CrossingGlobal Borders Literature • A.O. • Life Scott Lessons at the • UnsungMovies •Suffragist Free Speech

NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2019 • $4.95

Sex, Gender,1969 Science Sarah Richardson’s critique

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 INVEST IN YOUR CLASSMATES. WE DO.

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19111Harvard.indd 1 919 15 M NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2019, VOLUME 122, NUMBER 2

FEATURES 34 The Science of Sex | by Bennett McIntosh Historian of science Sarah Richardson questions scholarly assumptions about sex and gender

40 Vita: William Monroe Trotter | by Kerri K. Greenidge Brief life of a black radical: 1872-1934 p. 32 42 Made Visible | by Marina N. Bolotnikova An exhibition on migration and borders

48 The Way of the Critic | by Craig Lambert A.O. Scott watches, and reviews, lots of movies

JOHN HARVARD’S JOURNAL 18 Community discourse and free speech, a mapper of “social geography,” the College’s admissions policies upheld, more moderate endowment investment returns, how Memorial Church’s bell is rung, handling sexual harassment and other news, new University Health Services director and public-service personnel, the Undergraduate undertakes sensitive research, and football kicks off p. 48 DEPARTMENTS

2 Cambridge 02138 | Letters from our readers—and observations about athletics

3 The View from Mass Hall

12 Right Now | The setting for successful teaching, analyzing liberal political philosophy, local zoning and climate change

16A Harvard2 | Autumn events, ballet photos, jazz in Boston and beyond—and a jazz docu- mentarian, Nigerian conceptual art, Latin-Caribbean food, a Somerville market, and more ROBERT ADAM FUND MAYER; FOR THE ACQUISITION 58 Montage | From magic to stand-up, Jimmy Hoffa, a book warehouse, traditional Pakistani music, splendid seaweed, law and forgiveness, and more

68 Alumni | Colin Cabot renews old New England crafts, alumni interviewers and THE HARVARD CRIMSON; HARVARD THE honorands, and more

72 The College Pump | Life lessons circa the 1860s, the 1960s, and now

88 Treasure | Beautiful Byzantine textiles, in a new context p. 42 FROM TOP TIM RIGHT: O’MEARA/ OF PHOTOGRAPHS, 2019.80. © LILI ALMOG, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, HARVARD ART MUSEUMS/FOGG MUSEUM 73 Crimson Classifieds On the cover: Photograph by Stu Rosner

www.harvardmagazine.com

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LETTERS

editor: John S. Rosenberg

senior editor: Jean Martin Cambridge  managing editor: Jonathan S. Shaw Angela Davis, Bureau of Study Counsel, climate change art director: Jennifer Carling associate editors: Marina N. Bolotnikova, Lydialyle Gibson staff writer/editor: Jacob J. Sweet CRIME AND executive director, often INCARCERATION speaks with me about assistant editor/special sections manager: Nell Porter Brown The article about how education dramati- Elizabeth Hinton (“Col- cally changed his life berta greenwald ledecky or and Incarceration,” by during his 24 years of in- undergraduate fellows Lydialyle Gibson, Sep- carceration in a Califor- Julie Chung, Drew Pendergrass tember-October, page nia prison. I applaud and 40) included an observa- second Hinton’s call for contributing editors tion by Hinton when she Harvard to invest in pris- John T. Bethell, Lincoln Caplan, visited a loved one inside on education. Education Dick Friedman, Adam Goodheart, a California prison and is and will continue to be Elizabeth Gudrais, Jim Harrison, saw “all these black and critical in developing the Courtney Humphries, Christopher S. brown families.” I work leadership of those most Johnson, Adam Kirsch, Colleen Lannon, for the Anti-Recidivism Coalition (ARC), impacted by our justice system. As an alum, I Spencer Lee Lenfield, Stu Rosner, dedicated to helping incarcerated men and would love to see Harvard lead in this effort. Deborah Smullyan, Mark Steele women successfully transition back into so- Bikila Ochoa, Ph.D. ’09 harvard magazine inc. ciety and reform our criminal justice system. Los Angeles president: Margaret H. Marshall, Ed.M. I have walked into numerous prisons in Cal- ’69. directors: Ann M. Blair ’84, Peter K. ifornia, which has one of the world’s largest Hinton’s critique of our criminal justice Bol, Scott V. Edwards, Ann Marie Lipinski, prison systems. Each time I step into one of system, and her call for policy reform, are NF ’90, Philip W. Lovejoy, Susan Morris these institutions, my breath is taken away compelling and convincing. But aside from Novick ’85, John P. Reardon Jr. ’60, by the image of a sea of black and brown a few casual references, the article ignores Bryan E. Simmons ’83 bodies in oversized blue prison uniforms, an essential dimension of the story: the vic- slowly pacing these prison yards in a fog of tims. It is as if none of the incarcerated had Board of Incorporators hopelessness. committed an offense graver than posses- This magazine, at first called the Harvard Bulletin, was I’ve also seen how education can help sion of recreational drugs. Yet in many if not founded in 1898. Its Board of Incorporators was char- break through this fog. Sam Lewis, ARC’s most cases, the victims of crime are from tered in 1924 and remains active in the magazine’s governance. The membership is as follows: Stephen J. Bailey, AMP ’94; Jeffrey S. Behrens ’89, William I. Bennett ’62, M.D. ’69; John T. Bethell ’54; Peter K. Bol; Helping Hands Fox Butterfield ’61, A.M. ’64; Sewell Chan ’98; Jona- than S. Cohn ’91; Philip M. Cronin ’53, J.D. ’56; James We warmly thank readers who help support publication of Harvard Magazine. F. Dwinell III ’62; Anne Fadiman ’74; Benjamin M. Donors during the past year are recognized on pages 78 to 85. Your contributions Friedman ’66, Ph.D. ’71; Robert H. Giles, NF ’66; Rich- (and advertising revenues) underpin this nonprofit enterprise; the remaining operat- ard H. Gilman, M.B.A. ’83; Owen Gingerich, Ph.D. ’62; Adam K. Goodheart ’92; Philip C. Haughey ’57; Brian ing deficit is funded by a subvention from the Harvard president’s office. (The maga- R. Hecht ’92; Sarah Blaffer Hrdy ’68, Ph.D. ’75; Ellen zine’s finances are described further at harvardmagazine.com/why-donate.) Hume ’68; Alex S. Jones, NF ’82;Thomas F. Kelly, Ph.D. We hope that readers and others who are interested in ’73; William C. Kirby; Bill Kovach, NF ’89; Florence Ladd, BI ’72; Jennifer 8 Lee ’99; Randolph C. Lindel ’66; faculty members’ research will enjoy the new “Ask a Har- Ann Marie Lipinski, NF ’90; Scott Malkin ’80, J.D.- vard Professor” podcast. To learn more and to subscribe, M.B.A. ’83; Margaret H. Marshall, Ed.M. ’69, Ed ’77, L go to harvardmag.com/podcast. If the initial season, ’78; Lisa L. Martin, Ph.D. ’90; David McClintick ’62; Winthrop L. McCormack ’67; M. Lee Pelton, Ph.D. now under way, finds an audience (please spread the word!) ’84; John P. Reardon Jr. ’60; Harriet Ritvo ’68, Ph.D. ’75; and attracts support, we will make this effort a regular part Henry Rosovsky, JF ’57, Ph.D. ’59, LL.D. ’98; Barbara of our service on readers’—and listeners’—behalf. Rudolph ’77; Robert N. Shapiro ’72, J.D. ’78; Theda Skocpol, Ph.D. ’75; Peter A. Spiers ’76; Scott H. Stossel ~The Editors ’91; Sherry Turkle ’69, Ph.D. ’76; Robert H. Weiss ’54; Jan Ziolkowski.

2 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 THE VIEW FROM MASS HALL

Allston in Focus

ecently we dedicated the new ArtLab in Allston. Lo- cated on North Harvard Street between the Business School and Western Avenue, this jewel of a building is a microcosm of what I envision for Allston: a hive of Rcreativity and collaboration, where Harvard students and faculty join community members to do research, teach and learn, and—in the case of the ArtLab—create stunning art. The ArtLab is already holding classes, hosting exhibits and performances, and drawing visitors from both sides of the river. It is my hope that Allston will be a place where art, culture, en- gineering, science, and industry are part of the fabric of the com- munity. Just as Kendall Square has energized East Cambridge, we hope that the lively 24-hour neighborhood we are building in Allston will generate research, provide stellar teaching and learning oppor- tunities, and bring economic growth to the region. For many years, Allston was just an idea, a vision of the future, but that future is rapidly coming into focus. The i-Lab, the Launch Lab X, and the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab attract countless Harvard opportunities for us to collaborate with industry and our neigh- students, faculty, and alumni each day. About a third of all under- boring universities in new and interesting ways. We are working graduates spend time at the i-Lab during their four years at the with MIT and Boston University to explore housing options in the College. At the Business School, Xander University Professor Doug area for faculty and graduate students from all three institutions. Melton and Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government Shortly we will name a developer to help us create office and labo- Michael Sandel teach the largest undergraduate course at Harvard, ratory space in our Enterprise Research Campus. We also plan to “Tech Ethics,” and Paul Whiton Cherington Professor David Moss build a new hotel and conference facility to serve our growing need teaches a very popular undergraduate course on democracy. And, of for executive education facilities. course, our student athletes have been crossing the river for years Not least of all, I am excited by the opportunity to engage our to compete on the gridiron or in the pool. neighbors from the community. For several years, students from Before long, the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) will join the College have taught kids from the neighborhood through the the ArtLab on North Harvard Street. Thanks to a transformative Harvard Ed Portal. Later this fall we will re-dedicate William F. gift from David and Stacey Goel, the beloved A.R.T. is fnding a new Smith Field, a collaborative project with the Boston Parks Depart- home. Diane Paulus, Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director of ment that gives kids better recreational opportunities. We are also the A.R.T., envisions the venue as something like a “teaching hos- working with the city and the neighborhood to create a new multi- pital” for theater, where students will work with faculty to create use greenway that will extend from the library in Allston all the new dramatic forms for the 21st century. way to the Charles River. And next fall the new Science and Engineering Complex will For most of us, our college experience is tied inextricably to a open, and another 20 percent of our students will cross the river sense of place. For future graduates of Harvard, that sense of place each day to attend classes, do research, and push the boundaries of will likely meld iconic Cambridge with the vibrancy of Allston. I en- inquiry and discovery. It is ftting that a large portion of the Harvard courage you to come back to see our bold new campus taking shape. John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences will be located in Allston. At the end of the 19th century, then-president of Sincerely, Harvard Charles William Eliot tried to acquire MIT! Eliot wanted to move it to Allston, close to where the Business School is now. More than a century later, we are realizing Eliot’s vision of a major Harvard engineering presence in Allston. Beyond providing space for Harvard to grow, Allston also creates

Harvard Magazine 3

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Letters the same disadvantaged socioeconomic, ra- with the advent of the federal sentenc- cial, or ethnic groups as the perpetrators. ing guidelines. Drug cases, even for small Moreover, victim compensation, sometimes amounts of illegal drugs, were prosecuted in lieu of incarceration, should be a key el- in federal court instead of state court to take ement of humane and effective offender advantage of long mandatory minimum sen- publisher: Irina Kuksin rehabilitation. tences. While many black people were sen- In portraying the perpetrators as the vic- tenced to prison for crimes involving crack director of circulation and tims, the author airbrushes the real victims cocaine in urban areas, white people were fundraising: Felecia Carter out of the story. Truly, justice is blind. imprisoned for methamphetamine offenses donor relations and stewardship Andrew Sorokowski, A.M. ’75 in rural areas. manager: Allison Kern Rockville, Md. In effect, our country decided to treat il- legal drug possession and sales as a criminal- director of advertising: Robert D. Fitta The article was disappointing because it justice problem instead of a public-health left out an important part of the story. Gib- challenge. Many public officials, black and new england advertising manager: son overlooked James Forman Jr.’s book, white, were making decisions with the best Abby Shepard Locking Up Our Own, subtitled Crime and Pun- of intentions that resulted in what is now classified advertising manager: ishment in Black America, which won the Pulit- called mass incarceration. Fear of crime Gretchen Bostrom zer Prize for general nonfction in 2018. I am motivated all races to do something. I hope interested in the topic because I have been a Hinton is telling the whole story to her creative marketing director: criminal defense lawyer for most of my ca- classes about how we got to now. Jennifer Beaumont reer, beginning in 1981. Patrick Deaton, M.P.A. ’87 production and design manager: The article sums up Hinton’s book as: St. Louis Lydia S. C. Rosenberg [telling] the story of how federal policies—shaped by presidential ad- The statistics are painfully clear: 50 per- gift processor and office manager: Robert Bonotto ministrations and endorsed by Con- cent of U.S. murders are committed by 6 gress—ratcheted up surveillance and percent of our population, black males. A punishment in black urban neigh- very high violent crime rate in black com- ivy league magazine network borhoods from the 1960s through munities requires police presence to (a) director of operations: the 1980s, how criminalization was protect potential victims, mostly black, and Heather Wedlake, Heatherwedlake@ steadily expanded, and how all of this (b) deter more serious crime. But Hinton ivymags.com was driven by deeply held assump- concludes that history and white racism are editorial and business office tions about the cultural and behav- to blame for black crime and imprisonment. 7 Ware Street ioral inferiority of black Americans. Are we to believe that the black communi- Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4037 Gibson overlooks the most important ty bears no responsibility for its behavior? Tel. 617-495-5746; fax: 617-495-0324 point of Locking Up Our Own: that “amid a Richard Merlo ’57 Website: www.harvardmagazine.com surge in crime and drug addiction,” black Elkin, N.C. E-mail: [email protected] mayors, judges, and police chiefs who took @harvardmagazine ANGELA DAVIS office in the 1970s, “fearing that the gains of the civil rights movement were being Harvard Magazine’s hagiographic paean facebook.com/harvardmagazine undermined by lawlessness, embraced to Angela Davis (“Revisiting Angela Davis,” Harvard Magazine (ISSN 0095-2427) is published bi- tough-on-crime measures, including lon- the sidebar to “Color and Incarceration,” monthly by Harvard Magazine Inc., a nonprofit cor- ger sentences and aggressive police tactics” September-October, page 44) at least does poration, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4037, phone 617-495-5746; fax 617-495-0324. The magazine is (as the dust jacket puts it). Those officials touch on reality by noting a few of the de- supported by reader contributions and subscriptions, responded to the demands of black people tails of her part in a horrible terrorist mur- advertising revenue, and a subvention from Harvard University. Its editorial content is the responsibility of to do something about the crime in their der in the 1970s. Too bad the tone about that the editors. Periodicals postage paid at Boston, Mass., neighborhoods. incident is so forgiving and low key. and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send ad- dress changes to Circulation Department, Harvard There were big changes in the late 1980s However, to then pass off her totalitar- Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4037. ian sympathies by simply saying she was Subscription rate $30 a year in U.S. and possessions, $55 SPEAK UP, PLEASE a “member” of the Communist Party is an Canada and Mexico, $75 other foreign. (Allow up to 10 weeks for first delivery.) Subscription orders and Harvard Magazine welcomes letters outrageous evasion. She was the vice pres- customer service inquiries should be sent to the Cir- on its contents. Please write to “Let- idential candidate of the American Com- culation Department, Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4037, or call 617-495-5746 or ters,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, munist Party twice, supported the Soviet 800-648-4499, or e-mail [email protected]. Cambridge 02138, send comments by e- invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and was Single copies $4.95, plus $2.50 for postage and han- dling. Manuscript submissions are welcome, but we mail to your­turn@har­­vard.edu, use our awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1979 in cannot assume responsibility for safekeeping. Include website, www.harvard­maga­zine.­com, Moscow. It’s nice that Davis cares, or says stamped, self-addressed envelope for manuscript re- or fax us at 617-495-0324. Letters may she does, about prisoners in this country. turn. Persons wishing to reprint any portion of Harvard Magazine’s contents are required to write in advance for be edited to fit the ava le space. However, when Czech dissident Jeri Pelikan permission. Address inquiries to Irina Kuk- publicly called (please turn to page 6) sin, publisher, at the address given above. Copyright © 2019 Harvard Magazine Inc.

4 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Letters 7 WARE STREET Blues scandal, the dismissal of fencing coach leadership; and they learn to absorb losses About Athletics Peter Brand this summer (News Briefs, Sep- and rebound to compete again. For most, this tember-October, page 33) was a sharp re- is their last hurrah, and many athletes value As in other realms—thousands of minder that fnancial conflicts of interest re- their Harvard sports experiences very highly. courses, hundreds of nonsports extracur- main ever-tempting. But in a community devoted to inclusion, riculars—Harvard offers undergraduates Some of these traumas were self-inflicted. dispelling some of those stereotypes and a cornucopia of athletic options: 42 varsity Sexist youngsters apparently still need to sharing some of those passions, emotions, teams; nearly a million square feet of facili- grow up, and to learn the hard way about and disciplines would seem to be recipro- ties in Allston (plus the boat houses, sail- expressing themselves in a “scouting re- cally benefcial. A few “community” sports ing center, and an equestrian venue), many port”—and because one-quarter of them (night football; basketball and hockey con- buffed up courtesy of the Harvard Cam- age out each year, such learnin’ sometimes tests) draw a crowd. But most don’t, so the paign. The Crimson sportsmen and -wom- needs repeating. Senior managers ought not athletes’ labors are often unheralded—and en are supported by scores of professional to need equal-compensation laws to do the their schedules, in turn, prevent them from staff members, among them coaches with right thing by their subordinates. And so on. attending classmates’ plays and concerts. national reputations. Grateful graduates Compounding the problem: whatever has Male athletes in the bigger sports appar- have endowed 28 positions (the athletics been learned as a result of these experiences ently still skew toward economics and are website lists 11 remaining opportunities). has largely been kept in-house. The discov- underrepresented in other concentrations. This is a big sports program happily un- ery of problems and resulting reforms are (Those ec grads, whose teamwork and will tainted by the defects of big-time collegiate communicated and effected internally. The to win appeal to Wall Street, often end up in sports. Crimson youth are not on athletic larger community hears about them after fnance—to Harvard’s philanthropic bene- scholarships—which reduce many “student the fact and by email or official statement, if ft.) Given the rules on unrecognized single- athletes” elsewhere to peonage. They do not at all: the responsible authorities are rarely gender social organizations, some athletes enroll in junk classes and concentrations, available to discuss their fndings. will have to choose between being team cap- with special tutors and free passes that con- That seems unfortunate for an educa- tains or belonging to a fnal club. stitute officially sanctioned cheating. They do tional institution: a missed chance to mod- Some of these differences are matters of not live in segregated dorms. Their coaches do el behavior for the athletes, and, de facto, a taste. But the object of a residential college not earn 10 or 20 times tenured professors’ pay. determination that what happens in (ath- is to expose students to unfamiliar ideas, All to the good. Nonetheless, the substan- letic) Allston, stays in Allston. And isolating activities, and disciplines. Simply enabling tial athletic operation is a human enterprise, what student-athletes experience and learn high-school athletes, or actors, to pursue and so can fnd itself enmeshed in contro- deprives fellow students of the benefts of that talent at a higher level, without encoun- versies. Harvard athletes are supposed to be those life lessons. The opportunities forgone tering the other riches on offer, undercuts students above all, so their experiences must loom large for both cohorts. the premise of the place. Given the number be seen in the context of their educations. of athletes, their potential (and real) separ- Both issues merit consideration. The stakes are considerable. About 1,200 ateness, and the expense of sustaining them, undergraduates, one-ffth of those enrolled, there is an obligation here to make all stu- Harvard athletics in recent years has participate in intercollegiate sports. Their dents’ experience more genuinely inclusive been buffeted by the problems evident in practices, games, and travel (many week- (perhaps even having nonathletes take phys- the larger society. There was the 2016 Har- ends for many sports; and to California for ed), for their learning and growth. vard Crimson exposé of the men’s soccer team the footballers, and Hawaii and China for “rating” their female peers in crudely sexual the hoopsters of late) impose signifcant de- A good beginning would be articulat- terms (the men’s season, and chance at NCAA mands on their time during semesters and ing a vision for Harvard athletics congruent play, was canceled), and the self-reporting of breaks. About 15 percent of courses, by some with the College’s academic aims. Conceiv- similar behavior by the male cross-country estimates, are automatically out of reach for ing that vision would have to engage faculty runners (they were put on athletic probation). at least some athletes given those obliga- members and students broadly, and include In 2018, the department had to adjust coaches’ tions. Practices that run into the evening steps to effect the resulting plan through the compensation, reflecting persistent pay dis- mean that during part of the year, the affect- whole College. The Faculty of Arts and Sci- parities between men and women (see har- ed students aren’t sharing meals with peers ences’ review of athletics (see page 25) may vardmag.com/coach-pay-18). The introduc- in their Houses. And not a few athletes note evolve into what is needed. The new leaders tion of an Ivy basketball tournament meant that in a community that prizes research of the faculty’s standing committee on ath- more postseason play—and the schedule and education, they stand out, and apart, letic sports—Xander University Professor highlighted the unequal exposure given the and even feel stereotyped as (dumb) jocks. Douglas Melton and Coolidge professor of men’s and women’s teams (see harvardmag. Of course, the athletes, like fellow un- history Maya Jasanoff—may bring fresh per- com/ivy-scheduling-18). The enterprise is dergraduates, choose how to spend their spective, and the respect of their academic more commercial, with professional market- time. They are disciplined about their days; colleagues, to the committee’s “general over- ing and a proliferation of sponsor logos and they learn from coaches who are important sight of…all the Faculty’s athletic programs.” tie-ins. The Crimson Pub in Dillon Lounge mentors; they develop close friendships and Why waste a new opportunity to enlarge now serves alcohol. Although College admis- identities (as other students do in their ex- Harvard’s vision? Time to play ball. sions were not tainted by last spring’s Varsity tracurriculars); they internalize aspects of vjohn s. rosenberg, Editor

Harvard Magazine 5

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Letters on her to defend his imprisoned dissident comrades, she refused. When Alan Dersh­ City On A Hill owitz asked her to support Eastern bloc Urban Idealism in America political prisoners, she told him that “they from the Puritans to the Present are all Zionist fascists and opponents of so- Alex Krieger cialism.” Which of course calls attention to her strong support for the anti-Zionist “A fantastic, comprehensive account of BDS movement, which aims to dismantle utopian visions in American city planning.” the Jewish homeland. —Frederick Steiner, Angela Davis is a thoroughly reprehensible University of Pennsylvania extreme leftist and a hypocrite when it comes to prisoners’ rights. It is a shame that such a puff piece on her made it into your pages, and it is a disgrace for Harvard to have any- thing to do with glorifying or honoring her. Jonathan Burack ’64 The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours East Lansing, Mich. Gregory Nagy “[Nagy’s] analysis is fascinating, often In “Revisiting Angela Davis,” on the ex- ingenious.”—Times Literary Supplement citing, upcoming exhibit from the papers of Angela Davis recently acquired by the New paperback edition available in January Schlesinger Library, there is a questionable characterization of the “attack on the Marin County Courthouse” in 1970 that resulted in her arrest and trial on multiple charges related to this event. | hup.harvard.edu Belknap Press Often referred to as the August 7 Revolt or Rebellion, the court- house action was ini- tiated by Jonathan Jackson, the young- To read more er brother of George letters on race Jackson, who was the and incarceration, most influential of the climate change and radical black prisoners divestment, and referred to as the Sole- other topics, visit dad Brothers after be- harvardmag.com. ing accused of the murder of a guard in the California state prison of that name. The sidebar states that the courthouse action was “intended to free the Soledad Brothers but instead left four people dead…,” a claim that was actually used by the prosecution in her trial to sup- port the argument that Davis’s personal rela- tionship with George Jackson was the prin- cipal motive for her involvement with the incident. The prosecution could not present defnitive evidence for this claim, as detailed in Davis’s Autobiography, describing the cross- examination of chief prosecutor Albert Har- SHARE THE WARMTH ris by the defense on that point. The implica- tion that the four deaths resulting from the Give the gift everyone will love this action were attributable to the brutality of holiday season. Shop our full collection Jackson and three militant prisoners dur- To order please ing that incident was also contested in the visit us online at: of winter apparel and accessories. cross-examination. Jonathan Jackson, pris- www.thecoop.com Online only, not available in stores. oners James McClain and William Christ-

6 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Photo: Nicholas Valentine THE BIGGEST RISK IN LIFE IS NEVER TAKING ONE.

You can raise children by helicopter, confined inside a classroom, they’ll learn bulldozer or even tiger. by trial, and more importantly, error.

But when everything in their life is so We call it experiential education. structured, and things always go according to plan, they won’t be prepared for what We believe the wilderness naturally will quickly become the “real world.” fosters personal growth with the demand for decision making, perseverance Med school will not make someone a through unexpected adversity and the more empathetic human being. Liberal constant need for clear communication. arts won’t transform worldviews the way the outdoors can. And even the best MBA Whether it’s a gap year, a semester program can’t teach true leadership. away or even a summer expedition with NOLS, your kid will come back more Instead, consider what really allows resilient and confident in their ability a child to mature (both personally and to lead others. All because they’ve finally professionally)—time spent doing things learned to trust the most important for real. Rather than reading about stuff person of all: themselves.

AROUND THE WORLD NATIONAL OUTDOOR LEADERSHIP SCHOOL ALASKA / EAST AFRICA / INDIA / MEXICO / NEW ZEALAND / NOLS.edu NORTHEAST / PACIFIC NORTHWEST / PATAGONIA / 1.800.710.6657 ROCKY MOUNTAINS / SCANDINAVIA / SOUTHWEST / YUKON

A24104_3a_NOLS_Harvard.indd -09.23.2019 A24104x03A_NOLS_Harvard_3u.tif Letters mas, and Judge Haley were shot and killed inside a van by San Quentin guards in line with the policy at that time that all escapes must be prevented, even if the killing of hos- tages might be involved. EXPERIENCE HOLIDAY IN HARVARD SQUARE Anna Wexler, Ed.D. ’98 Magic Jamaica Plain, Mass. Friday 5pm – Happy Hour BUREAU OF STUDY COUNSEL The drop in temperature means it’s We are the fve living former directors and officially Hot Toddy season! Warm up associate directors of the Bureau of Study with one at Noir Bar. Counsel (BSC), representing nearly a half- 8pm – Curtains Up century (1971-2019) of the BSC’s existence No better way to get in the holiday since its founding in the mid 1940s. We are spirit than tickets to The Nutcracker at concerned about the characterizations of the Jose Mateo Ballet Theatre! bureau offered as justifcation for its closing (“Bureau of Study Counsel, R.I.P.”; harvard- Saturday mag.com/bsc-to-arc-19). We appreciate the 9am – Holiday Prep magazine’s recognition that something im- Head downstairs to Corbu Spa & Salon portant to students’ educational experience for a mani/pedi – it’s holiday party will likely be lost (“A Chill in the Air?” Sep- season, after all. tember-October, page 5). In our direct and 12pm – Hot Chocolate Crawl extensive experiences of the BSC, we know Shop your way across the city & turn it as an office that is deeply committed to an it into a hot chocolate crawl! We educational mission and model and that has recommend starting with L.A. Burdick. continuously evolved to support the learning 7pm – Fill Up and developmental needs of an ever-chang- Wind down with a homecooked meal ing student population. at Henrietta’s Table, complete with The primary mission of the BSC has al- gingerbread cheesecake for dessert! ways been educational. BSC services have helped students sharpen their academic Sunday skills (reading, time management, problem- 9am – Breakfast in Bed solving) with the broader goal of helping Enveloped in your plush comforter, you each student develop an independent mind won’t want to leave. Room service it is! that can, among other things, take thought- 12pm – See you in 2020 ful perspective on sources of knowledge and Still need one last gift? Grab a gift card authority; reckon with complexity and un- from the front desk...or just save it for certainty; generate and evaluate new possi- next year’s getaway. bilities; engage difficult endeavors with rigor BOOK YOUR HARVARD SQUARE GETAWAY and purpose; and weigh choices and conse- Now! quences against deeply considered values. These capabilities are central to the College’s 1 BENNETT STREET • CAMBRIDGE, MA • 800.882.1818 • CHARLESHOTEL.COM mission and the aims of a liberal arts and sci- ences education and are as relevant today as they were in the post-World War II era of the BSC’s founding. When the College hired a new director 自 in 2005, it expressly reconfrmed the BSC’s mission as an academic support office, not 我 a mental-health service—a clarifcation 教 that was necessary given that Harvard had moved oversight of the BSC to the Univer- 学 sity Health Services the previous year (a shift which the BSC counselors at that time cau- tioned against). In 2015, the staff welcomed Forging the consciousness of our birth the move back to the College as a renewed endorsement of the BSC’s original and con- tinuing focus on learning and development. www.andyo.org Sponsored by: WETANKNYSTORE.COM

8 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 SCOER NEW RONTERS N TA ATORMS.

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Letters Leavitt Established 1883 During the last few decades, at Harvard and beyond, the term “mental health” has Leavitt slipped almost unquestioned into everyday & Peirce Leavitt parlance and has become overly applied to Leavitt human experience, including the inherently personal and emotional aspects of education &Freshman Peirce Smoker. Reprint of lithographer 1316 Massachusetts Avenue & Peirce and learning. The best educational/develop- Cambridge, MA 02138 Close, Graham & Scully’s 1911 depiction of Harvard “club life” and its “price to pay”. mental support welcomes the rich complex 617-547-0576 FRESHMAN SMOKER 13161316Reprinted MassachusettsMassachusetts on heavy matte AvenueAvenue stock. 34 1/16”& x Freshman Peirce Smoker. Reprint of lithographer whole of students’ experience of learning. Cambridge,Cambridge, MAMA 0213802138 ReprintClose, Graham of lithographer & Scully’s Close, 1911 Graham depiction & Scully’s 19 1/16”. Shipped tubed; $39.95 (plus $9.95 S&H). Although such support—including that of- 617-547-0576617-547-0576 1911of Harvard depiction “club of Harvard life” and “club its “pricelife” and to its pay”. “price [email protected] 1316toReprinted pay”.Massachusetts Reprinted on heavy on heavymatte Avenue matte stock. stock. 34 1/16” 34 1/16 x Freshman" Smokerfered .by Reprint the BSC—is of lithographer appropriately informed Cambridge,x19 19 1/16”. 1/16 Shipped". $39.95MA tubed; 02138(plus S&H).$39.95 (plusShipped $9.95 tubed. S&H).Close, Grahamby & the Scully’s felds 1911of psychology depiction and neuroscience, of Harvard “club life” and its “price to pay”. Harvard College John Harvard 617-547-0576 it is not mental-health treatment. We’re now online at Reprinted on heavy matte stock. 34 1/16” x recaptured in Bookends. 19 1/16”. Shipped Listeningtubed; $39.95 closely (plus $9.95 to students’ S&H). experiences this famous www.leavittandpeirce.comHarvardU.S.A. – Collegemade John Harvard of learning has helped the BSC staff iden- Tercentenary onlinerecapturedand shop,exclusively in store history and more Bookends. tify and bring early attention to emerging map by Edwin thisdesigned famous for U.S.A. – made J. Schruers ’28. Leavitt & Peirce. educational issues and trends—often long Tercentenary Harvardand exclusively College John Harvard Painstakingly Antiqued brass HARVARD in advance of these becoming College pri- map by Edwin recaptureddesigned in for Bookends. reproduced on over zinc. 7” h x orities—including diversity, inclusion, and J. Schruers ’28. thisTERCENTENARYLeavitt famous & Peirce. U.S.A. – made quality “antique” Painstakingly4”w x 6”d. Over Antiqued brass TercentenaryMAP belonging inand the exclusively University; plagiarism and stock 33 5/8” x reproduced5 pounds each. on over zinc. 7” h x mapHarvard by Edwin recaptured academic integrity;designed academic for stress and re- 24 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. silience; the role of technology in the col- PainstakinglyTercentenary map Antiqued brass (plus $9.95 S&H). 24 $12.95 1/4”. Shipped S&H). $150.00 per lege experience; and the value of a holistic reproducedby Edwin J. on Schruers over zinc. 7” h x tubed; $39.95 statuette (plus JOHN HARVARD BOOKEND quality’28. Painstakingly “antique” approach to 4”wlearning x 6”d. Overand development. The (plus $9.95 S&H). $12.95 S&H). Antiqued brass over zinc. 7" h x 4" w stockreproduced 33 5/8” on x quality BSC has a longstanding5 pounds each. record of hiring di- x 6" d. Over 5 pounds each. $199.95 24“antique” 1/4”. Shipped stock 33 5/8" verse staff from $150.00 the felds per of education and (plus S&H). USA made, exclusively for tubed;x 24 1 /4$39.95". $39.95 (plus psychology as well statuette as a(plus history of drawing Leavitt & Peirce. Price is per bookend. (plusS&H). $9.95 Shipped S&H). tubed. upon and contributing $12.95 S&H). to evolving models and materials in the feld of student learn- ing and development. For over 70 years the BSC has provided an educational setting in which students from every background have found the practical support, illuminating perspectives, and per- sonal courage needed to engage in transfor- mational learning. We fve educators who “Israel is, by many measures, the lived and led two-thirds of the BSC’s long history are grateful to have been a part of country, relative to its population, such an innovative and inclusive learning ser- vice dedicated to promoting the intellectual that's done the most to contribute and ethical development of our students. Suzanne Renna, Ed.D. ’88 to the technology revolution.” Former associate director and former acting director Ann Fleck-Henderson ’64, Ph.D. BILL GATES Former associate director Jean Wu, Ed.D. ’84 Former associate director Abigail Lipson, Ph.D. Find out more about Israeli cutting edge Former director Sheila Reindl ’80, Ed.D. ’95 technologies at untoldnews.org Former associate director

Download a free copy of our ebook about CLIMATE CHANGE In an essay on “Climate Change” [Presi- Israeli inventions at tinydynamobook.com dent Lawrence S. Bacow’s regular letter to readers, September-October, page 3], it is stated that “The scientifc consensus is by

10 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Letters now clear:” Convenient, because there is not a word in the article to support this so-called science. Nor is there any mention that carbon dioxide, a small fraction of one-half of 1 per- cent of the earth’s atmosphere, is essential for plant life, and so for all life on earth—in- cluding us. One shudders to think how long life could “flourish” in this academically ideal “decarbonized future.” Of course, the “scientifc consensus” on the structure of the universe was settled by Ptolemy, creation by the Bible, gravity by Newton—until someone like Galileo, or Darwin, or Einstein, with the imagination and courage to challenge consensus, follow- the-crowd thinking came along. One hopes for something better from a major university. Nullius in verba. William J. Jones, J.D. ’60 Warren, N.J.

