In 1937, John Singer Sargent’s sister, Violet, donated a truckload of material from the late artist’s estate to Harvard. The haul contained studio tools, such as easels and brushes, as well as original sketches and paintings —including Still Life: Daffodils, an oil study on canvas that arrived unframed, rolled up, and water-damaged.

It’s common for museums to receive items in such condition. “A lot of things in vast collections are ‘fragile but stable’—they’re not going to spontaneously combust, but they cannot be shown to the public,” explains Saffie Patel, a Shader fellow in paintings conservation who completed her two-year posting at Harvard Art Museums in June. “A tiny portion of Harvard’s artworks are actually on the walls,” she says.

Recently, Harvard Art Museums curators decided that Daffodils should be among them. The painting, which shows flowers in a silver cup beside two wine glasses on a white tablecloth, went on display this spring for the first time in its history. It’s a rare still life from Sargent, best known for his portraits and masterful brushwork; as a study, it offers a glimpse of his style freed from editing or revision.

“John Singer Sargent’s modus operandi was creating artworks that felt like they’d been carried off in a single pass, but in real life took a lot of reworking,” Patel says. “This was actually done in one go. You get this spontaneous look at the hand of the artist.”

Getting the painting ready for the public took an ambitious restoration that spanned the fellowships of Patel and her predecessor, Lauren Cox. Cox took care of the initial salvage work, gluing tiny pieces of the chipping paint back to its canvas and carefully cleaning off dust and mold.

After that, Patel worked on getting Daffodils safely stretched, flattened, and framed after nearly a century of being rolled up. She used a method from her restoration training in the Netherlands, employing a vacuum seal, weaving inserts into the canvas, and alternating cycles of heat and pressure to ease out creases. She did color and texture matching on some of the more obvious spots of damage, a painstaking process requiring impossibly small brushes (“three or four hairs,” Patel says).

The freshened-up Daffodils will be on display for the foreseeable future. But in keeping with the ethics of conservation science, many elements of Cox and Patel’s work are reversible, in case more effective methods are developed one day.

“The materials we use can all be removed without damaging the original,” Patel says, “and we can return it back to its crumbly, unstretched state if we really need to.”

In 10 years, will humanoid robots be folding your laundry? This question—which might seem like science fiction—is becoming a real possibility to the founders and investors driving today’s robotics race. Recent reports that OpenAI is hiring robotics engineers has fueled new speculation about the future of high-tech tools in the workplace and our homes.

Andy Wu, Melwani family associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, studies the tech industry with a focus on strategic timing: when is the right time to adopt, or compete in, a new technology? In this Five Questions interview, Wu shares his thoughts on the market potential—and financial reality—of emerging consumer technologies including humanoid robots, virtual reality, and more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Humanoid robotics is one of the hottest investment areas right now. Is that hype warranted?

My honest view is that humanoid robots are suboptimal for nearly every conceivable use case, except possibly interacting with humans. Specialized non-humanoid robots are both less expensive and more effective. Consider locomotion: wheels and four legs are almost always better and cheaper than two legs.

The real question is whether humanoid robots become a dominant robotic format—so that the supply-side economics drive its cost below what specialized robots would cost.

A smartphone today is drastically cheaper than a barcode scanner, even though the smartphone is far more complex, because we manufacture over a billion smartphones a year and only a fraction of that in barcode scanners. Scale and learning wins.

The only way to hit that kind of scale for humanoid robots is for the technology to become general-purpose, with millions or tens of millions of units manufactured and deployed each year. Achieving this would require significant consumer adoption. Consumers may have different tastes than a factory manager about what the robot looks like and how they interact with it.

Even if both a humanoid and a non-humanoid robot could fold laundry equally well, the open question is whether consumers prefer the one that looks like them. If they do, the cost curve bends and humanoids could become viable in industrial settings too, almost as a byproduct. That’s the trillion-dollar bet.

A few years ago, many companies were betting heavily on the metaverse. What happened?

I still believe in the metaverse. The subtlety is in how you define it. Many industries are already operating in the metaverse—defined as 3D virtual worlds—today. The entire business of autonomous vehicles is built around 3D simulation of virtual worlds, which allows engineers to test driving algorithms.

A significant share of individuals already spend many hours a week in 3D virtual worlds like social media and in gaming platforms like Minecraft, Roblox, or Fortnite.

Do you think Meta Platforms still has a compelling long-term vision for the metaverse?

Meta bet on a very specific vision of the metaverse, centered on virtual reality (VR) headsets and augmented reality (AR) wearables. Most observers would say they were too early on VR.

That said, after Nvidia, Meta is one of the biggest winners from generative AI. I often use a “gold rush” analogy: OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI are out there digging for gold. Nvidia is the consummate shovel seller, designing the chips needed by the diggers. And Meta is the consummate jewelry maker. Meta’s social media, advertising, wearables, and metaverse businesses all stand to benefit from advancements in generative AI, wherever it comes from and whenever it arrives.

So even though Meta’s original metaverse bet hasn’t paid off, generative AI strengthens the long-term thesis.

What current technology trend feels overhyped to you?

I’ll give a counterintuitive answer: generative AI is both, depending on the time horizon.

In the short term, there are serious risks. AI may be a bubble—which I define as a mismatch between the vision for value creation and the current reality of value capture. Everyone can imagine how useful AI will be, but no one has figured out yet how to make money.

Do you think generative AI is on a sustainable course?

Generative AI today has high variable costs and insufficient revenue to cover it. Every time we ask a question to a chatbot, that costs real money; running an AI agent costs exponentially more so.

Most users get it for free, and power users and businesses mostly pay a flat subscription fee. Eventually, the most viable model will be something equivalent to pay-per-usage. But when we start paying for usage, generative AI becomes much less appealing.

Meanwhile, the companies pouring hundreds of billions into the infrastructure buildout face real financial obligations today that they may not be able to meet. OpenAI has promised $100 billion contracts to several vendors despite not generating anywhere near the revenue to pay them.

What separates a hype cycle that fades quietly from a truly destructive bubble is the amount of leverage and risk being taken by investors and vendors. By that measure, this one has the ingredients to do real damage if growth disappoints.

In the long term, what’s underestimated is all the opportunities AI will create, independent of whether and when we achieve superintelligence. The key opportunities are in complementary technologies like robotics, the metaverse, and wearables, and in redesigning legacy organizations around AI workflows.

Two titans of literature—separated by over 400 years. One a poet, one a grisly horror writer.

In the 2026 book Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King, renowned Shakespeare scholar Caroline Bicks ‘89 explores how William Shakespeare and Stephen King (one widely regarded as the finest writer in the English language, the other known as “the king of horror”) are connected—from their skill in characterization, to the ways they build tension and fear in their stories.

As the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine, Bicks was granted access to the writer’s personal papers and had the chance to correspond with the writer himself—an experience chronicled in Monsters in the Archives.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did your work on William Shakespeare lead you to Stephen King and the study of horror?

I was preparing my job talk for the Stephen E. King Chair position. The English department was looking for an early modernist, and I was deep into my project, Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World. On a whim, I took my 40-year-old copy of Carrie off the shelf to see if I might find some connection between King’s teenage girl character and some of Shakespeare’s. It fell open to the page where King describes the awakening of Carrie’s telekinetic powers as “mental puberty,” a phrase that perfectly captured the essence of what I was arguing about adolescent girls’ brainwork. Both authors’ writings tap into the embodied, human response to horror, and the core fears that animate it: losing the people and beliefs that we love and rely on. Once I got into King’s archives and started researching this book, I discovered that he, like Shakespeare, also intentionally mobilizes the power of word sounds—using them (as he told me) to “clang on the reader’s ear” and produce enduring effects.

Does Stephen King challenge the divide between “literary” and “popular” fiction?

Yes. Just as Shakespeare, Dickens, Shirley Jackson, and countless other popular authors did before him, although most weren’t recognized as “literary” by the elitist (usually jealous) gatekeepers of their time. In 1592, the Cambridge-educated Robert Greene called Shakespeare an “upstart crow”; in 2003, when King was honored by the National Book Foundation, Yale literary critic Harold Bloom called him an “immensely inadequate writer” with no sign of “inventive human intelligence.” [But] King is extraordinarily well-read and literary-minded. I found him citing Emerson in a response to a copyeditor, and Macbeth in an early draft of The Shining. In his novel The Long Walk—which he wrote when he was 17—he quotes Andrew Marvell. You can see (and hear) how his engagement with these literary texts affects the crafting of his prose. He told me that when he wrote ’Salem’s Lot he was immersed in James Dickey’s poetry: “Sometimes as a writer, another writer will show you the way in.”

How do you think technology is changing our relationship to writing and creativity?

I suspect that those of us who grew up writing on legal pads and typewriters still have a pretty good sense of our ability to think for ourselves. And obviously there are plenty of talented younger writers out there who have figured out how to put technology to good use. Like most educators, though, I’ve noticed a marked decline in my students’ attention spans and confidence when it comes to creating their own ideas and writing them down.

The embrace of A.I. and the glorification of “efficiency” by universities and American culture more broadly are exacerbating the problem, of course. Why shouldn’t a student game the system (and the teacher) by submitting A.I-generated writing if everyone else is doing it? That said, I haven’t given up hope. My classes are device-free (unless a student has an accommodation). We read hard copies of the books together, which makes a tremendous difference in how my students engage with the text. They also like writing in class because there are fewer distractions and temptations, so I’ve shifted more to that model—not as a way to police, but to support their creativity.

Did studying King’s revisions change how you think about the writing process?

