stitutional law at NYU, a member of the on his Law School reminiscences with has termed Medieval Christianity: A Board of Overseers, and a married gay Robert D. Manfred Jr., J.D. ’83, now the New History (Yale, $40) a textbook, but man) plumbs Hollingsworth v. Perry. The commissioner of Major League Baseball. it reads as something beyond that dreary case struck down California’s ban on For those tending greenery other than genre; medieval Christianity, he notes same-sex marriage and was the first fed- infields, The Tao of Vegetable Garden- briskly, was by the early seventh century eral trial on the subject. Timely, given the ing, by Carol Deppe, Ph.D. ’74 (Chelsea “the distinguishing and unitive religious and Supreme Court’s current docket. Green, $24.95 paper), is a confidence- cultural mortar of European society.” building guide to the karma of kale. Move, by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Ar- Strategy Rules, by David B. Yoffie, buckle professor of business administra- Starr professor of international business tion (W.W. Norton, $26.95). The subtitle, administration, and Michael A. Cusuma- “Putting America’s infrastructure back in no (Harper Business, $29.99). Yoffie, of the lead,” points beyond filling potholes the Business School, a member of Intel’s and mending bridges. Kanter describes board of directors, and Cusumano, of smart transportation systems that could MIT’s Sloan School, tease out lessons boost competitiveness and prosperity. from Bill Gates ’77, LL.D. ’07 (Microsoft), Andy Grove (Intel), and Steve Jobs (Ap- Something Must Be Done about eppe ple). The leaders’ distinctive traits shape Prince Edward County, by Kristen arol D their companies still: Gates as the prag- Green, M.P.A. ’09 (Harper, $25.99). A matist (hence all those tinkering software veteran journalist revisits her Virginia releases); Grove, the precise engineer and hometown to recount its extreme reac-

manufacturer (ideal for computer chips); tion to Brown v. Board of Education: closing opyright C by © 2014 C and Jobs, the design perfectionist. its public-school system rather than inte- Tao-think: all that winter snow was grating it. A vivid reminder of how things moisture for your summer beans. Two sobering analyses of deteriorating were, not so very long ago. economic prospects and the wrenching Muse, by Jonathan Galassi ’71 (Knopf, conditions of work for many Americans: The Antibiotic Era, by Scott H. Podol- $24.95). A debut novel, focused on pub- In Our Kids: The American Dream sky, associate professor of global health lishing rivals and a poet, by the poet, in Crisis, by Robert D. Putnam, Mal- and social medicine (Johns Hopkins, translator, and president and publisher kin professor of public policy (Simon $34.95). The director of the Center for of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (profiled & Schuster, $28), the author of Bowling the History of Medicine at the Count- in these pages in “High Type Culture,” Alone considers the Port Clinton, Ohio, way Library comprehensively reviews the November-December 1997, page 38). of his boyhood, when socioeconomic “wonder drugs”; attempts to limit their barriers “were at their lowest ebb” in overuse; and the ever-looming issue of The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of a century—and how the rich and poor resistance (see “Superbug: An epidemic Gardens & Ghosts, by Tiya Miles now face “radically disparate” opportuni- begins,” May-June 2014, page 40). ’92 (John F. Blair, $26.95). The author ties. Allison J. Pugh ’88, G ’91, associate (a MacArthur Fellow and University of professor of sociology at the University The Ocean, the Bird, and the Schol- Michigan professor in American culture, of Virginia, conducted deep interviews ar, by Helen Vendler, Porter University Afro-American and African studies, Na- for The Tumbleweed Society: Work- Professor (Harvard, $35). In this collective American studies, and more) turns ing and Caring in an Age of Insecurity tion of essays on poets and poetry, the to fiction to explore Cherokee own- (Oxford, $27.95). Precarious and part- nation’s leading critic begins by accounting ership of black slaves, a subject of her time employment affects not only life for “the three most intense episodes of scholarship, too.

Harvard Magazine 61 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage behalf of soldiers, as he serves as a nurse at Boston’s Gramercy Trio, San Antonio’s a Union hospital. The lyrics borrow from SOLI Chamber Ensemble, the Metro- Explore More his poetry only in snippets—a bit from politan Opera’s New Works program, “The Sleepers,” a verse from “Crossing the composing residency at Dumbarton Brooklyn Ferry” at the show’s climax— Oaks—that Aucoin feels able to take one For more online-only articles on and Aucoin’s restless melodic line makes himself. Introduced to conducting in col- the arts and creativity, see: the familiar words unfold anew. They lege, he’d found it was “a total narcotic don’t feel preordained, but like thoughts in experience. I got into it so fast that it pre- A New Audience open search of answers. cipitated a quarter-life crisis”—he knew for “A Night of Aucoin counts himself lucky to have it was steadier, better-compensated work Storytelling” received a steady stream of commissions than composition. Though he says, “I’d The first Irish thus far. Classical-music institutions are go slightly crazy if I did only one or the “talkie” comes to known to be conservative, leaning on other,” he can now accept fewer orchestra light at the Harvard tried-and-true repertory rather than seek- gigs, and allow himself unbroken time to Film Archive. ing out the work of living composers. “If sit at his piano and write. harvardmag.com/irish-15 you’re working in the classical tradition, That narrative of risk and discovery runs it’s like you’re born rich,” he says. “Your through his recent pieces. In Crossing, Whit- “The Great War at 100” great-great-great-great-grandparents man’s intimacy with a wounded Confeder- Scholars examine the wounds left by came on the Mayflower. You’re that kid. You ate soldier in disguise is electrified by the “the war to end all wars.” harvard- don’t need to work. If you’re an adminis- possibility, or threat, of romance. Second mag.com/war-15 trator born today, you can get fat off Tchai- Nature, a one-act children’s opera premier- kovsky forever. So the question becomes, is ing in Chicago this summer, also has heroes A New Life for Heaney’s Home that any way to live? Do you really feel 100 who dare to venture beyond what’s safe. at Harvard percent alive that way? Take a chance!” he (Asked if he changed his style for younger Adams House members, past and urges, and points out that on Broadway— listeners, Aucoin remarks, “I think kids present, dedicate a suite to the Irish or, for that matter, at Venice’s Teatro La are more musically open than many opera poet who lived among them. harvard- Fenice in the nineteenth century—a single audiences—they’re less likely to complain mag.com/heaney-15 season might produce many forgettable that I don’t sound like Puccini.”) flops, but alsoLa Traviata. “How do we ex- Set on a wrecked Earth where humans pect people to make great work if the con- live in zoo-like protective enclosures, Sec- story: “Biting the apple is what saves you.” dition of every new work is that it must ond Nature tells a dystopian fairy tale in Fitting for a composer at the start of his ca- be great?” he asks. “Of course it’ll be bad which two children meet a monkey who’s reer, these songs of innocence and experi- sometimes. It’s supposed to be.” been growing a real, illegal fruit tree. Au- ence relish the first taste of fresh fruit, and Enough have taken a chance on him— coin calls it a “reverse Garden of Eden” how it instills a restless urge to explore. Visas and Visions Kavita Shah makes music in many idioms. by samantha maldonado

