“Awhile ago I learned a bit about dreaming from a readable little book called The Chemistry of Conscious States that was written by a man named Hobson. Until then I had considered dreams enigmas. Indeed, the cause of dreams seemed fully as mysterious to me as the movement of certain stars must have seemed to medieval astrologers before Copernicus discovered that the earth and planets revolve about the sun. But of course we all love mysteries, a fact that goes a long way toward explaining why, throughout history, we have embraced the mystery of dreams, hiring untold generations of prophets and soothsayers, and more recent generations of psychoanalysts and dream interpreters, to probe the shadows and explain what our dreams really mean.”
Jonathan Leonard, Dream-Catchers
World's Best Blogger?
harvardmagazine.comA fantastic profile about Andrew Sullivan.
“It’s a kind of internet gyroscope. I find that it orients me in cyberspace. It fends off motion sickness. It gives pleasure. I almost always feel a little better after paying it a visit, even when the news of the day is unusually depressing. There ought to be a name for what the Dish is—‘blog’ doesn’t capture it, somehow. There are many excellent blogs out there in blogland…but Andrew’s ‘The Daily Dish’ is the best.” - Hendrik Hertzberg on Andrew Sullivan
Origin of the Arts
”Rich and seemingly boundless as the creative arts seem to be, each is filtered through the narrow biological channels of human cognition. Our sensory world, what we can learn unaided about reality external to our bodies, is pitifully small. Our vision is limited to a tiny segment of the electromagnetic spectrum, where wave frequencies in their fullness range from gamma radiation at the upper end, downward to the ultralow frequency used in some specialized forms of communication. We see only a tiny bit in the middle of the whole, which we refer to as the “visual spectrum.” “
- an excerpt from On the Origin of the Arts, by E.O. Wilson
The full (and incredibly long) article available here
On the origins of the arts - E.O. Wilson - Harvard Magazine
harvardmagazine.comWe are forced to stumble through our chemically challenged lives in a chemosensory biosphere, relying on sound and vision that evolved primarily for life in the trees. Only through science and technology has humanity penetrated the immense sensory worlds in the rest of the biosphere. With instrumentation, we are able to translate the sensory worlds of the rest of life into our own. And in the process, we have learned to see almost to the end of the universe, and estimated the time of its beginning. We will never orient by feeling Earth’s magnetic field, or sing in pheromone, but we can bring all such information existing into our own little sensory realm.
Pretty Excited About This: My first Mention in Harvard Magazine
Digital Display3.9.12
At an event this Sunday for alumni—and on panels at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW) in Austin (which overlaps in part with the famous film and music festivals under the same banner)—Harvard will display diverse elements of its interactive and online activities.
Digital Harvard in Austin, an alumni event on March 11—complete with its own “digital” Harvard Veritas crest (a wry take on the engineering/nerd pocket protector)—features presentations by:
- Jeffrey Schnapp, professor of Romance languages and literatures and faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard—a cluster of digital experiments in the arts and humanities (he founded the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000, and joined the Harvard faculty last year);
- Kara Oehler, a Radcliffe Fellow and co-founder of Zeega, a Harvard Library Lab-funded system for creating open-ended, participatory documentaries;
- Perry Hewitt ’87, Harvard’s chief digital officer, who directs the University’s social-media strategy and digital communications; and
- demonstrations by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Business School Startup Tribe (an entrepreneurship clearing house), College student innovators from the “Hack Harvard” fairs associated with Computer Science 50, and other units of the University.
Perry Hewitt
Hewitt, a regular attendee at SXSW, helped to organize the alumni event, taking advantage of the number of Harvard-affiliated participants and recognizing the opportunity to convene them under a Crimson flag. In her dual capacity as digital-communications chief both for the news and public affairs operation (see the Harvard homepage, harvard.edu, and its associated social media) and for Alumni Affairs and Development (which maintains alumni ties to the University through the Harvard Alumni Association and fundraising efforts), she was in a logical position to bring everyone together.
In a conversation a day before her planned departure for Austin, Hewitt took note of the participants from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Law School, Business School, Graduate School of Design, and other entities, and characterized the alumni event as “a real One Harvard moment.” As of Friday, 400 people had registered to attend, with affiliations from throughout Harvard, the digital and venture-capital industries, and elsewhere. Between the presenters and the audience, she said, the gathering would offer a lively representation of what Harvard “brings to the table in tee-ing up innovation”—both within the academic enterprise in many disciplines, and in the wider world.
In the same conversation, Christine Heenan, vice president for public affairs and communications, said that beyond convening regular Harvard participants, the alumni program would highlight the burgeoning work in digital humanities across the University. (For in-depth coverage of the evolving digital humanities, see the forthcoming feature in the May-June Harvard Magazine, available online April 19.) She put all the Austin activity in a still-larger University context, describing the participation in SXSW as “proof points of Harvard as a center of innovation”—a theme being emphasized this year with the launch of the Harvard Innovation Lab, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences venture-capital partnership, and the recently announced presidential challenge to encourage student-led social entrepreneurship.
Harvard people making presentations at the SXSW events proper include:
Jonathan Zittrain
- Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law and of computer science and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center, on a panel entitled “Help! I Have an Internet Stalker or Blackmailer!”
- Anne Cushing, director of online programs for the Harvard Alumni Association, on a panel about “Building Community Engagement Around Open Content.” (Cushing is shown complete with cowboy hat; she will reportedly talk about the online “Justice” course and discuss—this is a practical conference—“how the team shifted focus to topic rather than brand to allow for the creation of user-generated content without negatively affecting…Harvard’s brand. The team will share the social and digital approach used to build engagement, including their ongoing strategy to leverage user-generated content to keep the course and the topics relevant. Lessons include: Making the case to loosen brand control for the sake of engagement. Maintaining brand strength when opening content. Combining online learning with social media. Managing and engaging in conversations on multiple platforms.”)
- Henry Leitner, associate dean for information technology and chief technology officer, and senior lecturer on computer science, who works with the Division of Continuing Education on its extensive online course offerings, on “Designing a Successful Distance Education Program.”
- Jeffrey Schnapp on “‘But Is It Art?: The Aesthetics of Social Culture.”
- Peter Coles, assistant professor of business administration, Harvard Business School, where he teaches “The Online Economy: Strategy and Entrepreneurship,” on a panel about “X of Y: How to Ensure Your Start-up Is Defensible.”
http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/harvard-online-at-south-by-southwest-interactive
“Western does not believe it is a coincidence that when social-welfare programs were trimmed throughout the 1970s and 1980s, large increases in crime ensued. “We may have skimped on welfare, but we paid anyway, splurging on police and prisons,” he writes. “Dollars diverted from education and employment found their way to prison construction.” Assistant professor of sociology and social studies Matthew Desmond agrees, noting, for example, that the United States serves a smaller segment of its population with public housing than do most European countries—but makes up for it in spending on prisons, which are used as de facto public housing. Says Desmond: “We’re going to house the poor one way or another.”
—Elizabeth Gudrais, “The Prison Problem”, Harvard Magazine (that last quote is pretty damning)
On Not Going It Alone
harvardmagazine.comHow powerful is the United States, and how should it relate to the rest of the world? Is America a new version of the Roman Empire? These questions are increasingly debated around the world in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq.
(Harvard Magazine, July-August 2006)