When I started my archival work, I didn’t know what my process would be for this book, or even if I’d write one. I just wanted to explore how King had created some of the scariest moments from the books I had read when I was a teenager. Words and phrases were still sticking in my head forty years later, and—as a literary scholar—I wanted to understand why. As I got deeper into his manuscripts, and re-experienced all the sickening, heart-thumping fears I’d originally felt, I realized that this was going to be a story about how well-crafted language makes us feel something, whether that’s fear or joy or anger. I became more attuned to these connections as I studied his revisions and talked to him about his choices. When I sat down to write my book, I made a conscious decision to bring my personal story into it. As scholars, we’re taught to perform an emotional disengagement with our subjects. But, as I learned from King, the most effective writing (whether academic or fictional), connects readers to the humanity of the storyteller.

What keeps readers coming back to stories that scare them?

King’s literature has affected millions of people across cultures and generations, and a large part of that stems from his ability to write stories that meet us where we are as we age and our fears morph. As an anxious 12-year-old, I was terrified of his short story The Boogeyman, which is about a monster killing children in their bedrooms. When I asked him what inspired him to write it, he told me that, at the time, he was a father to two small children and very worried about crib death. That story endures because King was able to capture the vulnerability and fears of two different life stages as he crafted it. King describes a good horror story as a form of therapy, a filter that allows us to metabolize our traumas, real and imagined, without forcing us to look directly at them.

An associate professor of English at Harvard, Tara Menon teaches Humanities 10, a yearlong Great Books course for first-year students, as well as popular courses on fictional narratives set in cities and nineteenth-century literature. Her first academic monograph, Speaking Parts, will be published this September by Princeton University Press. Her debut novel, Under Water, was published in March by Riverhead Books.

The novel is set against the backdrop of two natural disasters, and the narrative is split into two separate timelines. In one, best friends Marissa and Arielle live together in Phuket, Thailand, before the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami strikes and tragedy ensues. The other, picking up almost eight years later, follows a lonely, grieving Marissa who is now living in New York as the city prepares for Hurricane Sandy.

Earlier this year, Menon discussed Under Water with Harvard Magazine. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did the central relationship of Under Water come to you?

I knew relatively early that I wanted to write about female friendship. My first (failed) dissertation was an attempt to write about nineteenth-century British novels that passed the Bechdel test—that is, novels featuring at least two women who have a conversation about something other than a man. It turned out to be difficult to write that dissertation because so few of those novels pass the test! Under Water is an effort to write a novel that does.

Of all the natural disasters you could have chosen, what made you want to write about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Sandy?

In 2004, when the tsunami hit, I was a teenager living in Singapore. It was Boxing Day, right in the middle of Christmas holidays, and in a typical year, my family and I would have been on holiday in Thailand. For some reason, which I can’t remember, we were not there that year. The tsunami killed a quarter of a million people; people at my school lost a sibling, a parent. The tsunami has haunted my imagination since.

In 2012, I was a graduate student at NYU when Hurricane Sandy hit. I sheltered at home, on the Upper West Side: we never lost power; school was cancelled; we had every possible comfort. It felt like a holiday. In the aftermath, I volunteered in Chinatown distributing basic goods to residents living on the upper floors of public housing buildings. I was struck by the disparity between downtown powerless life and uptown brunch fun. But I also found myself thinking deeply about differences in natural disaster response and relief, and thinking back to questions about the tsunami that I didn’t ask at the time.

Under Water’s opening quotes Rachel Carson, the groundbreaking writer and conservationist. What can novels like yours reveal about climate change?

I think of this novel partly as a riposte to the genre known as “cli-fi”—i.e., dystopian, apocalyptic, futuristic fiction. In many of these books, climate change is imagined as something that will happen in the near or distant future, and when it does, it will be total and spectacular. I wanted to write a different kind of climate change novel, one that shows climate change not as a future certainty but instead as a past and present truth. Some of my biggest inspirations in writing about the environment were non-fiction writers like Rachel Carson.

Also, I wanted to present irreversible, ruinous human-induced changes as mundane and quotidian. Both the New York and Thailand timelines move toward the two large-scale (and spectacular) natural disasters, but I place those at the end of the novel so I could focus on capturing the slow, gradual, often invisible changes to local ecosystems—what writer Rob Nixon called “slow violence.”

I also hope that Under Water can be read as a response to the writer Amitav Ghosh’s brilliant work of criticism, The Great Derangement, which argued that politics and culture, including literature, have failed to address the enormity of the climate crisis. I hope that the novel might even be seen as what Ghosh said (in 2016) doesn’t, but should, exist: serious literary fiction that captures both the freak event and the mundane truth of climate change..

The theme of loss—both natural and personal—is very present throughout the novel: Marissa, the narrator, is lonely and constantly grieving. Why did you write a novel about grief?

One of the most profound experiences of my college life was reading Tennyson’s In Memoriam in a class at Columbia. The poem (which I think is the greatest poem of the nineteenth-century) is about Tennyson’s grief for his friend Arthur Hallam. I was mesmerized by it, by how seriously it took grief for a friend, and how difficult it has been (and still is) for readers of the poem to believe that Tennyson and Hallam were just friends. Tennyson led me to the other great writers of grief—Auden, Lewis, Didion, Hardy—but most of them wrote about lovers. What if, I thought, a woman felt consumed by grief for a friend, just like Tennyson? What would that feel like, what would that look like? How could you capture that in a novel instead of a poem?

What are you working on next?

I am working on both a second academic book and a second novel. My academic book is an exploration of anger and the novel. I have noticed that readers often label books “angry”—they might say, for instance, “Jane Eyre is a furious book” or “Naipaul’s novels seethe with rage,” but it’s never been clear exactly how they make those determinations. In my book, I ask: what does it mean for anger to be embedded in a novel, rather than simply expressed by one of its characters? What are the formal characteristics of anger in fiction?

For our March-April 2026 issue, associate editor Schuyler Velasco wrote a story on Cambridge Common Voices, a partnership between Harvard and Lesley University. She discusses what’s behind the push for more flexible frameworks in music and the arts — and her favorite CCV performance moments.

You have a background in singing, including in choirs. Have you ever heard of a choir like this one?

Certainly not when I was studying music in high school and college in the early 2000s. But many choirs like CCV have been founded across the U.S. in the past decade or so. I suspect there are two reasons for this: First, universal design, or teaching with students’ different learning styles in mind, has spread across education, including in the arts. Second, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, choir leaders had to radically rethink how their ensembles were going to learn music and sing together for a while — they couldn’t just gather in a room and follow along to a piece of sheet music.

I think the new tools many of them adopted out of necessity at that time—Zoom rehearsals, teaching materials for singers to learn music at their own pace—may have driven home that a “choir” doesn’t have to look like one specific thing.

How has accessibility been a challenge in teaching and performing?

Many aspects of traditional choir singing can be rigid and demanding. Learning new music with multiple parts in a large group is a slow, sometimes tedious process; performances can mean standing still for hours on a hot stage. So people with physical limitations, or with learning differences like autism or ADHD, or who move or vocalize in less expected ways might naturally find it difficult. But they still want to sing with other people, because—speaking personally—it’s one of the best things on earth.

What’s the most surprising thing you learned from your reporting?
CCV’s framework isn’t just about accommodating limitations; it’s also about tapping into members’ unique abilities and gifts. Some have perfect pitch—during rehearsals the directors can just ask them for a particular note instead of going to the piano. Others can play multiple instruments or write lyrics. Many have contributed to original songs.

You attended the Cambridge Common Voices holiday concert at Sanders Theater last December. Can you describe the scene?

For their holiday performance, CCV joined Harvard’s choirs in a staging of A Christmas Carol, a very ambitious and difficult piece of choral and orchestral music that they worked hard on during the semester. Before that, they led the crowd in a singalong of favorites like “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and “Let it Go.” The CCV members wore Santa hats and danced. I brought my nine-year-old, who really enjoyed screaming along to “All I Want for Christmas is You” with the crowd. I worry he will expect every classical concert I drag him to in the future to start that way. (They don’t!)

What can other musicians learn from Cambridge Common Voices?

Andy Clark, who directs choirs at Harvard, told me that working with CCV “challenged, disrupted and interrogated all of [his] notions around who gets to be an artist, what constitutes a great choir, a successful performance.” So I think the lesson, really, is that whatever form it takes, making music should chiefly be a source of joy and fulfillment. And if it isn’t, maybe there’s a better way for you to do it.

For the last two years, curators have scoured the dusty corners and cabinets of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), collecting about 50,000 microscope slides featuring tiny specimens. Some, like the translucent wings of a true bug (Heteroptera Latreille, hemiptera) and segments of a Western honeybee (Apis mellifera), are more than a century old.

Professor of organismic and evolutionary biology Mansi Srivastava, one of the MCZ’s curators of invertebrate zoology, especially likes a series of slides of squid embryos, collected in 1880 by marine biologist William Keith Brooks, Ph.D. 1875. “It’s the first time that the detailed anatomy of squid embryos is captured at different stages,” she says. “It’s just amazing—the fact that we have the actual objects, the actual tissue of those squid embryos that became the basis of our understanding of how nature makes a squid.”

Srivastava has led the continuing curation project to restore, catalog, and digitize the MCZ’s slides. The goal, she says, is to make this “meaningful data available to anyone anywhere on the planet.” Meanwhile, anyone can see a small selection of these historic treasures, artful in their own right, at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Making the Invisible Visible: Digitizing Invertebrates on Microscope Slides highlights eight slides visitors can view through a microscope, among them a butterfly proboscis (through which the insect draws fluids) and a snail radula (a flexible ribbon of thousands of microscopic teeth by which the mollusk grates up food). Fifteen enlarged digital-print photographs on a nearby wall reveal the intricacy of a caterpillar’s skin, an ant’s head, and a veined dragonfly wing.