get stopped a lot at borders,” says ied Incan architecture in Peru and worked Kavita Shah Kavita Shah ’07, laughing, “I think they in Brazilian favelas. Reflecting her varied think I’m smuggling drugs because they experiences, her sound challenges the dustani solfège); the Indian tabla (a hand “see my I passport and they’re like, ‘You boundaries of geographic territories and drum similar to the bongo) and West Af- travel a lot. Why? Where do you go, and musical genres. rican kora (a type of lute) appear in the what do you do?’” She first experienced different musical instrumentation of her debut album, Vi- A jazz singer, composer, and arrang- structures and traditions as a member of sions. On it, the suite “Rag Desh” begins er, Shah plays gigs around her home- the Young People’s Chorus of New York with a rhythm from the tabla and spoken town, New York City, and has performed City, which performed folk songs, gospel, vocals called tabla bols, used in Hindustani throughout North America and Europe. Western classical music, and children’s classical music to vocalize the different She spent childhood summers in India, opera. Today, Shah sings in a number of sounds of the instrument, then concludes her parents’ native country; as a Latin languages, including English, Portuguese, with “Meltdown”: a bluesy, moody tune American studies concentrator, she stud- Cape Verdean Creole, and sargam (Hin- that deconstructs the traditional raga, or

62 May - June 2015 Photograph by Julien Charpentier/Courtesy of Kavita Shah Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage Harvard Chair At certain moments, creative o p e n b o o k sparks fly. How this came to pass at one such moment is the subject of The Fellowship: The Literary Lives An Oxford of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Wil- liams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Efflorescence $30), by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, Ph.D. ’84, professor of world religions at Smith College. This handsome chair is a true”classic” detailed Their massive portrait enfolds the Christian writer (Lewis), mythmaker and Old with the silk screen Harvard school or house English scholar (Tolkien), historian of language (Barfield), and publisher and super- shield of your choice. The chairs are made naturalist (Williams), among others. From the prologue: entirely of solid maple hardwood. Reg $660 / Member Price $594 During the hectic middle decades of polyvalent talents…won out. By the time S&H $70.00 within the continental USA the twentieth century…a small circle of the last Inkling passed away on the eve intellectuals gathered on a weekly ba- of the twenty-first century, the group k sis in and around Oxford University to had altered…the course of imaginative Veritas XL Tote Bag drink, smoke, quip, cavil, read aloud their literature (fantasy, allegory, mythopoetic works in progress, and endure or enjoy tales), Christian theology and philosophy, with as much grace as they could mus- comparative mythology, and the scholar- ter the sometimes blistering critiques ly study of the Beowulf author, of Dante, that followed. This erudite club included writers and painters, philologists and physicians, historians and theologians, soldiers and actors. They called themselves, with typical self-effacing humor, 100% cotton canvas with embroidered 4” design, reinforced handles, internal/external pockets. the Inklings. 16.5” x 14” x 9.5”. Novelist John Wain, Purchase Reg. $65/Member Price $4999 a member of the group who achieved notoriety k in midcentury as one of C.S. Lewis J.R.R. Tolkien England’s “angry young Enamel Cufflinks men,” remembers the Inklings as “a circle of instigators, al- Spenser, Milton, courtly love, fairy tale, most of incendiaries, meeting to urge and epic; and drawing as much from their one another on in the task of redirecting scholarship as from their experience of the whole current of contemporary art a catastrophic century, they had fash- and life.” Yet the name Inklings, as J.R.R. ioned a new narrative of hope amid the Tolkien recalled it, was little more than ruins of war, industrialization, cultural Harvard “Veritas” University Enamel Cufflinks with a “pleasantly ingenious pun…suggesting disintegration, skepticism, and anomie.… crest and chain back. Choose Harvard College or people with vague or half-formed intima- They were…lovers of logos (the ordering Harvard Business School. Made in England. tions and ideas plus those who dabble power of words) and mythos (the regen- Purchase Reg. $80/Member Price $72 in ink.” The donnish dreaminess thus erative power of story), with a nostalgia hinted at tells us something important for things medieval and archaic and a about this curious band: its members saw distrust of technological innovation that themselves as no more than a loose asso- never decayed into the merely antiquar- ciation of rumpled intellectuals, and this ian. Out of the texts they studied and the modest self-image is a large part of their tales they read, they forged new ways to charm. But history would record…that convey old themes—sin and salvation, their ideas did not remain half-formed despair and hope, friendship and loss, For ordering and shipping information nor their inkblots mere dabblings. Their fate and free will…. call: 1-800-368-1882, fax: 1-800-242-1882, or shop our online catalog: www.thecoop.com

Photographs ©The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images Harvard Magazine 63 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746