Editor’s note: The nearly universal scientifc consensus, worldwide and among Harvard experts, is that increased man-made emis- sions of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are accelerating the warming of the planet and climate change— as has been scientifcally predicted for de- cades. No one disputes that plants use carbon dioxide. Decarbonization refers to reducing man-made emissions from combusting fos- sil fuels, burning forests, and so on—not to changing the natural chemistry of the atmo- sphere. The magazine’s extensive coverage of these issues is searchable online at www. harvardmagazine.com; the president’s letter is about University affairs from his perspec- tive, not an article or a report summarizing the underlying science. HARVARD ANNUITY—

I read with admiration and sadness the IT’S A SURE THING Undergraduate column by Isa Flores-Jones ’19, who writes of the disempowerment she felt as a climate activist trying, in vain, to FOR YOU, FOR HARVARD convince Harvard to divest its holdings from oil and gas companies before her graduation (“Movement Ecology,” September-Octo- ber, page 35). As Undergraduate columnist from 1985 to 1987, I well remember the “Di- WHAT’S YOUR RATE? vest Now” balloon tethered to my and many classmates’ graduation mortar boards—re- EXPLORE A HARVARD ANNUITY TODAY. ferring not to the University’s fossil-fuel CONTACT UNIVERSITY PLANNED GIVING: assets, but to holdings in companies doing 800-446-1277 | [email protected] | alumni.harvard.edu/invest business with then-apartheid South Africa. Then, as now, the Overseers made student activists feel they had no agency. As Flores-

Jones describes: they listened politely, ac- UDO 20-2897 knowledged stu- (please turn to page 86)

Harvard Magazine 11

- Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 LETTERS (continued from page 11) (Harvard Squared). It’s drawn our atten- tion to all kinds of experiences we would dents’ quaint idealism, and disclaimed any have missed otherwise—just last week we power to change the status quo. Affirmation spent a wonderful afternoon at the fascinat- and moral conviction came, instead, from ing Public Health Museum in Tewksbury, afar: a graduation-day phone call from Arch- which I wouldn’t have known about with- bishop Desmond Tutu to student movement out Porter Brown’s article in the magazine. Miss the deadline for our leaders, assuring them their efforts would Tara Kelly ’91 matter in the end. And matter they did. Gloucester, Mass. Holiday Reading List? Although the lesson of history is that we don’t learn from history, the denouement I enjoyed All in a Day about Worces- of the present divestment story seems par- ter (“Purgatory—and Beyond,” Harvard ticularly obvious. Couldn’t Harvard simply Squared, September-October, page 16N). But cut to the fnish, and show that America’s I was sorry it did not mention the great Kore- most powerful institutions can occasionally an restaurant Simjang. The food is outstand- be leaders rather than laggards? ing, the staff welcoming; they even hosted a Claudia Polsky ’87 poetry reading where I had a chance to share Harvard Associate clinical professor of law some of my own dishes of poems about Ko- and director, Environmental Law Clinic rea. I hope others discover Simjang, too. UC, Berkeley School of Law David McCann Authors! Korea Foundation professor of BASEBALL’S RULES Korean literature emeritus Jacob Sweet’s baseball profle, “All In- Watertown, Mass. stincts” (May-June, page 32), states that a batter cannot steal frst base. But a batter may ERRATA attempt to steal frst on a wild pitch when The fourth paragraph of the Vita on there are no on-base runners. suffragist Adella Hunt Logan (September- Paul Coran October, page 54) contained inaccuracies Rockville, Md. in dating and other details involving Hunt Advertise your book in the Logan’s interactions with Susan B. Anthony, Summer Reading List. Jacob Sweet clarifies: This is true in the inde- which were pointed out by Anthony biogra- pendent Atlantic League as of July, but not pher Lynn Sherr. Details appear at harvard- THE DEADLINE IS: in college baseball or MLB as of press time. mag.com/vita-logan-19. We regret the errors. The profle of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas MARCH 13, 2020 ABOUT THAT VOLE (“A New Way of Being in the World,” Sep- Reach 258,000 Harvard Although I greatly appreciated the ar- tember-October, page 67) reported that she alumni, faculty, and staff. ticle about me (“A New Way of Being in had “three dogs and three cats”—but one of the World,” September-October, page 67), those dogs is her son’s. Your book ad will include: there’s something I would like to clarify. The The report on a collection obtained by a book jacket photo, your article ends with a vole who is cornered on Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library (“Revisiting name and Harvard class year, my porch by two of my cats. She knows she Angela Davis,” September-October, page 44) and a short description – can’t escape, she believes the end has come, indicated that Professor Elizabeth Hinton and she covers her eyes with her hands. That and two graduate students sorted and or- totaling 8 lines of text. part’s okay, but I’ve had some criticism from ganized the materials for an exhibition. In Your ad will appear both readers for letting this happen, and the truth fact, their selections for the exhibition were in print and online. (which didn’t appear in the article) is that preceded by processing of the materials by I didn’t let it happen. I ran toward the cats, Schlesinger staff archivists Jenny Gotwals, For information about pricing shouting at them, they turned to look at me, Amber Moore, and Jehan Sinclair. and ad specifications, go to: the vole saw she had a moment to escape, As published, the letter from Robert H. harvardmagazine.com/hauthors and she dashed away to safety. That’s in the Goldstein (September-October, page 6) book, and I’d appreciate your publishing this omitted a signifcant word, rendering “my contact Gretchen Bostrom letter so readers won’t think too badly of me. humorously intended comments incompre- at 617-496-6686, or e-mail Elizabeth Marshall Thomas ’54 hensible,” he notes. The letter should have [email protected]. Peterborough, N.H. read: “Among certain ethnic groups, the theological question of when life begins is KUDOS reputed to be answered, ‘On graduation from TURN TO PAGE 53 Thank you and Nell Porter Brown for law school,’” with the italicized word here to browse the Holiday Reading List the “Explorations and Curiosities” series restored.

86 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 PUTTING YOUR GIFTS TO WORK

We are dedicated to creating a Harvard about the research of historian and philosopher “The articles make me Magazine of the highest quality. Your donations Sarah Richardson. feel more connected ensure the magazine’s service to you—and help • cover Harvard faculty and alumni who are to the day-to-day life communicate the University’s contributions to making a difference. See “Where Teachers of the University, and others in the community and around the world. and Students Thrive” (page 12) about efforts its special place in Journalism of this quality and depth is by Murphy research professor of education the world.” made possible because of your support. Susan Moore Johnson to demonstrate that - Harvard Graduate when teachers find positive support in their Your donations each year enable us to: workplace, students do better. • report objectively and in depth about • hire Harvard undergraduates to report University news and policies—including on the student perspective during the Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean Claudine academic year and during the summer. See Gay’s comprehensive review of athletics, “Permission to Know,” about the ethical and the rollout of the College’s new General and intellectual challenges of writing a Education program. See “Sports in the senior thesis (page 29). Spotlight” (page 25) and “A Revised Gen Ed Debuts” (published online, 9.3.19). We need your support to continue producing this content on your behalf. Make a donation • explore the latest in scholarship and teaching to Harvard Magazine today. under way at the University. See, for example, “The Science of Sex” in this issue (page 34), YOUR GIFTS MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE.

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-- Right Now The expanding Harvard universe

LEARNING CULTURE Where Teachers and Students Thrive

Beginning in 2009, the Bill & Melinda funding, the seven-year program failed to on how well schools are organized. And in Gates Foundation funded a $575-million significantly improve student achievement her view, what she calls the “egg-crate” effort to hire and retain “effective” teach- or increase graduation rates. model of schools, in which teachers work ers at large, urban, public-school districts The philosophy backing that interven- alone and have few formal opportunities to around the country. The initiative sought tion and reflected in organizations like learn about what their colleagues are doing, to “reward and retain effective teachers Teach For America assumes that improv- is pervasive in U.S. schools, with deleteri- while dismissing ineffective ones,” writes ing K-12 education is a matter of dropping ous effects for students and educators alike. Murphy research professor of education Su- good teachers into schools. But this ignores Johnson’s work as an education researcher san Moore Johnson in her new book, Where the larger school context in which teachers began in the 1970s, after nearly a decade of Teachers Thrive: Organizing Schools for Success are working—and a lot of what it means to teaching English at Brookline (Massachu- (Harvard Education Press). Yet despite its be a good teacher, Johnson argues, depends setts) High School in an environment she describes as ideal, where teams of teachers wrote curricula together and conferred about how their classes were going. When she started her doctor- ate, she assumed other former teachers had had similar ex- periences. They hadn’t. “That was the beginning of this in- quiry,” she says. “That was a kernel of ‘Oh, this is very im- portant and it’s largely ignored by researchers and the public.’ There was very little research and writing about the context of teachers’ work.” At the turn of this cen- tury, Johnson says, econom- ics research indicated that high-quality teachers (usual- ly measured in terms of their students’ standardized test scores) are linked to better outcomes for their students, such as college attendance

12 November - December 2019 Illustration by Jason Blower

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now and higher earnings. “Rarely, if ever, has ac- ademic research had such an immediate and far-reaching impact on education policy,” she writes. After 2000, policymakers aimed to in- crease schools’ “human capital—the sum total of their teachers’ qualifications, skills, and professional habits.” That not only produced A SURE THING costly failed programs, but also militated against the kind of ground-level, context- Give and receive with a Charitable Gift Annuity dependent research Johnson conducted. to help alleviate suffering and improve Where Teachers Thrive is organized around the most important themes that have health and well-being for all. emerged from that research. It draws in part from the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, her Graduate School of Edu- cation program, initiated in 1998, seeking CGA Rates: Rates vary by age to understand the experiences of teachers in high-poverty urban schools. Using class- Age 60: 4.9% | Age 70: 6% | Age 80: 7.7% room interviews with 257 teachers and prin- cipals from 14 elementary, middle, and high schools in Massachusetts, the book maps Calculate your fixed income for life out Johnson’s findings on some of the most contested aspects of the teacher experience, with our free gift calculator: such as evaluations, pay, and responses to student conduct. She is not prescriptive hms.harvard.edu/giftcalculator about the merits of different educational or call 1-800-922-1782 philosophies, showing instead how var- ied approaches, like so-called no-excuses schools or progressive ones, can be success- ful if they apply systems that allow them to realize their values and goals (see “Re- thinking the American High School,” May- June, page 11). Indeed, Johnson presents few categorical answers at all. Whether stan- dardized tests are good or bad—or whether teacher evaluations are effective—depends, she holds, on how schools use them. Part of what underlies her work, Johnson explains, is the demographic shift that took place among teachers at the turn of the cen- tury. After the liberalizing social movements of the 1960s and ’70s, Johnson says, “schools could no longer count on women and Afri- can-American men to become teachers”— they had other career options. Now, teachers are drawn from a broader professional class who can move to other professions if teach- WE HAVE ANSWERS FOR ing doesn’t work out. Turnover has increased tremendously. This new cohort of teachers ANXIETY OR DEPRESSION. “didn’t expect to get rich,” Johnson explains. “They hoped that they could afford teaching, JUST ASK. but if they couldn’t do the work that mattered to them [in their schools], they could and mclean.org/anxiety 877.959.9238 would and did leave. No one before that had ever thought about the problem of turnover.” Suddenly, principals had to worry about making their schools appealing places to work, so good teachers would want to stay:

Harvard Magazine 13

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now making it possible for them to teach creative- ly, not just to the standardized tests; allowing Explore More Crows Know How to them to assume leadership roles influencing Have Fun their schools’ values and practices; and im- For additional, online-only, articles If you think birds lack plementing thorough, good-faith evaluation on research, see : intelligence, think again: systems that help teachers improve, rather these tool-making crows than look for ways to punish them. In schools Scholars Advocate “Managed are some of the smartest animals on earth. where evaluation systems worked well, John- Retreat”—Before Climate harvardmag.com/ son writes, “teachers appreciated receiv- Change crows-19 ing detailed recommendations that were Sinks grounded in thorough observations...to be Coastlines There’s (Still) No Gay effective, evaluators must have a deep under- The question is Gene standing of instruction and, ideally, be able no longer if Genes seem to play a role in to demonstrate the skills they recommend.” we abandon determining sexual orienta- Johnson says people often imagine “a trade- coasts, but when and how. tion, but it’s small, uncertain, and compli- off between teachers and whether they like harvardmag.com/coast-retreat-19 cated.harvardmag.com/gaygene-19 their jobs,” on the one hand, and students, on the other. “The assumption…is that it’s zero sum: what the teachers gain the students lose. ed States treats teachers. Those who are in- knowledges and funds the costs of a first- But the research is pretty clear that [when] trinsically motivated to teach, as she knows class education system will our schools and teachers report their workplace is a positive directly, aren’t trying to get rich. But neither teachers succeed in providing it.” support for them, students do better,” even should citizens imagine that high-quality ed- vmarina n. bolotnikova controlling for demographic differences. ucation can be done on the cheap. Cost-cut- In her final chapter, “What Pay Means to ting schemes “can save only so much before susan moore johnson website: Teachers,” Johnson addresses one of the most they begin to compromise students’ learn- projectngt.gse.harvard.edu/people/ publicly visible debates about how the Unit- ing,” she writes. “Only when our society ac- susan-moore-johnson

METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS religious sense. An anti-Pelagian, Rawls first denied the possibility of meriting salvation, and then maintained this denial of merit, even What Ails after abandoning religion. Modern, Rawlsian liberals, unknowingly

drawing from this theological debate, hold CLOCKWISE FROM MCCOY; ALFRED TOP DAKOTA RIGHT: PASIEKA/SCIENCE SOURCE; TORNADO CHASER/ISTOCK Modern Liberalism? that a person’s actions are most often “ar- bitrary from a moral point of view” because they are contingent on circumstance. Hu- central tenet of modern lib- the world’s ills follow from their unavoid- mans do not choose their birth families or eral political philosophy is that able errors. A dissenting group, the Pela- the traits they inherit, so how can they de- individuals can be governed only gians, asserted instead that “human beings serve any consequent benefits? A truly fair A by consent. But both the nature are fully able to choose” to be good. In that society, such thinkers claim, would elimi- of this consent and the conditions under case, humans can be held accountable for the nate all such unmerited differences. Only which it may be obtained have been de- results of their actions—but if they choose then could individuals be free to consent bated for centuries. In his new book, The correct conduct, they can merit salvation. to liberal government. Theology of Liberalism (Harvard University As Nelson explained in an interview, liber- The problem, Nelson argues, is that hu- Press), Beren professor of government Eric alism is “downstream of all that,” hinging mans cannot claim to know what perfect M. Nelson enters that debate, positing that on the Pelagian concept of humans as free- equality would entail. “For what we are re- liberalism took a “fateful wrong turn” in ly choosing agents. From that point follow ally asking,” he expanded in the interview, the 1970s. The problem, he argues, emerged contracts, democratic political representa- “is whether a world characterized by the because liberal thinkers forgot their meta- tion, and the notion of both accountability existing distribution of natural endow- physical roots. and reward for our decisions. ments among human beings is, from the Liberal thought, Nelson writes, sprang In the 1970s, John Rawls initiated a rejec- point of view of justice, the best of all pos- from answers to a longstanding problem for tion of this brand of liberalism. Before becom- sible worlds.” While most modern liberal Christianity: how can suffering and injustice ing a philosopher, he had studied theology, philosophers would say no, Nelson writes exist in the world if God is both good and planning to join the priesthood. His under- that he sees no way to know for sure. all-powerful? The orthodox position, which graduate thesis, which sparked Nelson’s proj- Religious faith, he says, can provide an an- Saint Augustine championed, blames human ect, dealt explicitly with the question of how swer: those Christians, for example, who be- sin. Humans cannot choose to be good, and and whether humans can be redeemed in a lieve their God is perfectly just, and the world

14 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now “What we are really asking is whether a world By returning to a Pelagian appre- ciation for human choice and ac- characterized by the existing distribution of natural countability, he believes liberalism can avoid the difficulties of attempt- endowments…is the best of all possible worlds.” ing to ascertain such a cosmic verdict. Governments can compel egalitarian is decidedly fallen, can answer that a better critiques the idea that liberalism requires re- redistributions so long as their subjects con- world than this one must exist. But without distribution, not redistribution itself. The sent to be governed in that way, even if an in- such beliefs, the question is harder to answer. two ideas can coexist, and often do, “but dividual’s consent entails mere participation Equally difficult is the problem of they needn’t.” Their exact relationship, ab- in the society the government administers. whether leveling advantages, as Rawlsian sent a link of necessity, becomes “a matter Consent need not be necessary for each ac- liberalism advocates, could alter someone’s of fine-grained judgment about what kind tion the government takes, Nelson suggests. character unrecognizably. A man with of society we want to live in.” The key lies in respecting the individual’s brown hair may remain the same person A modern, Rawlsian liberal might expect original consent to be governed. if he dyes his hair red, or even if a pill turns policy decisions to point toward a perfect vjohn a. griffin his hair blond. But what if the government equality in which all individuals can par- gave him a pill to change his personality, ticipate as equals in a liberal state. But as eric nelson email: making him smarter and easier to work Nelson counters, “It’s not that there’s some [email protected] with? If he is not the same man, it seems kind of cosmic verdict that will tell us what eric nelson website: difficult to say that the original individual tax policy should be.” scholar.harvard.edu/ericnelson/home has benefitted. Nelson worries that attempts to an- Eric Nelson swer such questions breed illiberal atti- tudes, both in academic circles and in the general public. Intelligence pills may be an esoteric example, but he argues that many liberals advocate redistributing wealth or eliminating educational selec- tivity based on the same denial of merit. Such liberals, he has noticed, increasingly assume they know what is best for oth- ers. More pointedly, he offers, it seems counterintuitive to uphold free choice by forcibly redistributing wealth. If these arguments read like veiled attacks on egalitarianism, Nelson in- sisted during the interview that they are not. “We can agree to distribute all kinds of ways, for all kinds of reasons,” he emphasized. If one accepts that eco- nomic inequality breeds political insta- bility, for example, “that’s a very good reason to mitigate inequality.” His book

TEMPERATE ZONING Land Use and Climate Change

he first man who, having anyone who wants to tackle the might of trickle-up politics of parochial interests enclosed a piece of ground, NIMBYism and local property rights in the and local sovereignty overpower broader bethought himself of saying, global fight against climate change today. societal needs. When environmental the- “T‘This is mine,’ and found peo- To combat the polluting byproducts of ory becomes zoning practice, few subur- ple simple enough to believe him, was the civilization’s development, many environ- ban homeowners want their neighbors to real founder of civil society.” So argued Jean- mental researchers agree that cities need convert their garages into granny flats, or Jacques Rousseau in 1754. And so bemoans to become denser. Very often, though, the see tall, multifamily walk-ups replacing bu-

Photograph by Jim Harrison Harvard Magazine 15

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now colic bungalows. Far-off Otherwise, the status quo hills are fitter for green will never change: local initiatives. citizens and their gov- In response, second- ernments will quash zon- year Harvard Law student ing proposals for denser Grant A. Glovin argues housing, thereby keep- that there could be a cre- ing greater metropolitan ative legal solution to this areas both too sprawling conflict of interests that and too sparsely populat- keeps Americans living in ed to support better pub- sprawling developments lic-transit systems, leaving and heavily dependent on commuters car-bound and cars. The winner of the carbon-dependent. 2018-2019 Environmental The legal logic of Mount Law Institute’s Consti- Laurel has been heralded tutional Environmental as both groundbreaking Law Writing Competi- and highly controversial. tion proposed applying It underpins New Jersey’s New Jersey’s Mount Lau- Fair Housing Act and fur- rel zoning doctrine more nishes activists with a broadly, to reduce subur- powerful legal argument ban sprawl and combat for fairer zoning policies. climate change. But it has not been legal- The Mount Laurel doc- ly adopted beyond New trine was the New Jersey Jersey’s borders—and it Supreme Court’s solution has been legally and bu- to a separate, but related, reaucratically challenged social problem: exclusion- by townships across that ary zoning practices that state for decades. (That promote inequality. The includes Mount Laurel it- case began when low-in- self, where the construc- come African-American tion of the original afford- communities started to able housing project that get pushed out of the sub- launched the case was urb of Mount Laurel, near stalled for years.) Camden, in the 1960s, after Glovin’s legal argu- the local government re- ments for widening the jected plans for an afford- Mount Laurel doctrine’s able-housing project. A re- scope are logical and sulting pair of New Jersey promising, but will likely Supreme Court cases, in be politically unpalatable 1975 and 1983, ruled that The legal logic of Mount Laurel suggests to many. That buttress- local governments could es one of Glovin’s main not create negative social that local regulation must promote the points: the parochial en- externalities through their trenchment of local gov- zoning policies. general welfare. ernment structures makes According to the it very difficult to solve the Mount Laurel decisions, the constitution- Glovin argues that climate change, like inherent conflict between NIMBYism and al need for a fairer, more socioeconomically affordable housing, should be considered global environmentalism through existing and racially diverse society outweighs a local in the same way, and thus could be legally political structures. For Glovin, this politi- government’s prerogative to push affordable- championed by using Mount Laurel as the cal problem warrants a legal workaround. housing obligations to neighboring town- precedent. He admits that this argument He writes: “We are running out of solutions ships. Mount Laurel argues that local reg- would shift power to local courts and put to an urgent problem, and judicial interven- ulation must promote the general welfare judges in activist roles, raising the funda- tion appears to be the best remaining hope.” of the state as a whole, rather than welfare mental question of whether the U.S legal vcherone duggan within a specific locality, and that adequate structure should be used in this way. But state-wide housing for people of all income Glovin believes the environmental stakes grant glovin email: brackets is part of the state’s general welfare. are high enough to warrant such activism. [email protected]

16 November - December 2019 Illustration by Pete Ryan

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

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191108_PSOH_1.indd 77 9/25/19 11:56 AM Harvard2 Cambridge, Boston, and beyond

16B Extracurriculars Events on and off campus in November and December

16D Sensual Images of the Ballet Russes Museum of Russian Icons

16J A True Combo Tuning in to Greater Boston’s live-music jazz scene

16P Fatimah Tuggar Works reflect on humans and technology, Davis Museum

16R La Fábrica’s Latin-Caribbean Flair Cambridge hot spot draws dancers, diners, and music-lovers from all over. 16T Bow Market Somerville’s newest hip place

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Harvard Magazine 16A

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

secular event, where visitors of all back- grounds can celebrate winter, light, and na- Extracurriculars ture together.” Seasonal fare and spirits are available amid an enchanting landscape. (No- Events on and off campus during November and December vember 29-December 30)

SEASONAL Ceramics Program Holiday Show The Game Winter Night Lights and Sale gocrimson.com towerhillbg.org ofa.fas.harvard.edu/ceramics The annual competition takes place in New Tower Hill Botanical Garden, in Boylston, Enjoy gift-shopping while supporting the local Haven. (November 23) Massachusetts, holds its annual “inclusive, art community. Works by more than 50 art- From left to right: From Aliens, part of the Harvard Film Archive’s series Make My Day: The ists—from mugs to jewelry to garden orna- Cinematic Imagination of the Reagan Era; flutist Claire Chase performs new works at ments—are on display in this popular annual Harvard; celebrating winter lights at Tower Hill Botanical Gardens show. (December 12-15) FROM THE LEFT: HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE; COURTESY OF THE HARVARD MUSIC DEPARTMENT; COURTESY OF TOWER HILL BOTANICAL GARDEN

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16B November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Over $1 billion in sales. It’s Harvard. That's billion, They can spell. with a ‘b’.

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191128_Coldwell-GailRoberts.indd 1 9/24/19 9:50 AM Harvard Squared The 110th Annual STAFF PICK: Images from the Ballets Russes Christmas Carol Services memorialchurch.harvard.edu Russian ballerina Lubov Tcherni­cheva, pictured here for a 1920 production of Cleopa- Celebrate the season with the Harvard tra, was ballet mistress of the Ballets Russes in the latter 1920s, and played a vital role University Choir and a liturgy—three in promoting groundbreaking dance move- scripture lessons offered amid choral and ments until her death in 1976. (Her papers are congregational carols—that’s remained vir- held at Harvard’s Houghton Library.) This tually unchanged since the inaugural service sensual shot is among the 73 platinum prints was held in 1910. Memorial Church. in Emil Hoppé: Photographs from the Bal- (December 8 and 10) lets Russes, at the Museum of Russian Icons. Also featured are the legendary dancers Vaslav Candlelight Christmas 1920. Nijinsky, Adolph Bolm, Michel and Vera Fo- choruspromusica.org kine, and Tamara Karsavina—and others who An a cappella concert by Chorus pro Mu- orbited impresario and Ballet Russes founder sica features an E.M. Skinner pipe organ Sergei Diaghilev. and classic songs, new works, and a selec- Hoppé, an internationally renowned pho- tion of audience-sing-along favorites. Old tographer of the 1920s and ’30s, fit right in. South Church, Boston. (December 13) His London studio drew artists, intellectuals, couturiers, celebrities, literary stars, and FILM members of the royal family. Thus, as the ex- Harvard Film Archive hibit notes, he captured creative forces and harvardfilmarchive.org dance performers that “shocked the senses Film critic J. Hoberman, author of the new Museum of Russian Icons and seduced the Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Rea- museumofrussianicons.org world into the mod­ gan, introduces the classic Being There on Opens November 15 e­rn era.” vn.p.b. November 11, and appears November 12 for

a book-signing at the Brattle Theatre (which CLEOPATRA, BALANCHINE’S GEORGE IN TCHERNICHEVA LUBOV BALLERINA RUSSIAN COLLECTION/© E.O. HOPPÉ ESTATE CURATORIAL ASSISTANCE INC.

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compass.com Compass is a licensed real estate broker and abides by Equal Housing Opportunity laws. All material presented herein is intended for informational pur- poses only. Information is compiled from sources deemed reliable but is subject to errors, omissions, changes in price, condition, sale, or withdrawal without notice. No statement is made as to the accuracy of any description. All measurements and square footages are approximate. This is not intended to solicit property already listed. Nothing herein shall be construed as legal, accounting or other professional advice outside the realm of real estate brokerage.

16D November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared also screens other period films discussed in amines both distinctive artistic/educational (November 13), and Pelin Kivrak ’11, who the book, November 5-14.) Meanwhile, the experiments. Barker Center. (December 4) earned a Yale doctorate in comparative lit- archive’s separate month-long series, Make erature earlier this year, explores “Home- My Day: The Cinematic Imagination of LECTURES ly Exhibits: Artistic Representation of the Reagan Era, includes The King of Com- Mahindra Humanities Center Hospitality and Hostility in the Twen- edy, Back to the Future, and Blue Velvet. (Octo- mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu ty-First Century.” (November 20) ber 31-November 30) Two 2019-20 postdoctoral fellows discuss their scholarship: Javiela M. Evangelista, Harvard Semitic Museum French actress and director Mati Diop, a assistant professor in the African American semiticmuseum.fas.harvard.edu former Radcliffe Film Study Center fellow, studies department at New York City Col- Visiting Wellesley College assistant profes- will be on hand for a screening of her At- lege of Technology, reports on “Denation- sor in anthropology Elizabeth Minor dis- lantique, winner of this year’s Cannes Film alization and Xenophobia: Civil Geno- cusses “Human Sacrifice and Power in Festival Grand Prix award. The story melds cide in the Dominican Republic” the Kerma Kingdom” (a Nubian civiliza- supernatural fiction with an exploration of the global migrant crisis. (November 18)

THEATER Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert and Sullivan Players hrgsp.org Love lives, class lines, and patriotism con- verge in the comedic opera H.M.S. Pin- afore; or, The Lass That Loved a Sailor. Agassiz Theatre (November 8-17)

American Repertory Theater americanrepertorytheater.org What to Send Up When It Goes Down, produced by The Movement Theatre Com- pany, employs “parody, song, movement, and audience participation to create a space for catharsis, reflection, cleansing, and healing.” Written by Aleshea Harris, directed by Where every day Whit­ney White. Loeb Drama Center. (No- vember 14-24)

The world-premiere musical reimagining of is your class reunion Moby-Dick follows Captain Ahab, Ishmael, and the crew pursuing their quarry, amid One of the best things about going to college is contemporary quandaries. Directed by Ra- chel Chavkin, with music, lyrics, book, and having all your friends in one place so you can see orchestrations by Dave Malloy. Loeb Dra- them whenever you want. Get the same feeling at ma Center. (December 3-January 12) the Harvard Club, where every day seems like a POETRY class reunion. Learn more about becoming a library.harvard.edu member and re-connecting with old friends. Harvard English professor and poet Steph- anie Burt, author of this year’s Don’t Read For more information regarding membership, please call Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems, 617-450-4444 or visit harvardclub.com. introduces readings by Jordan Davis (Shell Game, and editor of The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch) and Ron Padgett (Big Cab- U in), followed by book-signings and a recep- tion. Lamont Library. (November 19)

Reel Time: On Black Mountain and the Poets’ Theatre. Jonathan C. Creasy, Back Bay Clubhouse | 374 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA editor of Black Mountain Poems (2019), ex- Downtown Clubhouse | One Federal Street, Boston, MA

Harvard Magazine 16E

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared - MEL TAING/ICA/BOSTON Luminous works by the Panajachel, Guatemala-based artist Vivian Suter, at ICA/Boston 24 Clover Street Belmont $1,850,000 4 BD 2.5 BA 3,500 SF tion that was located in present-day Sudan). Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street. (November 19)

Harvard Museum of Natural History hmnh.harvard.edu “The Remarkable Nature of Edward Lear.” Robert McCracken Peck, curator of arts and artifacts at the Academy of Natural Sciences, Drexel University, sheds light on the children’s writer—and accom- plished painter of the natural world—who mysteriously abandoned a promising career in science. Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Ox- ford Street. (November 21)

Radcliffe Institute radcliffe.harvard.edu 240 Norfolk St Unit 240 Cambridge Francine Berman, RI ’20, Rensselaer Poly- $1,350,000 4 BD 2 BA 2,086 SF technic Institute Hamilton Distinguished Professor in computer science, delves into “Civilizing the Internet of Things.” Knafel Center. (December 4)

MUSIC Harvard Music Department music.fas.harvard.edu Professor of the practice of music Claire Chase, a flutist, MacArthur fellow, and co- founder of ICE/International Contemporary Ensemble, ends a week-long residency with Constellation Chor vocalists with a per- formance of her Density 2036 part vi (2019), other new works, and a host of guest per- formers). Free, no tickets required. Harvard ArtLab, Allston. (November 7) Currier, Lane & Young — Boston Philharmonic [email protected] boxoffice.harvard.edu

Compass is a licensed real estate broker and abides by Equal Housing Opportunity laws. All material presented herein is intended for informational purposes only. Information is compiled from sources deemed reliable but is subject to errors, omissions, changes in price, condition, condition, in price, changes omissions, errors, to but is subject reliable deemed sources from is compiled Information only. purposes informational for is intended herein presented All material Housing Opportunity Equal laws. by abides and broker estate real Compass is a licensed profes or other accounting as legal, be construed shall herein Nothing listed. already property solicit to intended This is not approximate. are footages square and All measurements description. of any accuracy the as to is made No statement notice. without or withdrawal sale, brokerage. estate of real realm outside the advice sional 617.871.9190 The robust program offers Carl Nielsen’s Helios Overture, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Vio- lin Concerto, and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Sym-

16F November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared phonic Dances, op. 45. Sanders Theatre. Peabody Museum of Archaeology & ICA/Institute of Contemporary Art (November 14 and 17) Ethnology icaboston.org peabody.harvard.edu Vivian Suter. Her luminous hanging canvas- Composer/Percussionist Susie Ibarra A formal dinner for Harvard students in es, many created partly outdoors, swirl with gsd.harvard.edu 1910 is the literal centerpiece of Resetting colors and fluid forms inspired by the natural “Listening and Creating Spatially: How the Table: Food and Our Changing world. (Through December 31) do we hear in real life?” The Graduate Tastes. (Opening November 16) School of Design Rouse Visiting Artist lec- Museum of Fine Arts turer shares her work, including: Fragility, A Carpenter Center for the mfa.org Game of Polyrhythms, and Himalayan Glacier Visual Arts More than 45 intricate watercolors, draw- Soundscapes, a collaborative project with the https://carpenter.center ings, and book illustrations from the Ken- glaciologist and geomorphologist Michele An Introduction to Nameless Love. Large dra and Allan Daniel Collection elucidate Koppes that “maps and records memory and text-based sculptures by Jonathan Berger artist Kay Nielsen’s Enchanted Vision. changes in the earth and its culture along the reflect a range of “true love” relationships (Through January 20) Ganges off of Satopanth Glacier.” Gund Hall. based on work, religion, community, and (November 19) other realms not typically associated with Events listings are also accessible at romance. (Through December 29) www.harvardmagazine.com. Plucking and Playing boxoffice.harvard.edu Virtuoso mandolin-player Sierra Hull joins Spotlight banjoist Noam Pikelny, a founding member of the Punch Brothers, and bluegrass multi- Child’s Play, at the Society of Arts + instrumentalist Stuart Duncan, for a night Crafts, in Boston’s Seaport district, ex- of rockin’ folk music. Sanders Theatre. plores the whimsical, and sometimes (November 22) adult, nature of toys. Minneapolis artist Dean Lucker builds Harvard Wind Ensemble on the tradition of automatons and me- harvardwe.fas.harvard.edu chanical toys with contemporary folk- The student group performs its annual Hol- loric compositions, like Swinger (2019). iday Concert. Lowell Lecture Hall. He and his wife, Ann Wood, are the in- (December 6) genious duo behind Woodlucker studio, where they also produce paper botani- Boston Baroque cals, surreal scenes and dioramas, and boxoffice.harvard.edu interactive sculptures featuring both. Celebrate the passing year, and new begin- More provocative are works by Na- nings, with works by thaniel Lewis. His J.S. Bach and Arcangelo “Little Terrors” se- Corelli,­­ among oth- ries features sturdy ers—along with com- wooden toys—like plimentary champagne the Automatic Fun and chocolates. San­ (2018) rifle and Play-

ders Theatre. (Decem- time Camera and COURTESY OF DEAN LUCKER ber 31 and January 1) Monitor (2016)— and big wooden guns. Another installation painted in bright pri- features the wooden framework and ob- EXHIBITIONS mary colors. Not in jects for a game of “airport-security check Johnson-Kulukundis the show because of point.” Included is: a rainbow-hued baggage Family Gallery prohibitive shipping belt, hand-held metal detector, a play sui- of Byerly Hall costs, but worth cide-bomber vest, and an X-ray cubicle radcliffe.harvard.edu checking out online, where kids can stand, feet apart, and raise Dario Robleto’s instal- are Lewis’s rendi- their hands above their heads. Distinctly lation Unknown and tions of child-scaled not for children—or not yet. Solitary Seas, based play structures. His Following that, Paul Daniel’s kinetic met- on lengthy research, “flea market” kiosk, al sculptures—like the geometric Aramis shows the “origins of with cheerful striped (2017), at right, which is powered simply by the pulse wave as a awning and lemon- the wind—are a welcome abstraction. graphic expression of ade-stand vibe, dis- Society of Arts + Crafts internal life.” (Novem- plays cute boxes of societyofcrafts.org

ber 4-January 18) COURTESY DANIEL OF PAUL “Big Boy Ammo” November 21-January 18

Harvard Magazine 16G

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Jazz and Boston: A True Combo A look at the live-music scene, from traditional trios to experimental student performers by jacob sweet

t’s a Friday night at The Mad Monkfish in Cambridge’s Central Square and Yoko Miwa I and her trio are performing their weekly set. The lights are dim and the Asian-fusion dishes are plated Clockwise from upper left: Sheila Jordan performs with the with style. For many, it’s date night, Yoko Miwa Trio at The Mad Monkfish, in Cambridge; a low-key evening at Wally’s, in Boston; Alita Moses and and although it costs $10 to sit in the Steven Feifke at the Shalin Liu Performance Center, in Jazz Baroness Room—where the Rockport; Ravi Coltrane has also made his way to Rockport. live performances take place—not everyone is completely tuned in. roll into one rhythms into the street. Some people stand For some, music is part of the atmo- another like and listen; others have somewhere else to be. sphere, akin to the lipstick-red lami- waves puls- A not-insignificant number are musicians, nated seats; for others, it’s the reason ing along the who—juggling guitars, keyboards, saxo- they came. Miwa, a Berklee associ- shore, inspir- phones, sound equipment, and even an up- ate professor of piano whose trio is ing some din- right bass or two—are off to their own gigs. a staple in Boston, plays with unpretentious ers to turn away from their food and watch. On any given weekend in Boston, there’s grace and fluidity. The sound reaches the Jazz is in the air. plenty of jazz to be heard. This might sur- back of the room, but the closer you get to The plate-glass storefront window be- prise those who think jazz hubs mean New the ankle-high stage, the more the nuances hind the stage gives passersby a view of the Orleans and New York City. “Boston doesn’t CLOCKWISE FROM TOP STU RIGHT: ROSNER; ACADIA MEZZOFANTI; stand out. Her breezy, articulate phrases trio, as external loudspeakers send Miwa’s have the reputation of being a great jazz ERIN SMITHERS; JANICE TSAI