Historically, the slides also reflect how scientists communicated their findings. See the image of soft coral tissue on which pioneering zoologist Addison Emery Verrill, S.B. 1862, etched the words, “sent to James Dwight Dana by Charles Darwin.” Professor of entomology William Morton Wheeler (the “ant man” who predated Harvard’s late Pellegrino University Professor E.O. Wilson) illustrated embryonic forms of the praying mantis (Stagmomantis carolina) for his 1893 thesis—based on the use of a microscope. The revolutionary instrument, invented in the late 1500s, enabled scientists to see the minutest of creatures and describe the anatomy and morphology that helped explain whole new species. In this sense, says Srivastava, the MCZ’s slide collection evokes an age of discovery, offering an “incredible glimpse into things that you couldn’t have really imagined beforehand.”

For Harvard Magazine’s January-February 2026 issue, staff member Olivia Farrar wrote about scientific and industrial efforts to make human exploration of Mars possible. Here’s what inspired her reporting, and what surprised her while putting the story together.

What made you interested in the race to Mars?

I’ve always loved reading about and imagining the universe; three of my favorite authors growing up were Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, and Timothy Ferris. Humans have been searching for the next frontier and next boundary since the beginning of recorded history. Space is one of the biggest things to discover, in every sense of the word.

Mars is a large-scale goal that is shared by NASA, private companies, and some of the richest individuals in the world. If I were a mega-billionaire, I would be putting some percentage of my wealth towards both the adventure and the engineering, scientific, and medical return on investment that space missions provide.

What’s the most surprising thing you learned from your reporting?

How much the timeline to reach Mars depends less on basic science and more on engineering constraints, cost, and political will. The foundational science largely exists today. What remains uncertain is how quickly we can scale propulsion, life-support systems, and long-duration human health protections in a way that is safe and sustainable.

After reporting this story, are you more or less confident that humans will reach Mars in the next decade? Or two decades?

I am somewhat more confident that humans could reach Mars within the next two decades. A ten-year timeline still seems ambitious. Progress has accelerated, especially in reusable rocket technology. Barring some war, pandemic, financial crash, or other civilizational collapse, I believe we will reach the Red Planet before 2040 at the latest. Fingers crossed! Even since I wrote the story the science has improved, although federal funding flows are in constant flux and under threat of cuts.

There is also emerging research suggesting that the time it takes to reach Mars, currently estimated at roughly six to nine months each way, could be reduced. Shortening that timeline would ease challenges related to radiation exposure, fuel requirements, and health.

Some people are skeptical about investing heavily in space when there are so many problems on Earth. What’s the most compelling case you’ve heard?

I think the best argument for space missions—including incredibly risky and expensive ones like the journey to Mars—is what these efforts can give back to science on Earth. I attended a reception held by Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Space Medicine Research recently, where I met researchers whose studies straddle space medicine and clinical research for chronic and currently intractable diseases on Earth.

The benefit of space from a medical perspective is actually just how bad it is for the human body. Because microgravity is a hostile environment, researchers are able to study things like bone density, muscle wasting, and changes in metabolic and circadian rhythms with a unique precision. Some drugs that are currently in the research and discovery phases for space medicine applications are also being used to explore potential cures for serious autoimmune conditions and cancer treatments (and vice versa).

This spring, NASA’s Artemis II mission sent astronauts around the Moon and back. Do you think its success will increase public interest in ambitious space projects?

The answer to this question is already written out by hundreds of millions—and billions—of people, all echoing their thoughts and emotions across the internet. Between television and streaming, viewership of the launch broke NASA records. The astronauts who went aboard the mission have developed deep and newly devoted fanbases across public television and social media.

One lesson from Artemis II is that it’s helpful to connect personal and human elements to science. If the crew of the first Mars mission has a public platform someday—and can articulate why they’re going and what that means for humanity and science—the enthusiasm will be huge.

It’s also easier said than done. The self is evasive, shifting, never quite complete—and continuously informed by the structures that surround it.

Books like those gathered here serve as emissaries of self-reflection: a stark medical diagnosis, a democracy seemingly on the precipice of collapse, a motto carved above a university gate. Each offers a vantage point to what it means to live deliberately.

Only a Little While Here by María Ospina, Ph.D. ’09, translated by Heather Cleary (Scribner, $28)

Two dogs, a songbird, a beetle, and a porcupine—these are the intimate lives that Only a Little While Here bears witness to. Winner of Colombia’s National Novel Award, Ospina’s novel takes us on lyrical, interwoven journeys of migration and abandonment in this work of ecological fiction. Somewhere along the way, we start to see ourselves a little better, too.

Coding Capitalism: Computers and the Remaking of the Postwar US Economy by Devin Kennedy, Ph.D. ’19 (Columbia, $30 paperback)

Kennedy, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, places the pursuit of economic order at the heart of early developments in computing. The book begins in the aftermath of World War II and the first attempts to stabilize the U.S. economy using computers and ends with the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash, recording many political, economic, and cultural shifts in how computers were viewed along the way. Coding Capitalism provides a complex but illuminating prologue to the digital age and the current entanglements of Big Tech, politics, and capitalism.

Gates of Harvard Yard, edited by Blair Kamin, NF ’13 (Harvard, $22.95)

“Enter to grow in wisdom.” “Depart to serve better thy country and thy kind.” The inscriptions on either side of Harvard Yard’s Dexter Gate feel equal parts aspiration and contractual obligation. Built between 1889 and 2020, the Yard’s 25 gates emerge here as time capsules of shifting architectural styles and ideologies that interact with the present around them. Kamin, a former Nieman fellow, supplements this new edition with an essay on the children’s literature-themed Peter J. Solomon Gate, erected in 2020, and a new afterword.

Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter by Stephanie Fairyington, Ed.M. ’01 (Pantheon, $28)

“What looks like agency is often sub--mission”—this subtle provocation permeates the pages of Ugly, where authenticity and identity remain fickle friends. Part cultural unpacking of “ugliness” throughout history, part memoir of queer motherhood, Ugly is still figuring it out, and that’s the point. Writing as much for herself as for the daughter whom she’s addressing, Fairyington invites readers to self-interrogate, but to do so with empathy.

Liar’s Dice: A Novel by Juliet Faithfull ’83, Ed.M. ’86 (Random House, $30)

This story of identical twins separated by circumstance unfolds against the vivid backdrop of 1970s Brazil under military dictator Emílio Garrastazu Médici. For Dolores, uncovering her sister Mita’s fate becomes inseparable from her own coming of age. Inspired in part by Faithfull’s own life, her debut novel beautifully captures the disorienting interplay of family secrets, memory, and identity.

Fed Up: What Evolution Reveals About Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well by Daniel Lieberman (Knopf, $35)

“What should I eat?” It’s the eternal question that makes monsters of us all. Lieberman, Lerner professor of biological sciences and professor of human evolutionary biology, argues that evolution has not prepared us well to answer that question in an age of abundance. Rejecting prescriptive answers, he surveys dietary lifestyles and fads—from vegetarianism to paleo and intermittent fasting—equipping readers to navigate them with curiosity rather than dogma.

Catching Sight: How a Guide Dog Helped Me See Myself by Deni Elliott, Ed.D. ’84, with Graham Buck (Beacon, $30)

“This is a book about taking personal responsibility and about how people should treat other people and dogs,” Elliott writes, setting a broader expectation for a narrative that blends memoir with an introduction to the guide dog training world. Catching Sight’s narrative does not quite achieve the synergy that Elliott and her guide dog Alberta do. But its strength resides in the tensions between self-knowledge and authenticity: a scholar of ethics confronting her own blindness after years of adaptation and denial.

Reboot: AI and the Race to Save Democracy by Beth Simone Noveck ’92, A.M. ’92 (Yale, $32.50)

Intentional design helps separate democracy from, say, mob rule. According to Reboot, it’s also the key to harnessing AI to enhance information gathering, expand participation, and increase government transparency, strengthening collaborative democracy rather than accelerating its demise. Noveck, the former U.S. deputy chief technology officer and the first chief AI strategist for the state of New Jersey, offers a cautiously optimistic yet urgent blueprint.

Homesick for a World Unknown: The Life of George B. Schaller by Miriam Horn ’85 (Penguin, $40)

What possesses a 26-year-old graduate student to abandon the human world to study gorillas in the deepest wilderness? Access to field journals spanning 70 years and six years of subject interviews help illuminate the fascinating life of leading field biologist and naturalist George B. Schaller, who is now 93. Homesick reads like a well-executed magazine profile thanks to Horn’s ability to capture the quiet intensity of Schaller, a subject known for his “world-class taciturnity.”

The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History by Mark Peterson ’83, Ph.D. ’93 (Princeton, $29.95)

On the 250th anniversary of American independence, Peterson invites us to examine the roots of the nation and the ways it might persevere, tracing the Constitution’s ideas back to British political traditions and the “Domesday Book” (the eleventh-century manuscript record of the Great Survey of much of England and parts of Wales). His sweeping history reveals how inherited structures now sit uneasily within modern political realities, sharpening the sense of an ongoing constitutional dilemma.

The Mysterious World of the Bull Kelp Forest by Josie Iselin ’84, illustrated by Ellen Litwiller (Heyday, $26)

This book is dedicated to “the growing cadre of kelp forest enthusiasts.” If you don’t currently count yourself among them, fear not. Writer Iselin and illustrator Litwiller hope to capture the main-character energy of bull kelp, a fast-growing seaweed described as “surprising, opportunistic, undervalued, foundational, resilient, and vulnerable.” Through profiles of 13 interconnected species that live in these ecosystems, such as otters and urchins, Iselin establishes the rapid decline of bull kelp forests as an important piece of a broader ecological puzzle involving biodiversity and climate change.