Montage melody, introduced earlier. Shah was on a college study-abroad program in Brazil, working in a rural town that was previously a quilombo, a runaway slave community, when she was asked the question that has shaped her career ever since. A resident whom Shah had befriended turned to her one day and said, “You, now that you’ve seen all these things, what are you going to do about it?” Although she’d thought they had a lot in common, she realized she would return home to a reality starkly different from his, and that her ability to travel—around the globe, and back to the United States—brought responsibility to tell stories that conveyed what she’d seen. After graduation, she held a series of jobs in journalism and the nonprofit sector while she considered graduate or law school, but music was always on her mind. “I think I ing them to music from around the world. Shah recently toured with the ensemble always knew in my heart that this is what Her interpretations of jazz standards like for Visions, which included piano, bass, guitar, and mridangam, a two-headed drum I wanted to do,” she says, “but it took some Wayne Shorter’s “Deluge,” and pop songs from southern India. time to muster up the courage, and also the like Stevie Wonder’s “Visions,” and Joni know-how, to take that plunge.” Mitchell’s “Little Green,” can reach audi- few lines. Shah sings, “Fly like paper, get A chance encounter on the subway with ences otherwise uninterested in jazz, or high like—/catch me on the border I’ve got legendary jazz singer Sheila Jordan pro- unfamiliar with the instruments she uses. visas in my—”: the music speaking for her. vided the push she needed. “The train doors Her version of the rapper and pop singer Where the original is sung with unapolo- opened and she was literally right in front M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” reimagines the 2007 getic confrontation, Shah’s tone is playful of me. I started talking to her. It was so ser- hit, pulling in saxophone and having a and welcoming, as if she’s inviting listeners endipitous,” Shah says. Along with words tabla beat replace the final word of the first to traverse the boundaries with her. of encouragement, Jordan gave her music lessons and introduced her to other young musicians. Soon after, Shah enrolled in a master’s program in jazz performance at the Manhattan School of Music, where she re- Grow Up! fined her technique and explored her voice, asking herself what experiences and ideas A philosopher’s take on individuals and maturity, she could bring to jazz that others couldn’t. in a world of institutions For her pre-graduation recital in 2012, she gathered an ensemble that included a string by harry r. lewis quartet, a jazz rhythm section, a tabla, and a kora to perform her arrangements. Later, she reached out to Lionel Loueke, an Afri- riting in the Harvard have in the United States seventy millions can jazz guitarist who’s performed on two Monthly in 1894, philoso- of people seized with the desire of abso- of Herbie Hancock’s albums; he became phy professor George San- lutely resembling one another in dress, a mentor and collaborator, as well as a co- W tayana, A.B. 1886, tried to speech, habits, and dignities, and not one producer of Visions, released last year. The account for the peculiar appeal of athletics great or original man among them, except, album’s sprawling, multilayered sonic land- in institutions of higher learning. The usual perhaps, Mr. Edison.” Athletics are a form scape was praised as a “sparkling debut” by explanations were too facile, he thought— of resistance to the machine that grinds us The Boston Globe and said by Connecticut’s that sports are good for the health of the up and homogenizes us as we reach adult- WNPR to reflect “the insatiably curious participants, that watching a game is better hood. They are “the most conspicuous and mind of an ethnographer, the soul of a poet, than doing nothing when we have nothing promising rebellion and the eye of a painter.” else to do, and so on. “Motives are always against this indus- Why Grow Up? Subversive To Shah, her album answers the ques- easy to assign, unless we wish to get to the trial tyranny.…While Thoughts for an Infantile tion posed to her in Brazil: by creating real one.…We make ourselves cheap to make we are young, and as Age, by Susan Neiman complex but accessible arrangements, she ourselves intelligible.” The paradox required yet amount to noth- ’77, Ph.D. ’86 (Farrar, wants to expand her audience’s concep- a philosophical analysis. ing, we retain the Straus & Giroux, $18) tion of what jazz can be, while connect- The real appeal of athletics is that “we privilege of infinite

Photograph by Jason Gardner/Courtesy of Kavita Shah Harvard Magazine 65 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage potentiality. The poor actuality has not yet up properly, we would remain free forever. in some detail,” she gravely forewarns us. “I taken its place, and in giving one thing has She takes a dim view of the cultural ide- will show how Rousseau and Kant set the made everything else for ever unattainable. alization of youth, and the denigration of terms of discussion, before exploring what But in youth the intellectual part is too im- adulthood as a series of compromises. In makes growing up even harder in the twen- mature to bear much fruit; that would come fact, she says, we do no one a favor by pre- ty-first century.” later if the freedom could be retained.” The tending that youth is the best time of our This is not the place for a counter- chief value of athletics, Santayana argued in lives. “By describing what is usually the critique of Rousseau, Kant, or any of the “Philosophy on the Bleach- others Neiman interprets ers,” is that “they are the with some reverence (Si- first fruits of that spontane- mone de Beauvoir, Marga- ous life, of which the higher ret Mead, Hannah Arendt, manifestations are not suf- and Paul Goodman in par- fered to appear.” ticular, with occasional Why Grow Up? by Susan nods to Hume and Locke). Neiman ’77, Ph.D. ’86, now But she selectively forgives director of the Einstein the obvious problems with Institute in Potsdam, Ger- their educational prescrip- many, is another philoso- tions. Emile gets his edu- pher’s take on questions cation from a tutor who is of maturation and obliga- extremely careful to keep tion, of mass conformity all culture—all books, ev- and individual freedom. In erything—away from his spite of the birthday bal- pupil. The boy is supposed loons on the cover, this is to figure everything out not a book aimed at loafing for himself, because “every college students. It neither step in an education for preaches self-improvement freedom should be freely nor goads readers into act- chosen,” as Neiman tells us. ing like grown-ups. Nor is By the same token, children it a guide for frustrated par- should not be chastised, ents about talking to their but left to wail about the spoiled post-adolescent consequences of their own children. There is some ad- actions. “If the child is to be vice (of questionable wis- educated for freedom,” she dom, as we shall see) about explains, “he must be edu- how to grow up. But for cated to submit to nothing the most part the book is but the demands of nature.” more an analysis of why we Though Neiman acknowl- should bother, when we edges that such tutelage seem to idolize people with is wildly dissonant with the most time and money to Rousseau’s abandonment enjoy grown-up toys (or even, in the case of hardest time of one’s life as the best one,” of his own five children, all that proves to Michael Jackson, childish toys). she writes, “we make that time harder for her is that the man was imperfect, not that The book is a treatise on the relevance of those who are going through it.” his ideas were wrong. Rousseau, Neiman the Enlightenment tradition to this ques- Instead, Neiman says, we need to reach tells us, “was the first who dared to ask: tion, as stated on the second page: “Can back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile to what if we could have it all?” philosophy help us to find a model of ma- understand how the West came to under- turity that is not a matter of resignation?” stand childhood. The Gedankenexperiment Jump to the present day. Education is the Neiman’s argument is opposite to San- Rousseau set himself in Emile is “raising an first of Neiman’s three instruments of mat- tayana’s. It’s not, as Santayana has it, that ordinary boy under conditions that will uration, and she waxes rhapsodic over pro- the “atrophy of the spontaneous and imagi- lead him to become a genuinely free adult.” gressive schools—they rarely outlast their native will” is inevitable when we “sell our Neiman gives us a careful parsing not only of founders, but “tireless and hopeful educators birthright for a mess of pottage, and the an- Rousseau on maturation, but of several oth- and parents continue to create new ones.” Of cestral garden of the mind for building lots” ers. The “historical backgrounds” chapter is course, she notes, there is an alternative: par- soon after leaving college. Neiman argues professional but ponderous. “The problems ents can educate their own children. “Those instead that we let social forces, advertising and promise of Rousseau’s Emile—philoso- with time and resources may choose to edu- in particular, trap us in a permanently puer- phy’s only full-length attempt at a manual cate their children at home,” she blithely of- ile state—and if we had the courage to grow for coming of age—will be examined later fers, “but most of us will scrounge for the best

