Harvard

Today

Douglas Murray

The derangement of Harvard

It is 60 years since William F. Buckley said that he would ‘rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University’. Yet even the godfather of American conservatism would be surprised at how much more attractive the folks in the phone directory appear today. Harvard is currently having a major row with Donald Trump’s administration. It results from the way in which the university responded to the 7 October attacks in Israel. While the Hamas massacres were still on-going, more than 30 Harvard University student organisations signed a letter which claimed to hold the ‘Israeli

Thursday

Ian Birrell

The nerdy obsessive who became the world’s richest man

Shortly before Bill Gates’s seventh birthday in 1962, his parents stuffed their son into a button-down shirt and blazer for a visit to Century 21, a bold showcase of scientific prowess in their home town of Seattle. This futuristic fair was intended as the nation’s rebuff to Soviet Russia following the Sputnik satellite launch, which sparked the space race. The family enjoyed the new 600ft Space Needle. They also saw the Mercury capsule that carried the first American into space; Ford’s concept of a six-wheeled nuclear-powered car; and IBM’s idea of a cheap computer, costing $100,000. Best of all in the boy’s view was rattling around on the Wild Mouse

Tuesday

Nicholas Lezard

The contagions of the modern world

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point in which he explained how little things could suddenly add up to cause huge change, in phenomena as diverse as the popularity of Hush Puppies and the reduction of crime in New York City. The book achieved its own tipping point and became a bestseller. It was followed by Outliers, which proposed among other things that in order to be really good at something you had to have practised at it for 10,000 hours. This is my first shot at reviewing a book by Gladwell, so I am several thousand hours short of practice. The phrase ‘tipping

Saturday

Heather Mac Donald

Affirmative action was hurting black students

Harvard may have a slightly more difficult time poaching black students from Boston College, Miami University of Ohio, or other less elite schools in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating Harvard’s racial admissions regime. Recruiters from BlackRock and Goldman Sachs may have to suffer the indignity of recruiting their black employees from the University of Connecticut or Rice University, rather than from Stanford and Yale. But contrary to the hysterical rhetoric from President Joe Biden, the Court’s dissenting Justices, and the democratic commentariat, the doors of educational opportunity will remain wide open to black people. As many black students as before will go to college, assuming that they

Thursday

Mia Levitin

Life’s great dilemma: Either/Or, by Elif Batuman, reviewed

In this delightful sequel to her semi-autobiographical novel The Idiot (2017), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Elif Batuman returns to Harvard to follow her protagonist Selin during her sophomore year. Selin has spent the summer of 1996 teaching English in Hungary, trailing her friend Ivan. Her crush on him remains unrequited and unconsummated, but she is determined to make up for lost time by having ‘interesting love experiences’ this year. The Idiot was preceded by The Possessed, a New York Times bestseller about Batuman’s fascination with Russian literature. While her first two books take their titles from Dostoevsky, Either/Or refers to Kierkegaard’s treatise on the pros and

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

A fantastic online show of Euripides’s take on Helen of Troy

Everyone knows Helen of Troy. The feckless sex popsicle betrayed her husband, Menelaus, and ran off with the dashing Paris, which triggered the ten-year Trojan war. The Greeks were victorious but after sacking the city they went straight home again. So what was the point? Euripides’s play Helen takes a radically different approach in this Zoom production by the Centre for Hellenic Studies at Harvard. The script is crammed with enough twists and turns to make an entire Net-flix series but the running time is barely 60 minutes. Euripides opens with a narrative bombshell by revealing that Helen was absent from Troy throughout the conflict. The gods had spirited her