16J November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Celeating 46 Ya

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Drummer Lenny White leads his band at the intimate Regattabar; percussionist Manolo Badrena performs at the same venue.

ies made contributions as well, but Boston was unique in that it made major contributions to all of them.” Proximity to New York City was a blessing and a curse. Posi- tively, many of the world’s best artists frequently visited: Diz- zy Gillespie, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Thelo- nious Monk. Negatively, they

COURTESY OF THE REGATTABAR (2) REGATTABAR THE OF COURTESY often went home with some of Document1Document1 11/20/03 11/20/03 11:51 11:51 AM AM Page Page 1 1 city,” says Pauline Bilsky, president of the schools: the New England Conservatory Boston’s most promising young musicians advocacy group JazzBoston. “It’s really not of Music (NEC), Schillinger House (now in tow. Other cities may have had a bigger recognized—even here.” But those on the Berklee College of Music), and The Boston pool, but Boston musicians could outschool lookout know that Boston certainly has a Conservatory (now Boston Conservatory anyone. “We sort of looked down on the mu- part to play. at Berklee). As Richard Vacca details in The sical knowledge of the New York musicians The local jazz scene began in the early Boston Jazz Chronicles, Boston was not just a because they were all there before they were twentieth century and took off in the late hotbed of musical talent, but also “a training ready,” said prominent avant-garde jazz art- 1940s, as American soldiers returned from ground for jazz journalists, a magnet for mu- ist and Boston Conservatory graduate Sam war. With support from the GI Bill, service- sic education, and a proving ground for new Rivers, according to Vacca. “They got on-the- men flocked to Boston’s three major music approaches in jazz presentation. Other cit- job training. We waited and got ourselves to-

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16L November - December 2019

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

gether first and then we went to New York.” of the ocean, the Shalin Liu stage provides Mike Rivard, strumming a North African Many of Boston’s most storied jazz insti- a pristine visual, as well as auditory, experi- sintir, leads Club D’Elf at the rose-tinted Lizard Lounge; Rachael Price sings with tutions have faded away, but others have ence, and features widely recognized artists the Boston-based group Lake Street Dive. popped up. And although very few clubs who might also perform at Lincoln Center and restaurants feature jazz exclusively, or Symphony Hall. Branford Marsalis visited ra Club, set in a nondescript brown build- JazzBoston tallied 150 venues in the Great- this September, and Grammy Award-win- ing on a suburban Methuen street: it offers er Boston area (extending to Worcester ners Ulysses Owens Jr. and Jack DeJohnette Tuesday-night jazz series, featuring an array COURTESY OF THE LIZARD LOUNGE and the North Shore) that book jazz acts are on this season’s docket. Chianti is a hom- of crowd-pleasing, mostly local musicians, with some regularity. Bilsky points in par- ier venue, with entertainment six nights a food and bar service, and cabaret seating. ticular to the Shalin Liu Performance Cen- week, and solid Italian food. Guest artists Moving into Boston’s South End, one clas- ter in Rockport, and Chianti Restaurant tend to be of more regional than national sic club does remain: Wally’s Café, which & Lounge in Beverly. Framed by floor-to- acclaim, but there is plenty of talent—and has been plugging away for more than 75 ceiling glass windows and a stunning view no cover charge. Also of note is The Saha- years. Even today, its audience skews young.

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Harvard Magazine 16M

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared On a Saturday night, an unbridled impro- sion of the crowd or the performers. Solos properly, and watch as the bassist takes con- visatory energy hits you just as you enter are rewarded with instant applause, and riffs trol during the bandleader’s bathroom break. through the club’s distinctive red door. are extemporized emphatically, with mini- Some 80 people can pack inside this airtight About the width of two bowling lanes, the mal breaks in the action. You can get close jazz haven, seven nights a week. Stepping venue lacks much room to stretch out, but enough to observe the tenor sax player’s mi- back onto the street, you wonder how such the restrictions do nothing to curb the pas- nor annoyance when a reed doesn’t respond a little room could contain so much verve.

Jazz Photographer whom he traveled between 1989 and 1992). There are Frank Stewart, at Harvard numerous unposed por- Capturing the energy and spirit of jazz traits of revered jazz he- through still-image photography is a little roes: Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny like trying to bottle a tornado. Yet Frank Rollins, Walter Davis Jr., Art Stewart has managed to do it by taking Blakey, Max Roach, Joe thousands of images across more than four Temperley. Stewart’s “Miles decades, focusing on musicians in candid in the Green Room” (1981) moments on- and off-stage. “What char- features the great trumpet- acterizes his photography, especially, is er and composer leaning how intimate it is, and the access he gets against a wall looking fierce, to performers,” notes Gabriella Jones- surrounded by an entourage Monserrate, program director at Har- and photographers, with a vard’s Cooper Gallery of African and Afri- towel draped around his can American Art, which features The neck like a prize-fighter, or, Sound of My Soul: Frank Stewart’s Life in Jazz as Stewart’s own caption through December 13. put it, the “Christ-like figure The 74 images—mostly black and white in Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln “God’s Trombones, Harlem,” 2009 prints, plus a selection of moody color Center.” shots—span the early 1970s through this Contemporary and rising jazz stars also formers pour their souls out in public. year. Some of the earliest photographs shine. “Etienne” (2017) features the versatile Growing up in Chicago and Memphis, came from traveling with pianist, composer, trumpeter/band leader Etienne Charles, Stewart listened to gospel, blues, and jazz and bandleader Ahmad Jamal, not long after who has reignited excitement over jazz’s with his mother, Dorothy Jean Lewis Stew- Stewart graduated from Cooper Union, Afro-Caribbean roots; he’s caught onstage art, and her extended family, according to where he studied with influential artists like in mid-percussive heat. The young multi- the exhibit catalog written by Ruth Fine, a Roy DeCarava and Garry Winogrand. Also instrumentalist and singer Camille Thurman, former National Gallery of Art curator reflected is Stewart’s work as the lead pho- whose album Waiting for the Sunrise won this who organized this show and has collabo- tographer for Jazz at Lincoln Center ever year’s best “jazz with vocals” Independent rated with Stewart on others. “The emerg- since its inception in the early 1990s; he Music Award, is shown barefoot and grin- ing centrality of jazz,” she notes, “may be captures that orchestra, along with Wynton ning while warming up in “Before the Gig” tracked, in part, to his stepfather, the re- Marsalis, D.Mus. ’09, and his musicians (with (2018). In a close-up of vocalist Cécile McLo- nowned jazz pianist Phineas Newborn Ju- rin Salvant, Stewart nior, with whom Stewart attended con- has captured her with certs in New York clubs in the 1950s, on head pitched back, 52nd Street, and in Greenwich Village.” The nearly parallel to the show has a tender image of Newborn at the floor, and mic in hand, keys, with his childhood friend, Jamil Nass- eyes squeezed shut, in er, on bass, taken by Stewart in the 1970s. full-throttle, expres- That personal tone, that profound depth of sionistic mode. feeling and focus, carries through all of He seems to have a Stewart’s photographs. It’s even embodied sixth sense for what’s in “God’s Trombones, Harlem” (2009), the sacred about those large-scale color print at the gallery’s en- moments when per- trance: musicians in the foreground hold Dizzy Gillespie and their instruments skyward, playing amid a Dexter Gordon, c. faithful throng—everyone black-skinned, 1976 (left), and dressed in bright white—a celebratory Walter Blanding “demonstrating scene that Stewart has captioned “Baptism Coltrane,” 2002. in the Street.” vnell porter brown

16N November - December 2019 All photographs by Frank Stewart/ Courtesy of the Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared Regattabar and Scullers, both located a sharpness aided by in Cambridge hotels, may lack the same the arguably overac- powder-keg excitement, but they draw tive speakers—and better-known acts several nights a week. guests dance in their Yosvany Terry, an internationally acclaimed seats, while stand- bandleader and Harvard senior lecturer in ing in place, and in music, suggested both venues, although he groups near the per- admits that he himself performs in New formers. Darryl’s York City most weekends. In November, doesn’t book just Scullers hosts two 10-time Grammy Win- jazz, but the musi- ners: legendary jazz trumpeter Arturo San- cians are good, and doval (November 8 and 9) and pianist Eddie the food is, too. One

Palmieri (November 29). Regattabar’s per- inebriated guest rec- COURTESY OF AARDVARK JAZZ ORCHESTRA formances are booked through New York ommended Slade’s Bar and Grill, a slight- Members of Aardvark Jazz Orchestra City’s Blue Note Jazz Club, and feature a ly cheaper soul-food joint down the block, similar talent slate. Both offer pristine envi- which sometimes features live jazz. “Noth- grub. On a Saturday night, the crowd is no- ronments for undistracted jazz enjoyment. ing’s like Wally’s, though,” he clarified, be- ticeably relaxed as they listen attentively to No jostling or fighting your way to the front fore sauntering out. Also in the South End the chilled-out headlining folk group. The of the room is required. is The Beehive, a quieter and more bohe- featured jazz artists tend to be a bit more At Darryl’s Corner Bar & Kitchen, a styl- mian restaurant with a nightly selection of contemporary and experimental than those ish soul-food spot in Boston’s South End, live music. Depending on where you sit, the at older-school venues: Club d’Elf, a frequent some voice-raising might be necessary. The music could be more atmosphere than draw. Lizard Lounge performer with a steady, hyp- music rarely falls below forte, and the bass Just north of Harvard Square, the Lizard notic sound, markets itself as a “Moroccan- can be felt as well as heard. Servers wait Lounge, recommended by Ingrid Monson, dosed Psychedelic Dub Jazz Collective.” On for the briefest lulls in the action so they Quincy Jones professor of African-American leaving a show, it’s tough to estimate how can hear the patrons’ orders. What’s fun is music, presents a cozy cabaret-like viewing much time has passed. The Lilypad, anoth- the funkier feel of the music at Darryl’s— and listening experience and low-key pub er Monson recommendation, is an Inman

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Harvard Magazine 16O

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared Square hot spot for modern jazz and funk. only about three dozen people on metal fold- good performances; they need them to grad- Resembling an off-campus apartment’s liv- ing chairs, and the walls are often covered uate. Presenting organizations like Global ing room, the venue draws an audience that’s in contemporary art installations. As local Arts Live, Celebrity Series, and Mandorla mostly college-aged, or a bit older, with jazz musician and blogger Stephen Provizer Music have picked up the slack as well, many attendees sporting creative facial hair has written “The skill level ranges from the producing shows throughout Boston, Cam- and cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Avant-garde competent to the ‘I can’t believe musicians as bridge, and Somerville. As for seasonal jazz and bebop are the most represented genres good as this are only playing for 10 people.’” events, don’t miss the Aardvark Jazz Orches- on the calendar—a bit more raucous than If many of Boston’s historical jazz venues tra’s forty-seventh annual Christmas Con- smooth jazz. On one Saturday night, the iron- have fallen out, NEC, Berklee, Harvard, and cert, on December 14 in Emmanuel Church, ically named dance-funk band Jeb Bush Or- MIT have helped fill the gap. A glance at the on Boston’s Newbury Street. chestra, whose members wore short-shorts schools’ schedules reveals numerous free, or Boston might not have the jazz clout of and sweatbands, had the crowd jaunty and inexpensive, concerts with some big names. New Orleans or New York City—or even of loose. Just down the road, Outpost 186 of- NEC, with frequent free performances by Kansas City, San Francisco, or Chicago—but fers an even smaller and more experimental faculty, students, and visiting artists, might that doesn’t mean it’s not a jazzy city. It’s a setting. It would be wise to enter expecting be the top spot. At semesters’ end, students matter of knowing where to look, and the less-than-traditional tonality. The room fits often give recitals for a grade. You’re in for desire to just get swinging.

CURIOSITIES: Reflections of Fatimah Tuggar

“Fatimah Tuggar: Home’s Horizons,” at Wellesley Col- tion. The images reflect lege’s Davis Museum through December 15, offers 26 large-scale nearly mirrored blue works by the Nigerian-born, Kansas-based conceptual artist. skies and oceanic wa- Given her trajectory, from roots in Africa to studying at the ter, separated along a Kansas City Art Institute and earning a master’s in fine arts from horizontal plane, that Yale in 1995, it’s perhaps not surprising to read in the exhibit splits images of what materials that her multimedia projects explore “systems under- might be a traditional, lying human interactions with both high-tech gadgets and hand- ancestral home on one made crafts.” side, and a modern ga- Her 1997 photomontage Working Woman features a grinning bled house, with the woman in traditional Nigerian dress sitting cross-legged on the proverbial American floor, sheltered by a handmade wooden windscreen. She’s also white-picket fence, on surrounded by a land-line telephone, power strip, wall clock, and the other. desktop computer—displaying on its screen a duplicate image A 2019 Guggenheim of the entire Working Woman montage. It’s as if the woman is Fellow, Tuggar has re- dialing in, or into her self, as she appears in the virtual, commer- ceived many other ma- cial brand-happy contemporary age. Home’s Horizons (2019) is a jor awards and exhibited works internationally since the 1990s. computer montage diptych that also speaks to cultural bifurca- The Davis Museum show is a major solo exhibition, however, and conveys Tuggar’s sense of humor and playfulness, along with her nuanced cultural commentary. The commissioned installation Deep Blue Wells combines textiles, sculptures, video, and augmented reality (an interactive experience in which real-world elements are digitally enhanced). It evokes the centuries-old indigo dye-wells in the ancient city of Kano, Nigeria (among the last of their kind in op- eration) and reflects on the intersections of history, vir- tual reality, and globalization. See the work in person, and/ or—in the spirit of computer-enabled communications— learn more, directly from Tuggar herself, by visiting the campus virtually via a free “Artist Skype Talk” on November 19. vn.p.b.

Clockwise from above: Working Woman; Home’s Horizons; and Robo Entertains (2001)

16P November - December 2019 Photographs by Fatimah Tuggar and BintaZarah Studios/Courtesy of the Davis Museum

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La Fábrica’s Latin-Caribbean Flair Cambridge hot spot draws diners, dancers, and music-lovers from all over. by nell porter brown

A nightclub, restaurant, live-music venue, and bar/lounge are all rolled into one Central Square storefront at La Fábrica. Its Caribbean-Latino fare andwiched between Veggie Plan- any given night,” may include quail with Cuban rice and beans, et and the Central Square Theater, says owner Dennis shrimp in butter-rum La Fábrica is the most exciting spot Benzan, a Cambridge citrus sauce, and desserts for Latin-Caribbean music, food, native, attorney, and such as tembleque, a S coconut pudding. and dancing in Cambridge. Actually, it’s former city councilor, one of the only such dynamic destinations whose parents immigrated from Puerto Rico over Boston, and the world—and we get to in Greater Boston. and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s. demonstrate and show off not just Latin- “We have some of the best salsa, me- “This is a place where everyone feels safe and Caribbean culture, but what it means to be rengue, and Latin jazz musicians here on comfortable. You get to meet people from all Latin American, and American.”

16R November - December 2019 Photographs by Isabel Lopez/Courtesy of La Fábrica

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared What sets La Fábrica apart is that it’s a to converse. The live music—Tuesdays, open ton and Top 40. “In the nightclub, we tend seamlessly fused restaurant/lounge, live- mic; Wednesdays, reggae; Thursday through to get a younger crowd, 21 to 40, in the back music venue, and nightclub. Authentic Saturday, Latin jazz—generally starts around room, and an older crowd, that doesn’t want Latin-Caribbean food, with a twist, helps 8 p.m. and floods the front room, making it far to be in a ‘nightclub’ [scene] but still really set that tone. Start with the shredded man- easier to dance than be heard. wants to dance, up front,” Benzan says. Many go-papaya-green bean salad, with a zesty On weekend nights around 10:30, the entire patrons dress up—stilettos, spangles, and aguachile (blended peppers, garlic, cilantro, space transforms into a nightclub. Wednes- flashy ties—and are seasoned, talented salsa and lime) vinaigrette ($8) and the crispy cro- days are reserved for bachata: lessons in the dancers, so even those who don’t get out on quettes ($6)—fried balls of mashed yucca Dominican Republic dance style start at 9:30 the floor themselves can order drinks, groove and provolone cheese dipped in “mayo- p.m.—followed by social dancing until 1 a.m. in their seats, and enjoy the spectacle. “The ketchup” sauce. Larger plates include the Weekend “Latin Nights” feature rotating best part of La Fábrica,” he adds, is that all paella-like “fisherman’s rice,” with shrimp, deejays and a mix of Latin and salsa rhythms, kinds of people are “assembled together, with calamari, and lobster tails ($25), and the suc- from traditional Afro-Cuban beats to reggae- positive vibes.” culent whole red snapper in a coconut Cre- ole sauce ($30). Order a pitcher of sangria, with berries and citrus, for the whole table ($40), or sample other potions, like a classic piña colada or the “Smokey Paloma,” made with mezcal, the aperitif Lillet, and lime and grapefruit juices ($13). Dinner is served in two spaces: a front din- ing room, with a more sultry atmosphere, bar, and stage; and the larger back room, deco- rated by a wall-length photographic mural of workers in sugarcane fields. La Fábrica, Spanish for “factory,” also refers to those fields, represented by a mill wheel as the res- Experienced in serving the financial goals taurant’s logo—and by the nearly 450-pound steel trapiche, a mill for crushing sugar cane of Harvard alumni (from a Dominican fábrica) that hangs on one wall. Choose a table in the back if you want We focus on the big picture by creating customized plans that consider your entire financial life. We actively look for ways to connect, educate and support our clients’ strategic growth through our comprehensive financial planning, wealth management and concierge services. Our services include tailored solutions for: – Corporate executives. Our custom strategies integrate equity awards and other benefits with your overall wealth plan. – Business owners. You benefit from a broad range of resources and solutions for every stage of the business life cycle. – Medical professionals. We’re experienced in the unique and complex financial challenges of physicians and and health care professionals. Contact us for a complimentary portfolio evaluation.

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Harvard Magazine 16S

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

Bow Market Somerville’s latest creative spot to shop, eat, and drink by nell porter brown

ow Market, in Somerville’s Union Square, is very likely the only place on the planet where B you can shop for vintage furs, tuck into platters of pierogis and pou- tine, catch a comedy act, and then chill out all night with pints of Exquisite Corpse. “It’s a vibrant marketplace that does not fit the norms of a typical mall Tucked back from busy or traditional market setting,” says Britta- Somerville Avenue, the ny Lajoie, manager of Remnant Brewing, market occupies two lev- which offers the “chewy, deep, and dark” els: downstairs is food, like the vegetarian up- Bow Street’s festive courtyard lit up at Corpse stout (flavored with Taza chocolate), start Saus (try the poutine topped with shal- night; poutine with kimchi and scallions at the vegetarian Saus; one of the many among other rotating drafts—and doubles lots and kimchi) and JaJu (get the cabbage pop-up musical and other events; Remnant as a day-time java café. “Here, there’s more and mushroom pierogis), and upstairs are the Brewing/coffee café; and the Comedy of a personal touch.” small-scale retailers, most of whom are art- Club, featuring everything from newcom- Remnant opened when Bow Market did, ists or designers selling their own creations. ers and open mic nights to national acts in mid 2018, and is now one of the 30-odd The largest store, at just under 400 square imperative to be in a location where I was arts-oriented niche shops and food outlets feet, is We Thieves. Owner Sandra Rossi ensured I’d have the right psychographic that line the pentagonal, open-air courtyard. says that for a vintage-fashion store, “it was of my clientele: independents, creatives…

16T November - December 2019 All photographs courtesy of Bow Market and the shops

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 191144_LuxBondGreen.indd 1 10/1/19 9:31 AM Harvard Squared

From left: Peruse art supplies at Make & Mend, or vintage fashion at We people who appreciate the fringe, appreci- We Thieves’ Rossi. Thieves and Blue Bandana ate what is not expected or predictable.” The vendors all tend Relic, or pick up handmade ment and clothing, or take work- Her constantly changing inventory includes to help plan and put gifts and home goods at shops. Spilker says Bow Market is global fashion and goods by local designers; on events throughout 9000 Things. Vinyl Index has a “cool place because there are re- one of the best curated this season, Rossi highlights furs and glitzy the year, and, essen- record selections around. ally creative people—artists, paint- festive garb, and is expanding her supply tially, cross-pollinate a ers, and musicians”—working and of “self-care, all-natural, hard-to-find” bath growing, like-minded customer base. Rem- learning in close quarters. and beauty products. “Also, I had hoarded nant’s Lajoie, for example, organizes market That’s all by design. In developing the a lot of jewelry,” she adds, “and items from events, from courtyard yoga and movie or small, manageable retail spaces—with rel- estate sales—including a great collection of trivia nights to block parties and a pot-luck atively affordable rents and short leases— vintage Chanel earrings—so I am going to dinner co-hosted with the Somerville Public Bow Market’s creators have intentionally put all that out for the holidays.” Library. “We do get a wide demographic of fostered those synergistic energies, and aim We Thieves’ eclectic goods pair well with patrons,” she says, “from student groups or to support the riskier, homegrown products the Americana antiques, and wearables for work-from-home types during the day, to and ventures. “Our goal is to make sure that men, found next door at Blue Bandana larger friend groups, writing workshops…a this is always a positive step for a business,”

Relics (also a presence at SoWa in Bos- good variety of [people] of all ages and col- says co-owner Zachary Baum, “whether TIRELLA;FROM EMILY LEFT: ELLA RINALDO; COURTESY OF BLUE BANDANA RELIC ton). Down the way is Filomena Dimarco, ors finding comfort in our space.” they start here and graduate to larger space, a shop full of eye-catching jewelry with The emphasis is clearly on the arts— or they figure out something about their Southwestern flair, made by artist Ashley and artisanal food. All purchases support business or model that they couldn’t have Vick; her pendants and bracelets look great the work of these young artists and entre- without moving into a brick-and-mortar with the bold, hand-crafted leather boots preneurs, and the courtyard space, which space.” Baum is part of the trio—with Mat- for sale at Adelante Shoe Co. Gifts and is open to the public, whether patronizing thew Boyes-Watson and his father, Mark home goods are the focus at 9000 Things, the restaurants or not. Boyes-Watson, an architect with a long- where designer Ali Horeanopoulos sells her “The market’s popped up pretty quickly, time office in Union Square—who bought own rainbow-hued pendants and wall art, and it’s already a gathering place,” says Eiden and began transforming the former storage made from upcycled materials. Steps away, Spilker, kitchen manager of the In Season building in 2017. “We do expect,” he adds, Home Slice features handmade graphic art, Food Shop, where everything, from toffee- “that some of our businesses are not ulti- embroidered and crocheted goods, and plant dipped potato chips and basil-infused soda mately going to work out, for one reason or hangers. At Make & Mend, embroiderer to noodles and coffee, is produced in New another.” That’s an understandable aspect and owner Emily Tirella collects “gently England or New York. Its café also serves of any worthy enterprising process. used” art supplies—like paints and brush- wholesome smoothies, grain bowls, and Baum holds political science and theory es, drawing tools, papers, yarns, and fab- soups. Like many who work at Bow Mar- degrees from Tufts and the London School rics—which can be prohibitively expensive ket, Spilker is also engaged in the arts; he’s a of Economics, and met the younger Boyes- bought new. “People donate leftovers and musician and appreciates the inspiring con- Watson, who was at work turning a graffiti supplies, and we sell it at reasonable prices,” nections fostered by and within the market haven in Central Square into a pop-up mar- she says (see how to donate at makeand- community. On the second level, he points ket, through mutual friends. They shared “a mendsomerville.com), and even though she out, is Vinyl Index, home to one of the best sense of the importance of small-scale retail doesn’t offer classes in the small place, she collections of new and used records around; to urban life,” Baum reports, “and really con- urges everyone to stop in, get inspired—and it’s co-owned by revered local DJ George “7L” nected around that similar love of wanting to “just start making things” on their own. Andrinopoulos. Next door, in the storefront to see these kinds of businesses thrive.” “It’s a really good community with a production studio and tech shop Union The Bow Market space, which abuts the lot of people who are just starting out— Sound, beat performers and music-lovers rear of Mark Boyes-Watson’s office, con- so we’re all kind of in it together,” reports crowd inside for events, or check out equip- sisted of garage bays on the ground floor

16V November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared GARDENER’S PARADISE WITH POOL

and a second level of warehouse-like rooms—all of which yard was originally used to hold the trolley faced a worn asphalt lot. The trio looked wires overhead when the Red Line was not 4 Bedroom | 3+ Bath | $2,500,000 past these homely conditions and were in- powered by third rail. Water views from this wonderful combination stead inspired by the property’s potential The trio also lined the courtyard with of a new and older shingle style bungalow in a as a public-focused, urban-renewal archi- simple gray pavers, installed corrugated tin private location near the Vineyard Haven Yacht Club and West Chop. This one of a kind tectural project. Rather than roof over the roofs over part of the second-floor walkway, year round property has been lovingly cared entire structure, framing in generic interior and planted trees and vines. The look and for and is a rare opportunity to purchase

FROM COURTESY LEFT: OF 9000 THINGS; ELLA RINALDO retail space and sectioning out other units feel of Bow Market suit the distinctly un- such a magical home in an idyllic, peaceful based on development-industry commercial fancy tenor of Union Square—which has, surrounding. Everyone will enjoy the formulas, they took a different approach. so far, avoided the homogenization of chain sparkling pool, fish pond, perennial gardens, Three mantras guided the design process: stores and other similar influences. expansive decks, and short walk to the outer Don’t mess it up: “We have a really great Working with city officials, and the harbor beach. This is the perfect house for all seasons! Exclusive. space!” Baum explains. “Even though it was Somerville Arts Council, has helped Bow 508-693-0222 | VIEWPOINTSMV.COM a little bit dingy and paved and the build- Market ensure a balance of interests is met. 71 Main Street, Vineyard Haven, MA 02568 ing had these strange brown/tan cinder-like A council venture, Nibble, has even leased blocks—it had this incredible view of the market space that features chefs and cui- open sky.” sine from local immigrant communities. In Maintain a really human scale: The nu- August, Create Boston—a festival project merous tiny storefronts, accessed by an by chef Louis DiBiccari that spotlights local outdoor walkway that rims the courtyard, chefs, mixologists, visual artists, and musi- Teaching the World® arcade-style, enable shoppers to dip in and cians—moved in and opened its first perma- out of stores while still staying in touch nent venue, CREATE Gallery & Cocktail with the courtyard action below. “It’s not Lounge. “We’re excited about this,” Baum so crowded that it’s chaotic between the says, “because it brings in another new con- shops, and each owner can map their indi- nection to the art—and especially the bar vidual personalities onto the space,” accord- and food—worlds.” ing to Baum. “The whole space feels large, As Bow Market moves into its second but also intimate. In the courtyard, for in- winter season, check bowmarketsomerville. stance, you’re not listening to other peoples’ com for special events, pop-ups, and gather- conversations, but you’re also not alone.” ings being planned—even for the courtyard, Cheap and cheerful: For reasons related where the chairs and tables will stay put. As Preschool starting at age 2.8 to aesthetics, affordability, and practicali- a native Northeasterner, Baum relishes being ties, they kept the industrial materials and comfortable outside in the winter—“it feels ALL SCHOOL OPEN HOUSE resulting architectural tone of the storage fa- good to be hardy.” He believes that, given the cility. And because all the walkways and col- opportunity to be in a lively space where SATURDAY,Open NOVEMBER House 2, 2019 umns are galvanized steel, they never need things are happening, people will spend more 10AM-1PM to be painted. Ditto the granite blocks in time outside, as they do in Europe and Can- the courtyard that serve as seating, and also ada at popular winter festivals. Heat lamps, PRESCHOOL & KINDERGARTEN help divide the space geometrically and vi- and maybe blankets, will help. “We’ve also 9aOPENm-12pm HOUSE sually into varying planes. That granite, in tested out igloos for folks who want a little PreschoolSATURDAY, and JANUARY Kindergarten 25, 2020 line with the project’s sustainability goals, more of a windscreen,” he adds. “But our 10AM-1PM was left over from recent renovations of biggest thing is to decorate the heck out of Arlington Campus: 17 Irving Street the Longfellow Bridge. And, Baum adds, this place, making it feel really festive—and To learn more, call 617.499.1459 or visit www.isbos.org the vertical post in the center of the court- unique.” ISB, 45 Matignon Road, Cambridge, MA

Harvard Magazine 16W

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President Lawrence S. Bacow at Morning Prayers

The Community’s value—and values—of higher education. In- Harvard College dean Rakesh Khurana stitutionally, Harvard’s leaders have histori- introduced members of the class of 2023 Conversations cally made the case for free speech within to these community norms in a letter that To a striking degree, the speeches and academia, as essential to its purpose—and noted: welcoming messages to students at the be- President Lawrence S. Bacow has done so At Harvard, you will be joining a ginning of the fall semester touched on a often and forcefully, throughout his career lively intellectual community where common theme: the importance of civil dis- (as reported in “The Pragmatist,” Septem- debate is an important part of learn- course and the centrality to the University’s ber-October 2018, page 32). And on a purely ing. Hearing each other’s points of mission of open debate in search of under- personal level, Bacow was dismayed by the standing and truth. rare violation of those principles when stu- Perhaps that should not have been sur- dent advocates of divesting endowment in- IN THIS ISSUE prising. Pragmatically, in the current over- vestments in fossil fuels and private prisons heated, polarized environment, heading prevented him from speaking at a sched- 21 Harvard Admissions Process Upheld into a divisive election year, any campus uled Harvard Kennedy School event last 22 A Middling Year incident that could be interpreted as re- April (see harvardmag.com/divest-disrup- 24 Yesterday’s News pressing speech on ideological grounds risks tion-19). In a subsequent op-ed essay pub- 25 News Briefs becoming grist for political attacks on col- lished in The Harvard Crimson, titled “What 27 Brevia leges and universities, at a time when much Kind of Community Do We Want to Be?” 29 The Undergraduate of the public is already skeptical about the he decried the “heckler’s veto.” 32 Sports

18 November - December 2019 Photograph by Rose Lincoln/Harvard Public Affairs and Communications

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 view, having our own assumptions challenged, and interrogating our HARVARD PORTRAIT own values are experiences central to Harvard’s liberal arts and scienc- es education. When we gather to ad- dress difficult questions, we may dis- agree, and we may encounter ideas that make us uncomfortable. The temptation to drown out those ideas can be strong. At the same time, we need to be open to different ways of knowing and understanding, and to the possibility that our perspective will change when we encounter new evidence and better arguments. And we must remember that even in dif- ficult moments, we are deserving of each other’s respect and compassion. He then pointed the students to the fac- ulty’s free-speech guidelines, and observed, “These guidelines acknowledge the tension between maintaining a civil and respectful campus and remaining open to a wide range of views, and discuss both individual rights and responsibilities in our context. Allow- ing someone to speak does not mean we condone what they are saying, and it does not absolve that person or group from con- sequences. At the same time, we all share the responsibility for creating a community in which we interact with respect, integrity, and compassion—and with an openness to the possibility of changing our minds.” Welcoming those students returning to campus, Khurana nodded toward last Ryan Enos spring: I’ve been thinking about how When government professor Ryan Enos was growing up, gifts always came wrapped we can advocate for change, both in a map. His father was a navigator for the U.S. Air Force, who used a sextant and on-campus and more broadly, in a paper map to help him fly around the world. “Subconsciously, I think this fascination world where common ground so of- with maps filtered into me,” Enos says. As a political scientist, he studies “social ge- ten seems elusive. ography,” or the way that different racial or ethnic groups are organized in space Last year at Harvard we saw ro- (intermingled, segregated, or completely removed from one another), and how that bust debate about a variety of issues, affects politics. After graduating from Berkeley in 2001, Enos taught with Teach For which we appreciate at an institution America on the South Side of Chicago, a city that “in many ways was defined by seg- committed to pursuing knowledge regation,” he says. “Segregation was this overwhelming experience in my kids’ lives.” and educating global citizens. When It felt dramatically different from his hometown of Merced, California, “an incredibly we gather to address difficult ques- diverse place, where you had this big influx of immigrants from SoutheastAsia  and tions, we will often disagree. While I Latin America.” Enos was struck by that contrast. How do such different social envi- am proud that so many of you fierce- ronments come to be, and how do they shape what people think about themselves ly advocate for your beliefs, I am also and each other? When he started graduate school at UCLA, he thought he would concerned that sometimes on this study institutional politics: things like why Congress does what it does. But when it campus we see those with differing came time to begin serious research, he realized his real interest was the intersection opinions as undeserving of our atten- of geography and race. His timing was auspicious: his career has coincided with a tion, our respect, or our compassion. renewed interest in race in political science. Newly tenured, Enos says, “All of a sud- Hearing each other’s points of view, den I’ve got my whole future ahead of me….How does that change what I work on? having our own assumptions chal- I’m still sorting that out.” And though he’s finally switched to GPS, he still keeps giant lenged, and interrogating our values stashes of old maps, to wrap gifts for his students. vmarina n. bolotnikova are experiences central to Harvard’s