66 May - June 2015 Illustration by Phil Bliss Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage alternative at hand. We’d prefer a school that cultivates our children’s autonomy,” following Kantian principles—free in all matters c hapter & verse (though it’s okay to stop a child from grab- Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words bing a knife), and so on. Is this advice harmlessly idealistic? Surely the time and resources required are Patrick Powers would like to learn liable) is that one of the ancient Greek not the only problems with home school- the name of the physicist who alleg- philosophers may have been the author.” ing; even parents who are skeptical of the edly declared, “This is not nuts, this is curricula of traditional schools think their supernuts,” on viewing the launch of the Luis Harss hopes someone can iden- children learn something from being social- prototype of a space ship powered by tify a poem, vaguely remembered and ized with others, if only the useful skills nuclear explosions. The pronouncement possibly Arabic, that describes how of compromise and cooperation. In actual appears in the book Who Got Einstein’s “The bird of sleep / came down to nest practice, home schooling sounds like a ter- Office? by Ed Regis. in your eyes / but seeing your lashes / rible way to develop autonomy. And I am thought they were nets / and took flight” skeptical that 12-year-olds, let’s say, so- Julian Kitay seeks a source for the fol- (or possibly “fright”). cialized in the culture of ordinary 12-year- lowing assertion: “You cannot convince a olds, should really be left alone to make man of his error when his error is him- Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter serious life choices on their own. self” (possibly phrased instead as “A man and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Similar problems challenge Neiman’s cannot be convinced of his error…”). Street, Cambridge 02138, or via e-mail to advice about travel, her second instru- Kitay adds that his “recollection (not re- [email protected]. ment of maturation. Travel is essential, she says, but must be carried out freely—not, for example, in college study-abroad pro- the basis of human happiness.” Carpentry for freedom rather than tradition will grams, which “send young people abroad is her canonical example of good work, keep alive such stabilizing institutions as with the promise of learning in and from though she acknowledges that we can’t all the universities that preserve philosophi- another culture, and keep them in condi- survive by making tables for each other. cal analysis, or “those wise restraints that tions under which they cannot possibly Neiman has nothing good to say about make us free” that our law graduates are do so.” Fair enough; as Horace put it in the institutions of any kind (except labor supposed to fashion. first century b.c.e., aelum non animum mutant unions, perhaps). We tell children that To be sure, the spirit of youthful free- qui trans mare currunt (those who go running their questions will be answered in school, dom is too often corrupted commercial- across the sea change their climate but she says, “and we send them to institutions ly: as Neiman wonders about Kant and Coke, I can well imagine what Santayana Taking a dim view of the cultural idealization of would think of the Ohio State-Oregon football youth, Neiman says we do no one a favor by championship game. But Visit harvardmag. the maturational ten- com/extras to read George Santayana’s pretending that it is the best time of our lives. sion never discussed is “Philosophy on the between stability and Bleachers.” not their mind). But are fences and over- that will dull their desire to pose questions spontaneity, between population really, as Neiman suggests, the at all.” Corporations are bad, too. Neiman respect for tradition and the impish urge main problems with young people sleep- imagines what Kant would have thought for creative destruction. These are, in my ing in haylofts half a world from home, as about Coca-Cola funding “public” schools experience, the challenging part of uni- she describes de Beauvoir doing? It’s de- in exchange for exclusive pouring rights— versity life in what Neiman rightly calls batable whether youth travel is less safe indeed a startling and absurdist image, an infantile age, and she gave me no help today than it used to be or whether we reminiscent of the scene in Dr. Strangelove in with them. are simply more risk-averse, but surely as- which Colonel Guano warns Group Cap- sault, robbery, abduction, terrorism, and tain Mandrake that he’s “gonna have to Harry R. Lewis, interim dean of the School of En- so on are reasonable worries. answer to the Coca-Cola Company” if the gineering and Applied Sciences and past dean of Work, finally, is the hardest instru- soda machine is damaged in the course of Harvard College, is Gordon McKay professor of ment of maturation to square with per- preventing nuclear holocaust. computer science. Long involved in undergraduate sonal freedom, and here Neiman’s political I failed to notice a single positive char- admissions and athletics, among other aspects of sympathies become apparent. She rues acterization of any enduring institution— College life, he has written popularly on such sub- “the alienation of labor,” “planned obso- no state, business, or long-lasting educa- jects in Excellence Without a Soul: Does lescence,” and “weakened unions,” and tional institution comes in for admiration. Liberal Education Have a Future? and was defines neo-liberalism as “the view that We can grant the exaggerated importance coeditor, with Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, of What free unregulated markets producing ever- of soft drinks in contemporary society, Is College For? The Public Purpose of increasing amounts of shoddy goods are while still wondering how children raised Higher Education.