Our Minds Were Always Free: A History of How Black Brilliance Was Exploited—and the Fight to Retake Control by Lisa E. Davis ’81 (Simon & Schuster, $29)

In this fascinating legal and cultural history, Davis, an attorney specializing in intellectual property law, confronts how the handling of copyrights and patents in the U.S. have
often both appropriated and devalued Black creativity. From household names such as Thelonious Monk to lesser-known innovators such as Onesimus, an enslaved West African who introduced Cotton Mather to smallpox inoculation in eighteenth-century Boston, Davis exposes how failures to acknowledge and compensate Black creators legally and historically have also sustained cultural myths of Black inferiority even as music, art, and technology have relied on Black ingenuity for profit and inspiration.

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Harvard Magazine’s May-June 2026 issue explored the University’s role in the American Revolution, with stories on key (if little known) historical figures, events, and moments in time —Patriot troops taking over the Yard; the year Harvard students relocated to Concord during wartime. In the conversations below, editor Joanna Weiss and creative director Jennifer Carling discuss how the issue came together—from early ideas and reporting to illustration and design.

Editor Joanna Weiss:

What inspired you to pursue this “Harvard Celebrates the 250th”-themed issue?

As we approached the nation’s semiquincentennial—a new word I learned this year!—we started to hear ideas, from all around the University community, about Harvard’s role in the Revolution. Sometimes, that role was physical: the doorknobs of Harvard Hall melted down to make musket balls. Often, it was intellectual: the Enlightenment values that marked a Harvard education in the eighteenth century were a giant inspiration to the Patriots. We loved the idea of highlighting the ways Harvard’s history is intertwined with America’s.

Can you walk us through the planning and reporting process—from the initial concept to the final publication?

The reporting and suggestions came from all over. Marc Goodheart, a longtime University leader who is currently a senior advisor to Harvard’s president, helped us identify Revolutionary sites around campus, along with many Patriots who had Harvard ties. A history writer dug into the archives of Concord, Massachusetts, to learn about the year troops were quartered in the Yard and Harvard students were exiled to Concord; a Harvard M.P.A. graduate who lives in Warren County, Ohio, wrote about the county’s namesake, Harvard-educated general Joseph Warren. Members of our staff researched poets, politicians, abolitionists, and the Native Americans who fought in the war. We wanted to cover the breadth of Revolutionary-era experiences and highlight some fascinating eighteenth-century characters who are no longer household names.

What kind of research went into shaping this issue, and how did you decide who or what to focus on?

The hardest thing was deciding what to leave out in our limited print space! We have more stories online that cover some quirky aspects of 1770s history, such as the bright blue sash George Washington wore to distinguish himself from the troops (now on display at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology). We’ve also published a list of 250th-themed events and exhibits hosted around Harvard this spring and summer. And look out for some fun videos on social media later this spring that will highlight Revolutionary sites around Cambridge.

Were there any stories that surprised you, or ones you found especially meaningful or enjoyable to work on?

I was inspired by Lydialyle Gibson’s story of Darby Vassall, the Black abolitionist who had a memorable (if apocryphal) boyhood conversation with George Washington in what would later become Longfellow House. And I loved reading the poetry and letters of Mercy Otis Warren, the wife and sister of Harvard graduates, who wrote the sauciest, most caustic missives to her friend John Adams, urging him to get on with it and start a revolution already.

What do you hope readers take away from this issue?

I hope readers feel, as I do, that they’ve learned something surprising about the people who created a nation. And I hope the next time they come to Harvard Square, they see these familiar buildings and streets in a new way. We all share a connection to Harvard’s rich past.

Creative director Jennifer Carling:

This issue is incredibly rich visually—what was your overall creative vision?

When thinking about the articles and the cover, we didn’t want to rely too heavily on historical images. Mark Steele’s amazing artwork instantly came to mind. Mark has been creating illustrations for Harvard Magazine since the 1990s and has a wonderful talent for capturing the look and feel of the campus while also injecting a strong sense of the people who inhabit it. While maintaining historical accuracy with the buildings (with a touch of artistic license), he was also able to weave in the richness of life at that period, with a flair for humor and playfulness.

How did you approach translating the themes of the stories into the cover and other visual elements?

As a child, I was introduced to the book Busy Busy Town by Richard Scarry, and I found myself mesmerized by the detailed illustrations and the thrill of finding new tiny gems that transported me to Scarry’s world. We wanted the cover to have this feel. The idea was to illustrate a “bird’s eye view” of the campus in 1776: not just the buildings, but the hustle and bustle of an active community, the soldiers living on campus, the townsfolk going about their daily business, and some hidden gems like George Washington on his horse, Mercy Otis Warren reading her poetry, and soldiers removing lead off the roof of Harvard Hall to use for musket balls.

Weaving Mark’s amazing illustrations into the rest of what we called the “Revolution package” helped bring the stories to life. He illustrated a small male figure (who I referred to as our “little colonial guy”) engaged in different activities: being a soldier, a town crier, and a student, and even enjoying a tankard of beer at a pub. He also appears in other magazine features: Treasure, Introductions, and the letter from the editor, which all have “Harvard and the Revolution” themes.

We knew a map of Cambridge during that period would be the obvious opener for the package. While not created to scale—and taking some artistic license, in terms of relative locations—it is loosely based on a map of that time period that is housed in the Harvard University Archives. Mark also illustrated the Harvard exodus to Concord, Joseph Warren’s life as a Harvard student, and Mercy Otis Warren working into the night, feverishly writing her poetry and prose.

How long did the design process take, from early concept through final production?

We typically have two months to pull an issue together—and it takes the full two months to do it. I spent hours researching historical images to provide Mark with reference materials and guide him through versions of sketches to get it just right. At the same time, I researched historical portraits and art for some of our other subjects. Our sketches evolved as we finalized the illustrations and the content came into better focus, but my initial plan remained intact.

What do you hope readers take away from this issue?

I hope readers learn something that they did not know about Harvard and its involvement in the Revolution—and that they have fun learning it. And I hope they take the time to look at the illustrations and find all the fun elements tucked in. Whether you enjoyed Richard Scarry’s books, Where’s Waldo, or both, I think most can relate to the joy of discovering the details.

For Harvard Magazine’s July-August cover story, “The Love Bunnies” senior editor Lydialyle Gibson chronicles her pet rabbit Petunia’s journey to find love after the unexpected loss of her companion, Oliver. Below, Gibson shares more about her experiences as a rabbit owner, how she wove together personal experience and in-depth reporting, and an update on Petunia and her current “husbun,” Spruce.

What is your favorite thing about rabbits?

I’ve always felt in tune with them—they’re prey animals, and they’re a little shy. If you earn their trust and show them some love, they give you their whole world. That resonates with me, as a person who was always a little bit more introverted than my classmates.

You come from a family of rabbit lovers. How did that start?

My mom was a history teacher at my school, and her best friend, Mrs. Hardy, was the science teacher. She had a classroom rabbit, Stanley, who would go home on the weekends with different students. The first time we spent real time with Stanley was when Mrs. Hardy went on vacation for a couple weeks in the summer.

And that was kind of it. We had never had any pets other than a few fish. But we all loved Stanley, and over the years we progressively usurped the classroom rabbits more and more. At a certain point my mom declared that one rabbit, Arthur (but we all just called him “The Rabbit”), had “graduated” from school, and he started living with her full time.

What misconceptions do non-rabbit people have about pet rabbits?

They think they’re easy, and they think they’re boring—just lumps of fur that sit there. And really, all of them have very different personalities, things that they do, things that they like, and ways that they relate to you. The first rabbit I owned after college, Sampson, knew when it was time for me to go to work in the morning, and he would come and sit on my feet, just so I wouldn’t leave for a little longer.

How does Petunia compare to other rabbits you’ve had?

Until Petunia, all my rabbits were male, lop-eared rabbits. The males are a little milder—the female rabbits have a reputation of being kind of ungovernable. She’s much more opinionated; she just wants things to be how she wants them to be. If they’re not, she lets you know.

Your story details how particular rabbits can be in forming relationships with each other. Are they like that with people, too?

I had had my previous rabbit, Norman, since he was very young. When I started dating my boyfriend, Carlos, Norman was already an old man. Carlos grew up in Lima and never had any pets. But Norman and Carlos immediately had this intense bond—to the point where Carlos, very seriously, was like, “Norman and I have known each other before.” He’s sort of kidding, but not really. And having seen the way Norman reacted to him versus how Norman reacted to other friends of mine, there was something real there.

In reporting this story on rabbits, what did you learn about people?

I was surprised at how much people, just from hearing the short description of Petunia’s story, started thinking about their own lives. I was careful not to confuse human biology and human neuroscience with stuff about rabbits while interviewing scientists—I wasn’t trying to cross that line. But no one seemed worried about it. I would share little details about Petunia and Oliver, or Petunia and Spruce, and the scientists would incorporate that into their descriptions of how people are together. Robert Waldinger, who runs the survey known as the Harvard Happiness Study, told me about a relative who had just lost his wife, and how reminded he was of it by Petunia and Oliver.

As a journalist, how was the experience of writing something both so in-depth and so personal?

Writing forces you to pay really close attention to the thing that you’re writing about, even if it’s something you think you know: your own life, or your own pet that you spend hours with every day. In thinking so deeply and paying such close attention to Petunia, I expected to just be telling a story, but I was also discovering a story.

This story has a lot of moving parts. Was there one moment in your reporting that helped you crack it open?

Reading Stephanie Cacciopo’s book, Wired for Love. I had felt like I had two stories running on separate tracks—people and relationships, and then this rabbit story—that I wasn’t sure I could splice together in a way that made sense. When Stephanie agreed to talk to me, that was the moment when the story finally made sense as a cohesive thing.

How are Petunia and Spruce doing?

They seem really happy together. They make out a lot. Kind of all day. But they also have little disagreements. Spruce sometimes chases Petunia and she’s like, “Okay, we’re done with this now,” and he’s like, “No, we’re still chasing.” He chews his nails, and sometimes he tries to chew her nails also. She’s not into that. It’s funny to watch her calmly walk away from something that annoys her, having seen her in the dating scene completely savaging all these other rabbits.