Photograph by Stu Rosner Harvard Magazine 19

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal liberal arts and sciences education. ues for public leaders also include engaging or Republican”—would disagree with that Addressing the public servants of the fu- in civil discourse with people with whom sentiment, he continued. “It’s necessary for ture, Harvard Kennedy School dean Doug- you disagree, even if those disagreements all of us to stand up and speak for the causes las Elmendorf wrote about the serious chal- seem insurmountable.…I am not suggesting in which we believe.” Bacow also said that lenges on any public agenda (gun violence, that you should always compromise or be in learning about and improving both them- refugees from war and poverty, the envi- morally neutral….On the contrary, I believe selves and the world, students need to hold ronment, bigotry and persecution), and that public leaders should make moral judg- onto one of Harvard’s most important tra- outlined the human qualities essential to ments. But I am suggesting that you should ditions: “intellectual maturity”—the will- addressing them: be open to the possibility that different ingness to adjust beliefs in the face of new The right values for public leaders judgments from yours have value as well.” information or a better argument. like us begin with a commitment to Bacow emphasized those themes directly The next day, at Morning Prayers in Me- serving others rather than serving and personally on the formal occasions that morial Church, Bacow was not only aspira- ourselves. That means being trust- signal the beginning of the school year. At tional, but blunt, about the stakes. Reflect- worthy—meeting high standards of the Freshman Convocation on September 2, ing on what he had learned about Harvard honesty and integrity, in what we say he recalled the traumas of his freshman year, since becoming president, he said, “The and what we do. It means serving all at MIT, in 1969, during the national convul- year past brought this extraordinary place’s others and not just people who are sions over the Vietnam War and urban un- strengths and weaknesses into greater focus like us in their demographic char- rest. In that context, he urged the newest for me, and I wanted to share with you today acteristics or ideological views. So, members of the Harvard community to an area in which I think we are at risk of fail- public leaders should not promote work to improve society and the world, and ing one another—and failing this University division, but should build connec- to do so in an intellectually open spirit: “The to which all of us belong.” tion; they should not inflame hostil- more you learn, the more you see, the more He then asked: ity and encourage violence against you understand what needs to change,” he How can we profess to be seekers people who are different in some way, said. “Harvard is not perfect. Massachusetts of Veritas, seekers of truth, if we shame but should instill understanding and is not perfect. This country is not perfect, and shun those who disagree with us? encourage respect of others. and neither is the world in which we live.” How can we urge forbearance and To that end, he counseled, “The right val- No one—“liberal or conservative, Democrat generosity in others if we are unwill-

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“Detaining Families Is Not Necessary” The Upside to Stories from the front lines of the humanitarian crisis Urban Life at the U.S.-Mexico border Cities are an integral part of harvardmag.com/-detention-19 Earth’s future: by 2050, 68 percent of the world’s population Over the Moon will be living in an urban area. A lunar rock and a moon landing’s fiftieth anniversary Solutions to social problems, prompt a party at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. from climate change to poverty, harvardmag.com/moon-fete-19 will therefore be tied to the fates of cities. In this episode, Glimp professor of economics Ed A Revised Gen Ed Debuts The College’s required curriculum relaunches with Glaeser explains why he is dozens of new experiential, case-based courses. overwhelmingly optimistic about harvardmag.com/new-gen-ed-19 urban growth and how cities confront problems. visit harvardmagazine.com harvardmag.com/glaeser FROM TOP: LEE HOPKINS; COURTESY OF THE HARVARD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY; COURTESY OF THE HARVARD GLOBAL HEALTH INSTITUTE

20 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ing to practice it ourselves? How can we succumb to the lure of moral cer- May we all see one another in that light….” we have any hope for the wider world titude, when we stifle disagreement By invoking “intellectual maturity” and if we cannot model in our community in our community by ignoring and “forbearance and generosity” in defense of the reasoned debate and discourse we ostracizing dissenters, we lose our effective discourse, Bacow addressed the wish to see elsewhere? ability to make meaningful change. community’s head and heart. Speaking in Yes, the issues we are confronting Bacow ended on a note of optimism about Memorial Church’s Appleton Chapel, where today—as a University, as a nation, the community’s ability to bring people to- his remarks drew upon the wisdom of his and as a planet—need our urgent at- gether (including people whose journey to own Jewish faith tradition, and caution- tention. Yes, they are deserving of our Harvard from other nations is being imped- ing against misplaced “righteousness” and thoughtful consideration. Yes, they ed by current visa and immigration policies, “moral certitude,” he was, perhaps, also ap- are worthy of impassioned argument. the subject of a message he emailed to the pealing to Harvard’s soul. But we cannot allow them to create in community the same morning): people “who A report on these messages, including links each of us a righteousness that abhors care deeply about the search for truth—and to the full texts, appears at harvardmag.com/ concession and compromise. When who want to sincerely improve our world. bacow-freespeech-19. vjohn s. rosenberg

basis of race in its admissions process, and “Ultimately, the Court finds that Harvard Harvard’s Admissions that Harvard’s pursuit of the diverse stu- has met its burden of showing that its ad- dent body central to its educational mission missions process complies with the prin- Process Upheld is lawful,” said Harvard Corporation senior ciples articulated by the Supreme Court in Federal Judge Allison Burroughs, who fellow William Lee ’72, who served as Har- Fisher II,” she wrote. In the Fisher case, the presided over the lawsuit arguing that Har- vard’s lead lawyer in the case. “It represents Supreme Court specified that college affir- vard College’s use of race in admissions dis- a significant victory not merely for Harvard, mative-action programs had to be tailored criminates against Asian-Americans, upheld but also for all schools and students, for di- narrowly and show that they accomplish the University’s admissions program as con- versity, and for the rule of law.” a specific goal, and also that colleges must stitutional on October 1. “The consideration of race, alongside prove that race-based admissions policies “Harvard’s admissions program has been many other factors, helps us achieve our are the only way to meet diversity goals. designed and implemented in a manner that goal of creating a diverse student body that Burroughs ruled on four separate counts allows every application to be reviewed in enriches the education of every student,” at stake in the case: a holistic manner consistent with the guid- Harvard president Lawrence S. Bacow said • that Harvard intentionally discrimi- ance set forth by the Supreme Court,” her in a message to the University community. nates against Asian-American applicants; decision reads. The plaintiff in the case “did “Everyone admitted to Harvard College has • that Harvard engages in illegal racial not present a single admissions file that re- something unique to offer our community, balancing, or a quota; flected any discriminatory animus, or even and today we reaffirm the importance of • that Harvard places too much emphasis an application of an Asian American who it diversity—and everything it represents to on race so that it is a determinative factor contended should have or would have been the world.” in admissions; and admitted absent an unfairly deflated per- Edward Blum, SFFA’s founder and presi- • that Harvard hasn’t adequately explored sonal rating.” dent, said in a press release that the group whether there are race-neutral means to Stakeholders have been waiting for Bur- plans to appeal the decision. “Students for reach its diversity goals. roughs’s decision since February, when the Fair Admissions is disappointed that the On each of these counts, she ruled in the parties presented their closing arguments. court has upheld Harvard’s discriminatory University’s favor. “[T]here is no evidence The plaintiff, Students for Fair Admissions admissions policies,” he wrote. “We believe of any racial animus whatsoever or inten- (SFFA), alleged in the case filed in 2014 that that the documents, emails, data analysis and tional discrimination on the part of Har- Harvard discriminates against Asian-Ameri- depositions SFFA presented at trial compel- vard,” she wrote. can applicants in admissions. Part of SFFA’s lingly revealed Harvard’s systematic discrim- Although Harvard looks at the projected case rested on Harvard’s practice of assign- ination against Asian-American applicants.” racial makeup of each class in making ad- ing applicants subjective “personal” rat- Blum, an opponent of affirmative action, pre- missions decisions, to ensure that it reaches ings, which the group argued disadvantaged viously initiated Fisher v. University of Texas. In diversity goals, Burroughs wrote, it does not Asian-American applicants. According to that case, ultimately decided in 2016, the Su- impose quotas or quota-like “target levels” Burroughs’s decision, “[T]he Court is unable preme Court upheld that university’s affir- for different racial groups. Having minimum to identify any individual applicant whose mative-action program. Many legal analysts goals for minority enrollment, she added, is admissions decision was affected and finds expect that the makeup of the current Su- not tantamount to a quota: “Every applicant that the disparity in the personal ratings preme Court would mean that the use of race competes for every seat.” did not burden Asian-American applicants in college admissions could be struck down On the third count, alleging that Harvard significantly more than Harvard’s race-con- or significantly curtailed if SFFA v. Harvard puts undue emphasis on race, she wrote that scious policies burdened white applicants.” were heard before the court. colleges that use race as more than just a “Today’s decision unequivocally affirms Burroughs drew extensively on the Fisher “plus” factor tend to use either a quota sys- that Harvard does not discriminate on the decision in her ruling in SFFA v. Harvard. tem or “assign some specified value to appli-

Harvard Magazine 21

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal cants’ racial identity.” Harvard does neither: conducting implicit bias trainings for ad- are children or relatives of donors to the it uses race on an individualized, context- missions officers, maintaining clear guide- University). Among admitted minority stu- dependent basis for each applicant, and not lines on the use of race in the admissions dents, that number was less than 16 percent. as the “defining feature” of any application. process, which were developed during this “Removing preferences for athletes and leg- And on the fourth count, Burroughs sid- litigation, and monitoring and making ad- acies would significantly alter the racial dis- ed with Harvard’s position that no feasi- missions officers aware of any significant tribution of admitted students, with the ble race-neutral alternatives would achieve race-related statistical disparities in the share of white admits falling and all other its diversity goals: options like eliminating rating process,” she continued. “That being groups rising or remaining unchanged,” the early-action admissions, admitting more said, the Court will not dismantle a very study concluded. transfer students, increasing outreach to fine admissions program that passes consti- Burroughs’s decision accepted Harvard’s potential applicants, and offering more fi- tutional muster, solely because it could do argument for why it needs to give preference nancial aid, she wrote, “would likely have better. There is always the specter of per- to ALDC candidates. Eliminating athlete no meaningful impact on racial diversity.” fect, but strict scrutiny does not require it.” preferences, she wrote, would make Har- One proposal, considered in this case and Since Harvard and SFFA made their vard “far less competitive in Ivy League in- more broadly in discourse about college opening arguments before Burroughs last tercollegiate sports,” while eliminating tips admissions, would be to give preference to October, public discussion of the massive for faculty children, legacies, and students low-income students instead of considering trove of admissions statistics released in the connected to top donors would “adversely race. But this would result in a significant case has been fierce. In September, a much affect Harvard’s ability to attract top qual- decline in African-American enrollment, circulated paper co-authored by economist ity faculty and staff and achieve the desired she wrote. Peter Arcidiacono, one of the experts who benefits from relationships with its alumni Burroughs’s decision acknowledged that provided evidence for SFFA, found that 43 and other individuals who have made sig- there are problems with Harvard’s admis- percent of white students admitted to Har- nificant contributions to Harvard.” For now, sions system. Asian-American applicants vard are so-called ALDCs: recruited ath- those preferences remain intact. may have a more difficult time getting into letes, legacies, children of faculty, or those The full court decision can be read at: Harvard, she wrote—and part of that may on the dean’s interest list (many of whom bit.ly/2nI4ktz. vmarina n. bolotnikova have to do with admissions officers’ implicit bias. “Overall, the disparity between white and Asian American applicants’ personal kar, the management company’s CEO, said, ratings has not been fully and satisfactorily A Middling Year “We are now halfway through our five-year explained,” she wrote. Harvard management company (HMC) transition of both the structure of HMC and “The disparity in personal ratings be- reported a 6.5 per cent return on endowment the University’s investment portfolio. I am tween Asian American and other minority assets for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2019. encouraged by the progress our team has groups,” she continued, “is considerably The endowment’s value on that date was $40.9 made to date, but we are mindful that there larger than between Asian American and billion: up $1.7 billion (4.3 percent) from $39.2 is much left to accomplish in the years ahead white applicants and suggests that at least billion a year earlier. In a year of more mod- to resolve legacy issues and position the en- some admissions officers might have sub- est results for most university endowments dowment for long-term success.” consciously provided tips in the personal (see below), HMC’s rate of return, which is Detailed results await publication of Har- rating, particularly to African American and net of all investment expenses, trailed the 10.0 vard’s annual financial report (after this is- Hispanic applicants, to create an alignment percent it realized in fiscal 2018. sue went to press), but Narvekar’s opti- between the profile ratings and the race- In his brief statement accompanying the mism may reflect his outlook for the HMC conscious overall ratings that they were announcement on September 27, N.P. Narve- investments shifted from past real-estate assigning. It is also possible, although un- and natural-resources supported by any direct evidence before the holdings toward new Court, that part of the statistical disparity private-equity and resulted from admissions officers’ implicit other assets—leavened biases that disadvantaged Asian American by continued poor per- applicants.” formance in, or further While implicit bias is a possible expla- write-downs of, some nation for the evidence she evaluated, Bur- of the remaining nat- roughs concluded, it hasn’t been shown for ural-resources invest- certain. (This is, of course, inherent in the ments such as tim- concept of implicit bias: it is subconscious, berlands. It was also hard to untangle from other factors, and a difficult year for in- rarely possible to prove through direct evi- vestors in emerging dence.) “Notwithstanding the fact that Har- markets. Including vard’s admissions program survives strict endowment and oth- scrutiny, it is not perfect,” she wrote. er assets, HMC had “The process would likely benefit from $4.8 billion invested in

22 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Magazine presents... Ask a Harvard rofessor In Season One of our new podcast, we sit down with some of the world’s most thoughtful scholars to talk about everything from academic ethics to hiphop music and medical marijuana. Drop in for office hours with: Lawrence Lessig, Dr. Staci Gruber, Ed Glaeser, Marcyliena Morgan, Robin Kelsey, and more. harvardmagazine.com/podcast

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John Harvard's Journal natural resources and emerging markets at the end of fiscal 2018. Yesterday’s News Until the University issues its report, the From the pages of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin factors contributing to the 4.3 percent rise and Harvard Magazine in the endowment’s value cannot be known precisely. But a rule-of-thumb estimate sug- gests that beginning from the $39.2-billion 1914 Lionel de Jersey Harvard 1954 After 311 years of being rung by value at July 1, 2018: ’15, the only member of the found- hand, the principal bell in Memorial • the investment return during fiscal 2019 er’s family ever to attend the Col- Church that calls students to prayers and boosted the endowment by roughly $2.6 billion; lege, speaks at exercises held at class will soon be operated electronically. • the distribution of funds to pay for Univer- the Harvard statue on November The editors report that there will be no sity operations (the largest source of revenue 25 commemorating the 310th an- detectable difference for listeners. for the schools and administration, about 35 niversary of his ancestor’s birth. percent of income in recent years) decreased 1969 The Faculty of Arts and Sciences the endowment by roughly $1.9 billion; and 1924 In the largest presiden- approves a spring-term experiment in coedu- • gifts for endowment increased its value by tial straw vote taken at Harvard cational living in which 150 volunteers from perhaps $1 billion—a large sum, but plau- to date, faculty and students give Adams, Winthrop, and Lowell will move north sible given pledges outstanding from The Calvin Coolidge a landslide vic- to the Quad, and an equal number of Radcliffe Harvard Campaign and continued, appar- tory over John Davis (Demo- students will take their places in the Houses. ently robust, philanthropic support. crat) and Robert La Follette Compared to the very strong results in (Progressive). 1974 FBI agents recover almost half the fiscal 2018, other institutions reported a ancient Greek and Roman coins stolen much tamer performance in the most recent 1934 The “dial method of from the Fogg Art Museum the previous period. Among the perennial leaders in en- signaling” for telephones has year. The approximately 3,100 coins are dowment returns, MIT earned 8.8 percent arrived, and the old exchanges found buried in a bowling-ball bag in a rural on investments in fiscal 2019 (down from University and Porter have wooded area in Lincoln, Rhode Island. In 13.5 percent the prior year); the University been replaced by Kirkland, a second find, 843 coins are discovered in of Virginia, 5.8 percent (vs. 11.4 percent); and Trowbridge, and Eliot.Unfor- a Montreal bank’s safe-deposit vault. Yale, which eschews nearly all stocks and tunately, note the editors, bonds (strong performers during the past that requires dialing “Eli” 1999 WHRB has begun broadcasting fiscal year), 5.7 percent (down from 12.3 per- to speak with Harvard over the Internet, which will make its cent). Stanford reported a 6.5 percent return parties on the Eliot ex- forthcoming January reading- and exam- (down from 11.3 percent). change. period Orgy® offerings available to lis- Endowment managers and deans face teners far from Cambridge. two challenges in the current environment. 1944 Enrollment First, for institutions like Harvard that aim figures for the term 2009 The editors report that 17 of to distribute investment earnings equivalent beginning November Harvard’s 114 varsity football players are to roughly 5 percent of the market value of 1 are roughly 1,800 wearing new helmets intended to help the endowment each year, a 5 percent to 6 for civilians and about insulate their brains from sudden move- percent investment return yields little, if 5,500 for military ments during impact that can result in any, net growth in the value of the under- men. concussions. lying principal (excluding gifts received). Were such results to persist, the real value of the endowment, and thus the academic expenses it could support, would be eroded by inflation. The Higher Education Price Index for fiscal 2019 was 2.6 percent. Thus, in- vestment returns of 6.5 percent, and distributions equal to 5 per- cent of market value, mean the endowment’s future purchasing power is reduced by more than 1 percent. Second, Harvard and similar in- stitutions therefore typically aim for long-term endowment investment re- turns of about 8 percent, allowing for the

24 November - December 2019 Illustration by Mark Steele

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 annual distribution and additional returns News Briefs those allegations. In addition, we are not to maintain real future purchasing power. asking the committee to review the behav- Academic plans and long-term budgets that ior or decisions of individual members of assume such returns over time are vulner- How Harvard the Harvard community in regard to the able if they cannot be achieved sustainably. Handles Harassment Domínguez matter.” The committee will Given persistently low interest rates, some In the wake of the charges of persistent issue a report to the University community. of the largest public pension funds have sexual harassment brought against Jorge Additional details appear at harvardmag. reduced their assumed rates of return to 7 Domínguez, former Madero professor for com/harassment-reporting-issues-19. The percent or so. the study of Mexico and Harvard’s first vice decision to remove Domínguez’s emeritus Both HMC and Harvard are considering provost for international affairs, a commit- status and Harvard privileges was reported what long-term rate of return the invest- tee will review factors that inhibit report- in May at harvardmag.com/dominguez-19. ment managers can be expected to earn. A ing of such misconduct or deter an effective lower expected return would have obvious response. President Lawrence S. Bacow an- Epstein Exposure implications for the academic operations nounced the committee on September 6, ap- In a September 12 message to the commu- the endowment supports. For example, pointing Susan Hockfield, MIT president nity, President Lawrence S. Bacow revealed income derived from the endowment ac- emerita; Kenji Yoshino, Warren professor of that Jeffrey Epstein—accused of being a se- counts for about half of the Faculty of Arts constitutional law at New York University rial sexual predator who continued to prey and Sciences’ operating funds. If Harvard’s and a past president of Harvard’s Board of systematically on underage women even af- current expected long-term endowment Overseers; and Vicki Magley, professor of ter a 2008 plea arrangement for sex offenses, returns are too high, given the investment psychology at the University of Connecticut, and who died in prison, reportedly by sui- outlook (and the labor-intensive processes whose research focuses on individual and or- cide, while awaiting trial on further charg- of teaching and research do not somehow ganizational coping with sexual harassment es—had cumulatively donated $8.9 million overcome habitual inflationary pressures), and interventions to address workplace inci- to Harvard. The gifts include $6.5-million in the effect on a faculty like FAS from lower vility. Bacow asked them to examine: 2003 to support a research program on evo- future distributions could be enormous. • What characteristics of organiza- lutionary dynamics (previously disclosed); As if these problems did not loom large tion or culture might have inhibited and $2.4 million in miscellaneous other cur- enough, fiscal 2019 was the first year in those who had suffered (or were aware rent-use gifts. As of the date of his note, Ba- which Harvard, and a few dozen well-en- of) misconduct from reporting it? cow wrote, Harvard had found no gifts after dowed peers, incurred the federal excise tax • When misconduct was reported, Epstein’s guilty plea—and “[W]e specifi- on endowment earnings enacted in late 2017. were there characteristics of our or- cally rejected a gift from Epstein following At last estimate (not updated for U.S. Trea- ganization or culture that inhibited his conviction in 2008.” The University con- sury guidance on how the tax will work, an effective response? tinues to examine its records, he wrote; it is nor for HMC’s latest results), the University • How do we vet candidates for also investigating further Epstein’s appoint- faced a tax bill of $40 million or more—ef- leadership positions to assure that ment as a visiting fellow in psychology in fectively, a reduction in the investment re- we are aware of any allegations of 2005. The unspent balance of $186,000 from turns available to distribute to the schools, misconduct, including sexual ha- the gifts will be directed to organizations that at a time when realizing planned-for rates rassment, and how might we do this? “support victims of human trafficking and of return already appears daunting. They will conduct interviews and review sexual assault”—an unusual step reflect- A detailed report on HMC’s initial an- materials and policies this fall, as they “ex- ing Epstein’s “repulsive and reprehensible” nouncement of results appears at harvard- amine factors that may undermine our Uni- crimes. Bacow has convened a working group mag.com/endowment-19. Check back at versity’s ability to prevent or address inci- to examine how the University vets donors, www.harvardmagazine.com for analysis dents of sexual harassment,” Bacow wrote. and on September 20, general counsel Diane of the University’s annual financial report, But they will not “re-investigat[e] the al- E. Lopez wrote to the community, asking for expected toward the end of October. v j.s.r. legations, nor [review] the investigation of help (anonymously, if preferred) in identifying information on “Jeffrey Epstein’s donations or KAREN PHILIPPI/COURTESY OF THE ARTLAB other interactions” across the decentralized Explore More University. Separately, The Harvard Crimson re- ported that while Epstein helped arrange the The Harvard ArtLab, a flexible space in major gift that paid for construction of Har- Allston dedicated to artistic collaboration vard Hillel’s building, completed in 1994, he across disciplines, opened in late Septem- did not himself donate the funds. ber. Flutist and professor of the practice of music Claire Chase called it a place “to Sports in the Spotlight gather and make noise together and ideate Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) dean and argue and create a community.” Read Claudine Gay has chartered a comprehen- more at harvardmag.com/artlab- sive review of Harvard athletics, aiming to opens-19. “engage our community to learn about our student-athlete experience, the culture

Harvard Magazine 25

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal of our programs, and the structure of our sonnel, or the consideration of athletics in on our campus,” he wrote, “find themselves department. This important work will in- admissions, fans will have to wait and see. the subject of scrutiny and suspicion in the form strategic planning for Harvard Athlet- Further details are available at harvardmag. name of national security, and they are re- ics over the coming decade, drawing on the com/ath-review-19. considering the value of joining our commu- proud history, traditions, and the values of nity in the face of disruptions and delays.” athletics at Harvard.” Who Gets In Acknowledging public officials’ “necessary The study is explicitly supportive: Gay Fretting—or boasting, or litigating—about obligation to weigh issues of national se- wrote about “set[ing] our aspirations for the who is admitted to Harvard and other selec- curity, I profoundly hope they will do so support of athletics at Harvard”; and the ef- tive institutions is a major industry. But now with full recognition of the ways that our fort is overseen by a committee who will be the issue surrounding the community’s com- country’s universities greatly benefit from well positioned to make the case for resources position has broadened in an ominous way. the presence and participation of talented for the program. Members include: Bob Scal- In July, President Lawrence S. Bacow wrote people from around the world, and the ways ise, Nichols Family director of athletics; Jack to U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, that U.S. national interests are served by a Reardon, senior adviser for alumni affairs and J.D. ’94, and Acting Secretary of Homeland system of higher education whose strength development, a past director of admissions Security Kevin McAleenan to “share my deep rests on a willingness to transcend barriers, and of athletics, and former executive director concern over growing uncertainty and anxi- not erect them.” of the alumni association (and a current di- ety around issues involving international stu- Writing personally, as the son of refugees rector of this magazine); College dean Rakesh dents and scholars.” While supporting “the from the Holocaust, he turned to those to- Khurana; FAS dean for administration and fundamental role of your agencies in ensuring day, who like “countless people from differ- finance Leslie Kirwan; and FAS’s new dean that those who come to the United States do ent parts of the world have long looked to for development, Armin Afsahi. They will be so with appropriate and honest intentions [this country’s] shores with hope—for the assisted by Mercer consultants. that meet the goals and requirements of our chance to learn, for the chance to contrib- Although Gay’s note touched on “the cul- laws,” he pointed to visa delays that increas- ute, for the chance to live better and safer ture of our programs” (see 7 Ware Street, page ingly impede the arrival of international stu- lives.” On their behalf, he continued, “I am 5), the context is on strategic planning: pre- dents and scholars, and to security reviews disheartened by aspects of the proposed sumably investments in the extensive athlet- that pose mounting threats to the conduct new criteria for people seeking to enter our ics facilities (some recently refurbished, but of “open and collaborative” academic science. country. They privilege those who are al- many aging), particularly as Allston campus The late-August news that Palestinian ready educated, who already speak English, development nearby or on some of those ven- student Ismail Ajjawi, from Lebanon, was and who already have demonstrable skills. ues proceeds; and in programs and the con- denied entry at Logan Airport after he trav- They fail to recognize others who yearn for nection between athletes and other under- eled to the United States to join the College a better future and who are willing to sac- graduates. In an interview apart from the class of 2023—apparently because immigra- rifice and work hard to achieve it.” September 5 announcement, Gay expressed tion officials objected to phone and laptop In remaining open to talent from any admiration for student athletes’ tenacity, social-media postings from his friends— source, Bacow concluded, “Harvard is, in- commitment to their teammates, and immer- only heightened those fears. (He was sub- deed, no island. We must devote ourselves to sion in and exposure to leadership—and her sequently cleared to enter the country, in the work of illuminating the world through interest in seeing those lessons and experi- time to begin classes.) word and deed, and we must continue to af- ences shared across the undergraduate body. Bacow amplified his concern in a com- firm and safeguard the values that underlie A report on the committee’s findings is munity email sent on the morning of Sep- the finest traditions of this extraordinary expected in the spring. Whether it con- tember 3, the first day of the semester. In- nation, especially in turbulent times. I hope siders the weighty matters of staffing, per- voking a 1957 observation by predecessor you will take up that important work with Nathan Pusey about Harvard me in the coming months.” “as a kind of island of light in Indeed, in mid September, Harvard joined a very widespread darkness,” 600-plus colleges and universities—under Bacow was at pains to assert the auspices of the American Council on that the University cannot be Education—in writing to the leaders of the a special place of learning and U.S. Congress, urging permanent protection discovery if it is an island kept for undocumented immigrant students (the apart from the best minds in “Dreamers” remaining in the country under the world. “Various interna- the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals tional students and scholars program). Bacow also signed a letter to the eager to establish lives here Massachusetts congressional delegation, A spirited moment for the from 42 presidents of institutions in the women’s lacrosse players. Commonwealth, urging action to reverse Harvard athletics plays an visa delays and other heightened barriers important role in the lives of the nearly one-fifth of to foreign-born students and other partici- undergraduates participating pants in higher education here.

HARVARD ATHLETIC COMMUNICATIONS ATHLETIC HARVARD in intercollegiate sports. vjohn s. rosenberg

26 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Helping Housing tion has a negative impact on society. From The Harvard Local Housing Collabora- 2012 to 2018, reflecting rising Republican tive—involving $20 million in revolving Brevia antipathy, the share of Americans saying University loan funds used to support af- colleges and universities have a negative fordable housing in what remains one of effect increased from 26 percent to 38 per- the nation’s most expensive resi- cent; the views of Democrats and dential real-estate markets—has Democratic-leaning indepen- been renewed. Created in 2000 dents have remained stable and and previously renewed, it has “overwhelmingly positive.” Pew enabled partners—the Local also found majority support (52 Initiatives Support Corpora- percent) for more federal spend- tion, BlueHub Capital, and the ing on scientific research, with Cambridge Affordable Housing Democrats more favorable than Trust—to preserve and create Republicans—but greater sup- 7,000-plus units of affordable port across the spectrum com- housing. pared to the recession-recovery year of 2013. And a New America Social-Club-Sanctions Lawsuit survey found general support for Harvard’s motion to dismiss a postsecondary education, espe- December 2018 lawsuit challeng- cially as a preparation for work, ing as discriminatory on the ba- but with ideological differences sis of gender the 2016 policy that in how the cost is borne: Repub- sanctions students for belong- licans emphasized individuals ing to unrecognized single-gen- paying their own way; Demo- der social organizations (final crats favored public financing clubs, fraternities, and sorori- of what they see as a social good. ties), has been effectively denied. In an August opinion, U.S. dis- Ratings Game trict judge Nathaniel M. Gorton The annual U.S. News & World Re- found that three plaintiffs lacked port beauty contest again ranked

standing, but that the remain- COURTESY OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY HEALTH SERVICES Princeton as the top university, ing litigants were entitled to proceed. In DOCTOR AND DIVERSITY: Giang T. followed by Harvard and a three-way tie his opinion, the judge observed that “it is Nguyen has been appointed executive among Columbia, MIT, and Yale. Williams director of Harvard University Health impossible for Harvard to apply its policy Services (HUHS), which provides care again was the magazine’s top liberal-arts without considering both the sex of the to students and to faculty and staff college, followed by Amherst and a tie be- particular student and the sex of other members who choose it for their tween Swarthmore and Wellesley. The top students with whom he or she seeks to health benefits. A family-medicine three campuses in its new “social mobility” practitioner, he has been executive associate.” The plaintiffs “have alleged a director of the Student Health Service ranking were the University of California’s plausible claim for associational discrimi- and clinical associate professor of Riverside, Santa Cruz, and Irvine campus- nation under Title IX” and “have alleged family medicine and community es. The Wall Street Journal crowned Harvard, health at the University of Pennsylva- facts sufficient to state a plausible claim nia. The Harvard announcement MIT, and Yale as its top three schools. Sep- under a theory of gender stereotyping,” emphasized Nguyen’s role in forming arately, The Boston Globe noted that private justifying a trial of the issues—and sug- collaborations to focus on “racial and institutions’ sticker prices (total cost of gesting at least some problems for Har- ethnic minorities, immigrants, and attendance) now exceed $70,000—a de- LGBTQ populations, particularly vard’s defense. transgender people,” and noted that terrent to many applicants, even though an early priority in his new post, which financial aid reduces the average cost per The Public Pulse he assumes November 18, will be student dramatically. Pollsters continue to plumb polarized working with schools to effect the work of the University-wide task force opinions about higher education. The Pew on student mental health. He succeeds Around Academia Research Center’s August survey reported Paul Barreira, who remains at MIT’s The Engine—a longer-term ven- “an undercurrent of dissatisfaction—even Harvard working on graduate-student ture-capital firm for difficult-to-build mental health. suspicion—among the public about the enterprises (in fields like energy from fu- role colleges play in society, the way admis- sion, which need lots of capital and time sions decisions are made, and the extent Those views are highly polarized, with 59 to progress)—is leasing a 200,000-square- to which free speech is constrained on col- percent of Republicans and Republican- foot space, aiming to host 100 or more com- lege campuses” (on the latter, see page 18). leaning independents saying higher educa- panies. MIT has invested $25 million in the

Harvard Magazine 27

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

PUBLIC-SERVICE PAIR: Deepening its investment in broader and more academically connected public-service programs, the College has appoint- ed Warren professor of the history of American education Julie Reuben the inaugural faculty director of the Phillips Brooks House Center for Public Service and Engaged Scholarship (PBHC) and Travis Lovett the assistant dean of civic engagement and service. Much student public volunteering has traditionally been channeled through extracurricular-service activities, in Boston and Cambridge, conducted under the Phillips Brooks House Association’s (PBHA) aegis. The faculty directorship points toward student involvement in faculty members’ service-oriented research, and courses with service experiences. The assistant deanship encompasses the many, diverse service opportunities throughout Harvard, beyond PBHA. Read a full report at harvardmag.com/publicservice-leaders-19.

for-profit venture, now capitalized at more of Christian studies, is in- Plant humanities, urban landscapes. than $200 million.…The College Board terim Pusey Minister in Dumbarton Oaks, building on its re- has pulled back from its single-factor the Memorial Church. She search and collections in Byzantine, Pre- “adversity index”—intended to give col- succeeds the Reverend Columbian, and landscape-architecture leges more information about applicants’ Jonathan L. Walton, now studies (see page 88), has launched Plant background, alongside their SAT scores. dean of Wake Forest’s di- Humanities Fellowships, supported by

Instead, it will provide data about their BLACKWELL JEFFREY vinity school. A search for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to high schools and neighborhoods: separate Stephanie a permanent successor is encourage scholarship melding science, gauges of socioeconomic status.…Among Paulsell underway. Read more at art, history, and digital humanities, draw- the members of Yale College’s class of 2023 harvardmag.com/paulsell-19. ing on rare books and manuscripts, her- are 20 New Haven students—13 of them baria specimens, and scholarly literature. from public schools; 11 of the 20 had partic- MacArthur Fellows: The MacArthur Separately, Mellon has funded a three- ipated in its “pathways” programs, which Foundation’s 2019 “genius grant” recipi- year program on democracy, race, and dif- PHOTOGRAPHS NEIL BY REUBEN (REUBEN) AND JEN DEAN (LOVETT) immerse high-school students in on-cam- ents include Baird professor of science Jer- ference, broadening a Dumbarton Oaks pus science or arts and humanities learn- ry X. Mitrovica, a geophysicist whose re- research initiative on urban landscape ing experiences with faculty members and search focuses on climate studies and environmental histories. Yale students.…Separately, that university, change; philosopher Eliz- in the quiet phase of a capital campaign, abeth Anderson, Ph.D. Miscellany. Harvard Law School has reported $826.8 million in gifts and pledg- ’87; attorney and restor- formally launched its Animal Law and es during the past fiscal year, its second- ative-justice practitioner Policy Clinic; some of the legal issues highest fundraising total ever.…Moody’s Sujatha Baliga ’93; ma- in the field and scholars involved were

Investors Service maintained its negative rine scientist Stacy Ju- COURTESY OF THE JOHN MACARTHUR & CATHERINE D. T. FOUNDATION addressed in “Are Animals ‘Things’?” outlook for higher-education finances, as piter ’97; and urban de- Jerry X. (March-April 2016, page 40).…Conclud- competition for students and the costs of signer Emmanuel Pratt, Mitrovica ing 31 years of service in the Faculty of making attendance affordable keep pres- a 2017 Loeb Fellow at the Arts and Sciences’ Office of Gift Plan- sure on revenues. Design School (see harvardmag.com/ ning, executive director Peter Kimball macarthurs-19). retired in early October. He handled gifts Nota Bene including a Stradivarius violin, oriental Fencing’s new face. Dar- Top teachers. Star associate professor of carpets, polo ponies, and a Frank Lloyd ia Schneider has been ap- stem cell and regenerative biology Ya- Wright house, along with, you know, fi- pointed head coach of the Chieh Hsu and assistant professor of stud- nancial assets.….Dartmouth paid $14 mil- men’s and women’s fenc- ies of women, gender, and sexuality Durba lion to settle a sexual-harassment lawsuit ing programs. The posi- Mitra (Harvard Portrait, September-Oc- brought by nine current and former stu-

tion was vacated when ATHLETICS CORNELL OF COURTESY tober 2018, page 17) have been named this dents who alleged misconduct by their Peter Brand was dis- Daria year’s Roslyn Abramson Award winners, former psychology professors, whose ten- missed for violating the Schneider conferred on junior faculty members for ure and appointments were terminated conflict-of-interest policy (News Briefs, excellence in undergraduate teaching. in 2018. The payment is among the larg- September-October, page 33). Schneider est paid in such cases by a higher-educa- fenced sabre at Columbia, and began her Architects of record. Among the five win- tion institution.…Nancy J. Brown, M.D. coaching career there in 2010; she was head ners of Architectural Record’s 2019 Women ’86, chair of the department of medi- coach at Cornell for three years, before her in Architecture Award are the Gradu- cine at Vanderbilt, has been appointed move from the Big Red to the Crimson. ate School of Design’s Sharon Johnston, dean of Yale School of Medicine, effec- professor in practice of architecture, and tive February 1; she studied molecular Minister for the moment. Stephanie Toshiko Mori, Hubbard professor in the biophysics and biochemistry as a Yale Paulsell, Swartz professor of the practice practice of architecture. undergraduate.