Harvard Magazine 67 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 alumni alumni “The Risk of Inaction” Alex Laskey and Daniel Yates want to transform the electric industry.

by nell porter brown

re you a “Steady Eddy,” “Twin ity users came from Opower’s analysis of utility clients better maintain reliability, Peaker,” or a “Night Owl”? A soft- what is probably the world’s largest data- comply with efficiency mandates now in ware company called Opower has set of residential electricity use, together effect in more than 30 states,and spend a identified what times of the day with information derived from such sourc- lot less to fire up primarily coal-burning Aa large swath of American households typi- es as the U.S. Census and weather statis- generators to meet periods of peak de- cally use the most electricity—and is help- tics. The data encompass more than 40 mand. In time, ideally, these interventions ing consumers change their usage in order to percent of American homes and have also will enable the utilities to build fewer save power and money. Steady users tend to shown that one commonality—past inter- new generating plants (whether coal- or be home all day, whereas Twin Peakers’ de- actions—correlates with energy reduction natural-gas-burning)—and thus save the mand spikes in the morning and then again across all demographic segments. Custom- companies, their owners, and electricity shortly after dinner. ers who have interacted with the utility, customers billions of dollars while lessen- The ultimate payoff for this combined use e.g., called to question a bill or report loss ing environmental degradation. of big data and behavior science, in econom- of power, “are far more likely to interact Opower has 580 employees and went ic and environmental terms, could be enor- the next time,” explains Yates, a computer public last April (and expects to turn a mous. “To date we have reduced consump- scientist; in other words, “we have found profit in 2017). Like competitors such as tion by six terawatt hours,” says Opower that everybody will respond—that is, re- C3Energy and Tendril, it is at the forefront president Alex Laskey ’99, who co-founded duce consumption—if they are engaged.” of helping traditionally stolid, regulated the Arlington, Virginia, company with CEO Understanding energy use by time of monopolies transform how they do busi- Daniel Yates ’99 in 2007. “Last year alone we day, place, and household (and probably ness and stay viable in the face of multiple saved close to three terawatt hours. Just more personal parameters in the future), threats: flat U.S. demand, public pressure to compare, the Hoover Dam—one of the enables Opower’s nearly 100 electric-util- on rates and on the siting of new facili- country’s largest hydroelectric power sourc- ity clients in the United States, Great Brit- ties, challenges of managing intermittent es—produces 3.9 terawatt hours a year. So ain, Japan, and other countries, to more renewable-energy sources and distributed we are catching up in terms of impact.” precisely target their customers. They generation (such as rooftop solar panels The behavioral patterns among electric- can promote customized information and on homes), and the increasingly complex An office blackboard reflects Opower’s timely messages about how to reduce con- and uncertain energy markets around the effort to encourage creativity. sumption—the day before that 95-degree world. Yates would add one more inhibit- heat wave starts, for example—and also ing factor: “the industry itself.” The resis- thank customers: thus building positive tance is generally the result of “massive in- relationships, the critical engagement fac- stalled bases and capital investments built tor that spurs more energy savings. out over almost a century that they are If consumers save, the utilities and loathe to watch the value deteriorate on,” power generators can potentially save even he adds. (See Harvard scholar Mara Pren- more. Opower does not work directly on tiss’s perspective on these issues in “Alter- the issue of power generation, nor does it ing Course,” page 46.) “They are struggling. “go beyond the meter,” says Yates, as in in- And they don’t have a ton of regulatory stalling smart devices that record electric support to help them transition or to allow energy consumption and send the informa- innovation. So what we are seeing is that tion back to a utility, or engage in any other the risk of inaction has now, in most cases, hardware solutions. Instead, the company eclipsed the risk of action.” Their effective, figures out the best ways to measure and efficient operation obviously matters to the manage demand for electricity, and per- economy and society at large. suade people to change habits, largely by Opower is allied with the old incum- creating lively, gratifying ways to commu- bents, yet Yates and Laskey compare their nicate with users. This, in turn, helps their company to upstarts in other industries

68 May - June 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 alumni such as Zipcar, which can help people degradation. That’s still their overarching participate in providing new, larger-scale forgo car-ownership, and Airbnb, which goal. They would like to see the big, for- renewable sources of supply. There are may ultimately mean that fewer hotels are profit utilities be allowed to aggressively some exceptions; Opower clients, includ- built. “Instead of producing new power compete in the renewables markets (solar, ing Sacramento Municipal Utility District plants and new electricity,” says Laskey, wind, hydroelectric, and other alternative and Southern California Edison, are pro- “we are helping utilities use their own cus- sources of electrical power), Laskey says, if gressively grappling with how to move tomers as an asset and changing the way only because those companies already have forward. Shifting business to distribution electricity is used and when.” the distribution system and could poten- and customer service (versus generation) Their brand of more personalized com- tially operate products and services on a at least puts utilities in a better position munications is already helping client Bal- large scale. “The planet and country need to “accommodate new kinds of energy timore Gas and Electric (BGE) manage them to be in a place to do that,” he ex- resources,” he explains, “because you are what’s called “demand response”: the goal, plains. “It’s one thing for Tesla electric-car going to need a more sophisticated grid to reduce peak-use among customers on the hottest days, when air conditioners are blasting. A pilot program there yielded a 5 percent decrease among participating households in 2013 (2014 results have not been released). This summer, the campaign will be extended to more than one million customers. It works like this: the evening before a peak-use day, customers are alerted by text, e-mail, or a phone call and provided with information on their usage compared to their neighbors’, and what they can do to cut consumption (and their bills) during peak hours. The day after the peak event, if a reduction occurred, BGE recognizes the behavioral change and credits a rebate. The system depends on BGE- installed smart meters, which measure and report almost real-time electricity usage, but do not (yet) link use to specific actions, like turning on the air conditioner. “The follow-up is critical,” notes Laskey, a former political strategist who is particularly adept at persuasive communications. “It reinforces the habit, says thank you, and ensures they notice the $8 rebate when the owners to buy their own charging stations, Yates (left) and Laskey have merged their high bill comes in a few weeks.” Opower but if we are going to make a dent in cli- talents—computer science and political communications—in Opower. has helped run other peak-use pilot pro- mate change, utilities need to be a part of grams in Vermont, Michigan, and Cali- the solution.” A handful of states have re- to handle the ebbs and flows of more in- fornia in which the utilities did not offer quired utilities, including some of the big- termittent renewable resources.” (A solar- monetary incentives. Instead, the firm bol- ger, investor-owned companies, to decouple based system works when the sun shines, stered communications and “engagement” generation from distribution. “Eversource and not otherwise—presenting problems and made good use of what Laskey calls and National Grid, for example, which serve that do not arise from running fossil-fu- their “time-tested social-norms model,” Massachusetts, own very little if any gen- eled or nuclear-power plants in response which shows that people will change to eration,” says Laskey. “So they make their to demand.) “You may need district stor- fit in with the surrounding norm: they will business on maintaining a reliable grid and age facilities for neighborhood batteries, keep up, or down, as in this case, with the helping the customer use energy at appro- essentially,” Laskey adds, “and those are Joneses. “What we found was an average of priate times and using less of it, if it’s appro- the things that right now the disruptive 3 percent reduction at peak without finan- priate.” Whether and how utilities compete providers are doing.” cial incentive,” according to Laskey, “and in renewable energy remains to be seen. Laskey, the son of a former, longtime during the hottest day—in September in Many utilities still view renewables— Brooklyn district attorney and a public- Glendale, California—we got a 5 percent at least household, rooftop solar pan- school teacher, had also planned on a ca- reduction, which was remarkable.” els—as taking money out of their pockets. reer in public service. “I had no interest in And yet the companies generally have becoming a business person,” the former Yates and Laskey originally teamed up to not pushed for restructuring of regula- history of science concentrator notes. He find a way to help mitigate environmental tions that would allow them to more fully and Yates first met at a freshman-year ice-

