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Technology, Paternity, Patriarchy
… “All the decisions we make in our most intimate lives…about who … by technology,” contends Debora Spar. A Baker Foundation professor at Harvard Business School, Spar was president of … the creation of marriage at the dawn of agriculture, to the rise of feminism in the twentieth century, to the legal …
Issue: March-April 2019
Trade Cards in the Age of Invention
… In the United States, the late nineteenth century was an age of … … 223 … A nineteenth-century advertising medium traces the rise of consumer culture. … A nineteenth-century advertising …
Issue: July-August 2021
Plumbing the Deep Sea
… Biological Laboratories, biochemist Peter Girguis frowns at the pressure vessel in his hand. The machined titanium cylinder, about the size of a French press, gleams as he works to release the cap, … plumes. Working from a research ship at the East Pacific Rise, he brought the delicate creatures up. “He was one of …
Issue: May-June 2023
Trafficking in Chance
… The dozens of ATM machines lining the entrances to the Mohegan Sun casino … slot displays that allow wagers and blood-alcohol levels to rise together. Slot machines are the profit centers of …
Issue: July-August 2002
The Democracy of Everyday Life
… It started with a bully . “The noise bully,” Nancy Rosenblum calls him, a man who lived in her Cambridge loft building years ago and tormented the family next door … Winthrop’s argument. “The democracy of everyday life rises from the ground of day-to-day reciprocity and …
Issue: September-October 2016
Historic Threads
… By the time the talented and shrewd Samuel Slater arrived in … Rhode Island, in 1790, the race to mechanize was on. Groups of carpenters and mechanics, funded by businessmen, were … that also led to the influx of immigrant workers, the rise of labor unions, widescale railroad infrastructure, and …
Issue: May-June 2020
All Eyes on China
… T minus two weeks to the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in China. Amid … "PSB [Public Security Bureau] personnel may conduct surprised [sic] inspection of our property without notification …
“Global Whitemanism”
… a dark book about a dark subject. Walter Johnson burst onto the historical scene with the 1999 publication of his influential Soul by Soul , which positioned the slave … cotton prices that might drop, shipping costs that might rise, credit that might evaporate, paper money that might be …
Issue: September-October 2013
All Eyes on China
… T minus two weeks to the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in China. Amid … "PSB [Public Security Bureau] personnel may conduct surprised [sic] inspection of our property without notification …
Off the Shelf
… and Warlike Democracies, by William S. Smith (University of Michigan, $70). Harvard, widely known as a liberal … managing director of Catholic University’s Center for the Study of Statesmanship, plumbs the political thought of … promotion of the habit and product, through the rise of activist citizen nonsmokers who waged a fight for …
Issue: November-December 2019
50 Years of Social Studies
… In 1960, the idea that Harvard undergraduates could concentrate in a … science, sociology, history, and philosophy, instead of choosing just one of those disciplines, was … she deemed “intimate ethnography,” which has given rise to studies such as ethnographies of kidney dialysis …
A Toolkit in 0s and 1s
… In the late 1930s, Harvard graduate student Howard Aiken was dreaming of a computing machine. His doctoral thesis in physics … from basic science to advertising; already, it has given rise—via complex computational models, coupled with …
Issue: November-December 2013
Climate Change Solutions?
… Thanks in part to photographs of shrinking glaciers, news reports on the devastation caused by fierce storms, and the Nobel … plants. It might also, in theory, benefit coral reefs. The rise in CO 2 levels has made the oceans more acidic, a …
Issue: May-June 2008
The World’s Costliest Health Care
… L ONG BEFORE the presidential primaries, or a paralyzing pandemic, … by the national elections, that mattered to the future of the country—and that would probably be addressed … terms of health value received for dollars spent, may surprise you. It has certainly proven resistant to political …
Issue: May-June 2020
“The Perfect Sheet”
… Matt Gilmore sits straight up on the Zamboni’s elevated seat, his left hand guiding the … back. He leans leftward, his eyes trained on the few inches of space between the vehicle and the boards. Hitting the wall with the five-ton machine would be one of the worst things he could do, but his 14 years of …
Issue: March-April 2020