IN 1785, the Marquis de Lafayette sent George Washington a few special gifts. A new jack (known today as a donkey) and two jennets (the female of the species) arrived at Mount Vernon, as per the former general’s request. The shipment also included a partridge and several Chinese pheasants, which came from French King Louis XVI’s aviary. There’s no record of why Lafayette threw in the birds, and they didn’t last too long in Virginia.

But two of the pheasants were preserved and will be on display at the Harvard Museum of Natural History starting on June 27 as part of Harvard’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. The exhibit “Collecting Wonders—Tomorrow’s Discoveries” features the elegantly tailed birds, technically golden pheasants (Chrysolophus pictus), among other specimens from the Museum of Comparative Zoology’s vast collection. Also of note is a woodpecker, Melanerpes lewis, that is the only extant complete specimen from the Lewis and Clark Expedition commissioned by U.S. President Thomas Jefferson.

The pheasants were exotic creatures in eighteenth-century America. Having heard tale of them, artist and naturalist Charles Willson Peale, Washington’s portraitist, wrote to Washington asking if, when the birds died, he could have their bodies for display. “I cannot say that I shall be happy to have it in my power to comply with your request,” Washington replied in January 1787, “but expect that it will not be long before they will compose a part of your Museum, as they all appear to be drooping.” Upon receipt of one pheasant, Peale was clearly pleased. He wrote back that, until he had a bird in hand, he had believed their appearance in Chinese paintings to be merely “works of fancy.”

The birds were displayed at Peale’s Philadelphia museum, founded “to instruct the mind and sow the seeds of Virtue” in the emerging republic. It began with art and expanded into natural curiosities in 1786 (among them a nearly complete skeleton of a mastodon). Other Peale museums were opened elsewhere, but all eventually closed. In 1849, Peale’s collection was sold and much of it, including the blue silk sash Washington wore to distinguish himself when he took command of the Continental Army, was ultimately donated to Harvard, where they offer a glimpse into bygone curiosities. (The sash will be on display at the Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology starting May 25.

AMERICA’S national parks are a major economic engine. In 2024, outdoor recreation made up 2.4 percent of U.S. GDP, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data, as Americans flocked to trails, waterways, and campsites in record numbers. National parks alone saw their highest visitation ever—generating $56 billion in total economic output.

Yet, even as demand surged, federal support declined. Budget and staffing cuts reduced funding for key agencies, including the National Park Service (NPS), the Bureau of Land Management, and the Forest Service. By the end of 2025, the NPS had lost nearly a quarter of its permanent workforce to buyouts, forced resignations, and a prolonged hiring freeze.

Linda J. Bilmes ’80, M.B.A. ’84, Moynihan senior lecturer and public policy expert at Harvard Kennedy School, has spent years studying the economics of public investment. A former chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce under President Bill Clinton and co-author of Valuing the U.S. National Parks: America’s Best Investment (2019), she studies how government spending shapes long-term economic outcomes.

In this interview, edited for length and clarity, Bilmes discusses the economic contributions, and future, of the U.S. National Park System.

1) Why do we struggle to measure, and defend, the government’s investment in public lands?

It’s difficult to fully account for the value of national parks using traditional accounting measures, or to translate it into the national budget. The entire National Park Service budget is less than $5 billion—a tiny fraction of the total estimated value.

The public recognizes that the 400 national park holdings—including national parks, seashores, monuments, and historical places—have an intrinsic worth. My research with co-author John Loomis found that Americans would pay $92 billion in higher taxes simply not to lose these special places and their core programs (such as protecting landscapes and historical landmarks).

2) You’ve called national parks “America’s best investment.” How do they contribute to the economy?

In addition to the economic value, we identified billions of dollars that the national parks help to generate for the economy. These include serving as pristine locations for blockbuster movies (including Star Wars, E.T., Planet of the Apes, and dozens more), producing educational curriculum for schools, and promoting tourism, which helps local economies.

The NPS also safeguards botanical species, wildlife, and cultural treasures, and it has a mission to protect these lands and places forever. It’s hard to put a number on how great an investment this is.

3) How do you calculate the economic value of the parks’ environmental contributions?

That’s a great question that is broader than the National Parks. For example, John Loomis and I, working with Harvard Kennedy School student Adam Banasiak, found that the NPS sequesters nearly $1 billion in carbon and helps maintain watersheds which supply fresh drinking water to millions of Americans.

But these benefits don’t show up as assets on the U.S. balance sheet. In many countries, including the U.K., South Africa, and New Zealand, there are serious efforts to assign a monetary value to “natural capital.” Economists and statisticians have developed robust methods of valuing these assets. For example: we can compare the cost of preserving forests, which provide natural filtration systems for drinking water, to building a filtration plan (which costs $10 billion plus operating costs).

4) What have been the most significant recent policy shifts affecting America’s national parks?

I’ll start with the good news: The U.S. added more than 265 acres of public lands and waters in national monuments by the end the Obama administration, created several new NPS units, and celebrated [the NPS] centennial in 2016. This drew millions of visitors into the parks, and the National Park Foundation raised nearly $500 million in private donations, far outpacing its goals.

Then in 2020, during his first administration, President Trump signed the Great American Outdoors Act, the biggest land conservation legislation in a generation. It strengthened the Land and Water Conservation Act—guaranteeing $900 million per year in perpetuity to acquire land for recreation and conservation—and established a fund to fix deferred maintenance at national parks, wildlife refuges, and forests.

But in 2025, the DOGE process hit the NPS badly. The agency lost about one quarter of its staff, including rangers, scientists, and technical experts. The Trump administration’s 2027 budget calls for a further 25percent cut to NPS operations, which would eliminate thousands more positions and drastically cut the park construction maintenance budget, even as parks face a large backlog of repairs. This would be disastrous for the NPS, its programs, and the millions of people who visit.

5) What’s the long-term economic outlook for the National Parks?

I had the privilege of serving on the National Park System Advisory Board and the National Parks Second Century Commission, which focused on how to protect the parks over the next 100 years. We quickly realized that the mission of the National Park Service was an poorly aligned with its funding structure, which was an annual operational budget.

We helped persuade Congress to establish an endowment for the National Parks and to restructure the National Park Foundation so it could effectively solicit and manage large private donations and grow that endowment. These recommendations have now been implemented. Public support for the parks remains strong and bipartisan, which gives me confidence that over the long-term, the NPS will be sustained; and its mission will be fulfilled for future generations.

SIX MONTHS BEFORE the Declaration of Independence was signed, an anonymous pamphlet went the colonial era’s version of viral. Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America argued, in fervent prose, for independence from Britain, calling the cause of America “the cause of all mankind.” It was an immediate bestseller. No one readily guessed its author was a newly immigrated Englishman named Thomas Paine. He’d left school at 12, failed in marriages and at making a living, and had barely survived typhus during the transatlantic journey. Yet here, in a nascent republic, he made his mark. In plain language, Paine declared that the colonies would thrive under economic freedom, that an island ruling a continent was absurd, and that monarchical systems were abnormal and oppressive. “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” he wrote, “yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

This incendiary document is part of a new exhibit, War of Words: A Citizen’s-Eye View of the Revolution, at Houghton Library (May 18 through August 7). About 60 items explore what “the people of the period would have used to learn about the events of the Revolution,” notes John Overholt, curator of the Hyde collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson and early books and manuscripts. Documents on display also include an original copy of the Declaration of Independence (see below) printed on paper made from pulped rags (only 26 of the estimated 200 initially printed are known to exist today). Colonists would have read it as a public poster or in a local newspaper, Overholt says. So crucial was the document, he adds, that its first signer, John Hancock, sent copies to leaders of the Continental Army so the troops would know what they were fighting for. Six years earlier, Paul Revere’s propagandistic 1770 engraving (see below) depicting what would come to be known as the Boston Massacre had sent that message in graphic terms: British soldiers are portrayed as a firing squad, and the colonists as their hapless victims. In organizing the exhibit, Overholt wanted to emphasize not just the history, but the tone. “Showing the kinds of publications and images of the period, how people were expressing themselves and reporting the news,” he says, seemed like “something that visitors would find relatable.”

Published in the May-June 2026 print issue under the headline “The Revolution Was Not Televised,” in the John Harvard's Journal section.

KNOWING HOW to disagree well may be one of today’s most important skills, and most of us are bad at it. Political dialogue in the United States has grown increasingly fractured, and the numbers reflect it: according to Pew Research Center data from February, 56 percent of Americans now say they have stopped talking to certain people about political news because of something they said—up from 45 percent in 2024.

Julia Minson, a behavioral scientist and professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, has spent her career studying conflict management, negotiation, and the psychology of disagreement. Her book How to Disagree Better will be published next week.

She shared practical strategies for engaging with people we disagree with in an interview with Harvard Magazine. (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)

1. What’s the most common mistake we make when we disagree?

Trying to win. We go in wanting to persuade the other person they’re wrong and we’re right. That usually backfires. Often, what is underneath is a phenomenon psychologists call “naive realism:” we assume our view of the world is basically correct and objective, and we don’t notice how much our background, incentives, and mood shape what we see. So when someone disagrees, we don’t think, “I might be missing something.” We think something’s wrong with them.

2. What practical shifts would make others more receptive to opposing views?

First, say out loud that you want to learn. Don’t assume people can tell you’re curious. Use clear phrases like, “That’s how I see it, but I’d like to understand other perspectives.” The research shows that even a couple of sentences like this—without changing your actual argument—makes the other side see you as more reasonable, trustworthy, and worth talking to again. Second, use the H.E.A.R. framework when you make your case: hedge your claims (“most of the time,” “in many cases”); emphasize where you agree; acknowledge their view before you disagree; and reframe to the positive (fewer “don’t,” “can’t,” “never” and more “I’d appreciate,” “what would help”). You’re not changing your position, but you’re showing that you are leaving some mental space for their arguments. And receptiveness in language tends to be reciprocated.