Photographs by Brooks Kraft Harvard Magazine 69 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 alumni cream social, were friendly throughout runs Little Acre Flowers, an environmen- computer-science concentrator and his their years in Lowell House, but became tally and socially conscious florist. classmate Jay Kimmelman co-founded close only after reconnecting years later Yates, the son of a U.S. Air Force pi- and ran Edusoft, which developed a Web- when both were living in San Francisco lot and a Hebrew-school teacher, was based, standardized-test performance- with their future wives, Rachel Abi Far- raised largely in California; his parents assessment tool. After they sold that com- biarz (Laskey) ’99, an artist, and Tobie E. had grown up poor and “were extremely pany to Houghton Mifflin in 2004 for $40 Whitman (Yates) ’00, who founded and conservative with resources,” he says. The million, Yates took a year off to drive the

Overseer and HAA Greenville, South Carolina. Attorney. Andrew Herwitz ’83, J.D. ’90, New David B. Weinberg ’74, Chicago. York City. President, The Film Sales Director Candidates Chairman and CEO, Judd Enterprises, Company. This spring, alumni can vote for five new Inc. Sharon E. Jones ’77, J.D. ’82, Chicago. Harvard Overseers and six new elected di- John Silvanus Wilson Jr., M.T.S. ’81, President and CEO, OH Community rectors of the Harvard Alumni Association Ed.D. ’82, Ed.D. ’85. Atlanta. President, Partners. (HAA). Morehouse College. William R. Koehler ’87, Shaker Ballots, mailed out by April 1, must Heights, Ohio. Senior financial services be received back in Cambridge by noon For elected director (three-year term): executive. on May 22 to be counted. Election re- Krzysztof Daniewski, M.B.A. ’99, Tracy “Ty” Moore II ’06, Oakland, sults will be announced at HAA’s annual Warsaw. President, Ivy Poland Founda- California. Co-founder, MindBlown meeting on May 28, on the afternoon of tion. Labs. Commencement day. All holders of Har- Paige Ennis, M.P.A. ’10, Washington, Anders Yang, J.D. ’94, Irvine, Califor- vard degrees, except Corporation mem- D.C. Vice president, office of external re- nia. Assistant dean, office of external -re bers and officers of instruction and gov- lations, Atlantic Council. lations, The Paul Merage School of Busi- ernment, are entitled to vote for Overseer Ellen M. Guidera, M.B.A. ’86, Santia- ness, University of California, Irvine. candidates. The election for HAA direc- go, Chile. Investor and director, Portillo Ariel Zwang ’85, M.B.A. ’90, New York tors is open to all Harvard degree-hold- Ski Resort and Tierra Hotels. City. CEO, Safe Horizon. ers. Candidates for Overseer may also be Overseer director nominated by petition by obtaining a prescribed number of signatures from eligible degree-holders. (The deadline for all petitions was February 2.)

For Overseer (six-year term): R. Martin Chavez ’85, S.M. ’85, New York City. CIO and partner, The Gold- R. Martin Fernande Sandra Krzysztof Paige Ennis Ellen M. man Sachs Group, Inc. Chavez R.V. Duffly Edgerley Daniewski Guidera Fernande R. V. Duffly, J.D. ’78, Boston. Associate Justice, Massachusetts Su- preme Judicial Court. Sandra Edgerley ’84, M.B.A. ’89, Brookline, Massachusetts. Nonprofit strategist and community volunteer. Brian Greene ’84, New York City. Pro- fessor of physics and mathematics, Co- Brian Greene Beth Y. Carl F. Muller Andrew Sharon E. William R. lumbia University. Karlan Herwitz Jones Koehler Beth Y. Karlan ’78, M.D. ’82, Los Ange- les. Director, Women’s Cancer Program, Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute; director, division of gynecolog- ic oncology, department of obstetrics and gynecology, Cedars-Sinai Medical Cen- ter; and professor of obstetrics and gynecology, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. David B. John Silvanus Tracy “Ty” Anders Yang Ariel Zwang Carl F. Muller ’73, J.D.-M.B.A. ’76, Weinberg Wilson Jr. Moore II