28 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 community members about their experi- THE UNDERGRADUATE ences participating in health research, and their opinions of the integration of West- ern biomedical and Native Hawaiian heal- ing traditions. Permission to Know On my second day at DNHH, I sat on the third floor of the medical school overlooking skyscrapers and the gorgeous blue skies of by julie chung ’20 Honolulu and reflected on my relationship to the place. All 10 undergraduate interns had gathered for two introductions: of ourselves ast summer, during my third her na‘au (gut), which is the center of thought, and of the land. After giving a brief history week of senior-thesis fieldwork intellect, and instinct for Hawaiians. of the colonization of Hawai‘i and the mis- in Honolulu, I visited a kalo (taro) sion of the school of medicine, our DNHH patch, Ka Papa Lo‘i O Ka-newai, When I arrived in Honolulu on May 31, I presenter pulled up a slide on the projec- Lat the Hawai‘inuia-kea School of Hawaiian had a bad feeling in my gut. I was conduct- tor screen. ‘O Wai Au? Who am I? The slide Knowledge. Our group had spent only a few ing my 10 weeks of fieldwork at the Uni- had images of various natural landscapes in minutes shuffling single-file along the nar- versity of Hawai‘i at Ma-noa Department of Hawai‘i. Our presenter asked us to introduce row mountain trail before our guide stopped Native Hawaiian Health (DNHH), the only ourselves “the Native Hawaiian way”: “My us. As we settled into a silence, the rest of medical-school department devoted to re- name is… My mountain is… My river/ocean the scenery came alive. I could hear the searching indigenous health disparities in is… My rain is… My wind is… I am from….” freshwater stream tumbling downhill be- the United States. The department hosts As my turn approached, I was nervous. The side me, and I watched hundreds of frantic an interdisciplinary team of psychologists, six interns before me had all given the Hawai- ants, emboldened by my stillness, scramble public-health researchers, physicians, and ian names of places around them, while two of over my exposed feet and legs. Until that bench scientists from both Native Hawai- them had spoken their entire introductions in point, my eyes and senses had been fixated ian and non-native backgrounds with the Hawaiian. I was the only student who did not on the rocky path, which had tested the lim- common purpose of addressing the strik- grow up in Hawai‘i. My mountain, my river, its of my foam flip-flops. ing burden of disease in Native Hawaiian my ocean, my valley, and my wind were all After our guide had arranged us in a communities that stems from generations of scattered across California and New England. large circle, she asked, “I would never go historical and cultural trauma. Intrigued by What was my place in Hawai‘i? into your house without knocking, right?” the DNHH’s emphasis on cultural revital- My unease about my initial plans had I shook my head, unsure why we were dis- ization and community engagement, I ini- actually begun six months before, when cussing this. “No, that’s trespassing,” she tially planned to interview Native Hawaiian I sat with other juniors in the anthropol- reminded us. She continued, “We are in the same situation here. Just because there aren’t any doors or walls, doesn’t mean that anybody can come and enter this mountain. We need to introduce ourselves to the ‘a-ina (land).” We would normally introduce ourselves with an oli, or chant, but given we did not have enough time to learn one, our tour group each shared our first and last names, our geneal- ogy, our family’s place of origin, and our educational pursuits. I welcomed the change of pace from the standard “Harvard introduction” of name, year, House, and concentration. Even after a greeting as simple as an “Aloha, my name is…,” our guide told us, “The land will tell you if you have permission. You might hear the sounds of a songbird or maybe you just get a bad feeling inside telling you not to go farther.” She pointed to

Illustration by Simona Mulazzani Harvard Magazine 29

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal ogy department’s weekly ethnographic- forefront of that movement, writing academic teenth-century account of indigenous Aus- methods tutorial. That concentration re- and popular eugenics articles and lobbying tralians as uncivilized because they lacked quirement, besides teaching us the nuts government to enact eugenics laws. Promi- a land-tenure system later became the le- and bolts of ethnographic research, aims nent faculty members in fields ranging from gal basis for seizing their land—a decision to “[engage] students in the intellectual economics and genetics to psychology all overturned in the Australian High Court and ethical questions at stake in designing “proved” a racial hierarchy in their research. only in 1992. During my time in Hawai‘i, a research project.” The first day of class, we Given these power dynamics, a major I learned how academics in the mid 1900s discussed Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s classic ethical debate for undergraduate anthro- “proved” the theories of early European ex- text on the “savage slot,” a critique of an- pology concentrators focuses on questions plorers, who believed humans first reached thropology’s role in placing certain peoples of permission and consent, especially when the Pacific islands by passively drifting on and cultures in imperial categories of non- working with marginalized communities, currents. These theories fed into prevailing Westerness, otherness, and the “primitive.” where anthropologists historically have stereotypes about the inferiority of Native In our weekly sessions, we reckoned with gained unbounded access to traditions, Hawaiians—until the revival, starting in the anthropology’s collusion with nineteenth- practices, secrets, knowledge, and world- 1970s, of knowledge about ancestral Polyne- and twentieth-century colonialism, a time views. But like many indigenous peoples, sian navigational techniques—wayfinding— when many anthropologists served as cul- Native Hawaiians have become aware of as used on traditional double-hulled canoes. tural informants to colonial officials. An- their fraught history and present relation- After talking to several people at DNHH, thropology isn’t the only discipline rooted ship with the often excessive, extractive in- I rethought my initial research plans. My in colonialism, but given its particularly no- vestigations of Western academics. Always internship adviser had told me, “In Native torious history, we devoted much more time positioned as the study subjects, never the Hawaiian culture, there is a sense that this than many other concentrations to grap- researchers, many indigenous peoples have knowledge is knowledge that is not for ev- pling with the power dynamics and ethics complained about being “researched to eryone. You are chosen to be given knowl- of our research. After dismantling many of death.” DNHH faculty and staff members edge, rather than simply seeking it.” In other the original premises of our discipline that frequently talked about the harm done by words, I had to question whether I was even semester, some students questioned, in our “helicopter research,” in which academics allowed to know what I was seeking. I decid- last meeting, whether they should write se- literally or figuratively fly into such commu- ed to exclude all Native Hawaiian lay people nior theses at all. nities, conduct their study, and disappear. from my study, and to focus instead on how Ethical qualms also emerged from our dis- During the summer, a resident of a Hawai- health professionals at DNHH have reshaped comfort with the particular power and validi- ian homestead talked to the interns about their scientific practices as a result of navigat- ty often granted to Harvard-approved knowl- her experiences as a “guinea pig,” includ- ing their roles as scientists and individuals ac- edge, which at times has legitimized and ing the innumerable times her family had countable to Native Hawaiian communities. reinforced harmful ideas, including eugenics provided blood samples, survey responses, As I conducted my fieldwork, I learned the (see “Harvard’s Eugenics Era,” March-April and hours of interviews to researchers—and importance of transparency and long-term 2016, page 48). Early in the past century, Har- never learned anything about the benefits or engagement with consent. Permission relied

JIM HARRISON (2) vard administrators and alumni were at the results of those studies. on a robust self-introduction to the people I When I relayed my plans to interview Na- worked with, especially given the political tive Hawaiians to my internship adviser, she stakes of my academic work. As the Amer- warned me that representations of Native ican Anthropological Association states, Hawaiians by Westerners have often result- the consent process is “necessarily dynam- ed in harmful consequences for the group. ic, continuous and reflexive.” Several times, That reminded me of a tutorial reading de- my oral-history participants forthrightly scribing how Captain James Cook’s eigh- asked, “I want to know who you are. Why are you doing this project?” In anthropol- ogy, we often discuss how we cannot enter Explore More our fieldsites or write our pieces as “objec- The renewed Lowell House—the largest tive” researchers. Our identity markers, our project to date in the serial renovation gender, race, and political views, all influ- of undergraduate residences—reopened ence the ways in which we interact with our in time for fall semester. Familiar spaces interlocutors and collaborators. When we and amenities (the library and dining hall, sit down to write, these same identities, life for instance) were meticulously refur- experiences, and educational backgrounds bished, while the complex was made all shape how we perceive and therefore rep- accessible and augmented with resent the communities, cultures, and his- new facilities like a tiered screening tories we are studying—just as occurred in room and dance studio. Take a guided Australia, where colonial academics failed to tour, with illustrations, at recognize how their culturally inscribed as- harvardmag.com/lowell-renewed-19. sumptions about property warped the way they understood indigenous land relations.

30 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Rejecting any thin veil of objectivity, I This summer, I also joined hundreds of Na- intrinsic and universal benefits of scientific therefore introduced myself as Julie Sun­young tive Hawaiian activists to protest the con- knowledge. Scientific progress seemed to be Chung, a Korean American from Los Ange- struction of the Thirty-Meter Telescope taking precedence over all other concerns. les who supports current Native Hawaiian (TMT) on the sacred Maunakea Summit News accounts depicted the controversy political movements, the niece and grand- on Hawai‘i Island. Adding TMT to the ex- as “science versus religion,” casting Native daughter of Korean traditional medicinal- isting telescope array there poses potential- Hawaiians aside as backward and supersti- ists, and an undergraduate at Harvard. One ly damaging environmental consequences tious. Rather than automatically agreeing, of my first interviewees, a Native Hawaiian and would further deny Native Hawaiians “The more knowledge, the better,” I lis- researcher and activist, generously offered to access to areas used for cultural and spiri- tened to people questioning: Whom will provide feedback on my work and reached tual practices on the mountain. Meanwhile, this knowledge actually benefit? Upon what out to her own contacts to encourage them to work with me as well. Although I do not Whom will this knowledge actually benefit? yet fully trust myself, I’m reassured that such advisers will guide me in the right direction. Upon what kinds of values should that knowl- This year, I also plan to share copies of all my thesis drafts with my oral-history partici- edge be built? Who decides what kinds of pants. They will have full liberty to redact parts of it and give me feedback. I was partly knowledge to seek, and will that involve the inspired to do this by stories told by my eth- nographic-methods instructor, postdoctoral indigenous people of this land? fellow Kaya Williams. In her own process of sharing dissertation drafts with her interlocu- some University of Hawai‘i administrators kinds of values should that knowledge be tors, she sometimes had to remove quotes and and government officials argued that the built? Who decides what kinds of knowl- anecdotes that might have been the strongest telescope would advance science and there- edge to seek, and will that involve the in- pieces of evidence for her argument. If con- fore benefit all the people of Hawai‘i and the digenous people of this land? sent is more than a bureaucratic checkmark, world. In their view, permission to use the At Harvard, it can sometimes seem that I it demands long-term commitment. sacred summit for TMT stemmed from the have unbounded permission to seek out all

Harvard Magazine 31

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal the knowledge in the world. As I step through tional success. Even in the College’s mission changing this world—not in the knowledge their endless bookshelves, the stacks of Wid- to “educate the citizens and citizen-leaders that I uncovered, but in the knowledge that ener Library illuminate, quietly inviting me for our society,” the power to influence our I chose not to seek. to explore. No research question seems too world too often seems to lie only in our effort far-fetched or impractical, given Harvard’s to build up vast reservoirs of knowledge and Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow wealth and resources. My curiosity is com- establish our expertise. Julie Chung ’20 is a social anthropology concentra- pounded by academia’s constant demand to In my summer thesis research in Hawai‘i, tor living in Adams House. She is currently venturing publish: a criterion of individual and institu- however, I found a bit more of my role in into the world of fiction writing.

SPORTS absent, his backfield mate, junior Devin Darrington, was capable of running over or jetting past defenders. Even without Ad- ams, the receiving corps was deep, featur- ing senior speedsters Jack Cook and Cody Reload and Fire Chrest. Senior Jake McIntyre was a trusted In the early season, an infusion of new talent and a placekicker from 40 yards and in. Back for another stint at quarterback was junior Jake hot quarterback buoyed the Crimson football team. Smith, who had many good moments as a freshman and sophomore before ceding the starting job to Stewart early last year. How n Tim Murphy’s 25 years as Harvard’s to restock his roster. He had lost 30 seniors much Smith had matured would be crucial football coach, every four-year play- from his ’18 team, including howitzer-armed to the Crimson’s progress. er has won or shared at least one Ivy quarterback Tom Stewart and many stal- In an intriguing twist, Murphy decided to League title. So far, this year’s seniors, warts from the powerhouse offensive and begin the season by inserting into the defen- Ithe class of 2020, have been championship- defensive lines. To compound Murphy’s sive-line rotation a quartet of promising but less. The early part of the 2019 season— task, two star offensive players—running inexperienced sophomores: Truman Jones, which featured a 31-23 loss to the University back Aaron Shampklin, the Ivy League’s Anthony Nelson Jr., Jacob Sykes, and Chris of San Diego and a 42-7 blowout win over rushing leader in 2018, and speedy wide- Smith. The coach knew it was a gamble, at Ivy rival Brown—showed that it would be a out Tyler Adams, who scored a sensational least as far as the 2019 season was concerned. challenge to extend the streak, but perhaps long touchdown on an end-around against not impossible. Yale—did not enroll in school for the fall In the opener against San Diego, which During the first half of this decade, Har- semester. was playing its third game of 2019, the Crim- vard was the bullyboy of Ivy football, win- Harvard was not without weapons. Se- son showed its flaws—and its rust. Twice ning or sharing four titles in five years. But in nior defensive back and captain Wesley previously a Harvard football team had trav- the past three seasons the Crimson slipped Ogsbury was one of the league’s top ball- eled to southern California, which has be- back into the pack, going 7-3 in 2016, 5-5 hawks, with six interceptions in 2018. Ju- come fertile recruiting territory (see Tid- in ’17, and 6-4 in ’18. A major cause: parity nior Jordan Hill was one of the Ivies’ best bits). In 2013, the Crimson had thrashed the has engulfed the Ivies. Every game is a dog- linebackers. On offense, with Shampklin Toreros 42-0 (and also beat them again in fight. The results in the Cambridge, in 2014 and conference’s preseason ’18). But the more mem- media poll had the orable appearance came Crimson fourth, prob- 100 years ago, on January ably justifiably, behind 1, 1920, when Harvard, the Yale, Dartmouth, and 1919 national champion, last season’s undefeated played in its only bowl champion, Princeton. game, defeating Oregon As he approached his 7-6. twenty-sixth season This time, in sunny on the Crimson side- 70-degree conditions, the line, Murphy needed Toreros didn’t even give the Crimson defenders Tag team: Harvard senior captain and time to apply their sun- defensive back Wes screen. Harvard was play- Ogsbury Jr. (1) and ing the first half without senior linebacker Joey CRIMSON HARVARD THE Ogsbury, who was serving Goodman (59) doubled up on Brown end Dan out a suspension as a result

Gemmell. TIM O’MEARA/ of being called for a target-

32 November - December 2019 www.gocrimson.com

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ing penalty in last year’s season-ending win Against San Diego, over Yale (see harvardmag.com/thegame-18). Harvard senior wideout Jack Cook snared a So on the first play from scrimmage, San Di- team-high seven passes ego quarterback Reid Sinnett took full advan- from junior quarterback tage. He dropped back and threw downfield Jake Smith, including an to star receiver Michael Bandy, who was run- 80-yard pass-and-run connection, tied for ning an inside route from right to left. Bandy fourth-longest scoring gathered it in and outran the Harvard defend- toss in Crimson history. ers into the end zone. Eight seconds into the season—stung! Torero 13. On fourth-and- What ensued was one of the most dread- five, McIntyre kicked a ful first halves in recent Crimson annals. At 20-yard field goal—the

its conclusion the Toreros led 24-0 and had thirty-first of his career, COMMUNICATIONS ATHLETIC HARVARD OF SCOTT/COURTESY BROCK outgained the Crimson in total offense, 305 snapping his tie for most all-time with Matt Borguet barged in from five yards out. Smith yards to 70. Murphy’s youthful defensive Schindel ’08. San Diego 31, Harvard 23. felt he had progressed since last year. “I’m linemen received a brutal baptism of fire on There was one last gasp for the Crimson, able to see the defense faster and process San Diego’s second drive, which consumed but Smith, pressured, had a pass picked off information and see my reads quicker,” he 19 plays and more than 10 minutes before the by the Toreros’ Daniel Tolbert. Smith finished said. “It makes the game slow down for me.” Toreros had to settle for a field goal. with 22 completions in 39 attempts for a ca- All the while, the Crimson defense, led by The second half brought a turnaround— reer-high 325 yards and three touchdowns. Hill (five tackles) and Sykes (five tackles and hope. On the first play from scrimmage “Jake was solid,” was Murphy’s verdict. and a sack), bottled up Brown’s Perry. from the Harvard 25, Smith dropped back and Even as the better part of the Ivy steeple- saw Chrest running deep down the left— A scant six days later Harvard was at the chase loomed, there was a palpable sense open. Smith threw and hit him in stride. The Stadium, under the lights against Brown in of relief that the Crimson had surmounted lanky senior took it all the way to the house. both the home and the Ivy opener. The start the first jump. McIntyre converted. San Diego 24, Harvard 7. was again a catastrophe. On the first play, After the Toreros restored their 24-point Bears running back Allen Smith ran 53 yards; Tidbits: Defensive back Ben Abercrom- margin with a 68-yard touchdown drive, on the third, going right up the gut, he rum- bie ’21 (’23), who was paralyzed below the Smith went to work again. At the end of bled the remaining 22 to the end zone. A few neck in the opening game of 2017 at Rhode the third quarter, he launched a drive from minutes later Brown had reached the Crim- Island, has returned to Cambridge this se- the Harvard 23 highlighted by comple- son five when quarterback EJ Perry, fading mester and resumed his academic career as a tions to junior tight end Ryan Reagan and back to pass, mysteriously dropped the ball. freshman. Abercrombie is living in specially to Cook, and by a darting 15-yard run by Harvard junior defensive lineman Nasir Dar- designed quarters in Weld Hall….Defensive Darrington. In the beginning of the fourth nell recovered—and the Bears never did. lineman Brogan McPartland ’20, of Stephens quarter, on second and nine from the San Six unanswered Harvard touchdowns en- City, Virginia, and Leverett House, has been Diego 14, Smith found sophomore tight end sued. The first four came on Smith passes. named one of 185 semifinalists for the Wil- Kyle Klink in the end zone. San Diego 31, (The quartet of scoring tosses was another liam V. Campbell Trophy. The honor, pre- Harvard 13. On its next possession Harvard personal best for Smith.) On the first, Smith sented by the National Football Founda- took over on its 20. On first down, Smith nimbly evaded the Bears rush, ran to his left, tion, recognizes academic success, on-field dropped back. Cook streaked on a fly pat- and zipped a difficult throw across his body performance, and exemplary leadership. An tern along the right side. Whoosh! Smith’s to Chrest in the left corner of the end zone. applied mathematics concentrator, McPart- pass sailed through the air and into Cook’s The second was an eight-yarder in which land led the Crimson in 2018 with 4.0 sacks…. outstretched hands. He ran the rest of the Smith lobbed one that six-foot-seven junior Massachusetts has contributed the most distance into the end zone. At 80 yards, it tight end Adam West leaped to snare in the members—13—to the 2019 Harvard football was tied for the fourth-longest touchdown end zone. The third, coming with 13 seconds roster. California is next with 11, followed pass in Crimson history. McIntyre kicked in the first half, was a 34-yarder to Cook, by Georgia (eight), Florida, New Jersey and the point. San Diego 31, Harvard 20. who had beaten his defender on a post pat- Pennsylvania (seven each), and Texas (six)…. Moments later the Crimson defense tern. The fourth, on the first possession of Three players from last year’s Harvard roster, forced a fumble that was recovered by Hill the second half, was a flip over the middle to all of whom are from the class of ’19 and have at the Harvard 36. Helped by two San Diego junior wideout B.J. Watson, who ran toward football eligibility remaining, are continuing penalties, Smith moved the ball down to the the left sideline, then looped their football careers for other college teams back across the field and as so-called graduate transfers. Wideout and weaved through oppo- punt returner Justice Shelton-Mosley, healed To receive weekly nents to the end zone. from leg injuries suffered against Cornell football reports, sign up at Later on, Darrington that cut short his brilliant Harvard tenure, scored on a 19-yard bolt is playing for Vanderbilt. Quarterback Tom harvardmag.com/email up the middle, then fresh- Stewart and running back Charlie Booker man running back Aidan are suiting up for Rice. vdick friedman

Harvard Magazine 33

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 The Science of Sex Historian and philosopher Sarah Richardson and what happens once they interrogates the science of sex and gender. are unleashed in the public sphere. Historians of science like Richardson are interest- ed not just in the idealized he “Sins of the Mother,” trumpets a headline in process of empirical discovery, but in the ways its all-too-human the journal Science, warning of a “maternal assault” participants are guided and misguided by their scientific tools and against children. Another headline calls mothers the cultures and institutions that support them. The Maternal Imprint “smoking guns,” the source of incalculable harm. is a history of the idea that a woman’s actions or environment dur- What wrongs have these mothers committed? Not ing pregnancy can affect her children’s and even grandchildren’s any sort of physical violence: these articles describe health and welfare throughout their lives. Ta series of subtle, poorly understood chemical changes, passed from It’s an idea that dates back to Aristotle, who declared that moth- mother to child during pregnancy, that cause obesity and other ers had merely to glance at an object to imprint some quality of that long-term impairments. object on her child. But in recent decades, scientists using the tools But such charges stand on shaky ground, declares Sarah Rich- of epigenetics have examined the molecular basis for such claims ardson in her forthcoming book, The Maternal Imprint (University of as never before. Epigenetics (literally meaning “on top of” genet- Chicago, 2020). The author, professor of the history of science and ics) is concerned with chemical modifications to DNA thatdon’t of studies of women, gender, and sexuality, has spent her career researching the history of scientific ideas: where they come from, by Bennett McIntosh

34 November - December 2019 Photograph by Stu Rosner

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 change its sequence, but can still be perpetuated as cells divide, line” and “feminine” behavioral expectations and social roles com- affecting genes’ function in complex but profound ways. It’s a field monly expected of the sexes. of compelling possibilities, demonstrating that DNA sequence is How did the X and Y chromosomes come to be seen as the essence not destiny—and putting forward specific chemical explanations of biological sex? What does that history mean for the researchers for why events during gestation might manifest as health prob- who study them—and everyone who carries them in their cells? lems later in life. How can medical research account for the distinct but entangled “I was drawn to it,” says Richardson about epigenetics’ holistic influences of sex and gender? For Richardson, these questions can- view of human development, but “I pretty quickly became deeply not be answered without interrogating the assumptions embedded ambivalent.” While in utero exposure to specific dangers like the in the very words used to ask them. chemical thalidomide or diseases like rubella and syphilis has well- Much of this questioning now happens during meetings of the documented effects, those exciting early results seemed to give mo- GenderSci Lab, a research group that Richardson officially estab- mentum to far-reaching claims about the dangers (or advantages) lished when she gained tenure in 2017, but which grew from a read- of everything from chocolate to the traumas of World War II. These ing group that began in September 2010, just weeks after Richard- claims routinely reach the public as scientific truth despite their son arrived at Harvard as an assistant professor. That group was origins in small studies and the even smaller effects they report, started by Meredith Reiches, Ph.D. ’12, then a doctoral student in and despite study designs that have taken as a given that in utero the department of human evolutionary biology (HEB), who had just effects—rather than genetic or postnatal effects—were the only returned from fieldwork in The Gambia. She had all the samples effects worth considering. and data she needed to write her dissertation on how adolescent “Some of these studies don’t even include fathers,” Richardson girls’ bodies balance the energy demands of growth and puberty. says—“and this includes mouse studies, so it’s not a question of But she had left The Gambia with lingering questions about the having access to the fathers.” She worried that this bias became self- unintended impact of work like hers on the women and girls she reinforcing: scientists looking for the epigenetic origins of disease was studying. examined primarily maternal effects, because that’s where much Reiches invited other students and trainees in her field and re- of the knowledge, funding, and publicity were. As the influence of lated areas to a reading group that would discuss the history of the father, and of life after birth, are left underexamined, she says, their field and of its assumptions about gender and sexuality. She pregnant mothers must bear “fierce, punishingly harsh” blame for invited Richardson as “a bit of a Hail Mary,” she says, expecting a their children’s ill fortune from scientists, doctors, policymakers, faculty member in a distant department would have other things to and the media. do, but “to my astonishment and delight, she showed up.” At first, “My book doesn’t offer pregnancy advice,” Richardson is quick Reiches was more dismayed than delighted at the focused intensity to say. What it does offer, she writes, is “insight into how and why of Richardson’s questions throughout the discussion, until “we ac- claims about the long reach of the womb are at once beguiling, tually sat down together and talked about our intellectual training, challenging to validate, stubbornly persistent once launched, and [and] I understood that she was trained as a philosopher and this beset by scientific controversy.” mode of questioning was a way of conveying interest and respect.” Her critique gained circulation among fellow scholars years be- It’s a habit Richardson was introduced to as a philosophy major fore her ideas became the book. “It’s changed my whole outlook, at Columbia, thanks to the happy concurrence of a class taught by on everything I do,” says Gemma Sharp, a lecturer (professor) in philosopher of science Philip Kitcher, which taught her to question molecular epidemiology at the University of Bristol in England, the assumptions scientists make, and one taught by the feminist who met Richardson in 2017. The two soon collaborated on a pair psychologist Lila Braine, which showed her, she says, that when it of papers examining the “looping effect” caused by assuming the comes to investigating scientific ideas about sex and gender, “there mother’s influence is paramount: they urged researchers in Sharp’s are so many low-hanging fruit.” As a Ph.D. student in Stanford’s field not to let previously discovered correlations—or the hype interdisciplinary Modern Thought and Literature program, she surrounding them—bias what they considered in future studies. learned as well to study the history of ideas, mining archives, pub- “I got a grant last year [2018] that I wrote trying to incorporate a lications, and interviews to try to understand what coincidences lot of these ideas,” in studying the prenatal origins of infant health, of culture, ideology, empirical fact, and pure luck give rise to these Sharp adds. “I built into the grant from the start that I would look assumptions. at mums and dads.” She also specified that the research would be The GenderSci Lab now meets in Richardson’s basement office guided by a panel—including Richardson and expecting couples— in Boylston Hall. Though the only beakers are held by a Marie Cu- to help her understand what knowledge gleaned from the study rie bobblehead on her desk, the focused and collaborative inquiry would matter most to parents. on display in lab meetings would be familiar to any scientist. At a July meeting, conversation moved rapidly between a practical task “Knowledge that matters,” Richardson says, is her mantra. and a high-level theoretical discussion as the lab juggled edits to Throughout her career, such knowledge has come from carefully a soon-to-be-published paper on women in STEM jobs and talk considering the fraught overlap of sex, gender, and science. about a nascent project to study how online communities asso- Though “gender,” in popular use, is often simply a synonym for ciated with the white nationalist “alt-right” use and abuse ideas “sex,” for the scientists and scholars who study them, they are dis- from evolutionary theory to prop up their ideology. Lab members tinct. “Sex” is the biological category: the coalescence of genes, hor- discussed their own research projects, ranging from probing large mones, and anatomy shaped by eons of evolution to differentiate epidemiological data sets to understand whether health outcomes males and females. “Gender” is the cultural category: the “mascu- stem from the cultural influences of gender factors (such as high

Harvard Magazine 35

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 heels, employment disparities, or discrimination) or sex factors mounting evidence that males with one Y and two X chromosomes (hormones, genes, and biochemical development)—or both—to had similar stature and arrest rates to the XYY males. To discount a review of amicus curiae briefs to understand how scientific ideas that evidence, some researchers even relied on the widely accepted about gender become translated—and mistranslated—into policy. gendered expectations to explain away the similarities in arrest And they congratulated Reiches, now an assistant professor of an- rates between XXY and XYY males, postulating that problems for thropology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, for winning XXY males resulted from “hyperfeminine manners…passivity, emo- an international award for feminist scholarship with the publica- tionality, and subpar intelligence.” tion of a paper on that research in the Gambia all those years ago. The “supermale” theory was finally discredited by the 1980s, but “There isn’t any other space like this operating in the U.S. right in Sex Itself, Richardson argues that it made the Y chromosome the now,” says Heather Shattuck-Heidorn, Ph.D. ’17, who also met Rich- star of sex-difference research in a way that still reverberates. She ardson at the reading group’s first session. “Where you have a group points to scientists like David Page, M.D. ’84, a geneticist at MIT, of scientists and feminists who explicitly are supportive of empirical whose search for the genes that determine sex meant a laser-like science, coming together…to ask what’s the science-savvy feminist focus, from the late 1980s through the early 2000s, on mapping the take on X, Y, or Z?” Y chromosome and discovering which part of it led to the devel- opment of the testes. Such a focus was not inevitable, Richardson The X and Y chromosomes were at the center of Richardson’s first writes: from the 1920s to the 1950s, based on evidence in fruit flies, big foray into the history of sex and science. The story told in intro- researchers saw the X as the driver of sex-determination. And sci- ductory biology textbooks is relatively simple: each set of parents entists now understand sex differentiation, in mammals as in other confers 23 chromosomes on each child—22 of which are matched species, as the result of numerous interconnected genetic “switches,” pairs and two of which, the X and the much shorter Y, determine some on the X and Y and others on the other 22 pairs of chromo- sex. Males have an X and a Y, while females have two Xs, and from somes. But from the mid 1980s, Page and his colleagues studying this all the other hallmarks of sex—gonads, hormones, genitals— mammals focused on the Y and the testes. follow. It’s a more complicated story than that, of course: a wide variety of intersex and related conditions exist, for reasons from When a historian like Richardson turns her critical examina- atypical hormone exposure during development to extra, missing, tion from people long dead and events safely past to those whose or atypical X or Y chromosomes. But these exceptions aside, the X participants are still-living experts in their field, they can—and and Y chromosomes have for decades been seen as the expression often do—dispute her accounts. Page’s reaction to Richardson’s of one’s “true” sex or of “sex itself.” It’s the job of a science historian narrative in Sex Itself is illustrative: He agrees there was a focus, even to uncover where these stories come from, and why. an over-focus, on the Y and the testes in research of that era, he said Richardson’s doctoral dissertation, published in 2013 as Sex It- over the phone. But he does disagree with Richardson’s answer to self: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome, does just this, why the focus on the Y. tracing the history of the idea that sex is centered on the X and Y In Richardson’s history, the XYY research looms large in later chromosomes. Early in the twentieth century, she shows, it was researchers’ decisions to focus on the Y, but Page responds that controversial even to refer to them as “sex chromosomes” because research on XYY males “did not interest me, it did not impress they don’t always correspond with anatomical sex. But the fact that me, it did not look to be the foundations of a path forward.” Map- sex chromosomes are visible under a microscope (unlike the genetic ping the Y, he says then, was not inspired by the popular image of a markers for essentially any other trait) made them useful enough masculine Y that XYY research built, but was the most “tractable” to two groups of scientists—those working to establish the role of research path, and “was very much grounded in the strength of chromosomes in heredity and those working to untangle the role the empirical data.” of hormones in sex determination—that the association between Richardson’s intent, she says, was not to disparage the motiva- chromosomes and sex solidified for decades. Since then, scientists tions of individual scientists: instead, she shows that, at the start have projected not only sex-related but gender-related expectations of Page’s career in the 1980s, the structures of sex-determination on them: some call the X chromosome “she” and the Y “he,” (though research were focused on the Y, whatever Page’s personal motiva- men, too, have an X chromosome); others speak of “defend[ing] the tions. XYY research played no small part in this. “What inspires honor” of the “vigorous” Y chromosome against competing scientific some resistance to these ideas,” says Richardson, “is the assump- theories that slander it as “wimpy” and “pathetic.” tion that it implies that the work is not scientific. But the tradi- Such characterizations, writes Richardson, may be tongue-in- tion that I come from suggests that all science is social, that we use cheek, but equating “sex” with “the sex chromosomes” has seri- the resources around us to reason about the world.” Science is not ous consequences, such as the “criminal chromosome” theory, the motivated solely by either empirical reasoning or gendered bias. “It hypothesis popular throughout the 1960s and ’70s that males with can be both!” one X and two Y chromosomes (a rare disorder whose subjects are As she writes in Sex Itself: taller, and more likely to be arrested, than average) were hyperag- XYY studies… represented the primary work on the hu- gressive “supermales” driven by that “criminal” extra “Y.” man Y chromosome for two decades. XYY spurred interest In fact, more “Y” doesn’t mean more male: it’s now widely ac- [in the Y]…., prepared the ground for future Y chromosome cepted the tall XYY stature derives from growth-promoting genes research, and rallied researchers and resources to the study of found on both X and Y chromosomes, and the arrest rates are driven the Y. XYY research also helped to cement a working model by intellectual difficulties common to many chromosomal disor- of the Y chromosome as the chromosome for maleness that… ders. But the “supermale” theory held sway for two decades against remained extremely influential in the coming decades.