In experiments, people who get brief training in [the H.E.A.R framework] are rated by disagreeing counterparts as more trustworthy, objective, and desirable as teammates, even on very divisive topics…Teaching people what to say works better than only urging them to be more empathetic or humble, because it gives them concrete moves they can use in the moment.

3. Political and cultural polarization have intensified in recent years. What psychological forces drive this trend?

Interestingly, some of what we call polarization is actually false polarization: we think we’re much further apart than we are politically. Multiple studies show that people overestimate how much the other side disagrees with them. Those assumptions prevent us from engaging in dialogue, which means we never correct the caricature, and the cycle continues. When people do talk, they often find more overlap than they expected. I think we should put ourselves in the position to be pleasantly surprised more often.

4. What can make some disagreements harder to navigate than others?

Our identities absolutely shape both what we’re willing to discuss and how we explain the other side. Depending on your own experiences, some issues feel sacred or off-limits. We might be fine debating one topic but feel that engaging with another legitimizes something we see as harmful. That’s often tied to identity (e.g., immigrant experience, faith, profession). It makes those disagreements feel riskier and more emotional.

We also use our counterpart’s identity to explain to ourselves why a disagreement is happening. When someone disagrees with us, we often attribute it to their group, motives, or flaws, rather than to information or values we might not share. So, disagreements that touch moral convictions or core identity are harder.

5. What role does language play in conflict? Are there particular words, phrases, or framings you shouldn’t use?

Language is central. We can’t see someone’s intentions; we only see how they behave. Words are the main way we signal receptiveness or lack thereof. Avoid negations and negative emotion like “don’t,” “can’t,” “never,” “hate,” “terrible”—they escalate. Avoid reasoning words when they sound condescending: “because,” “therefore,” and “the fact is” can sound like you’re lecturing. Avoid adverb limiters like “just,” “simply,” “only,” “merely”—they shrink the other person’s view and feel dismissive.

The research shows that the same ideas land very differently depending on whether they’re wrapped in receptive language or are stated simply as a counterargument. One person’s choice of words can shift the whole exchange.

THIS YEAR COULD BE a critical one for court decisions that redefine how U.S. copyright law applies to generative AI.

More than 70 infringement lawsuits have been filed by copyright owners against AI companies, centered on whether training large language models (LLMs) on copyrighted material constitutes fair use. Major media and entertainment companies including The New York Times and Disney have launched lawsuits against OpenAI and Midjourney, respectively, and Anthropic reached a $1.5 billion settlement in the Bartz case, the largest known copyright settlement in history, after facing liability for downloading millions of pirated works used for training. Courts, however, have sent mixed signals on what constitutes illegal use of copyrighted material by AI.

Rebecca Tushnet, the Stanton professor of the first amendment at Harvard Law School, is a leading expert on copyright and trademark law. She has written extensively on fair use, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) compliance, and the legal architecture governing creative and commercial speech.

Despite her skepticism about generative AI, Tushnet thinks copyright law is poorly suited to regulate it—and that changing the laws could have unintended consequences for creators and future innovations. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

1. What is “fair use” in copyright law, and how are AI companies using it to their legal advantage?

The basic idea of fair use is that some unauthorized uses of copyrighted works are beneficial for society: parody, satire, and academic commentary, [for example].

“Big data” uses are also often fair because they generate new insights and have different purposes from the point of any given individual work—for example, you can use Google Books to track the rise of a concept across the decades. Some AI training is that kind of use—by analyzing hundreds of thousands of different works, the output can be something different and useful.

2. In which scenarios could training an AI model lead to violation of current copyright laws, or not?

If the training produces infringing copies as outputs every time it’s used, that’s clearly not fair; if a model never produces infringing copies as outputs when it’s used, then that’s a case for fair use.

If it sometimes produces infringing copies, then the fair use case probably depends on whether the infringement is directly caused by the training (which could happen if the infringing copies pop out readily in response to innocuous prompts) or by a prompter deliberately trying to get an infringing result. In the latter case, it’s probably not right to blame the AI model. Two district court cases ruled this way last year, and I think that’s the right result.

3. A big question in these cases is the potential replacement of existing products: an AI-generated news summary undercutting a newspaper subscription, for example. What legal weight does this carry?

Some people have been pushing the argument that this makes AI training unfair. But that’s not how copyright has ever thought about copyright harm. The rise of record players wasn’t unfair even though it put the musicians who used to play in restaurants out of work.

[In the case of AI], if a search on Google Books answers the question of when FDR was born, and a searcher doesn’t need to buy the book from which that fact is taken, that’s not the kind of substitution that copyright cares about, because copyright doesn’t protect facts. Competition among non-infringing alternatives is good, not bad—it means that audiences have more choices.

4. How do companies like OpenAI store their models’ source materials, and what does that mean in terms of copyright law?

As far as I’m aware, there’s no evidence that training models contain copies (or substantial parts) of most works on which they’re trained; there is evidence that some models can be prompted to generate pretty good copies of a few works like the first Harry Potter book or George Orwell’s 1984.

If a model can be easily prompted to generate a decent copy, then current law will likely consider the model to contain a “copy” of that work. But that will have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, because that seems likely to be true only of a handful of widely available works.

This argument is also probably less important than it seems because everyone agrees that the training process involves making and using digital copies, which is going to require fair use or some other justification, even if the resulting model isn’t a copy of the training data.

5. Do you think the law should change so that AI companies have to pay licensing fees to creators for training models on copyrighted materials?

I find myself in an odd position: I generally don’t think that most generative AI is good for society, but copyright law is not the right way to regulate it. Fair use under U.S. law is deliberately flexible and is generally handling AI issues well so far.

Ruling against the companies [on fair use grounds] could set a new precedent by recognizing a new kind of “training market” would threaten both existing fair uses and the next, unknown innovations. This is because copyright owners can always assert that they want to get licensing fees for any use they want to control, including commentary and criticism.

Rejecting fair use would transfer money to Thompson Reuters, Warner, and other big copyright owners, but—like every increase in copyright rights in the past few decades—will not do much for artists. Even if the big copyright owners give one-time payouts to current authors, their future contracts will not provide for additional payments for AI training or will offer the kind of penny-a-year payments that musicians complain about from Spotify now. As Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin point out, the problem that artists face is not lack of rights, it’s lack of market power.

The books featured in Harvard Magazine’s May-June issue differ widely in subject matter and methodology, yet they all expose the pitfalls of resorting to extremes. From a cultural examination of spiders to a memoir confronting the paradigms of deafness, these books offer narratives that seek nuance and accountability.

While pendulums will continue to swing, and upheavals agitate, the future is not only found in the immediate revolution but in the smaller daily motions—and in how we learn to discuss, govern, and study the radical ideas that shape our world.

Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History by Linford D. Fisher, Th.D. ’08 (Liveright, $39.99)

Through primary sources and data, Stealing America exposes a suppressed chapter in the history of slavery and its ramifications: from 1492 to 1880, an estimated three to six million Indigenous people from the lands stretching from Brazil to Canada were enslaved, 600,000 of them from what would become the United States. Untold numbers were stolen from communities by other means, such as boarding schools and land seizures during wars. This extensive research stems from a database project at Brown University, undertaken with tribal collaboration, for which Fisher serves as the principal investigator.

Riding into History: The Surprising Story of Sarah Keys Evans and the Fight to Desegregate Bus Travel by Amy Nathan ’67, M.A.T. ’68 (Duke, $29.95 paperback)

On a hot summer night in 1952—three years before Rosa Parks made history for challenging segregation on a city bus—Sarah Keys, a Black member of the Women’s Army Corps, refused to yield her seat to a white man on a bus traveling from New Jersey to North Carolina. She was arrested, jailed, and fined. Drawing on years of interviews with Keys, Nathan recounts the case as both biography and legal history, illuminating an understudied chapter of the civil rights movement. Keys’s landmark 1955 victory closed a loophole that bus companies had long used to maintain segregation in interstate travel.

Arachnomania: Spiders and the Cultural Work They Do for Us by Maria Tatar (Princeton, $24.95)

Spiders weave strange and wondrous webs all around us, and yet, according to Tatar, Loeb research professor of folklore and mythology and Germanic languages and literatures emerita, they have remained in the shadows far too long. From Shelob in The Lord of the Rings and Aragog in the Harry Potter series to the spider god Anansi of West African mythology and Darwin’s “little aeronauts,” spiders—equal parts horror and beauty—colonize this indulgently fun cultural study bridging nature, literature, folklore, and art.

The Flag Was Still There: A History of the American Experiment in Five Anniversaries by David McKean ’79 and M. Todd Bennett (Hachette, $32)

Celebrating jubilees may have fallen out of fashion, but in The Flag Was Still There, these anniversaries provide an opportunity for examining the progresses and failures of the American experiment every 50 years. As we look to the 250th anniversary of the United States, McKean and Bennett—who both have ties to the U.S. Department of State—revisit the inflection points of 1776, 1826, 1876, 1926, and 1976, reminding us just how fractured the nation can become, but also how it has been able to emerge from the pits of division.

P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance by Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau ’03 (Duke, $27.95 paperback)

Long before his internet-breaking Super Bowl halftime show, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—aka Bad Bunny—propelled plena, a traditional Afro-Puerto Rican genre, onto the global charts and became the first Spanish-language artist with more than 100 songs on the Billboard Hot 100. In P FKN R (a title borrowed from his popular anthem to Puerto Rico), Rivera-Rideau and Díaz place Ocasio’s activism—from cancelling lucrative tours as a form of protest to infusing his work with references to Puerto Rican independence—in a long history of Puerto Rican resistance.

Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice by Rachel Kolb (Ecco, $29.99)

In this engaging memoir, Rachel Kolb, a deaf writer and former Harvard Junior Fellow, navigates language in the deaf and hearing worlds. From the mechanics of forming the “R” sound with her mouth and her views on oralism—the emphasis on oral language through lip-reading and speech in the education of the deaf community—to the trope of overcoming disability, the mythos of Helen Keller, and the vulnerability of entrusting one’s words to an interpreter to voice, Articulate skillfully intertwines the intimate with the ideological, the personal with the universal.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, Ph.D. ’10 (Simon & Schuster, $30)

How does an author capture the layers of an artist at the height of their creative output? Lin-Manuel Miranda’s success redefining musical storytelling and his mainstream popularity make this task all the more challenging. Pollack-Pelzner’s narrative aims to debunk the myth of the innate creative genius, drawing on extensive interviews to explore Miranda’s unlikely path. It’s not surprising that this study veers ever-so-slightly hagiographic at times, given the sentimentality and exuberant energy that inhabits Miranda’s work. And for this, Hamilton fans and the children singing along to Disney’s “Encanto” are thankful.

Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI by Nina Begǔs, Ph.D. ’20 (University of Michigan, $24.95 paperback)

Can the humanities and AI go hand in hand—and have they been doing so longer than we imagined? From George Bernard Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle (popularized by My Fair Lady stage and film adaptations) to the 1960s chatbot ELIZA, Begǔs examines the Pygmalion myth and humanlike representations of AI as portrayed in literature and film. Along the way, she presents an ambitious conceptual framework she calls “artificial humanities,” in which the humanities inform AI technologies, perhaps to the betterment of both.

Nothing on Earth by Ian MacKenzie ’04 (Unnamed Press, $35)

A spy and a mother—one and the same yet ever at odds—is the star of this existentialist espionage thriller in the vein of le Carré. Anna, a former counterterrorism specialist, becomes absorbed in an international investigation into a mysterious metal with possible otherworldly origins. The search unfolds against a real-life backdrop of coups, civil unrest, and the global pandemic. Its emotional core—the tension between Anna’s career and motherhood—resonates, even if most readers’ jobs involve fewer secrets and lower stakes.

Whiplash: From the Battle for Obama-care to the War on Science by David Blumenthal ’70, M.D. ’74, M.P.P. ’75 and James A. Morone (Yale, $30)

In the battle to expand healthcare access in the United States, successes lay the groundwork for failures, and each triumph sows seeds of division. Morone and Blumenthal, a professor at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, tell the story of three presidents—Obama, Trump, and Biden—who pushed healthcare to the center of partisan politics and national identity. Culture wars, class dynamics, and the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic coalesce in this perfectly titled account of the changing relationship between the presidency and public health.

Wildness: Henry David Thoreau and the Making of an American Theology by Lydia Willsky-Ciollo, M.T.S. ’07 (Notre Dame, $35)

This deep dive follows Henry David Thoreau on an unexpected theological path. Lydia Willsky-Ciollo argues that he developed his own “theology of wildness,” exploring relation- ships among humans, nature, and the divine. Acknowledging Thoreau’s well-documented skepticism of organized religion, she describes how his beliefs differed from broader transcendentalist thought. Whether or not readers subscribe to this argument, Wildness offers many an insight and close read for the dedicated Thoreauvian.

Published in the May-June 2026 print issue under the headline “Off The Shelf,” in the Arts & Culture section.

ON FEBRUARY 4, The Washington Post laid off roughly 30 percent of its employees, including about 300 of some 800 journalists. The newspaper eliminated its sports section, closed several foreign bureaus, and ended standalone books coverage.

Founded in 1877, the Post is one of the largest daily newspapers in the U.S. today. Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos bought the magazine in 2013 and helped to modernize its digital presence, as well as aiding in its overall strategic and editorial direction.

The Post’s cuts were reportedly driven by significant financial losses from declining digital traffic and subscriber cancellations. A day after the layoffs, however, Amazon announced plans to invest approximately $200 billion over the next year in artificial intelligence, robotics, and related infrastructure.

Although Amazon’s investment plan and the Post’s layoffs concern different segments of Bezos’s business interests, the timing drew attention. Across the tech sector, large firms—including Amazon—have cut corporate and technical roles in recent years as they reorganize for efficiency, often citing AI as part of broader strategic shifts that emphasize automation.

Harvard Magazine asked Thomas E. Patterson and Nancy Gibbs, two experts on media and politics, about how journalism is changing in 2026 in response to digital disruptions including AI.

Patterson is the Bradlee professor of government and the press at Harvard Kennedy School and author of three books on mass media and politics, including The Unseeing Eye (1977), named one of the 50 most influential books on public opinion of the past half century.

Gibbs is the Murrow professor of the practice of press, politics, and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, the Lombard director of the Shorenstein Center, and the former editor in chief of TIME magazine—a role she held from 2013 to 2018, after more than three decades at the publication.

1. The Washington Post once framed itself as a civic institution willing to lose money in service of democracy. Has platform-driven distribution—such as browser searches, social media, and AI summaries—fundamentally broken that model, or did ownership lose faith in journalism’s non-market value?

Gibbs: There’s a third possibility. Henry Luce, who founded Time Inc., once observed, “Publishing is a business, but journalism never was and is not essentially a business.” Major news organizations like The Washington Post are commercial enterprises that aim to be profitable—but journalists aim to hold the powerful to account without fear or favor. That’s why newsrooms talk about a firewall protecting reporters from pressure from owners. During President Donald Trump’s first term, Jeff Bezos supported the newsroom and its editor, Marty Baron, even when this threatened his other businesses. I can’t speculate about what changed in his priorities; I leave that to the therapists. Suffice to say, the excellence of the editorial side was not matched by the business side, and one terrible decision after another drove the enterprise into the ground.

Patterson: The Post has struggled with the declining business model facing all U.S. newspapers, compounded by missteps like rescinding its Kamala Harris endorsement at Bezos’s direction—prompting nearly 10 percent of its subscribers to cancel. The paper was already deep in the red before this development, but it may have hastened the decision to cut its newsroom by a third. It’s possible the cutbacks reflect Bezos’s effort to cozy up to the Trump administration. Bezos could be the only one who knows that answer, but it’s clear, as a business decision, that shielding Amazon from government regulation easily outweighs maintaining the Post’s journalistic clout.

Notably, Bezos didn’t shut down the Post, so it retains a civic role, albeit at reduced scale. I’m less concerned about the closure of its foreign bureaus—there are better sources of international news—than the sharp reduction of the metro desk, which has long provided vital coverage of Washington, D.C., northern Virginia, and Maryland. The desk has also produced breaking stories of national importance, such as the Watergate scandal uncovered by metro reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

2. If elite national newsrooms can no longer sustain large investigative staffs, where does accountability journalism migrate?

Gibbs: I’d caution against taking the plight of the Post as a death knell for serious investigative journalism. The Wall Street Journal (owned by another billionaire) is thriving under editor Emma Tucker and regularly breaking substantial stories that enrage the White House. The New York Times has crossed 12 million subscribers. Nonprofit newsrooms like Pro Publica and open-source Bellingcat regularly provide deep accountability reporting, as do small regional outfits like Mississippi Today. And these high performing newsrooms provide the raw material for the large and growing universe of YouTubers and Substackers and creators who curate and comment on the news. The ecosystem of accountability is not just dissolving, it’s evolving.

Patterson: Across the newspaper industry, the capacity for investigative journalism has declined compared to decades past. However, a few outlets like The New York Times have maintained—or even strengthened—their investigative teams. Despite this, much accountability journalism is now produced by nonprofits, university reporting centers, and local newsroom collaborations. Organizations such as Pro Publica and the Center for Investigative Reporting fill critical gaps, often partnering with traditional media to amplify their impact. Universities offer students hands-on investigative experience while contributing to the public good, and local collaborations, typically supported by community foundations, address issues that might otherwise be overlooked. These developments are promising, yet these alternatives generally lack the scale and stable funding of legacy newsrooms. There isn’t yet an accountability crisis in journalism, but the long-term sustainability of some of these newer models is uncertain. Foundation support for journalism, for example, tends to fluctuate, and some signs suggest it has plateaued.

3. What does it say about the current media economy that Jeff Bezos can cite AI-driven search disruption to justify firing hundreds of journalists from the Post,while Amazon announces plans to spend roughly $200 billion in a single year?

Gibbs: Many people have found vivid ways to make the point that this was not a financial decision. Peter Baker at the Times noted that Bezos’s net worth when he bought the Post in 2013 was $25 billion; it is now 10 times that. His yacht cost $500 million. He earns every week what the Post was on track to lose over the next five years. I don’t think it says much about the media economy; it says more about Jeff Bezos.

Patterson: This question speaks to speculation that Bezos’s motivation was politics, not money. That could be true, but the situation underscores the fragile financial foundations of newspapers, even under wealthy ownership. In this sense, the issue extends beyond Bezos. The idea that billionaires should subsidize essential news coverage has been seen as a solution to the crisis in local journalism. However, the reality is that few wealthy individuals are eager to invest in money-losing newspapers when there are other, potentially more impactful ways to support their communities. The way Bezos and others allocate their philanthropic efforts deserves scrutiny, but reducing investment in a newspaper is not inherently uncharitable. Even with the large staff cuts, the Post remains by my calculations a money loser. Not $100 million a year in the red, but perhaps $50 million or so. While it’s troubling to see the staff reductions, it’s notable that the Post still has a newsroom of about 400 journalists—larger than nearly all other U.S. papers.

4. To what extent is AI genuinely destabilizing journalism’s business model?

Gibbs: As with so many industries, AI is a driver of innovation, efficiency, and opportunity, while carrying the potential for enormous harm. Platforms were already de-prioritizing news; now a search will yield an AI summary without taking you to the original source. We are looking at a ferocious battle over intellectual property, and journalism is just one of many litigants. It is far too soon to count winners and losers.