70 May - June 2015 www.alumni.harvard.edu Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 alumni

Pan-American Highway with Whitman— Opower, which will also operate Puget’s listening to Collapse: How Societies Choose to billing system, anticipates that this feed- Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond ’58, in the back will both improve relationships and car—and saw former Guatemalan rain for- allow the company to anticipate and cut ests that are now prairies. down on call volume. He returned home with a sense of ur- Managing demand and expectations gency about climate change around the go a long way toward smoothing indus- help same time that Laskey, fresh from fin- try transitions such as those that utili- ishing a political campaign in which ties anticipate in California, where state energy issues played a role, felt equally regulations will now require a shift to a inspired to act. While researching po- “time-of-use pricing scheme.” That’s “es- tential nonprofit and for-profit busi- sentially a nights-and-weekends pack- nesses, they came across research by age,” says Yates: it offers incentives to use Robert B. Cialdini, author of Influence: energy at off-peak hours. He and Laskey The Psychology of Persuasion, on what mo- think utilities anxious about compliance tivated people in Southern California to could benefit from having a company like save energy. “They showed conclusively Opower organize communication efforts that if you gave people information about that will give consumers advance notice their energy use that was grounded in these prin- “Nobody has deep familiarity” ciples of normative—or neighbor—comparison, with the notoriously complex and provided targeted recommendations, then morass that is the energy people would change their behavior,” Yates re- industry, but they persevered. calls. “We did the math and realized there was this big efficiency of pending changes and peak-use alerts. market,” historically focused on subsidiz- Yates says reducing California’s peak use ing “light bulbs and refrigerators, that we by even 3 percent would “significantly re- could potentially disrupt with informa- duce the carbon footprint of power plants tion services.” They quickly learned that that California needs to meet its energy “Nobody has deep familiarity” with the demands.” If utilities don’t figure out how notoriously complex morass that is the to do this, he adds, “They will inevitably energy industry, but they persevered. do what they have done before, which (Today, Yates does say he’s finally “over is ask for a three- to five-year delay [in the learning curve.”) implementing the new regulations], and Initially, Opower helped its clients that’s a delay” in improving the environ- send out user-friendly home-energy re- ment. ports that explained how much energy Utilities are often portrayed as the vil- customers were using compared to their lains in climate-change scenarios: the We need YOUR help neighbors. Smiley faces reinforced good image is Montgomery Burns, from The to continue providing behavior. They began to see results, and Simpsons. But the picture is more nuanced, this publication. such energy-efficiency campaigns remain a Laskey and Yates have found. “For more major part of the company’s work: detailed than 130 years we have depended on them home-energy reports go out to 15 million to be reliable, safe, and cheap,” Laskey says. Please make a tax households. It has since added digital ser- “Now, we’re telling them that what they’ve deductible donation vices and improved its behavioral-science been doing is destroying the planet.” Not methodology for peak-use programs, such surprisingly, he has become more sympa- by JUNE 30. as the initiative in Baltimore. In February, thetic to his clients’ plight. “The folks who Opower announced plans to move further run these utilities went into it because they THANK YOU. into customer services: longtime client are providing a public service; they also Puget Sound Energy, which serves tech- went into it to make money,” he suggests, savvy consumers, will use the company’s “and they’ve helped transform our econo- harvardmagazine.com/ consumer data at its call centers to let peo- my and the way we live and made each of donate ple know specifically how they are using our lives better.” Utilities “are not innocent energy and how they can change to save, bystanders,” he adds, “but neither are the like running the dryer at off-peak times. rest of us.”

Harvard Magazine 71 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 The College Pump Loot, Vinegar, Blisters

(background is the view of Reno from our Gone but not forgotten: The main house). We are moving to Laguna Beach, Cambridge Public Library has in its sec- California, and I think it may be time to ond-floor local-history reference room a throw it away—but it is too big for our case filled by the Historical Commission garbage service to take. Do you think the with products once manufactured in Cam- athletic department might have any inter- bridge. There are the paper collars, later re- est in the piece of goalpost as a memento?” placed by innovative paper-and-cloth, made “Your wooden arm you hold outstretched The editors forwarded Altrocchi’s letter close to Harvard Yard on Arrow Street by to shake with passers-by.” to Warren M. “Renny” Little ’55, curator the Reversible Collar Company. Catching (pro bono) of the Lee Family Hall of Ath- the eye also is a bottle that once held Har- all him a preservationist, cer- letic History. He conferred with various vard Vinegar (marked by a red pennant tainly not a thief. This magazine other powers-that-be in Harvard’s athletic with an H for a trademark), made by the got an explanatory note recently establishment, among them director of ath- Harvard Pickle Works, Inc. The label prom- from John Altrocchi ’50, retired letics Robert Scalise, executive director of ises vinegar pressed from fresh apples and Cas a professor of behavioral sciences at the the Harvard Varsity Club Robert Glatz, and “reduced to legal strength.” University of Nevada School of Medicine football coach Tim Murphy. They deliberat- and as a clinical psychologist. He enclosed ed. They weren’t sure just where they would a photograph in which he holds a five-foot- put the piece. Little observed that it could long segment of the goalpost that he and be positioned somewhere so as to point to- Rite of passage: If history repeats, many three co-conspirators “took from grasping ward the Stadium. In the end the conferees of this year’s graduating women will have Yale fans after our big win at home in ’48,” decided that yes indeed, they wanted that entered the real world with sore feet. Ath- he wrote. Their names are painted on the hunk of history. It’s coming home. letic curator Renny Little is also a stalwart relic: classmates and fellow Lowell House “By the way,” Altrocchi added, “if you of the Harvard Alumni Association’s Com- denizens Bob (Carl Robert Wesen), Dick are interested in my bona fides on goalpost mittee for the Happy Observance of Com- (Richard B. Covey), and the late Bill (Wil- shenanigans, here is a picture of me from mencement, and does color commentary liam L. Mobraaten). the Crimson (11/21/49) attempting to paint in the broadcast of the proceedings on the “I have carried this with me,” Altrocchi the Yale goalpost crimson after our disap- afternoon of the day. He reports an en- wrote, “when moving from Cambridge to pointing loss there in ’49. We couldn’t pull counter he had at the grand pageant last Berkeley, to North Lake Tahoe, to Reno the goalpost down because it was made of year. “I got to talk- metal pipe—and covered with ing with a middle- lard! The New Haven police aged woman who were much less tolerant than the had a stethoscope The Pump Overflows: Cambridge police and we barely around her neck and got away.” wore an EMT badge. Visit harvardmag.com/ Altrocchi noted that Harvard’s I noted that I didn’t extras to read about first game of 1949, his senior think she would be astonishing linguist year, was an away game against needed as much as in Calvert Watkins. Stanford in which Harvard lost the past because the 11 starters, and as a result was weather was pretty cool. She replied, “Oh, “creamed” by all the Ivy teams, I’m here with the bandages. These young including Yale, so “the only fun ladies have been wearing flip-flops for four we had was tearing down the years and this is the first time many of them Altrocchi at his home in Reno. The goalpost has to go. goalposts.” have worn high heels.” vprimus v