36 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ing Yehuda’s, of the past’s im- “The tradition that I come from suggests print on our genes. But she sees clearly the imprint of that all science is social, that we use her grandmother (now 94 years old and still “bright- the resources around us to reason about the eyed” and “formidable”) in her own work. The Nazi world.” Science is not motivated solely by state, Richardson points out, guided and justified its mur- either empirical reasoning or gendered bias. ders with the logic of eugen- ics, an international scientif- “That’s the cool thing about the history of science,” she says. “This ic movement—supported by Harvard president emeritus Charles is where I get very happy, when I’m in that space of trying to hash W. Eliot, his successor A. Lawrence Lowell, and alumni including out the causal story.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Henry Cabot Lodge—that resulted in the forcible sterilization of as many as 70,000 people (see “Harvard’s It comes easily to Richardson to think of science as a human Eugenics Era,” March-April 2016, page 48). “This for me is part of endeavor inextricable from other human forces driving it. Her ma- my grounding in a very fierce tradition of social-justice work,” she ternal grandfather, pioneering molecular biologist Martin Rodbell, says. “From a very, very early age, I understood that great wrongs helped discover G proteins: molecules that help pass signals be- can occur, even by those who purport to be the most educated, the tween and among cells. Richardson recalls his sharing the “genuine most developed, so to speak, and that what needs to be cultivated joy” he took not only in his research, but also in its wider context: is intellectual courage, the ability to speak out, the ability to resist.” “He constantly talked about the practice of science, the things he For Richardson and the GenderSci Lab, speaking out means chal- valued about it, and about the changes in the field that bothered lenging harmful uses and misuses of science, whether by white him. He worked at the [National Institutes of Health] for all his nationalists or by well-intentioned biologists who might benefit career on basic science, and bemoaned the corporatization of sci- from a fresh look at seemingly fundamental ideas, such as the na- ence, bemoaned the need to constantly produce applied findings.” ture of sex itself. That commitment to basic science paid off in perhaps the biggest way possible: Rodbell shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in physiology With the completion of The Maternal Imprint, Richardson has or medicine for his role in discovering the G protein. “I lay claim to returned to the deep question that animated Sex Itself, which she picking up the telephone on the day that he received the call, on my feels remains unanswered: what, actually, is sex? little Garfield telephone,” says Richardson. “I was 14, and he hap- The “sex essentialist” view interprets sex as a fundamental cat- pened to be visiting us, so we were together when he won the prize.” egory that divides humans and other sexually reproducing organ- But Richardson’s family had also been touched by one of the most isms—whether plant, animal, or fungus—neatly into two types. horrific chapters in the history of science. “My grandma, my Oma, was Evolution may tweak its trappings—hormones, chromosomes, born in Berlin in 1925,” she explains. “At the age of eight, she and her anatomy—between species and over time, but sex itself remains family moved to the Netherlands—they were a Jewish family—and constant. at the age of 15 or so she went underground. Her family was deported, Yet nature is full of examples that defy this pat view. Plants and and ultimately murdered at Auschwitz. Her mother, her father, her some snails are mostly hermaphrodites, many reptiles develop sex sister, her grandmother, and many other aunts and uncles.” Barbara based not on genetics but on temperature, female bees have twice Ledermann escaped to the United States, where she met and married as many chromosomes as male drones, and fungi can have dozens, Rodbell, but her experience reverberates today: “The unbearable, un- or even thousands of sex-like “mating types.” In the lab, samples of speakable loss, to imagine my mother growing up with no relatives on human cells–many of which have been reproducing asexually for that side of the family,” says Richardson. “I think it’s foundational.” years–have been known to spontaneously lose their Y chromosomes She opens The Maternal Imprint by contemplating how the con- or double their X chromosome, raising the question of whether such sequences of such unfathomable horror can be passed down from cells can be rightly said to have a sex at all. one generation to the generations thereafter. She cites research on Research into the extent of these differences continues: in July, Holocaust survivors and their descendants from neuroscientist David Page, the MIT geneticist, published a study of five different Rachel Yehuda, who argues that mothers who survived the Holo- mammalian species that compared the sex-related genes that occur caust may have children more susceptible to trauma, because el- on all their chromosomes (not just on X and Y). Even though all these evated stress hormones in utero can result in chemical modifica- mammals use the same XX/XY sex-determination system, he found tion of fetal DNA. If these children are female, their own egg cells, that the genes on the other chromosomes that determine other sex developed while they were still in utero, may pass this molecular differences—from brain development to stature disparities—vary legacy of tragedy on in turn. “As the matrilineal granddaughter of greatly from species to species, even between Homo sapiens and close a Holocaust survivor,” Richardson writes: “I could not help but be cousins such as macaques. In many cases, genes that were amplified in curious about these claims.” the males of one species were amplified in thefemales of other species. The Maternal Imprint is written in the context of this eagerness to In contrast to “sex essentialism,” then, Richardson proposes a understand intergenerational connections. Richardson may have mind-set of “sex contextualism.” Instead of seeing chromosomes come away from her research skeptical of particular claims, includ- (or anatomy, hormones, or some yet-to-be discovered biomarker) as

Harvard Magazine 37

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Scientists need to be extremely careful want to understand how sex is operating in a particular animal about applying to humans their results about or tissue model? It’s inadequate to just compare the two. Sex is sex differences gleaned from lab animals working at multiple levels and in different ways.” or even human cell samples. Richardson hopes the idea of sex contextualism will be “sex itself,” she encourages seeing each of these categories as “sex- useful not only to biologists, but also to transgender and intersex linked variables”: they are related to sex, but in a changing, contex- people fighting for legal recognition against sex essentialist laws tual way. Biologists generally acknowledge that the biological vari- that try to fit them into categories that simply don’t apply. That’s ables related to sex vary greatly across space, time, and species, but “Knowledge that matters,” from the lab bench to the state house. Richardson says this variability must be treated not as a tacked-on Page, the subject of so much of Richardson’s first book, says he’s caveat, but as central to how the study of sex is conducted. eager to see how her newest ideas—on sex contextualism—apply Thus, she says, scientists need to be extremely careful about apply- to his newest research on sex differences. “The next chapter” of that ing to humans their results about sex differences—whether in the ef- history, he says, “is currently being written,” in his lab and others fect of a drug to a behavior—gleaned from lab animals or even human around the world, and in Richardson’s own research. cell samples (which don’t experience puberty, let alone misogyny). It will take some time, says Richardson, to turn sex contextu- When the NIH promulgated a policy urging scientists to report their alism into a fully fledged philosophical theory, thanks in no small findings about male and female test subjects—worm, rat, or human— part to the countless ways that sex matters for biology, scientific separately, Richardson and other GenderSci Lab members published research, and culture. “All of these implications,” she says, “will opinions everywhere from the Journal of Neuroscience to the Washington Post be fun for me to work out. And then someone can critique it, once urging scientists not to expect those reported differences to general- it is out there as a fully thought-out, positive system for thinking ize to humans. “I’m actually arguing that…a requirement to include about what sex is. Then we will really get a debate going.” both types and to report and compare by sex type [is] inadequate to address the stated goals. You want to address gender inequalities in Bennett McIntosh, a freelance writer living in Boston, covers science for this and medical outcomes? It’s inadequate to just study male versus female. You other publications.

38 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Universities have a responsibility not only to educate, but to make the world a better place.

Participants in Radcliffe Day 2019 engaged directly with organizations that address injustices in our food system. Pictured: the labor and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta; Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin of the Radcliffe Institute; and two representatives from Fresh Truck, which brings healthy food to communities in need.

Discover our exciting work and how you can get involved: radcliffe.harvard.edu/discover

harvard_mag_fall_2019.indd 1 9/20/19 3:05 PM 191121_Radcliffe.indd 1 9/23/19 9:41 AM VITA William Monroe Trotter Brief life of a black radical: 1872-1934 by kerri k. greenidge

n august 28. 1919, William Monroe Trotter, A.B. 1895, Party was “the ship and all else the sea,” he forced northern, en- sat before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations franchised, and “thinking members” of his race to “agitate, agitate, Oto urge inclusion of the “rights of colored people” in the agitate” for rights being denied through federal neglect, counseling U.S. peace treaty with Germany. He spoke for the Liberty League, readers and supporters that “Only the colored people themselves which he helped found in 1917 in the spirit of the political activism can determine their political, social, and economic future.” and militant protest that spread across the African diaspora dur- In Massachusetts, Trotter used the Guardian to confront white ing and after the Great War; the league sought political equality progressives who insisted “the Negro” was a southern problem, that for African Americans and a “guarantee of self-determination for New England’s abolitionist history absolved it of racial sin. In 1902, darker nations” across the globe. Using the league’s language of for instance, he organized massive protests against the extradition of black liberation, Trotter demanded the following change to part a North Carolinian, wrongly accused of insubordination and arson, 16 of the treaty: “In order to make the reign of peace universal and who had fled to rela- lasting, and to make the fruits of the war effective in the perma- tives in Massachusetts nent establishment of true democracy everywhere, the allied and and sought help from associated powers undertake, each in its own country, to assure full Boston’s black com- and complete protection of life and liberty to all the inhabitants, munity. The Guardian- without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race, or religion, promoted effort failed, and agree that all their citizens, respectively, shall be equal before but highlighted white the law and shall enjoy the same civil and political rights without ignorance of, and re- distinction as to race, language, or religion.” luctance to acknowl- By then, Trotter had been a radical newspaper editor and activist for edge, racial injustice in nearly two decades. He was part of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “talented tenth”: the Jim Crow South. his father was a Union Army officer, real-estate investor, and federal appointee, and his mother a descendant of free artisans and land- holders in Charlottesville, Virginia; he was raised just south of Boston, in the town of Hyde Park. At Harvard, where Trotter never ranked lower than third in his class of 321, he started the first Total Abstinence Club (to curb student drinking) and led his first protest—against segregated barbershops in Cambridge. In founding the Boston Guardian newspaper in 1901, Trotter was determined to use his rela- tive privilege to challenge the denial of civil rights and the proliferation of anti-black vio- lence that flourished in Reconstruction’s af- termath. The Guardian’s goal, he said, was to do as “the press ought to do: hold a mirror up to nature” by exposing the consequences of white supremacist policy. As Supreme Court rulings weakened the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and southern states rewrote their constitutions to segregate, disenfranchise, and marginalize African Americans, Trotter invoked the militancy of antebellum radical abolition to fight back. With 90 percent of southern blacks disenfran- chised, and northern blacks being told the Republican

40 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Even as many leaders, both black and white, insisted that slavery, democracy and freedom on their own terms. Throughout the 1920s, Reconstruction, and blackness itself rendered African Americans he continued his crusade against Boston’s segregated public hospi- “incapable of intelligent and reasonable democratic engagement,” tal, supported congressional efforts to pass an anti-lynching bill, in the words of film director D.W. Griffith, Trotter organized what and founded the African Blood Brotherhood, to mobilize armed contemporary political pundits called the “New England exam- black self-defense against racial violence. But newer black week- ple”—black communities using their power as swing voters to elect lies like the Chicago Defender were eroding the Guardian’s popular- “principles, not parties.” In 1915, he relied on this strategy to launch ity, its viability already sapped by the death in 1918 of Trotter’s a national protest against Griffith’s racist filmBirth of a Nation. By activist wife, Geraldine “Deenie” Pindell Trotter, whose editing 1920, black voters in Michigan, Ohio, New York, New Jersey, and and bookkeeping skills had helped sustain it. By the early 1930s, New England consistently voted with the Democratic party, not Trotter was broke, and many of the causes for which he’d fought with the Republicans, in local and state elections. seemed lost. He jumped to his death from a Boston apartment Trotter had become “the stormy petrel of the times,” declared building the morning he turned 62. the black radical magazine publisher and editor Cyril V. Briggs: Radical activists across two generations were inspired and chal- “the most significant voice of radical Negroes (for the man on lenged by Trotter and the black Boston politics he cultivated. At a the street anyways) in a generation.” Radicals across the Afri- time when the black press was owned and operated by racial con- can diaspora had donated money for his trip to Paris for the 1919 servatives, black and white, who stifled black dissent for the sake Paris Peace Conference, where he pre- of white comfort and racial respectability, Trotter galvanized black William Monroe Trotter as a high- sented the Liberty League’s demands to working people to recognize and embrace their political power. school senior (below the French public. left) and at a gather- The trip cemented Trotter’s role as the Kerri Greenidge, Ph.D., director of the Program in American Studies in Tufts ing, circa 1918, of populist hero of the black working class. University’s department of race, colonialism, and diaspora, is the author of the leaders of the Liberty League (in the first He returned from Europe determined that forthcoming Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe row, fifth from right) “the colored people of the world” define Trotter (Liveright), the first book-length biography of Trotter in half a century.

From left: Photograph courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; photograph courtesy of the Hubert Harrison Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Made Visible The ubiquity of movement across man-made borders by Marina N. Bolotnikova

Above: Adál Maldonado’s The Passport, 1995, from the series The Spirit Republic of Puerto Rico. n the United States and throughout the world, migration al seal usually found on Opposite: Richard Misrach’s “Border is a newly urgent issue—more people are displaced today passports is a domino: a Patrol Target Range, Near Gulf of than has ever been recorded. Yet migration has also shaped trick, a roll of the dice Mexico, Texas,” 2013. Bill McDowell’s and reshaped the world for as long as humans have lived. that determines who “Untitled (approaching the border, Roxham Road),” 2018, from the A new Harvard Art Museums exhibition, spanning media, leaves and stays, and, of- series Almost Canada Iplaces, and times, explores these two dimensions of human move- ten, who lives and dies. ment, and the space in between. Its images and objects—of people, The symbolism of but also of landscapes, things left behind, ghostly traces—present passports echoes the exhibition’s larger interest in borders—such a vision of migration that, however contested today, is central to a focal, contested part of today’s discourse on migration. What are world history. Walking through the gallery, one is confronted with borders, and what do they mean? They don’t merely come into exis- HARVARD UNIVERSITY, GIFT © ADÁL OF THE ARTIST, 2012.178. the sense that migration is not a special or marginal part of the hu- tence: they are constructed, and reflect choices about how to carve man experience. It is a constant, pervasive consequence of human up places and landscapes. A large back wall of the exhibit displays conflict and disaster—a reflection of the will to survive, and -hu images of the southern and northern U.S. borders. An oversized pho-

mans’ capacity to make their world anew. tograph of a Border Patrol target practice range in Texas, by Rich- TRANSFER FROM THE ROCKEFELLER DAVID CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, “Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging ard Misrach, is unforgettable, with nine human-shaped decoys shot in Contemporary Art,” which runs through January 5, begins with through with bullets, and the foreground littered with gun casings. a passport. Walk up closer to it, and it becomes clear the passport In a photo of the U.S.-Canadian boundary by Bill McDowell, taken is a fabrication, a Spanglish document created by Puerto Rican art- from the dashboard of a car, the border barely exists. “You can just ist Adál Maldonado for his imaginary country, El Spirit Republic of roll up in your car,” says co-curator Makeda Best, who leads the mu- Puerto Rico. “The longer you look at it, the more it breaks up your seums’ photography curation. “There’s no line; it’s not militarized.” sense of what is real,” says Mary Schneider Enriquez, a curator of The photo looks like it could have been taken on anyone’s smart- modern and contemporary art. Puzzling over the document, the phone. The southern and northern border photos, Best explains, each components of a passport appear surreal, silly. In place of the nation- enact a kind of looking: the “militarized gaze” of the Border Patrol,

42 November - December 2019 All images courtesy of Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 FUND FOR THE ACQUISITION OF PHOTOGRAPHS, 2019.82. © BILL MCDOWELL; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST. GIFT OF THE ARTIST, 2018.112. © RICHARD MISRACH; IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND FRAENKEL GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO.

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Above, left to right: Jim Goldberg, “Home, Hyderabad, India,” 2008, printed 2019. Lili Almog, “Muslim Girl and the perspective of someone #14,” from the series The Other Half of driving up to Canada, from the the Sky, 2009. Images from this series safety of their car. focus on women belonging to ethnic “Crossing Lines” is only the and religious minorities in China, like female imams and Muslim leaders most recent contribution to Har- who lead women-only mosques. Facing vard’s campus-wide conversation page: Zarina, Home Is a Foreign Place, of objectivity, but the images chosen for the exhibit still on migration and displacement. 1999 (complete work), and two details, serve a documentary role, with the ability to reveal and Rain (above) and Sky. Serena Chopra, This summer, the Harvard Global “Kalsana Dorjee” (right) and “Karma surprise. Beside well-known symbols of migration—pass- Health Institute hosted a panel on Tsetan,” from the series Majnu Ka Tilla ports, the southern border—are others that visitors may the emergency at the U.S.-Mexico Diaries, 2009, printed 2016. Chopra’s never have heard of, or may not have registered as a type border, where lawyers and public- series documents the lives of Tibetan of migration. A 2008 photograph by Jim Goldberg shows exiles in the colony of Majnu Ka Tilla, in health professionals reported that New Delhi. The community was a family living at a waste-management facility on the out- children and families were being established in the 1950s, yet these skirts of Hyderabad; rising temperatures have forced fam- abused and irrevocably harmed by images reflect its still marginal status. ilies like these to abandon their farms, a reminder that the current administration’s poli- the climate crisis is now reality. Another photo from Bill cies toward immigrants. In April, McDowell’s “Almost Canada” series shows the open en- Masha Gessen’s distinguished Tanner Lectures on Human Values trance to a narrow Underground Railroad tunnel, inviting viewers invited listeners to question what it even means to restrict human to imagine climbing inside—another kind of migration. movement—a question that resounds alongside an exhibition photo The flip side of boundaries and borders—the coercion and control that shows the southern border as a vast, empty desert landscape, cut exercised over movement—is the idea that migration gives rise to in half by a rusty barrier. new cultures that are always remaking the world. “Crossing Lines” Most of the works in the “Crossing Lines” are new acquisitions considers these “hybrid spaces, identities, languages, and beliefs,” commissioned by Enriquez and Best. These contemporary pieces, from the perspective of an individual’s psychology as well as from Best says, reflect how photographers today think about their work: that of the greater culture. A woodcut print by Indian artist Zarina not merely documenting some fixed version of reality, but also as shows 36 abstract, geometric representations that bring to mind participants who shape the way their subjects are looked at. An- parts of homes she has lived in—a door, the night sky—with Urdu other piece by Bill McDowell, a photo of the fragments of an asy- and English inscriptions under each. After the partition of India, lum seeker’s testimony found at the U.S.-Canadian border, reveals Zarina’s family and millions of others were displaced and became incomplete glimpses of who this person was: a refugee forced to refugees in their own countries. Her work, titled Home Is a Foreign leave Nigeria because of sexual orientation. Says Best, “These slower Place, reflects the idea that returning home means going to a place methods of working speak to how contemporary photographers that is not hers. are interested in a slower process and layered process that recog- Zarina’s work is an evocative mediation on how immigrants see nizes their own position as producers—and not just the idea that themselves—but what about when they are looked at, seen from the photography can offer some sort of evidence.” outside by their host culture? A large slide show displays a set of Photography may have moved beyond a “view from nowhere” idea 80 photos by Candida Höfer of Turkish families in Germany in the ABOVE FRANCIS LEFT: H. BURR MEMORIAL © JIM FUND, GOLDBERG; 2019.104. COURTESY PACE/MACGILL NEW GALLERY, YORK. ABOVE FUND RIGHT: FOR THE ACQUISITION OF PHOTOGRAPHS, 2019.80. © LILI ALMOG; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

44 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 These contemporary pieces reflect how photographers today think of their work: not merely documenting some fixed version of reality, but also as participants who shape the way their subjects are looked at. MARGARET FISHER FUND, 2018.309. © ZARINA HASHMI RICHARD AND RONAY MENSCHEL FUND FOR THE ACQUISITION OF PHOTOGRAPHS, 2018.258 AND 2018.259. © SERENA CHOPRA COURTESY SEPIA EYE.

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Germany’s supposedly temporary Turkish migrants, Candida Höfer’s photos seem to announce, were here to stay. FUND FOR THE ACQUISITION OF PHOTOGRAPHS, © GRACIELA 2019.87. ITURBIDE Above: Graciela Iturbide, “Teno- sique, Mexico,” 2015. At a shelter in Tenosique, near the border with 1970s. The immigrants are captured Guatemala, a man stands by a mural in intimate portraits in their homes, marking violent attacks against and in candid shots on streets and migrants. Right: Emily Jacir, La mia in shops and public parks. “Turks in Roma (omaggio ai sampietrini), 2016 GIFT OF MR. AND MRS. JOHN JACIR COWLES, © EMILY EXCHANGE, BY 2019.114. (complete work above; detail Germany” was taken while the coun- below). White casts of cobblestones try was ending its postwar foreign- taken from the streets of Rome evoke labor program, but, as an exhibit the movement of migrants. They also double as symbols of protest: label explains, this series “contra- cobblestones torn from the street dicted the then-widespread notion were used as weapons by working- that ‘guest workers’ were tempo- class Europeans during times of rary. By the mid-1970s, Turks were unrest. Gilles Peress, “Bus depot. Qom,” 1979, from the series Iran. A the largest immigrant population in bus dominates this photo, taken the country and, as Muslims, the least during the Iranian Revolution, while accepted.” Höfer’s series represent- the people nearby seem to be making ed the immigrants in a German visual their decision: will they stay or leave? Opposite: Eugenio Dittborn, 2nd discourse “from which they remained History of the Human Face (Socket of otherwise conspicuously absent,” a the Eyes), Airmail Painting No. 66, 1989. label explains. These new Germans, These “airmail paintings,” showing criminal mugshots and photos of the photos seem to announce, were indigenous people, were printed on here to stay. fabric during Augusto Pinochet’s from the gallery space, REMAINS is an immersive, eerie The final works that visitors see in dictatorship in Chile, then folded up experience. Enriquez felt it was essential for the muse- THROUGH THE MARGARET FISHER FUND, © GILLES 2011.400. PERESS/MAGNUM PHOTOS “Crossing Lines” are a set of six pho- and mailed outside the country—an ums to represent the importance of Irish immigration PURCHASE PARTIAL AND GIFT, PARTIAL COLLECTION, PROOF PRINTER’S SCHNEIDER/ERDMAN exploration of how art can persist and tos taken by Dylan Vitone in 2001, be seen under state repression. Dylan for Boston, and the enduring consequences of conflict representing working-class residents Vitone, “friday night,” 2001, printed about identity and sovereignty in Ireland. The sub- of historically Irish South Boston; and 2019. From the series South Boston jects of Vitone’s black-and-white portraits, like those REMAINS, a film by Irish artist Wil- of “Turks in Germany,” stare straight into the camera, lie Doherty describing his and his son’s kneecapping during the announcing their place in their homes and communities: a reminder Troubles in Northern Ireland. Playing on a loop in a black box offset that migration, past and present, is all around us.

46 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 SCHNEIDER/ERDMAN PRINTER’S PROOF COLLECTION, PARTIAL GIFT, AND PARTIAL PURCHASE THROUGH THE MARGARET FISHER FUND, 2011.400. © GILLES PERESS/MAGNUM PHOTOS

FUND FOR THE ACQUISITION OF PHOTOGRAPHS, 2019.115. © DYLAN VITONE MARGARET FISHER FUND, 2013.11. © EUGENIO DITTBORN

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 n 2012, New York Times film critic Anthony “Tony” Scott ’87 you a message, through the ventriloquism of ancient marble and (writing under his byline, A.O. Scott) reviewed a big Hol- modern literature,” Scott writes, setting up a quote of the poem’s lywood release, The Avengers. He praised some aspects of the famous last line: “You must change your life.” movie and bemoaned others, specifically “its sacrifice of origi- Scott’s film reviews, which have appeared in theTimes for nearly nality on the altar of blockbuster.” Scott called The Avengers “a 20 years, make an even stronger argument for the value of criticism. snappy little dialogue comedy dressed up as something else, They offer articulate, well-reasoned, and informed viewpoints on that something being a giant ATM for Marvel and its new new movies, rendered in a highly readable style. In an Internet era of studio overlords, The Walt Disney Company.” random, unmediated commentary on entertainment, Scott’s essays, Disney’s giant ATM worked flawlessly. The movie quickly built on evidence and under the imprimatur of The New York Times, took in more than $1 billion in box-office receipts globally. But offer readers a reliably intelligent viewpoint anchored in objective after Scott’s review ran, Samuel L. Jackson, who starred in The data as well as opinion. Avengers as Nick Fury, tweeted that “AO Scott needs a new job! Let’s Occasionally he also produces an essay casting new light on an help him find one! One he can ACTUALLY do!” This kicked off an older work like the 1999 Matthew Broderick-Reese Witherspoon Internet brouhaha, with Jackson’s followers retweeting the salvo film Election. And not infrequently, Scott folds in humorous flour- and even adding their ishes, as in a recent own colorful sugges- review of Yesterday, tions as to what Scott a comedy built on was qualified to do a fanciful premise with himself. It be- about the Beatles. came international His review straight- news before the fra- facedly includes nu- cas burned itself out. merous quotes of But it had raised is- Beatles song titles sues, even timeless and lyrics, all sans at- issues, about the tribution but perfect- place of the critic in ly seamless in con- culture. text. “She’s carrying In his 2016 book a torch for him vis- Better Living Through ible from across the Criticism, Scott wit- universe,” he wrote tily recounts this of the film’s female dustup and explains lead, before adding, that it surfaced well- “With a love like worn objections to A.O. Scott on watching and that, you’d think he critics: they lack joy; would be glad.” they rain on everyone reviewing a lot of movies “I inhale Scott’s else’s parade; they reviews because he are haters, squares, champions the for- snobs, or nerds. Scott by CRAIG LAMBERT eign and indepen- pushes back at these dent movies I like,” stereotypes and ar- says screenwriter gues that criticism Jesse Kornbluth ’68, remains integral to editor of HeadButler. the process of cre- com. “But the reason ation in the arts. I read even his re- Certainly, over the centuries, critics have been a beleaguered lot— views of the fifth sequel of some Hollywood dreck is because he’s esteemed among small, sophisticated circles of readers, but widely a hard-wired humanist who actually cares about the relationships disparaged, especially by those whose work they criticize. Yet crit- in a movie. As a critic, he’s a writer—he matters.” ics have somehow survived the insults and objections. Today they actually occupy a crucial leverage point in the culture. Economic, Commenting on a 1973 New York Review of Books essay, Scott notes that social, and technological evolution have made the critic’s function “Joan Didion cut down critics for not getting it—not understanding more, well, critical than ever. that the highest form of art in Hollywood is the deal memo. The indus- Scott’s book ventures far beyond cinema and deals with fun- try’s creative output, she says, is actually products and deals. Maybe damental questions of art, audiences, and commentary. His back- the movie didn’t get made—but ‘we had some fun along the way.’ ground in literary criticism, for example, informs a close reading “Yet the paradox is that some really marvelous works of art have there of Rilke’s sonnet, “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” He extracts emerged from this capitalistic, cutthroat, greedy system,” he con- the poet’s view of how readers should let the power of art affect tinues. “One reason movies are so interesting to write about is the

them. “You are opened up, exposed to the universe, which sends possibility of art and the attempt to make art. Movies require enor- SPECIAL THANKS TO THE QUAD CINEMA, 34 NEW WEST 13TH YORK ST. , NEW YORK

48 November - December 2019 A.O. Scott at the Quad Cinema, New York City. Photograph by Robert Adam Mayer

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 mous outlays of capital up front. A poem or a painting does not. “I’m proud to have championed Moonlight,” he recalls. “I saw it And in film, the creative people are not using their own money.” at the Telluride Film Festival. It was a quiet movie with no stars, The saying has it that a painter needs a palette, a composer needs and wasn’t necessarily destined to catch on the way it did. The big a piano, but a filmmaker needs an army. The cost of making a studio final scene was two guys drinking tea together. It shows the influ- feature is indeed exorbitant. In 2017 the Hollywood Reporter pegged the ence of European and Asian work. I felt it deserved more than just average production budget at between $70 million and $90 million, modest success. I told readers to go out and see this one. I did a but the studios’ bigger bets typically came in at $200 million to $300 short interview with Barry Jenkins, the director, and worked re- million. These giant outlays certainly shape how studios and creators ally hard on the review, writing it by hand in a café in Rome. It ran see film critics: as people of great power who can have a profound under the head, ‘Moonlight: Is This the Best Movie of the Year?’” effect on how their immense investment fares in the marketplace. Four months later, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sci- “Movie studios are trying to market these things and create media ences agreed that it was; Moonlight won the Oscar for Best Picture, circumstances that get people to see them,” Scott explains. “Critics becoming the picture with the second-lowest budget ever to do so. can throw a certain amount of cold water on this, and they aren’t controllable. We are independent, and that drives them crazy. The son of two academics, Scott grew up in a scholarly home. “You do have to be fair,” he continues. “I try not to be cruel, al- By the time he got to college, “Most of the adults I’d ever met were though you can be harsh. You don’t want to have too much fun at college professors,” he says. His father, Donald Scott ’62, an Ameri- the expense of someone else’s money, labor, and creativity. Nobody can historian, is dean of social sciences emeritus at Queens College. is trying to make some- His mother, Joan Wal- thing bad. It used to be lach Scott, has been that every bad movie— professor of social sci- especially things that ences at the Institute were cynical, dishon- for Advanced Study in est, or pandering—I “It used to be that every bad movie…I saw Princeton, New Jersey, saw as a personal insult since 1985; her uncle to be avenged. Now it was film, stage, and takes a little more to as personal insult to be avenged. Now it television actor Eli make me mad.” Wallach. Scott grew Critics’ power over takes a little more to make me mad.” up in Chicago, Chapel the marketplace varies Hill, and Providence, greatly in different me- and recalls being “very dia. In Broadway the- literary and bookish as ater, for example, the a kid. The point of life lead drama critic of The New York Times still wields an influence ap- was to read as many books as I could.” proaching that of the Roman emperors’ thumbs up/thumbs down At Harvard, he concentrated in literature, a small department verdict on a gladiator’s fate. A harsh pan can doom a play, while a since absorbed by comparative literature, and was interested in rave might launch a hit. At the opposite extreme, television criti- “what was called ‘theory’”—a type of literary criticism derived from cism may make interesting reading, but its effect on a show’s success Continental philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes. is virtually nil. Traditionally, the TV business has listened to only “I was monastically serious about academic work,” he recalls. “I one critic: the Nielsen market-research company, which produces would close down the library.” viewer ratings. (That may be changing now in this era of stream- His senior year, he moved into the Dudley Co-op on Sacramento ing; Netflix doesn’t release its viewing data.) Street, a.k.a. the Center for High-Energy Metaphysics, as the leg- Film reviewers fall in between these antipodes of influence. “I’m end above its entrance proclaims. “It was great,” he says. Residents sort of relieved to be in the middle,” Scott says. “Unlike a theater shared the housekeeping and could earn maximal work points by or restaurant critic, my review doesn’t mean life or death. What I cooking dinner every two weeks. Scott learned to cook there, and say about any Avengers or Star Wars movie will not change its suc- has pursued cuisine avidly ever since; he is an excellent amateur cess in the marketplace. But with a smaller movie, a review can chef. In the co-op kitchen, he also met his wife, Justine Henning make a difference. ’88. (“My friends were cynical, punk-rockers, cigarette smokers,” “That’s partly because the sheer quantity—millions of hours of he recalls. “She was a vegetarian, a classic hippie into Indian phi- scripted film and television content each year—that critics and losophy and Judaism.”) They married in 1991 and have a son, Ezra, a audiences now deal with is overwhelming,” he continues. “There recent Wesleyan University alumnus—and film-studies major—and is no way anyone can process it all. It can be paralyzing and con- a daughter, Carmen, an undergraduate at Wesleyan. Scott himself fusing, and there is a danger of work falling through the cracks.” has taught a film-studies course at Wesleyan for the past few years. Part of a critic’s job, Scott believes, is to prevent that from hap- Two years after college, Scott entered a doctoral program in English pening—to say, in essence, “Wait a minute, here’s something spe- at Johns Hopkins. “It was a very small department—rigorous, com- cial.” He did as much for the 2016 filmMoonlight, a coming-of age petitive, you might even say sadistic,” he recalls. He took his orals but story with an all-black cast centered on a poor, gay, male. Scott’s foundered when it came to writing a dissertation. “You had to special- review called it an “at times almost unbearably personal film and ize, and I was too much of a dilettante,” he explains. “My attention an urgent social document.” would wander. I didn’t want to be a professor. My heart wasn’t in it.”