Patterson: Like similar breakthroughs, AI is a disruptive technology. It introduces even more competition for people’s attention in an already fragmented and hyper-competitive environment. For struggling newspapers, additional competitors contribute to a further decline in audience and revenue, giving owners yet another justification for cost-cutting. However, the story of AI is not one-sided. Unlike their slow response to the internet, many newspapers have embraced AI, leveraging it to boost productivity. AI speeds up content creation and lowers research costs, enabling newsrooms to do more with fewer staff. This comes with challenges, such as concerns about the accuracy of AI-generated content, but the benefits so far outweigh the drawbacks, both editorially and on the business side, such as through improved engagement metrics and hyper-targeted advertising. A major concern, though, is that chain-owned newspapers—and most dailies are chain-owned—may use AI’s efficiency as a reason to permanently cut staff, rather than as a tool to enhance reporting capacity. If profit becomes the prime motivation, the potential gains from AI will be lost.

5. Looking ahead five to 10 years, is the erosion of legacy outlets such as the Post more likely to weaken democratic accountability, or will new forms of journalism emerge that are better suited to a fragmented, AI-mediated information environment?

Gibbs: I don’t think you can separate the fate of mainstream newsrooms from the success and growth of independent media or AI-mediated information. Someone has to be on the frontlines, knock on doors, cultivate confidential sources, file Freedom of Information Act requests, do the hard work of finding things out. Then countless writers and robots can repackage that information in countless forms. The value and reliability of the whole information ecosystem still depend on the energy, enterprise, and expertise of the first responders. So, it is imperative that we find new ways to support journalists and those who perform the function of journalism.

Patterson: While AI will undoubtedly reshape journalism, the nature of the change remains uncertain. The imperative at the moment is finding ways to support quality reporting during the transition period. I recently studied local TV stations to explore how they might address the information gaps left by shrinking newspapers. The results were mixed, but encouraging insights emerged: stations that invested more in investigative, enterprise, and community-focused journalism were most likely to grow their audiences over the past two years. Notably, these gains were achieved not with a larger staff but by strategically reallocating staff resources. The takeaway isn’t that we don’t need new models, but that existing outlets must rethink how they deploy their journalists. Prioritizing timely coverage of important events and holding the powerful to account should be front and center. If newspapers focused their limited resources on these two missions, it wouldn’t prevent the broader collapse of their business model, but it would help reduce the information deficit until new, sustainable models for high-quality journalism can take root.

WHAT DO your gums and teeth have to do with your heart? According to a growing body of research, quite a lot.

Studies show a strong connection between oral health and cardiovascular health. For American Heart Month, Harvard Magazine spoke with Tien Jiang, a dentist, prosthodontist, and assistant professor in the department of oral health policy and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, to explore how the bacteria in your mouth, and your oral hygiene habits, can influence your overall well-being. At Harvard, Jiang focuses on prosthodontics, patient education, and health literacy.

1. What does current research tell us about the link between gum disease and cardiovascular health?

Current research tells us that the health of our mouths and bodies is connected. Gum disease, formally known as periodontal disease, is associated with increased risk of severe cardiovascular outcomes such as stroke and heart attack.

2. Why is oral health often treated as separate from overall health, and why does that matter?

Historically, some physicians in the 1800s practiced both medicine and dentistry. Dentistry at that time was seen as a trade, as dentists focused on extractions and could travel around like salespeople with tools to perform these procedures. Then, as medical and dental schools were founded in the mid-1800s in the U.S., distinct educational paths were created. The separation was made even more pronounced with the creation of medical and dental insurances in the early and mid-1900s, respectively. Each had a different approach: medical insurance provided catastrophic protection while dental insurance limited expensive services.

3. What everyday actions can patients take to protect both their gums and their heart?

Our mouths are full of good and bad bacteria. It’s not the bacteria per se that we should fear. It’s the sticky film, also known as plaque, on our teeth and gums that leads to inflammation and cavities. Therefore, the two best ways to protect our gums and heart are to remove plaque by brushing and flossing twice a day, and to maintain a healthy diet. We all know that we’re supposed to brush and floss but most of us aren’t doing it enough or effectively.

4. How else can we avoid cavities?

We know that we’re supposed to avoid candy. But what causes the most cavities are, first, frequent snacking on starchy foods like chips and crackers, and second, all-day sipping on beverages other than water, such as soda, juice, energy drinks, and coffee with sugar. Lastly, many people take multiple medications, which dry out their mouths. Reduced saliva severely affects our mouths’ protection mechanism against cavities. We work with physicians to change or adjust medications, or we must seek alternative dental treatments to protect the mouth.

5. Beyond cardiovascular disease, what does research suggest about the links between gum health and other medical conditions?

Periodontal disease has been linked to other systemic conditions such as diabetes, adverse pregnancy outcomes, and pneumonia. The common thread is inflammation and immune response. These connections affect quality of life. Connecting the mouth and body is no longer novel and needs to become commonplace. We need to do a better job of getting the word out so that everyone understands that a healthy mouth goes hand in hand with a healthy body.

FANS HEARD THE CLOP-CLOP FIRST. Six times a day, a horse climbed a series of ramps up to a 40-foot platform. The emcee asked for silence, his voice booming a half-mile down New Jersey’s Atlantic City pier. A young woman in a bathing suit mounted the horse—harness but no saddle—and waited. Sometimes, the horse took 20 seconds to advance; sometimes, 20 minutes passed. The horse approached the edge, placed its two front hooves onto the slanted platform, slid, and pushed off with its hind legs. The rider reared back, avoiding the horse’s head, and held on tight. Then: SPLASH! The eleven-foot-deep above-ground pool lost half of its water on impact. Horse and rider emerged victorious.

These peculiar diving horses served as the centerpiece of Atlantic City’s water circus for nearly 50 years. A veteran diver’s scrapbook, recently acquired by the Harvard Theatre Collection, allows viewers to imagine a day on the pier.

Elsa Rahr, the scrapbook’s creator, was born in Hamburg, Germany, and immigrated to the U.S. at age 18. She grew interested in the circus and signed up to be shot from a cannon. But she said she was “too light” and went “too far,” enduring constant bruising. Then, she met William Frank “Doc” Carver—a sharpshooter who performed with Buffalo Bill. Carver pioneered diving horses, supposedly inspired by a bridge collapsing while he was riding over it. He and his daughter Lorena (also a diver) convinced Rahr to join the troupe.

Rahr’s beauty was part of her appeal. A 1936 newspaper account of her act describes her as “hazel-eyed and pretty.” Such marketing may have played into the choice to have riders (all female) not wear goggles or helmets. Rahr said she broke her nose multiple times, but when asked about it, she did not seem to mind. She went blind later in life, perhaps as a complication of her act. (Another performer went blind after entering the water with her eyes open on a botched dive.)

Alongside photos of her act and newspaper clippings, Rahr collected photographs of her fellow performers. There were water skiers and dancers, tiger-tamers and acrobats. She married Rupert Corri, a comic actor, and the pair later staged (horse-free) shows together. An interior design certificate in Rahr’s name hints at a later, and safer, career.

Two pages from Rahr’s scrapbook will be on display at Houghton Library this summer in the exhibit All Stars: The Sensational History of Athletics as Entertainment. “Before the rise of professional sports, there were athletes, but you couldn’t really get paid to be a professional sportsperson,” says curator Matthew Wittmann. “People had these incredible physical skills, but they used them to entertain people, not to compete.” The exhibit is organized around physical and mental attributes. Rahr’s, of course, is “daring.” 

Published in the July-August 2025 print issue under the headline “Pony Plunges,” in the Treasure section.

THREE LINES, BENT AND BLUE, were painted on a creamy canvas in a day. Kenneth Noland’s 1964 abstract sensation Karma helped define “a distinctive voice in American painting” that deviated from the European standard, says Houghton curator of modern and contemporary art Mitra Abbaspour.

Noland gifted Karma to the Harvard Art Museums in 1965. But problems quickly emerged. The untreated canvas grew unevenly darker, and several irregular discolorations became more noticeable—so much so that the museum stopped displaying the painting in 2004. Conservators faced a dilemma: the technique that makes the work notable also made it difficult to refurbish.

There are two reasons Karma is hard to maintain. First, it is massive: 12 feet long and 8.5 feet tall. Second, Noland’s technique—applying a single round of synthetic paint that stained the canvas, seeped into it, and bled through the back—makes Karma materially more similar to a textile than a painting. Whereas traditional paintings (made with multiple layers of paint that lie on top of a canvas, rather than meshing with it) can be touched up with hand-rolled swabs and locally applied solutions, massive stained paintings like Karma can be harmed by such treatment.

The museum staff was befuddled until associate paintings conservator Ellen Davis presented an idea. As a graduate student at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Davis had researched a restoration technique that harnessed the power of the sun.

In September 2024, museum staffers wheeled Karma outside on a custom rig, removed it from its wooden stretcher, and laid it on a wheeled plywood board in front of the Winter Garden. For three and a half hours, as a group of students, faculty, staff, and passersby looked on, Davis sprayed the massive artwork with filtered water through a garden hose. The water pressure was strong enough to soak the water-resistant fabric, but gentle enough to prevent tearing.

Davis wheeled the painting across the lawn to follow the sun’s path, ensuring the work stayed in the shade—direct sunlight would have been too strong. She had previously participated in treatments where, relying on time in the sun alone, paintings received excessive UV light and their canvas was over-brightened, subtly shifting from warm cream to slightly cool grey.

Following its bath and suntan, Karma’s canvas is once again evenly colored and on display on the museum’s first floor. Despite years of study, Davis never learned why Noland called the piece Karma. But she has come to appreciate it, saying, “The good work that we did to take care of this—it feels like we all got a little good karma.”