72 May - June 2015 Photograph courtesy of John Altrocchi Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Letters

LETTERS (continued from page 10) rather than the flm shown as entertain- Amplifications ment. Those who originally arranged the The article “Good Design” (March-April years and touched the life of nearly every showing decided, as a result, to cancel it. 2015) referred incorrectly to the nonproft American,” Faust wrote in This Republic of Beginning the following day there was with which Toshiko Mori Architect (TMA) Suffering. “A military adventure undertaken a major debate that unfolded around the partnered in Senegal as “Le Kinkeliba.” After as an occasion for heroics and glory turned flm and the protest. There were those the French medical nongovernmental orga- into a costly struggle of suffering and loss.” who said that we challenged freedom of nization Le Kinkeliba ceased operations, its We regret if the abbreviated account in speech. Dr. Ewart Guinier, chairman of American affiliate changed its name from The Pump led to any misunderstanding; the Afro-American Studies department, American Friends of Le Kinkeliba to Ameri- Faust has written extensively on many as- came to our defense. In an op-ed published can Friends of Le Korsa—TMA’s partner. pects of the Civil War, and her scholarship in The Harvard Crimson, Guinier compared The article also described the brickwork is widely acclaimed. what we had done with the protests orga- patterns in TMA’s Senegal project as remi- nized by William Monroe Trotter in Bos- niscent of Bauhaus tapestries; they were in Griffith and trotter ton in 1915 when the flm was frst shown. fact meant to evoke the brickwork of Bau- I read with interest the reference to the I wanted to bring this to the attention haus faculty member Josef Albers. The ar- new book by Dick Lehr ’76 on the flm Birth of Harvard Magazine. While I am excited to ticle stated as well that a public interest de- of a Nation (Off the Shelf, March-April, page hear about the publication of Dick Lehr’s sign certifcate program at the University of 64). The blurb says, “The hitherto unreport- book and wish to take nothing away from Minnesota launched last fall. That program’s ed confrontation between the Hollywood him, I think that it is critical to set the re- timeline has been pushed back, and a similar director D.W. Griffith and Monroe Trotter, cord straight. The struggle led by Trotter program—the frst of its kind—has since A.B. 1895, A.M. ’96.” against the flm may not be well known, launched at Portland State University. I found this wording curious. In the fall but it was known. Guinier made sure to Vijay Iyer (Harvard Portrait, March-April, of 1974 I was one of the leaders of a protest remind us of Trotter’s role and why the page 23), is Rosenblatt professor of the arts. against the showing of the flm Birth of a Na- stand that several of us took that fall eve- An editing error caused the misspelling, tion at Adams House. We surrounded the ning in 1974 was the right thing to do. in a caption, of the name of education pro- projector and insisted that if the flm was to Bill Fletcher Jr. ’76 fessor Tina Grotzer (“Computing in the be shown that there should be a discussion Mitchellville, Md. Classroom,” March-April, page 49).

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Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Treasure Pre-Pixel Portraits An exhibition of College class albums

ong before selfies, Harvard graduates had a powerful instinct to preserve their class identities in portraiture: 85 of the 88 members Lof the College class of 1852 traveled to Bos- James M. Freeman ton to sit for daguerreotypes, unique images wrote in his diary about having his picture taken captured on silvered copper plates, collected in 1859; Aaron Molyneaux in a wooden chest (see “Class Act,” Treasure, Hewlett (bottom left), from May-June 1999). That first class “album” and an album image, with gear, was an instructor and curator of successor albums of paper-based salt prints, the Harvard Gymnasium, 1859- through 1864, and the 1865 images using a 1871, and thus one of the first African- new technology, are explored in “We Carry image) by coating glass-plate negatives American faculty members. with Us Precious Memorials,” on display in with albumen, from hens’ eggs, and honey: Pusey Library through May 29. (The title the “crystalotype.” tracting students from beyond New Eng- derives from the heartfelt sentiments of At once, the album morphed to paper land—and the world, in turn, intruding on Charles Carroll Tower, A.B. 1855, reflecting form: small notebooks, initially, that ex- Cambridge. Alongside the baby-faced Wil- on “college associations.”) panded quickly to massive tomes, finely liam Yates Gholson, of Cincinnati, in the Although meant to preserve cherished bound, embossed, with marbled endpapers 1861 album, a later correspondent wrote, moments, the albums also reflect a period and gilt edges, to which classmates added “killed at Hartsville Tenn. 7th Dec 1862 of dynamic change. The year after the inau- successor images later in life. They were aged 21,” leading a Union infantry unit. gural daguerreotypes, photographer also embellished with prints of Harvard Beyond its human interest, the exhi- John Adams Whipple im- buildings like Gore Hall, the new bition, produced by proved upon fibrous salt library built in 1844 (shown the Archives and the prints (which enabled left); professors (Henry Weissman Preserva- Visit harvardmag. multiple copies of an Wadsworth Longfellow, tion Center, documents com/extras to view Louis Agassiz, Oliver photographic technol- coverage of the 1852 class “album.” Wendell Holmes); and ogy evolving, and is such figures as the “good- part of the center’s effort to preserve and ies,” as housekeepers were enhance Harvard’s holdings of salt prints. then known (above). Happily, The class of 2015 will be amazed not the Harvard Archives, created in only by the albumen, but also by the per- 1851, was there to receive the first albums. vasive treacle, as in this Senior Dinner Harvard itself boomed, with Gore Hall Poem, cited from the Harvard Advocate of and other new buildings like the College January 14, 1889: “Just hand me my album, Observatory—the fruits of that era’s phi- the class one, my dear, It’s a long time since lanthropy. Entrepreneurship blossomed, I’ve seen the old faces, I fear. My honest old too, as George Kendall Warren, the com- class-mates, dispersed far and wide, Drift- mercial photographer who made the por- ing ever apart on eternity’s tide.” Pixel traits from 1861 on, distributed order forms self-portraitists may not match what the for customizable albums, and peddled his exhibition organizers call the “remarkable services to Brown, Dartmouth, Princeton, detail and tonal rendition” of these formal Williams, and Yale. 1800s images—but can surely improve The albums show the College also at- upon the poetry. vjohn s. rosenberg

Photographs courtesy of the Harvard University Archives

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