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Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Meanwhile, Justine began a doctoral program in history and Ju- shouldn’t be allowed to review [Scorsese’s film]Gangs of New York.” daic studies at New York University, so the couple moved to New By 1999, he was the father of two children with a burgeoning York City. Scott felt “miserable, stuck in a thing I had no desire to freelance career. Then New York Times editor John Darnton invited do.” He got his foot in the door as a book critic when the arts edi- him to lunch. Janet Maslin was stepping aside as a film critic at the tors of The Nation, John Leonard ’60 and his wife, Sue, assigned him paper, and, over a chatty meal, Darnton confided that theTimes was to review two books by then Porter University Professor Helen looking for a film critic or two. “I wasn’t going to say no,” Scott re- Vendler (now emerita). The assignment paid 10 cents per word, members, “but I also thought, ‘This is completely crazy.’ I had writ- but Scott did his homework thoroughly and “threw everything ten one piece of film criticism, and with two young kids, I hadn’t into it.” He followed this with another on John Updike’s 1996 novel, gone to the movies at all that year.” In the Beauty of the Lilies. It ran as The Nation’s lead review and Scott Nonetheless, he wrote two audition pieces, and soon enough says he “just loved doing it. It felt very liberating to be writing for realized that he really wanted the job. In December 1999, he got non-academic readers—you can say what you like. With academic the offer, and was amazed to find himself with a position at a level writing, everything had to be justified, cited. But here it was pos- he had dreamed of achieving in perhaps five or 10 years’ time. He sible to have an opinion and just state it. It was also possible to was not alone in his amazement. When word of his hire got out, make a joke.” a Variety reporter phoned him to ask, in He adopted the byline “A.O. Scott” essence, “Who the hell are you?” when he began writing for The Nation. “There were already several famous Tony In January 2000, Scott acceded to the Scotts,” he explains. “It was not a distinc- job of New York Times film critic, joined tive byline.” He chose “A. O. Scott” as a there by Elvis Mitchell, who got the homage of sorts to his great-grandfather, other critic job. When Mitchell left the an English immigrant on his way to San Times in 2004, the newspaper named Scott Francisco who stopped in Ohio, set up co-chief critic with Manohla Dargis, an shop as a mason, and never left. The fam- arrangement that has worked smooth- ily business was “A.O. Scott & Sons.” ly ever since. (Dargis lives in Los Ange- A good break arrived in the form of a les, Scott in Brooklyn, with escapes to a job at The New York Review of Books (NYRB), Maine island retreat in Penobscot Bay.) where Scott spent just over a year work- The two take turns at having first pick ing directly for co-founder and editor of new film releases each week. They al- Robert Silvers. “The New York Review of ternate movies by the same director. “We Books has a place in my heart,” he says. make it so the distribution of significant “It was a very unusual, intense, literary, films is pretty equal,” Scott says. “Manoh- and intellectual atmosphere. Bob [Sil- la is a very good writer and very smart. vers] worked 16-hour days, seven days We’re good friends. If I read something a week. He didn’t behave like a mentor, of hers that’s terrific, I feel I have to step but I learned more in one year of look- up and do better than I would if I were ing over his shoulder than I did in all my the solitary chief critic.” years of graduate school. I learned about He watches 200 to 300 films per year writing, thinking, and the importance of and reviews 100 to 150 of them, an average criticism and critical thought. The first “I’m proud to have championed Moonlight,” Scott of two or three per week. In the darkness half of the 1990s felt like 20 years to me; says. “It was a quiet movie with no stars, and of screening rooms around Manhattan, wasn’t necessarily destined to catch on.” the second half seemed like six months.” where he sees about 95 percent of the While working at the NYRB, Scott continued to freelance book films he reviews, he has compiled, he says, “hundreds of notebooks reviews, for The Village Voice and The New York Times as well as The Na- filled with illegible notes.” But big commercial releases frequently tion. Eventually, Silvers assigned him to write an essay on Cormac hold “all-media” screenings in multiplex theaters: essentially sneak McCarthy’s novel Cities of the Plain. When it ran, “seeing my byline previews with a few rows of seats reserved for critics. “It’s useful, alongside a David Levine caricature of McCarthy was a thrill,” and fun, to see a comedy, a horror movie, or an action movie with Scott recalls. a civilian audience,” Scott says. But advancement was impossible at the NYRB, which had no se- In constructing a review, “the only data you have that you are sure nior editors. Scott therefore moved to Lingua Franca, an irreverent, about are your reactions,” he explains. “But to report on your taste gossipy review of academic life, while continuing to contribute to is not necessarily useful to anybody else. They might like different the NYRB. Eventually he left Lingua Franca to write a Sunday column kinds of movies than you do. The key is turning your response into in Newsday, and also became a regular contributor to Slate. an argument that will somehow connect with your readers’ inter- One of Scott’s Slate pieces focused on film director Martin Scors- ests.” A basic technique involves linking the reviewer’s reactions ese. “In my way, I wildly overdid it,” he recalls. “I laid out my grand to elements in the film that provoked those reactions. “What I’m theory of cinema. It was a good piece that included a cheap shot trying to do is persuade people to think about it,” he says. or two, prompting a grudge that the Scorsese people held for a “The most important aspect of the relationship between a critic long time. Years later, Miramax tried to persuade the Times that I and a reader isn’t agreement, but trust,” he declares. “A few months

Harvard Magazine 51

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ago, a reader who had seen The Souvenir—a movie I loved—sent me a tion from a national print newspaper to a global digital medium, and I note with two ticket stubs enclosed. I don’t think he really wanted have always been able to write what I thought and what I care about. his money back, but he was making a point that I hear a lot, which If there is an obscure film that I think deserves attention, I can give it is that I had let him down or betrayed his trust. On the flip side of that attention. Now I am working on an essay about Susan Sontag, that, sometimes people say, ‘We never go see a movie unless you who looms large in my own work and intellectual life. I’ve felt im- recommend it,’ which is meant as a compliment, of course, but measurably free to experiment with my own voice and perspective.” which is kind of a terrifying thing to hear. That’s a big responsibility. “I’d say that it’s not so important to like things, or to experience The future of film criticism, even for a polished practitioner only what we like,” he continues. “If we didn’t sometimes see movies like Scott, remains uncertain, linked as it is to the future of film we hated—or were bored itself, as well as that by, or didn’t understand, of newspapers and or found offensive—we other media. “Along would know a lot less with the collapse of about movies, our tastes, “The audience is used to the alibi, ‘We a lot of daily news- and the world. There are papers, many of them a lot of movies I’ve found have shed their arts unpleasant or that I’ve had are giving people what they want,’ but critics,” he says. In various aesthetic or other addition, consumer- problems with—White Rib- review websites like bon, The Color Wheel, The Wolf audiences will embrace alternative fare.” rottentomatoes.com of Wall Street, Gangs of New have brought either York—that I’ve found it a populist voice or a interesting and challeng- haphazard flood of ing to think about. My hope is that my readers are open to that uninformed—and perhaps sponsored—opinions into the fray. kind of experience as well, and that I can sometimes nudge them “Sometimes I worry that Hollywood as we know it—the seven toward it. Taste isn’t a settled fact; everyone should see their taste major studios and various independent players—may disappear,” as a work in progress.” he says. “We will wake up one morning and there will just be Dis- If Scott’s reviews have a polemical thread, it’s his distaste for the ney and Netflix. Disney just swallowed Fox. They are very good at use of algorithms to predict and control audiences’ reactions and the exploitation and monetization of longstanding brands—Mar- tastes—“the notion that ‘Netflix will tell me what I like,’” he says. vel, Star Wars, Pixar. They are armed with a global audience and the “That is really dystopian. It turns everything into a manipulation Disney name. The sequels and remakes out there leave less room of the public.” for other kinds of movies. The audience is used to the alibi, ‘We are The Times does have a few rules to protect the objectivity of re- giving people what they want,’ but audiences will embrace alter- viewers. Even though other critics do so, Scott and Dargis aren’t native fare. Jordan Peele’s movies like Get Out and Us didn’t come allowed to sit on film-festival juries or any awards-giving bodies, from a cookie cutter.” where they would have a voice in dispensing things of value to Another danger is the threat that online streaming poses to going filmmakers. At festivals, he has met filmmakers and shaken hands to the movies, which might become “a niche, or specialized activity with them. “I might feel I want to be friends with this person,” he like reading a print newspaper,” Scott says. “There’s a loss of com- says. “But then I couldn’t do my job. You can’t be vicious to your munal experience. You also lose an aesthetic quality you have with friends when the occasion calls for it. All the movie people have the big screen. Streaming could induce a kind of passivity on the part more money than you do, and the vast majority are better looking! of the audience, which may get used to ‘watching Netflix,’ just like You are not in the film industry, and you can’t fool yourself into ‘watching TV.’ If things go onto the platform and disappear into an thinking that you are.” algorithm, I wonder how they can enter the cultural bloodstream.” Still, occasional connections with the creators can be fun. Scott As of now, though, the ritual in the dark still remains available. has met director Alexander Payne a handful of times at film festivals Returning to that final scene inMoonlight of two characters drink- and parties. That didn’t stop him from writing a 2005 pre-Oscar ing tea, Scott recalls the silence that hung in the air of the screening piece titled, “The Most Overrated Film of the Year” about Payne’s room once the movie had faded to black. “You just can’t get that, celebrated 2004 hit Sideways, which won more than 40 awards. “I looking at a phone,” he says. wrote about the way it was particularly embraced by film critics,” Such cinematic moments sustain his belief in the future of film, Scott explains. “They seemed to identify heavily with the [male despite current—and emergent­­­—challenges. “I try not be pessi- lead] Paul Giamatti character.” The following year, at the Cannes mistic about the ‘death of movies and decline of Hollywood,’” Scott Film Festival, Scott was standing next to the Palais checking his says. “My book was written in a spirit of defiant optimism about schedule when a voice came over his shoulder. It was Payne. “You criticism and human creativity: our drive to create, and to experi- know, I think you’re right,” the director said. “It was overrated.” ence those creations.” “The thing that has surprised me is how much freedom there is with this job,” Scott says. “People think you operate under constant Craig A. Lambert ’69, Ph.D. ’78, was a staff writer and editor at this magazine rules and taboos. But I have been here through seven culture editors from 1988 to 2014. His most recent book is Shadow Work: The Unpaid, and five or six executive editors, and lived through theTimes’ s transi- Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day.

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

60 Open Book: “The Luckiest Books” 61 “A Melodic Being” 62 Off the Shelf 64 Forgive, but Don’t Forget 67 Chapter and Verse

Comedy Is Magic TODD SEIDENBERG For Harrison Greenbaum, it began with “Pick a card….” by lydialyle gibson

arrison Greenbaum was five  took root. “I became su- when his father pulled out a deck per serious about trying to figure out how Harrison Greenbaum’s What Just Hap- of cards and told him to pick this trick worked. I used to go to the library pened? (left) combines his two creative obsessions: comedy and magic. And H one. Greenbaum did, and then and check out magic books. And we’d go to Greenbaum, who performs more than 600 BRODO BRODY watched his dad riffle the rest of the deck magic stores in New York” from the fami- stand-up shows a year, is a regular at clubs beside his own ear, saying the cards would ly home in Long Island. “Those are some of like the Comedy Cellar in New York. tell him which one his son had chosen. With my favorite memories.” He started attending a flourish, his father named the card. Green- magic camp every summer and discovered Magic led him to comedy. As a freshman, baum doesn’t remember what it was, just a whole world of other weird kids as nerdy he joined the Harvard Magic Society (“It that his father got it right. and magic-obsessed as he was. By the time had, like, three members—I very quickly “But he wouldn’t tell me how he did it,” he solved his father’s trick—he says now it became president”) and started spending says Greenbaum ’08, now a comedian and was probably the only one his father knew— Tuesday nights at the Mystery Lounge, a magician. And that’s when the fixation Greenbaum’s fascination was deep and wide. weekly magic show held above the Hong

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Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage Kong Restaurant in Harvard Square. “My apprenticeship,” he calls it. The magic show Jack Goldsmith is Shattuck profes- was hosted by the stage’s main tenant: the o p e n b o o k sor of law. As such, he is known for his Comedy Studio. “So that started rattling work on the legal aspects of terror- around in my head, the idea of stand-up.” ism, national security, and other Later that same year, he tried it out, per- Hoffa and fraught topics in international law. But forming a few jokes in a student-organized like all faculty members, he has a life campus show. beyond the classroom and his scholar- He was hooked immediately. Partly it Harvard Law ship. In his case, the complications of was the adrenaline: “Doing stand-up is like that personal life are the subject of the jumping out of a plane without a parachute,” new book, In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search he says, “and you hope you can build a para- for the Truth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28). From the introduction: chute while you’re falling.” Partly it was the stripped-down purity: “That’s what makes One evening in early December it almost a blood sport. You remove so much, 2003, I found myself alone in a brightly until it’s just you and a microphone. It’s very lit cavernous office on the fifth floor of raw and visceral—you feel everything.” But the United States Department of Jus- even more exciting was the freedom. He was tice, reading a stack of Supreme Court used to performing magic in a blazer and decisions about the Fourth Amend- khakis. In stand-up, the dress code, and the ment’s prohibition on unreasonable expectations, were wide open. searches and seizures. At the time I He spent his college summers in New was serving as the assistant attorney York City, working an internship at MAD— general in charge of the Office of Legal “comedy boot camp”—and barking comedy- Counsel, a position that made me a club customers in off the street in exchange senior legal adviser to the attorney for a little stage time. Back on campus, he general and the president. A few weeks helped found the Harvard College Stand Up earlier, I had concluded that President Comedy Society (HCSUCS; “To Harvard’s George W. Bush’s secret two-year-old Close to home: Jimmy Hoffa (foreground) credit,” he says, “once they figured out the warrantless surveillance program…was and Chuckie O’Brien near the federal courthouse, March 1, 1964, after Hoffa’s acronym, they never made us change it”) shot through with legal problems.… trial for jury-tampering and wrote a prize-winning senior thesis My thoughts that stressful December on the effect of racial humor on prejudice. evening began with a crisis about national the government had eavesdropped on After graduation, his parents implored him security and presidental power but soon Hoffa and O’Brien in possible violation of to take the LSAT, but instead he leapt into veered to a different turbulent period of a new governmental policy and develop- performing full time. He moved to New York my life. One of the cases in my “to-read” ing Supreme Court jurisprudence.… and gave himself two years to make it work. pile was a 1967 Supreme Court decision… After reading the decisions, I immedi- Eleven years later, “work” is the opera- that restricted the government’s use of ately saw their connection to each other, tive term. Greenbaum performs more than electronic bugs to capture private conver- and to me. In the 1950s and 1960s, Jimmy 600 shows a year, locally and internationally, sations by stealth. As my tired eyes Hoffa was the nation’s best-known and

headlining at places like Carolines on Broad- reached the end of the opinion, two cita- most feared labor leader.…Chuckie ROBERT KELLEY/THE W. LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES way and the Comedy Cellar. In 2010, he won tions leapt off the page like ghosts: “O’Brien O’Brien met Hoffa at age nine and later the Andy Kauffman Award, given to promis- v. United States, 386 U.S. 345 (1967); Hoffa served as his most intimate aide for more ing comics doing unconventional material. In v. United States, 387 U.S. 231 (1967).” than two decades. Chuckie helped Hoffa 2015, he reached the semi-finals onLast Comic …The Hoffa case involved the pension bulldoze to the president of the Team- Standing and later appeared on America’s Got fraud conviction of James Riddle Hoffa, sters. He was Hoffa’s trusted messenger Talent and Conan. More recently, he created a the autocratic leader of the International to organized crime figures around the Web series for the United States Tour Opera- Brotherhood of Teamsters, who would country, and was by his side during his tors Association, called Recalculating. It’s kind later vanish, on July 30, 1975, in what re- seven-year battle with Bobby Kennedy of a video travelogue with a quirky comic mains one of the greatest unsolved that ultimately sent Hoffa to prison.… touch: Greenbaum samples Aztec mosquito- crimes in American history. The O’Brien But in 1974, he and Hoffa had a falling egg pancakes in Mexico City, drives a dog- decision concerned the conviction of out.…Soon after Hoffa vanished, Chuck- sled outside Vancouver, eats fire at a Coney Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien, also a Team- ie became a leading suspect.…Based on Island sideshow, and rappels down a wall sters official, for stealing a marble statue a slew of circumstantial evidence, the FBI in Slovenia in search of aquatic salamanders of St. Theresa from a U.S. Customs ware- quickly concluded that Chuckie picked up said to be the offspring of dragons. “My ca- house in Detroit Harbor Terminal. The Hoffa and drove him to his death. reer has been a bunch of random, crazy jobs,” Supreme Court vacated both convictions I knew this history well because he says. “I like to say yes as much as I can.” so that lower courts could determine if Chuckie O’Brien is my stepfather. Last August, he debuted What’s Your Prob-

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

Greenbaum samples local culture in Vancouver and Mexico City in Recalculating.

posterous prescription. That’s how Green- baum comes across in his stand-up routines, too: easy, relaxed, full of gentle bemusement.

USTOA (2) He takes obvious, dis- lem? a series of improvisational Facebook ated summa cum laude in psychology, stops arming delight in bantering with the audi- videos in which he plays a “comedian ther- New Yorkers on the street and invites them ence, including (maybe especially) hecklers. apist” to unsuspecting passersby. Dressed to sit and talk (and joke) about their money Partly that’s a comedian hitting his stride in a cardigan, and trailed by a small entou- woes and dating quandaries and, in at least after years of practice and study; he recent- rage carrying an upholstered couch and a one case, “a cat issue.” Each “session” ends ly gave an interview to a comedy podcast framed diploma, Greenbaum, who gradu- with a hug and a hastily written, mostly pre- that amounted to a two-hour master class

o p e n b o o k “The Luckiest Books”

In an era of omnipresent digital media (and distractions), Leah Price ’91, RI ’07, is an anti-alarmist about the future of reading and of tangible books. The former Higginson professor of English, an expert on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and on book history, recently decamped to Rutgers, where she is Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor and founding director of the Rutgers Initiative for the Book. In What We Talk About When We Talk about Books: The History and Future of Reading (Basic Books, $28), Price reassures: “One constant in the history of books is their power to take new forms, and to prompt new ways of reading as a result.” In the course of making her case, she describes a class visit to a venue where lots of old-fashioned books await their next users:

One blustery Febru- books in Harvard’s depository also inhabit a scale incomprehen- ary afternoon, the sible to human minds. As tall as five people stacked on top of one class…took a field another, the sublime crags of the depository’s 30-foot-high trip. A school bus metal shelves produce the same vertigo as a stark cliff face. On whose bright yellow campus, books are shelved by subject; here, by height. Arriving looked like something at the depository, each volume encounters a sizing tray….Also out of a Richard Scar- on arrival…each book’s title is replaced with a bar code readable ry illustration ferried by a pistol-grip Motorola scanner: prisoner without a name, cell

STEPHANIE MITCHELL/ HPAC MITCHELL/ STEPHANIE us to an exurb an without a call number. Where there are still plenty of real hour west of Boston, The ticket to this Siberia isn’t always one-way. At some point books: the Harvard Depository where a climate-con- in their exile, the luckiest books will be released at the request trolled Home Depot- of a catalog user. If that user requests hard copy, the volume will style hangar refrigerates Harvard Library’s 10 million least-loved be zapped by a scanner in the grippy-gloved hands of a fluores- volumes in off-site storage. A clang drew our gaze upward: 20 cent-lumbar-support-clad worker riding a cherry picker, bundled men were shoveling snow from three acres of roofs. Beyond the into a plastic bin, shunted onto a metal hand-truck, and loaded fumes of the loading dock, neither leather spines nor wood shelv- into an 18-wheeler to trundle past the sentry box and the near- ing lay in sight. Instead, my students encountered fluorescent by Kwik Print to the highway leading to campus, and finally into lights, linoleum floors, metal carts, plastic bins sold by the thou- the reader’s hand. When books do make the trip down the sand-count, an eyewash, and a stenciled hard-hat reminder. highway…they travel…11 million times slower than a packet of Climbing on the cherry picker for a high-tech hayride, the stu- digital information. More often, therefore, the catalog user re- dents looked about as credible as politicans posing in a tank. quests page images—meaning that the lucky volume will be Stored at a temperature inhospitable to human bodies, the scanned without ever escaping the building.

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Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage In What’s Your 10 years and recently began touring: Harrison Problem? he stops Greenbaum’s What Just Happened? It combines New Yorkers on the street and the rhythm of stand-up—a laugh every 10 invites them into or 20 seconds—with the suspense of a magic his roving “office” show, weaving in original tricks that connect for some comedic to the jokes. The show bears out a conviction talk therapy. Greenbaum often preaches when he speaks battle-tested jokes at magic conventions: tricks, like stand-up is about Roy Sulli- jokes, should start with an idea. “Comedians van, a park ranger come up with an idea first, and then figure who set the world out a funny way to say it,” he says. “In magic, record for surviv- a lot of people go out and buy a trick and just ing the most light- jam it into their act.” But if magic is an art ning strikes: seven form—and Greenbaum believes it is—then times, between 1942 its practitioners, he says, should strive for on joke structure. But it’s also the fact that and 1977. Greenbaum ambles around inside originality and self-expression, should be his jokes—observational, narrative, some- the joke for several minutes, building digres- willing to push the envelope in ways that times playfully political—often arise, he says, sions, unearthing absurdities, detonating lit- feel political or personal. “When I give lec- from a feeling of love. “For a lot of comedi- tle moments of surprise, before finding his tures on magic, I always encourage people ans, the motivating emotion is anger, but for way back for the final flourish. to break stuff. ‘Just break stuff and see what me it’s more like, ‘Isn’t this amazing? Isn’t His favorite project right now is a comedy- happens. You’ll figure out how to put it back this insane? Let me show you.’” One of his magic show he’s been developing for the past together.’” After all, it’s magic.

COURTESY OF HARRISON GREENBAUM’S WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM? “A Melodic Being” Singer Ali Sethi finds his voice in classical Pakistani music. by lydialyle gibson

he drums are calling out audience, tradi- your name,” Ali Sethi ’06 tional boundar- exhorted the gyrating audi- ies among wor- “Tence in Sanders Theatre, as shippers—class, he and his bandmates wound toward the caste, gender, ge- climax of the night’s final number, a song ography—break with roots stretching back to the medieval down. period in what is now Pakistan. Some listen- Something similar seems to happen with Ali Sethi brings the Sanders Theatre ers were already on their feet, and a handful Sethi’s music: boundaries fall away—be- crowd to its feet during a concert last spring. His Harvard mentor, Ali Asani of students were dancing on stage. Behind tween past and present, earthly and tran- (right, in suit and tie), joined him on stage. Sethi, the tabla player’s fingers flew across scendent, between art and religion and poli- the drums, pounding out a rhythm that was tics. “We are many and we are one,” he says. media orchestral work co-created by Pulit- intricate, ecstatic, irresistible. A singer classically trained in Pakistani tra- zer Prize-winning composer Du Yun, Ph.D. It was the headlining concert at Har- ditional music, whose voice can shift from ’06, about human migration and the flight of vard’s ArtsFirst Festival last May, and the plaintive to raw to warmly intimate, Sethi refugees. And for the past several months, song, “Dama Dam Mast Qalandar,” is a (pronounced say-tee) has become a star in he has collaborated with Grammy-winning South Asian favorite, with a melody com- (and, increasingly, beyond) Pakistan. Since musician and producer Noah Georgeson on posed in the 1960s and lyrics drawn from a 2012, when he appeared on the soundtrack an album, to be released by summer 2020, thirteenth-century poem honoring the Sufi for the filmThe Reluctant Fundamentalist (di- that combines classical South Asian music

saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. The work is of- rected by Mira Nair ’79), he has toured in- with his own songwriting. JAKE BELCHER/COURTESY OF THE OFFICE FOR THE HARVARD ARTS AT ten performed at Qalandar’s shrine in south- ternationally and become a regular presence Born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, he eastern Pakistan, where pilgrims commune on Coke Studio, Pakistan’s popular live-music is the son of dissident journalists; his fa- with the divine by taking part in dhamal, a television show. This past April he made his ther has been jailed repeatedly, and in 2011 whirling, pounding, trancelike dance. Inside debut at Carnegie Hall as one of three so- the family fled the country for more than the song’s feverish rhythms, Sethi told the loists in Where We Lost Our Shadows, a multi- a year after receiving death threats. Sethi

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Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage arrived at Harvard in September 2002, ex- “There was this wanting to have a narrative sor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic religion and actly a year after 9/11. “Everywhere I went, that fit”—about his home and culture, and cultures Ali Asani. For the first time, Sethi people were kind of cagey about Muslims,” himself—“and not quite having recourse learned about the role the arts had always he recalls. “Like, ‘Ooh, what do Muslims to one.” played in Muslims’ understanding of their really believe?’” Even as he felt pressure to He found it in a class on Islamic culture faith. He learned that Islam was not only explain, a part of him was searching, too: in contemporary societies, taught by profes- politics and theology but what Asani called

texts, historical images, and her own Choosing College: How to Make Bet- riveting portraits of their beauty ter Learning Decisions Throughout Off the Shelf may help readers appreciate their Your Life, by Michael B. Horn, M.B.A. ’06, Recent books with Harvard connections biological importance, too. and Bob Moesta (Jossey-Bass, $25). An education strategist and innovation consul- The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A tant of the Clayton Christensen “disrup- Democracy and Imperialism: Irving Noble but Flawed Ideal, by Martha C. tion” school (the professor provides a Babbitt and Warlike Democracies, by Nussbaum, Ph.D. ’75, RI ’81 (Harvard, foreword), Horn and co-author Moesta William S. Smith (University of Michigan, $27.95). It is a long way from philosophical offer a consultant-like approach to figuring $70). Harvard, widely known as a liberal discourse on Cicero, the Stoics, Adam out whether to go to college and if so, why, bastion, was not always and is not only so. Smith, and their successors to “America and then, how applicants might attend Smith, managing director of Catholic Uni- First” as a campaign-rally slogan. That makes their “best school.” The book’s chief value versity’s Center for the Study of States- the distinguished University of Chicago phi- may be its operating assumption that its manship, plumbs the political thought of losopher’s engagement with the ideas of readers are not confined to the tiny minor- Babbitt, Harvard’s long-serving compara- world citizenship and universal human dig- ity of 18-year-olds seeking admission to tive-literature scholar. In assessing “the nity—and their practical limits in a material highly selective liberal-arts colleges and ambiguity of imperialism in democra- life—timely and urgent, if not light reading. universities. cies”—and Babbitt’s link between that problem and his essential understanding The Education of an Idealist, by Sa- The Empowered University, by Free- that (in Smith’s phrase) “the quality most mantha Power, Lindh professor of the man A. Hrabowski III, LL.D. ’10, Philip J. required for a successful political order is practice of global leadership and public Rous, and Peter H. Henderson, M.P.P. ’84 high moral character in leaders”—the au- policy and Zabel professor of practice in (Johns Hopkins, $34.95). The flip side of thor performs the dual service of rehabili- human rights (Dey Street Books, $29.99). college choice is what choices colleges tating an important idea undergirding The human-rights scholar-activist (author make. Here the president, provost, and genuinely conservative thought, and dem- of A Problem from Hell, on America and senior advisor to the president of the Uni- onstrating its unmistakable application to genocide, reviewed in September-Octo- versity of Maryland, Baltimore County, twenty-first-century America. ber 2002) was schooled in diplomatic reflect on how theytransformed a run-of- practicalities as National Security Council the-mill local institution into a nationally The Curious World of Seaweed, by leader for multilateral affairs and human acclaimed powerhouse, distinguished for Josie Iselin ’84 (Heyday, $35). The author- rights, and then as ambassador to the UN, educating minority and disadvantaged stu- artist, who has made readers really look at in the Obama administration. Her memoir dents in STEM disciplines. The spirit of beach stones and seashells, here goes to details that work (historians will hash out chapter 12, “Looking in the Mirror,” seems town on seaweeds and kelps. The helpful controversies like those arising from U.S. useful generally—for educators, but also intervention in Libya), over- for trustees, civic leaders, and others. laid with her personal pri- orities (IVF and creating a Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music family with husband Cass in America from the Great War Sunstein, Walmsley Univer- through the Cold War, by Jonathan sity Professor, profiled in Rosenberg, Ph.D. ’97 (W.W. Norton, “The Legal Olympian,” $39.95). The Juilliard-trained author, now January-February 2015). A a twentieth-century U.S. historian at useful reminder of the role Hunter and the Graduate Center of of diplomacy—and of the CUNY, has composed a breathtaking ex- challenges faced by those ploration of the intersection of interna- who conduct it. tional relations and classical music, from the patriotic dismissal of German music Sublime seaweed: nature during World War I to the embrace of photographer Josie Iselin’s cyanotype of Pikea Shostakovich during the Nazi siege of Len-

CYANOTYPE JOSIE BY ISELIN californica ingrad and the politics of Van Cliburn’s

62 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage “heart-mind knowledge”: that before it was grown up with in a new light—ghazals (love ies and advertisements and jingles on the codified into scripture, the religion had be- poems) and qawwalis (devotional songs) radio—“just a part of our cultural DNA”— gun as an aesthetic tradition that sought handed down by the Sufis, Islamic mys- but they’d always seemed separate from re- “to explain God through beauty.” The class tics whose practice emphasizes pluralism, ligion, and lesser; now he understood they unlocked something in Sethi. tolerance, and an inward search for the di- were neither. He began to see the old folksongs he’d vine. He’d heard them embedded in mov- He abandoned his planned economics fo- apotheosis in Moscow during the Cold War. Capturing the cosmos: a Original, and bracing­ly written. comet reported in 1527, from the Augsburg Book of Miracles, by an Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged unknown artist the Literary Cold War, by Duncan White, lecturer on history and literature calls, in the context of (Custom House/Morrow, $32.50). As her research, “the confi- sweeping in scope and ambition as Danger- dence to believe in a dif- ous Melodies, but in the different medium ferent future.” of literature. As capitalism and communism vied for hearts and minds, and their spies The Age of Living Ma- engaged one another, friendships and enmi- chines, by Susan Hock- ties changed and metastasized, from field (W.W. Norton, George Orwell and Stephen Spender to $26.95). MIT’s president

Richard Wright, John le Carré, and Václav emerita, a neuroscientist COURTESY OF THE GEORGE ABRAMS COLLECTION Havel: a worldwide engagement of politics with many Harvard ties, is a clear guide to those earlier paradigms—and reformulat- and prose. the emerging synthesis of biology and en- ing them might help in addressing mental gineering, resulting in entirely new tech- ailments today. The Confounding Island, by Orlando nologies, with promise for fighting cancer, Patterson, Cowles professor of sociology feeding an ever-hungrier (and -hotter) Dispossessed, by Noell Stout, Ph.D. ’08 (Harvard, $35). The preeminent sociolo- world, and so on. (University of California, $29.95 paper). gist (profiled in “The Caribbean Zola,” The author, associate professor of an- November-December 2014) here returns Cosmos: The Art and Science of the thropology at NYU, dug into the housing to “Jamaica and the postcolonial predica- Universe, by Roberta J.M. Olson and Jay foreclosures that ravaged the Sacramen- ment”: the subtitle, and his birthplace. M. Pasachoff ’63, Ph.D. ’69 (Reaktion to Valley (and much of the country) in the Democratic but mired in poverty, religious Books/University of Chicago, $49.95). wake of the 2008 Great Recession. Loan but plagued by violence, lifted up by its Wheaton College art historian emerita servicers, call-center representatives, indigenous music, the Connecticut-sized Olson and Williams College professor of and homeowners themselves became en- island becomes a lens for Patterson to ex- astronomy Pasachoff join strengths felici- meshed in a toxic bureaucracy, trans- amine globalization, development, pov- tously in a large-format tour and celebra- forming a financial contract into a moral erty, and postcolonial politics in ways that tion of images of the cosmos, from ancient relationship that colors the lives and resonate far beyond a place whose inhab- and fine art through scientific illustrations views of millions of Americans still. Her itants say (in creole), “We are little but so to the (literally) out-of-this-world observa- account of the “administrative violence” mighty.” tions made by the Hubble Space Telescope homeowners encountered, instead of and other modern instruments. debt relief, is an imaginative, informative The Cigarette: A Political History, by use of anthropology. Sarah Milov ’07 (Harvard, $35). The author, How the Brain Lost Its Mind, by Allan assistant professor of history at the Univer- H. Ropper, professor of neurology, and All Blood Runs Red, by Phil Keith ’68 sity of Virginia (tobacco country!), rereads Brian David Burrell (Penguin Random and Tom Clavin (Hanover Square Press, the narrative of smoking, from early farm- House, $27). With medical constructs for $27.99). A brisk life of Eugene Bullard, a er-government promotion of the habit and understanding mental illness now very slave’s son who made his way from Georgia product, through the rise of activist citizen much contested (see “Misguided Mind Fix- to Europe; rose in boxing as the “Black nonsmokers who waged a fight for clean ers,” May-June, page 73), the authors re- Sparrow”; enlisted in the French Foreign air. It is more than tempting to draw analo- examine the nineteenth-century’s simul- Legion and became the first African-Amer- gies from this careful analysis of interest- taneous experience of neurosyphilis (very ican fighter pilot during World War I; mas- group politics to such contemporary chal- much organic) and of epilepsy-like hysteria tered the Paris club scene; served as an lenges as, say, controlling greenhouse-gas (with no bodily cause). The contending Allied spy in the next world war; and found emissions to secure the larger atmosphere narratives of psychoanalysis and of psycho- his way back to the United States and the and the life it blankets on Earth—what she pharmacology, they suggest, trace to civil-rights movement.

