Arts & Culture
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17 books to soak up this summer
Harvard Library staff recommendations cover romance, fantasy, sci-fi, mystery, memoir, music, politics, history
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What to make? Let the wheels decide.
‘Randomizer’ gets creative gears spinning in ceramic studio
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Writing to the beat of your inner Miles Davis
Jesse McCarthy sees Black authors during Cold War philosophically opting for none of the above, and improvising their own way
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A modern approach to teaching classics
Martin Puchner is using chatbots to bring to life Socrates, Shakespeare, and Thoreau
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Stumbling through fog, disillusionment of 1970s
Francine Prose’s memoir trails fleeing 26-year-old novelist to S.F., her attraction to deeply troubled, fading counterculture hero
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Finding new art in unexpected places
Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies loaning pieces from collection to areas around campus to widen exposure, spark reconsideration
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The ongoing allure of Tolkien
In a question-and-answer session, Stephen Mitchell, Harvard professor of Scandinavian and folklore, explores the lasting appeal and the inspirations behind author J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic tale “The Hobbit.” Director Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the book for the big screen opens in the United States mid-December.
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Good, but never simple
Delivering Harvard Divinity School’s Ingersoll Lecture at Sanders Theatre, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison discussed concepts of good and evil in her work and that of her contemporaries.
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Girls who rock out
A film and a discussion at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library highlight Girls Rock Camp, which teaches girls and young women during summer sessions to find their inner musicians, shed some inhibitions, and celebrate themselves.
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An ancient statue, re-created
Harvard’s Semitic Museum is employing a high-tech response to the destruction of 3,300-year-old figures, using 3-D scanning to repair a ceramic lion that was damaged by the Assyrians.
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Lincoln’s dimensions
Screenwriter and playwright Tony Kushner sat down with President Drew Faust to dissect Abraham Lincoln’s legacy and talk history, politics, and writing after a Harvard-sponsored screening of his new biopic, “Lincoln.”
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Apocalypse now? Hardly
During a sometimes tongue-in-cheek lecture on Wednesday, Professor David Carrasco discussed the historical origins of humankind’s periodic preoccupations with the apocalypse.
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Shadow and substance
Harvard alumnus T.S. Eliot published 10 poems in the student-run literary magazine The Harvard Advocate between 1907 and 1910, including the one below.
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Disruptive music
Harvard Professor Ingrid Monson during a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study is exploring the music of Malian Neba Solo.
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To understand, make a map
“Cartographic Grounds,” an exhibit of new and old mapmaking at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, intends to inspire a new generation of designers to draw, with precision, what they see, and to present, with art, what they imagine.
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Note taking in a clickable age
A recent Radcliffe symposium explored the history and future of note taking.
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Poetry in the making
David McCann, the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature, is spreading his love of sijo, a poetic form.
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Creating a whole from fragments
A show by artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, which examines issues of family and the Afro-Latin experience in America, opened Thursday at the Neil L. & Angelica Zander Rudenstine Gallery in the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.
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Exorcising the curse of knowledge
Author Steven Pinker told a packed audience what is wrong with so much academic writing: It’s filled with abstract language, clunky transitions, clichés, “zombie nouns,” and “compulsive hedging.”
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A collection unlike others
Harvard’s newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection is the largest of its kind in the world, centuries of art, literature, and popular culture artifacts related to the chief avenues to altered states of mind: sex and drugs.
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When jazz was king
Three local jazz figures came to Harvard to explore their passion for the music and its future as a singular American art form.
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The art of the possible
Artist Kerry James Marshall’s massive woodcut print, on view at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, challenges the artistic status quo.
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The designing woman
Radcliffe graphic designer Jessica Brilli does what she loves and loves what she does, using her artistic talent in her personal and professional life. A reception will be held Nov. 8 from 5:30 to 7 p.m.
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Found in translation
French historian Roger Chartier, whose work examines the history of books, publishing, and reading, explored the creation of literary archives and the appearance in the 1750s of authorial manuscripts during a talk at Radcliffe. “Take Note” will “consider the past and future of note taking on Nov. 1 and 2.
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‘Hidden Lake’
Josh Bell, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English, reads his poem “Hidden Lake.”
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‘While Josh Sleeps’
Josh Bell, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English, reads his poem “While Josh Sleeps.”
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For whom Josh Bell tolls
Poet Josh Bell, the new Briggs-Copeland lecturer, calls on the spirit of rocker Vince Neil in his latest poems.
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In on the act
More than 30 collaborators, including four Harvard undergrads, take the stage in the American Repertory Theater’s (A.R.T.) production of “The Lily’s Revenge,” at Oberon through Oct. 28.
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Evidence of greatness
“A Storied Legacy: Correspondence and Early Writings of Joseph Story,” online and at Harvard Law School, goes deep into the life and work of the scholar, best-selling author, and Supreme Court justice.
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The art of saving art
Works by Le Corbusier and Joan Miró are back at the Carpenter Center after painstaking repair work by conservators at the Weissman Preservation Center.
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Under the skin
Participants in a Harvard panel drew from their own experiences in a look at life for mixed-race families in the U.S.: “American Masala: Race Mixing, the Spice of Life or Watering Down Cultures?”
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From concerts to context
Cultural historian and author Joseph Horowitz offered hope for the future of classical music orchestras in the form of innovative partnerships and collaborations.
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The epic of Hadzi
The stone sculpture “Gilgamesh” by the late Professor Dimitri Hadzi, who died in 2006, was donated to Harvard’s Mineralogical and Geological Museum by his wife, Cynthia.
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Future man
“Tectonic Visions Between Land and Sea,” at Gund Hall through Oct. 16, is a room-filling, eye-filling Kiyonori Kikutake retrospective.
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The sounds of nature, as music
The Woodberry Poetry Room hosts an evening of forest recordings and verse about nature, twinning sounds with wordplay.
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Back to Birmingham
Historian Diane McWhorter, a Harvard fellow, finds a surprising nexus between the racial segregation of Birmingham, Ala., in the early 1960s and some of the attitudes of the Third Reich.