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

Sethi performs on Coke Studio, a popular live-music TV show in Pakistan that he says “gives young people something to hold onto” amid religious and political strife.

a transgender person,” Sethi says. “They’re all residents of Lahore, people who embody the multiple interpretations of this poet- ry and music.” Three days after the video was released on YouTube last February, an unexpected skirmish flared up between Pakistan and India, and the two countries seemed briefly on the verge of war. The vid- eo’s comment section flooded with listen- ers writing from each side of the border, preaching peace and togetherness, praising the song’s message of love. “It became kind of an anthem,” Sethi says. “It felt genuinely miraculous.” A similar spirit animates a concert series that Sethi and Asani present together in cities around the world, “The Covenant of

COURTESY OF ALI SETHI AND COKE STUDIO Love”—from a Quranic phrase describing cus and began pursuing music and creative Sung in Hindi, it takes its refrain from a God’s relationship with humanity. Sethi and writing, concentrating in Sanskrit and In- ghazal by Saiffudin Saif: “This moonlit night his band perform songs by legendary Sufi dian studies (and shortly after graduating, has been a long time coming / The words poets, while Asani, seated onstage, explains published a well-received, semi-autobio- I want to say have been a long time com- their history and symbolism. This was the graphical novel, The Wish Maker, about poli- ing.” “The implication is of something half- show Sethi brought to Sanders last spring, tics and family in Pakistan). He acquired a veiled, half-visible,” says Sethi, who added and before the musicians played “Dama Dam harmonium and during summers in Lahore his own lyrics gesturing toward an un- Mast Qalandar,” Asani told the audience began apprenticing under classical singers specified union, and set the song to a soft, about a 2017 suicide bombing at the shrine Ustad Naseeruddin Saami and Farida Kha- slow melody adapted from two ragas. The that killed 90 worshippers. “But the next num, embarking on the rigorous art of sing- music video shows a spectral, ruined train day, people were back, dancing,” he said, a ing ragas, a complicated structure for melod- station and a collection of stranded pas- testament to poetry’s power to give courage ic improvisation in which shifting notes can sengers who gradually warm to each other and spiritual solace. And then he invited stu- sound almost molten. “The music is never across differences in age, religion, ethnicity, dents to their own version of dhamal. “If the fixed,” he says. “Araga is almost like a me- sexual identity, and walks of life. “There’s spirit moves you, just dance.” lodic being. You have to breathe life into it, and every rendition, every performance, may be different.” In traditional music, he has found room for musical experimentation and an ave- Forgive, but Don’t Forget nue for his own “language of dissent.” Sufi songs, in particular, lend themselves to …and don’t always forgive multiple interpretations; the same verses, by lincoln caplan Sethi says, may be read as the story of a love affair, or a heartbroken letter to an unjust society, or a dialogue with the divine. For he first person President Don- that they had committed a crime. In the 2016 centuries, Sufi poets have dealt with top- ald Trump pardoned, in August elections, Arpaio lost his race for a seventh ics like gender identity, sexuality, cultural 2017, was Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He term in Maricopa County, Arizona, appar- difference, and political strife. “The poems T was infamous for being brutal to ently because the county no longer wanted are so extremely inclusive,” he says. “And undocumented immigrants and others in his a sheriff who engaged in what the Justice the appetite for Sufi music in Pakistan al- shameful jails, and cheered on by neo-Nazis. Department called “unconstitutional po- lows people like me to get away with a lot The month before, a federal judge had found licing.” But in the presidential election, Ar- of potentially subversive stuff through the Arpaio guilty of criminal contempt, which paio helped push the metaphors of Sufi poetry—these beautiful, carried a jail sentence of up to six months, county and the state When Should Law Forgive? deliberate ambiguities.” for “flagrant disregard” of a court order. He for Trump, who ad- by Martha Minow “Chandni Raat,” a single from his forth- had refused to stop harassing and arrest- vanced his own an- (W.W. Norton, $27.95) coming album, illustrates what he means. ing Latinos without any basis for suspicion ti-immigrant cru-

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Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Cover3_Cover4_MJ18.indd 4 4/3/18 12:03 PM Montage sade by saying Arpaio was in legal trouble There are “acceptable and unacceptable for doing his job—rounding up people who were in America illegally. grounds and circumstances” for granting In When Should Law Forgive?, 300th Anni- versary University Professor and former presidential pardons and forgiveness. Harvard Law School dean Martha Minow reckons with a list of ways the pardon was Trump’s pardon of Arpaio shows what is During the civil war in Sierra Leone, wrong: it rewarded a crucial campaign sup- different and notable aboutWhen Should in West Africa, from 1991 to 2002, more than porter; it signaled to current and former Law Forgive? There are “acceptable and un- 50,000 people were killed; according to the Trump aides that they should refuse to tes- acceptable grounds and circumstances” for United Nations, the combatants included tify against the president—and, if they were granting presidential pardons and for oth- about 10,000 child soldiers. Minow focuses convicted, the president would pardon them, er kinds of forgiveness, Minow writes, and on one she calls Emmanuel: abducted at sev- too; it went to a man known for his racist she identifies and elaborates on both. What en years old and, for four years, used by his ranting and haughty defiance of law; and it Trump did is not the only corrupt excep- captors for the mundane (chores) and the reveled in that defiance. As a result, Minow tion to a fresh, uplifting norm. The book is savage (spying, fighting, and killing). Adults emphasized, that pardon was and “is a di- fundamentally a brief for forgiveness, but it involved in such bloody conflicts turn chil- rect invitation for disobedience.” Appalling presents tempering counter-examples that dren into soldiers “because they are more as Arpaio’s contempt was, Trump’s was even explain why forgiveness is sometimes an in- easily conditioned into fearless killing and worse as an abuse of constitutional author- defensible assertion of power, not an act of unthinking obedience.” As many as 40 per- ity: “to pardon a law enforcement official benevolence: some wrongs are unforgivable. cent of child soldiers in some conflicts are who so thoroughly disdained the law is to In three substantive chapters— girls, many forced to become sex slaves and excuse or honor that attitude of disrespect “Forgiving Youth,” Forgiving Debt,” and prostitutes as well as killers. After the war, for law and for the courts.” “Amnesties and Pardons”—Minow explores Emmanuel’s mother and grandmother for- Minow’s book is full of similarly sharp an- a humane vision of justice and law, without gave him. His uncle did not. Others in his swers to the hard question of its title. It is a saying exactly how to fulfill it systematical- community beat him. Minow: “He dropped compact yet panoramic addition to the lit- ly. The book reflects what I have described out of school, became involved in theft, and erature about restorative, sometimes called previously for this magazine (see harvard- fell into a cycle of social rejection.” reparative, justice—an old practice recently mag.com/minow-17): her disposition as a Child soldiers are victims, but also perpe- revived by a growing movement in American reformer, not a rabble-rouser; her encour- trators. Some abduct other children. Some criminal justice. In matters involving young agement of skepticism about law, including join a side without being abducted, “drawn people, wrongful conviction, and other cir- new fashions in reforming it; and her pas- by the ideology, or by chances for action and cumstances where fresh starts are possible sion for exposing inequities embedded in responsibility, or even by the thrill of the vio- for criminal offenders or defendants, victims it. In When Should Law Forgive? she addresses lence or being part of a political effort that and/or their families, and others in affected “why a fresh start is permitted in some cases could offer better opportunities.” Yet those groups, this approach to justice focuses on but not others, and when and how forgive- who make that choice don’t have the same repairing harm, not on meting out punishment. It ness can be compatible with law’s demands level of accountability and blame as compe- brings these people together to work out a of predictability and equal treatment.” tent adults, because “growth toward adult shared understand- maturity takes time” ing of what happened and “adolescents un- and its consequenc- der the best of cir- es. The approach is cumstances can both restorative in being think like adults and able to help every- be gripped by im- one let go of griev- pulses and fears.” ances, overcome re- Minow continues, sentment, and resolve “There are problems conflict, and to give with viewing for- victims the chance mer child soldiers or to ask for an apology child sexual slaves” or compensation. Mi- as suitable recipi- now ends her book ents of forgiveness, with a piece of con- because “forgiveness temporary folk wis- by definition first dom: “Forgiveness does not change the President and supporter: Maricopa past, but it does en- County sheriff Joe large the future.” Arpaio, pardoned by

The account of SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES President Trump

66 November - December 2019

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Fourteen-year-old 2005, 68 percent were Abu Kamara, a child arrested within three soldier for the Sierra Leone Army, holding years and 83 percent a self-loading rifle, within nine years— May 23, 2000 with almost two mil- lion arrests among needs acknowledg- the inmates released, ment of wrongdoing” an average of five ar- and child soldiers rests per inmate. Re- may lack “the degree tributive justice, the of psychological and retaliatory, dominant moral responsibil- form in the Ameri- ity to be treated as can legal system, as wrongdoers.” Rachel Elise Barkow, As victims and J.D. ’96, explains in perpetrators, Minow her new book Prison- writes, child soldiers ers of Politics (Harvard make conventional University Press), is a legal mechanisms for dual failure in not im-

dealing with them PRESS BUTLER/ASSOCIATED ADAM proving public safety “overly simplistic blanket assertions of in- drug trafficking, and other criminal activity,” and in not preparing prisoners for sustainable nocence or overly stringent assignments of who can’t evade legal responsibility as child re-entry into the world outside. Or as Minow blame.” She regards restorative justice as a soldiers often do. puts it, “Fully enforced criminal laws produce valuable alternative for them, “some kind of In both instances, she observes, “legal for- much punishment but not necessarily better public process to acknowledge their partici- giveness should be less concerned with par- people or a better society.” pation in violence and lawlessness” and “help ticular victims than with remaking the rules The promise that the restorative-justice individuals forgive themselves and construct and institutions that constrain the choices movement has been realizing is helping new and productive chapters in their lives.” and opportunities of young people.” Child sol- perpetrators, victims, and others shaken Through this nuanced case study of children diers and gang members “may not be entirely by wrongdoing find their way to a better caught up in distant wars of other nations, innocent, but neither are they responsible for future. It has been helping “law grow to- Minow makes it easier to see the similar dual the social conditions in which they make their ward justice,” in Minow’s words. But her nature of “American youth involved in gangs, choices.” Minow expands this point in her book teaches that forgiveness will contrib- chapter about forgiving debt—of individu- ute its full potential—without overstepping als with consumer and other debt or student its bounds—only if justice grapples with the loans, and of nations and cities in debt, too. requirements of law. C hapter Forgiving gang members who ravage a con- One effort she proposes is developing a ju- venience store may seem morally different risprudence of pardons, including “a needed & Verse from forgiving the hospital debt of a family check against abuses and unequal treatment.” Correspondence on buried financially by the cost of a breadwin- The worst abuse would be for a president to ner’s catastrophic illness, but the “spirit of pardon himself (which Donald Trump, in June not-so-famous lost words second chances embedded in bankruptcy 2018, tweeted that he has the power to do). shows a long-standing legal and cultural The Constitution explicitly limits the pres- Frank Wagner writes: “Years ago, I embrace of forgiveness.” She writes, “Each is ident’s pardon power “in Cases of Impeach- saw an early scene in a British (proba- to blame when they violate promises to pay ment,” which arguably bars a self-pardon. But bly) movie in which a young barrister back loans or laws against violence, but each the prospect of a disgraced president forgiv- must cross-examine a witness at a trial also is embedded in larger social patterns that ing himself, Minow warns, underscores the because his Queen’s Counsel is sud- construct limited and often poor options.” need for defining the limits of forgiveness in denly indisposed. The young man uses this now-prominent field. Otherwise, self- his experience with betting on horses A premise of Minow’s book is that while forgiveness would be the ultimate denial of at the track to expose the witness’s lies bad things happen when people flout the law, wrongdoing. It would ridicule the idea of law and win the case. Can anyone identify they can also happen when the government providing meaningful forgiveness. the movie?” strictly enforces it. The most regular result of American criminal justice is punishment, Contributing editor and journalist Lincoln Caplan Send inquiries and answers to Chapter whose main product is more crime. Recidi- ’72, J.D. ’76, assessed the importance of Oliver Wen- and Verse, Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware vism—a relapse into criminal behavior—is a dell Holmes Jr. in “America’s Great Modern Justice” Street, Cambridge 02138, or via email national disgrace. The Justice Department’s (May-June 2019). He works with Minow on the Amer- to [email protected]. Bureau of Justice Statistics found that of ican Academy of Arts & Sciences project called Mak- 401,288 inmates released from state prisons in ing Justice Accessible.

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Colin Cabot takes heart in the traditional skills, like woodwork- ing, that are preserved at Sanborn Mills Farm.

the original grist mill, and the old blacksmith shop, and the water- powered sawmill,” he says. “Those are what hooked us, because there’s no other place that I know of that has those three industrial/ preindustrial structures all in one place, and in working condition.” They weren’t entirely “work- ing” when Cabot and his actress wife, Paula Dewey Cabot, bought the dilapidated property in 1996. What started with a few resto- ration and renovation projects— stabilizing the mills, rebuilding both dams, and clearing a site for “The Red House,” an antique saved from destruction in a fire- department training exercise in Maine, and for a second barn ALUMNI moved 20 miles from Northwood, New Hampshire—has led to wholesale re-boot- ing of the working farm. Both mills are now operational, fields are cultivated, and a new, Back to the Future fully equipped teaching blacksmith shop has five forge stations. Promoting craftsmanship and agrarian skills This past year, the focus was on revamp- ing the largest barn (it once incorporated a in an idyllic New Hampshire setting milking shed), and the abutting “New Car- by nell porter brown riage Barn.” There’s also a new addition on the main house, where Cabot and his wife live when in residence. (They spend about triding through the newly re- A tall, prepossessing man who’s retained half the year in Key West, and also visit his built barn at his Sanborn Mills his boyish grin, Cabot was a theatrical pro- family’s estate Les Quatre Vents, on the Farm, in Loudon, New Hampshire, ducer in Milwaukee for two decades, before Saint Lawrence River north of Quebec City.) F. Colin Cabot ’72 explains his plan: diving into rural life. His days at Sanborn Sto develop a center for learning and preserv- Mills Farm, beautifying the landscape and Cabot’s artistic vision for Sanborn ing traditional crafts and farming skills, like overseeing a team of employees, are not un- Mills Farm knows almost no bounds, mak- blacksmithing and ox-yoke-making. like producing live theater. He laughs cheer- ing it a boon for those who care deeply about In the barn’s teaching kitchen, visitors fully at the thought of this, and will cook and can the farm’s produce, and doesn’t disagree. they’ll gather in the dining room, for which Upstairs, he leads the way a carpenter is busy creating Shaker-style through seven dorm rooms and tables and chairs from the property’s ash shared baths. “The view is better trees; decimated by the emerald ash borer, over here,” he calls out, directing they are now milled and kiln-dried on site, attention through one window to using eighteenth- and nineteenth-century a hilly pastoral scene. The dirt road tools and techniques. winds past the main house (built “Making things by hand and creating art in 1875), two dams, and a scat- are so undervalued in today’s world,” says tering of outbuildings. “There’s Cabot, “that I suppose I want to provide ac- The new blacksmith shop’s five cess to a different way of living than what, forges are used in workshops for lack of a better term, is often called ‘the ranging from basic techniques rat race.’” to hardware- and tool-making.

68 November - December 2019 Photographs by Jim Harrison

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ALUMNI Miller-Hunn Alumni Interviewer Awards

This year, the newly renamed Miller-Hunn Awards—the orig- inal award, which recognized the work of Hiram S. Hunn, A.B. 1921, now also honors recently retired admissions officer Dwight D. Miller, Ed.M. ’71 (see “Admissions, through the Ages,” September-October, page 30)—went to eight alumni for their volunteer efforts to recruit and interview prospective under- graduates. David Babin Michael Katie Daniel “Bud” David Babin ’56, of Falmouth, Massachusetts, has served as Cominsky Williams Fahs Kelly an alumni interviewer since 1972. He has also served as president of the Harvard Club of Cape Cod (2005-2007), and is now the club’s “vice president for schools.” Michael Cominsky ’80, of Old Forge, New York, began in- terviewing for the Harvard Club of Syracuse as a law student in 1982. After graduating, he returned to Utica, New York, where Arthur Freedman ’37 (his College interviewer), asked him to keep Frances it up. He now chairs the schools and scholarships committee of Carlos Marjorie Susan St. Mendoza Murstein O’Leary Louis the Harvard Club of Mohawk Valley. (His son Manuel ’14 is now an alumni interviewer for the Harvard Club of New York.) treasurer, and directed the Clubs and Shared Interest Groups for Katie Williams Fahs ’83, of Atlanta, has led the Harvard Latin America between 2008 and 2012. Club of Georgia’s schools and scholarships committee for 11 Marjorie Murstein ’71, of Boca Raton, has interviewed can- years, coordinating more than 800 applicants and 200 interview- didates for the Harvard Club of the Palm Beaches since 1982. ers per year, and is a former director of the national schools and During her service, she has met students from Palm Beach and scholarships committee. Boca Raton to the crop fields of Belle Glade and Okeechobee. Daniel “Bud” Kelly ’43, M.B.A. ’48, of Santa Fe, has long She currently serves as both vice president for the schools and been familiar with the admissions process: his father, Daniel T. scholarships committee and as area chair. Kelly, was a member of the class of 1908. The elder Kelly subse- Frances O’Leary ’54, of Cambridge, has served the Welles- quently served as the office’s New Mexico representative, a role ley area since her son, Mark ’81, was admitted to Harvard. With- later assumed by his son, who has served for more than 40 years. in her first years as an interviewer, she became chairman of the Carlos Mendoza ’88, M.P.P. ’90, of Panama City, has been area, and only recently retired as committee co-chair. an interviewer, and chair, for the local schools and scholarships Susan St. Louis ’81, of Mirage, California, has been an alum- committee since 2001. He also founded the Harvard Club of na interviewer since 1998 in Riverside and San Bernardino coun- Panama, serving as its first president, and then as director and ties, and has chaired the committee for 15 years. craftsmanship, as well as artisans working mally be all made of plaster—but I forbade it!” build a jog to bend the bows after making on-site, including six woodworkers/car- he says, in a mock-tyrant voice. “The idea is them bendable in a steam box.” penters, three farmers/teamsters, two mill- to remember how to do this stuff because no- Employees at Sanborn do work with wrights, and a gardener. Cabot also aims to body knows how to do it anymore, and these teams of oxen and two Percheron draft hors- foster self-sufficiency in the age of climate skills and crafts are dying out.” es to plow, plant, and till. Sheds also house change. When a tool or piece of vintage The scheduled yoke-making workshops two pigs (raised for meat), a dozen layer equipment breaks, he points out, you don’t may seem more anachronistic. But they’re chickens, and occasional batches of meat need to go to a store to replace it: you can of “vital interest to anyone who wants to chickens. Down the dirt road, adjacent to learn how to fix it—just as you can learn work with oxen,” Cabot explains: yokes an additional small farmstead that Cabot how to grow food, forge tools, and weave aren’t commercially available anywhere, also owns, are several acres of vegetable gar- cloth: “It can be done!” and they must be hand-made to custom-fit dens and fields of corn, wheat, hay, and flax. Inside the New Carriage Barn, a multi- specific animals. The long process involves With its dams, mills, and non-motorized purpose space to be used for gatherings and cutting, drying, and carving the yoke from practices, the farm operates somewhat as it workshops, Cabot had challenged carpenters green wood—and requires knowing which did when the Sanborn family, which first set- to construct a free-standing, wooden spiral trees are strong enough to withstand the tled there in 1770, developed it as the com- staircase. Also made from wood on the prop- pressure of the workload, and when and munity’s critical locus of agrarian technol- erty, it required, among other labors, steam- how they should be harvested. The farm ogy from the early 1800s to the early 1900s. bending, kerfing, and laminating six layers of currently buys its oxbows from Amish The footprint of Cabot’s farm—with its 10 white pine, and an underside covered with communities in Ohio, because, he reports, buildings, arable land, and managed forests— steam-bent and twisted tongue-and-groove “We do not have any hickory in our forest, is 540.5 acres, smaller than the Sanborn opera- ash wood strips. That section would “nor- and because we haven’t taken the trouble to tion. But it’s also surrounded by nearly 2,000

Harvard Magazine 69

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Workers employ draft Business School, failing to graduate, and horses and oxen at left Harvard for Milwaukee with his then- Sanborn Mills Farm. wife and fellow theater practitioner, Marie what renowned British gar- Kohler ’73, to be closer to her family. dener Penelope Hobhouse There, he served as assistant to Clair Rich- says in The Gardener, which ardson, the brilliant, erratic co-founder of the he paraphrases as: “when Skylight Opera Theatre, before spending a you’re in the presence of year abroad working for another larger-than- something that is so beau- life personality, the opera composer Gian Car- tiful that you can’t believe lo Menotti. He then returned to Milwaukee it’s an accident or just evo- to become the Skylight’s managing director, lution, the numen is pres- and for 12 years built the company, expanding

COURTESY OF SANBORN MILLS FARM ent.” Both men approached both the staff and the annual budget (from contiguous acres held in conservation ease- their living creations with that aesthetic in $150,000 to $1.8 million). “I loved the theater. ments placed by a group of property owners mind, he adds: through a “making process We had a wonderful time, it was a family—a in the 1980s. [as] a piecemeal development without a community of people and we worked hard Sweeping views and majestic rural beauty master plan: letting the site speak to us over and made things happen,” he says. In 1989, suit the single-minded, visionary projects time.” Sanborn Mills Farm, though, also has however, feeling burned-out, he “retired” to that run in the family. His father, the late an externalized purpose: “I strive to find a take a volunteer post, chairman of the cam- Francis H. Cabot ’49, a financier and self- vocation—making a craft school, using the paign to build the Skylight’s new performance taught horticulturist, spent decades creat- mills as practical machines—whereas he space. The grand 358-seat Cabot Theatre, a ing extraordinary landscapes. Stonecrop was making an intensely private expres- replica of an eighteenth-century European Gardens, a plantsman’s haven and horticul- sion of his personal vision.” opera house, opened in 1993. ture school in the Hudson Valley, is open to By then, he and Kohler (they have two the public; Les Quatre Vents, and the elder Cabot followed his father to Harvard, grown daughters) had divorced and he had Cabot, star in The Gardener, a 2018 documen- where he concentrated in English literature married Dewey; the two met through the the- tary. “He explains how he got into garden- and immersed himself in theater, participat- ater and periodically performed as a cabaret ing: because he’d had business reverses and ing in more than 40 productions, and served duo: she sang and he accompanied her on the then he found out he loved this and he could as president of the Harvard (now Harvard- piano. Because the theater-building had end- do it—and do it right,” Cabot says of his fa- Radcliffe) Dramatic Club. In hindsight, ed and because “artistic people and nonprofits ther, who also founded the Garden Conser- though, he says he feels that he “wasted” need change,” he and Dewey in 1996 began vancy and helped preserve old mills. “His art his Harvard education, and was “scarred” eyeing a move to Boston to pursue graduate involved setting up liminal spaces, preparing by that tumultuous period on campus; he degrees (urban planning for him, Celtic stud- for transporting surprises: ‘Aha! Moments.’” felt angry and disillusioned by the Univer- ies for her), and second careers. Then a friend Although Cabot never spoke with his fa- sity’s actions during student protests (see showed them the fateful real-estate listing for ther about the concept of the numen “as a “Echoes of 1969,” March April, page 52). He Sanborn Farm. Resurrecting pre-Industrial prereligious divinity,” he says they both felt then spent two “miserable” years at the Revolution machinery (“as a tribute to the Aloian Memorial Scholars

The Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) has recognized Michelle Walsh ’20, of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and Benjamin Roy ’20, of Haverhill, Massachusetts, as the 2019 David and Mimi Aloian Memorial Scholars for enriching the quality of life in their Houses. Walsh produced and directed Cabot’s “Housing Day” video, co-led development of the House peer-advising program, and organized the “Sophomore Retreat.” As the House Committee’s Stein Club chair, she broadened the appeal of happy hours by of- fering more group activities and non-alcoholic drinks. And as 2019 captain of the intra- mural squash team, she recruited members and led them to victory over an unde- feated Lowell House squad, clinching Cabot’s first inter-House squash championship. As a sophomore, Roy guided the Classics Club in writing a new, more accessible translation of Sophocles’s Antigone, and organized a group to stage a free public perfor- mance at Harvard Stadium, drawing an Arts First audience of nearly 5,000. He has also performed in Kirkland Drama Society shows, and has been an enthusiastic participant in (and recruiter for) intramural athletics. COURTESY OF THE HARVARD ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

70 November - December 2019

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ALUMNI achievement of water power”) and renting programming and training partnerships (ap- land.” He points to other influences, such it out for use, captured Cabot’s imagination. prenticeships already exist with North Ben- as the writer, activist, and farmer Wendell Twenty-three years later, he is still en- net Street School, in Boston, and the Guild Berry, Land Institute founder Wes Jackson, thralled, still “having fun” fashioning build- of New Hampshire Woodworkers). There’s and environmentalist Bill McKibben ’82: “In ings and landscapes with artistic flourish- also the possibility that other academic, archi- reading the work of these modern conserva- es. Next year, he plans to re-assemble the tectural, and trade organizations, like the In- tionists, and the writer Michael Pollan [RI town of Loudon’s former grange (removed ternational Molinological Society, Society for ’16], you realize we have to do this.” to make way for new town offices)and erect the Preservation of Old Mills, and the Timber “This” is succinctly captured in a quota- a donated 1919 Lord & Burnham greenhouse Framers Guild, could use the farm for confer- tion that Cabot has had meticulously paint- on the farm. ences and educational events. ed over a bank of windows in the large com- Alongside all that, he’s also addressing the Cabot allows that he’s “guilty of succumb- mon room of the main house: “The Life So realistic matter of the farm’s sustainability. ing to the concept of ‘If you build it, they will Short, the Craft So Long to Learn.” This Cabot has established the nonprofit Sanborn come.’ Perhaps I devote so much energy to Chaucerian version of Ovid’s Ars longa, vita Mills Inc., with its own executive director, creating things of beauty that function in a brevis (itself originally from Hippocrates) and plans are under way to design a long-term pleasing way because I want others to expe- means, Cabot explains, that “if you take the business model that identifies more sources rience what I think is meaningful, inspiring, ‘making part’ of art seriously—like growing of revenue, and an endowment, to cover oper- and, most of all, restorative.” He idealizes hickory trees for oxbows—you will run out ating costs and further develop the center. A the Jeffersonian agricultural ideal—sans of time before you get the job done,” he adds. slate of weekend workshops, including fiber slaves—of sustainable community farms, “The only way to keep art—craft—alive is arts and draft-animal handling, are scheduled because he believes “that modern industri- to have a community of artisans continu- to run from April through early November. al agriculture has made it almost impossible ally transmitting knowledge across genera- And part of the plan entails expanded public for people to connect with nature and the tions—to those who will follow them.”

alumni community; he also led a review Harvard Alumni SIG, which earned the 2017 2019 HAA process resulting in changes to the HAA HAA Clubs & SIGs Committee Award. Award Recipients board’s structure and approach to work. Patrik Johansson, M.P.H. Katie Williams Fahs ’83, of Atlanta, is a ’01, of Omaha, became an Six alumni were recognized with HAA former Radcliffe Club of Cincinnati presi- HAA elected director in Awards, for their outstanding service to the dent who has been a mem- 2006, and has also served on University, during the alumni association’s ber of the Harvard clubs of the School of Public Health’s fall meeting. New York, London, Cin- alumni council and the Salvo Arena, LL.M. ’00, of New York cinnati, and Georgia, and Harvard Club of Sweden’s City, has served in vari- held board positions in the board. Of African-American, Patrik ous roles since 2004, in- last two. In Georgia, she Cherokee, and Swedish de- Johansson cluding as president of the initiated the use of Face- scent, he completed the Harvard-affiliated worldwide Harvard Law book to connect alumni Katie Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Minority School Association. He is with current local under- Williams Health Policy and was integral in ensuring the Fahs now president of the New graduates and chaired the representation of the Mashpee Wampanoag York City chapter, co-chair schools and scholarships committees. In Tribe, the Nipmuc Nation, and the Wampa- of the HLSA International Salvo Arena 2011, she was elected to the HAA board, noag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah in ceremo- Committee, and a gradu- where she has chaired the University-wide nies commemorating the 350th anniversary of ate-school director on the HAA board of schools and scholarships committee and ad- the Harvard Indian College. directors. Arena has spearheaded alumni vised the Harvard College Fund. Rev. Gloria White-Hammond, M.Div. ’97, events that blend law with other disci- Kevin Jennings ’85, of New York City, of Boston, joined the School of Public Health’s plines, drawing record attendance from has been an alumni interviewer, Harvard Children’s Health Advisory Council after across Harvard’s schools. Club of New York member, and, as HAA graduation, and has spoken at campus gath- Paul L. Choi ’86, J.D. ’89, of Chicago, is elected director, co-chair erings about her work with two fellow Di- a former Harvard Club of Chicago presi- of the fundraising cam- vinity School (HDS) alum- dent, and has served as a reunion leader paign for Harvard’s first nae in aiding the liberation for his College and Law endowed chair in LGBT of thousands of enslaved School classes, as elect- studies. He is the former Sudanese women, and the ed HAA director, and as co-chair of the Harvard subsequent founding of My HAA president (2015–16). Gay and Lesbian Caucus Sister’s Keeper, a humanitar- As president, he promot- Kevin (now the Harvard Gender ian and human-rights initia- ed University-wide citi- Jennings and Sexuality Caucus). As tive. She has also served as a Rev. Gloria zenship and the strength- the first college-bound person in his fam- White- graduate-school director on Paul L. Choi ening of Harvard’s global ily, he also founded the First Generation Hammond the HAA board. www.alumni.harvard.edu Harvard Magazine 71

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

Life Lessons

Appleton Chapel, arranging the famous 1861 three different centuries, but a common, ex- photograph of past and current presidents pansive attitude toward living expansively. Quincy, Everett, Sparks, Walker, and Felton), and an Overseer from 1879 to 1885. Strikingly, the chapter on his College years notes: “ ‘A man may be honest, active, brave, Fifty-fifthreunioner  Peter H. Gibbon “Your wooden arm you hold outstretched moral, and religious, and still no scholar,’ is ’64, an educator and humanist scholar, has to shake with passers-by.” the true but dangerous text with which the shared the substance of his talk to classmates diary of his college life opens.” Observing the when they gathered in May. His point of de- boy’s development, President Josiah Quincy parture, too, was Harvard’s role in “imparting ne summer’s day, the (ter- wrote to his father, “I have thought it best to knowledge” and in “purport[ing] to teach us restrial) mail brought, unbid- advise to take him away a short time, say un- to think critically and to grow in wisdom.” den, a package from East Mid- til next commencement, and let him study In that spirit, he offered some insights from dlebury, Vermont, containing under some fellow master.…I think…the obli- life not learned at the College. Among them: Oboth a warm letter from Catherine Nichols gation to study, which an instructor, particu- “[B]elief is a slow process. It requires a ’66, who’d purged her shelves for a charity larly attentive to him, might impose, would be great deal of time to form opinions. Harvard book sale, and one of the evicted volumes: the very useful to his future habits.” Apparently encouraged the arrogant and confident, the handsomely published, if somewhat acidi- it was. He lived to enjoy his fiftieth reunion. quick generalization. I envied the Crimson fied, Life of Amos A. Lawrence, with Extracts from his Nichols is no slouch, either. In her fiftieth writers who held such strong opinions.” Diary and Correspondence, by his son, William Law- reunion report, she writes, “At Harvard we “Remember your strengths. Surrounded by rence (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1889). learned to think—about facts, about trends, achievers, it is easy to dwell on your deficits.” Amos A. L., A.B. 1835, had an extraordinary about ideas, all of what academia offers. But “Listen and inquire. Be interested in what life—even by today’s standards, when such to think for ourselves? To be aware of the con- other people have to say. Talking at length and adjectives are overblown. He prospered as a ventions that defined our role in life? Heck, constantly interrupting becomes the norm in mill owner, was an active and ardent aboli- no! Not in the mid sixties. At least not me.” narcissist America, particularly among am- tionist, and as a progenitor of educational in- She unspools her dawning recognition that a bitious, egotistical males. If you doubt this, stitutions was unexcelled. “girl” could be a minister — listen in at a gathering of strivers—in Wash- He financed the founding and her subsequent deeds: ington, D.C., Manhattan, Cambridge.” of the University of Kan- first woman canon in the “Read more science. When we were fresh- sas, in Lawrence (named Diocese of Texas; preaching men, C.P. Snow warned us…about the split after him) and founded at Coventry Cathedral; “of- between two cultures, the literary and the Lawrence University in ficiating at the civil union scientific.…[A]n emphasis on the liberal arts Appleton, Wisconsin, on of the gay couple who left us adrift in a STEM society, an omission 5,000 acres of land he pur- sued…Vermont for the right I am now trying to correct.” chased. (And Boston Col- to marry”; and “watching Complaints aside, Gibbon reports: “I am lege ultimately purchased with delight as my Rad- enormously grateful to Harvard College for his local land in 1907.) He cliffe classmates stormed emphasizing high culture, individuality, ex- was Harvard’s treasurer the doors” of law, medical, cellence, and service.…I am as well for pro- from 1857 to 1862 (sub- and business schools “to fessors, such as Walter Bate, David Owen, scribing funds to “Agas- enter professions formerly Bernard Bailyn, and I.B. Cohen and for the siz’s museum,” seeing to closed to them.” four years surrounded by original, interest- the interior of the original Two different lives in ing, and stimulating classmates.” vprimus vi

72 November - December 2019 Painting of Amos A. Lawrence, 1887, by Eastman Johnson. Courtesy of the Harvard University Portrait Collection, Gift of friends of Amos A. Lawrence to Harvard University. Photograph of painting ©President and Fellows of Harvard College Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 TREASURE Byzantine Beauties Textile treasures from Dumbarton Oaks

ow can one understand peo- ple, and a civilization, who perished centuries ago? The jewelry and textiles they Hwore “are some of the most intimate objects to survive,” observes Elizabeth Dospeˇl Williams. “We can relate to them today. We understand immediately how they function. It closes the gap of time.” And gorgeously so, in “Ornament: Frag- ments of Byzantine Fashion,” drawn from the Dumbarton Oaks collection of Egyp- tian funerary textiles from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries, on display through January 5. Assistant curator Wil- liams co-organized the exhibition, and a concurrent one on household textiles (at George Washington University’s Textile Museum), with Gudrun Bühl, director obstacles to understanding. Williams has liams laments. But the surviving fragments of the Museum für Lackkunst, Münster. devoted the past seven years to cataloging are “categorically beautiful.” This first exhibition of one-quarter of the the holdings, organizing this display (post- The tunic clavi (the decorative vertical D.O. collection had to overcome not only graduate fellow Samuel Shapiro ’18 assist- bands above at left) depict multiple figures, the frailty of the materials, but formidable ed), and creating the dazzling online ver- in beige, red, light green, light blue, blue, sion invaluable to scholars and dark blue, purple, several shades of tan, and the curious alike (www.doaks. brown—a dazzling rainbow of dyes (not org/resources/textiles). yet analyzed, but mostly derived from plant As the samples shown here at- sources). The rectangular tunic fragment test, “the Sunday best of the de- (above) depicts faces and vegetal patterns ceased,” as she puts it, survived beneath a border, perhaps of gemstones; burial suprisingly well, the plain- more gems descend to a pendant face, and woven linen backgrounds and frame a gem-studded cross. The intricate tapestry-woven woolen details medallion (left) surrounds a human bust intact. Then they were discov- with geometrical shapes, vegetal motifs, ered, largely in nineteenth-cen- and indeterminate quadrupeds. tury excavations, and—like the A few complete tunics, and replicas, are illuminated manuscripts torn on display, including a toddler-sized one. apart by book “breakers” to sell Unlike architectural antiquities, these are the prized bits—were cut up by “human-sized,” Williams says. “We connect dealers. (A dealer’s album, with immediately to the people of the past”—as specimens, is on loan from the she, with two young children, connects to Metropolitan Museum of Art.) the unknown wearer of that tiny tunic from “Tons of context are lost,” Wil- ages ago. vjohn s. rosenberg

88 November - December 2019 Photographs courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks

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