Harvard Magazine: A September sampler

"Beef will become like caviar."

"Price-fixing may be useful when strong corporations and strong unions with big wages are pushing up the prices, but it has no point whatsoever when the prices are being raised by an excess of demand. As I see it, the meat crisis is the result of comprehensive mismanagement by the Nixon administration. It is still to be corrected by the former dean of the Harvard faculty....Crops have been bad this year, but no one should blame anything on God as long as you have the Nixon administration." --John Kenneth Galbraith, one of several economists commenting on the meat crisis.

Totality.

The sun would not suddenly be snuffed out in the middle of the day unless the heavens were trying to say something important....When we'd stepped off the plane at Nouakchott, several people thought they were feeling exhaust from the airplane engines. But it was just an average Mauritanian afternoon, 114 and breezy....Much of the equipment Kern had brought to Africa was homemade, including a coelostat that incorporated a bicycle chain, part of a gun mount, and lead from melted car batteries.... Total eclipses are the ideal time for Vulcan hunts, since the sun is high but the sky is dark. Fischer was going to use an enormous aerial camera from World War II to photograph the region between the sun and Mercury....Mauritania has one modern hospital. Six doctors. Four midwives. Fifty-eight secondary school teachers. But that's an improvement...."I felt that shadow come right through my skin and the marrow of my bones."   --From Darkness over the desert, a scientific adventure story by Anne Fadiman.

How to live to be 70 and never get sick.

"For some forty years I have not experienced any kind of bodily pain. I have had no colds, no headaches, no sickness, no insomnia, and if I ever take an aspirin tablet, it will be the first one; nothing to see a doctor about. I am the mother knows best."   --From a profile of Maurice Kramer '23.

I.A. Richards at eighty.

"My nominal subject was history, but I just couldn't bear history. After one term of it, I went to see my supervisor, a young and very, very understanding man, Frank Salter, and said that I couldn't go on reading history even with him. I must find something that was better for me. He was totally sympathetic, and said, 'That being the case, you must come to lunch Tuesday.'..."   --From an interview with I.A. Richards, critic, poet, philosopher, playwright, educator, and chief promoter of Basic English.

For the connoisseur of crime.

If there is a caste system for library books, then PZ is a shantytown for Untouchables, a repository for the forgotten or despised. Within this junkyard of print, however, there lies a treasure trove, shelved in among the romance and adventure and pure trash. In comparative secrecy, Widener wallows in a dazzling cumulative history of detective fiction in the twentieth century.   --From The Widener mystery tragedy, by Josh Rubins.

Mr.Sparhawk, Mr. Goldthwait, and the Hunt-Pierce HP6N.

Wheatland's problem is a common one among instrument collectors. Sundials, astrolabes, globes, telescopes, and microscopes are old favorites with antique buyers who admire the shiny brasswork, wax the basswood, and wonder what the gorgeous object was ever used for. While the stiff bidding of these amateur antiquaries has made much of Harvard's collection too valuable to risk exhibiting, their uneducated enthusiasm has depressed its worth in the marketplace of ideas. It is scarcely surprising, with more interior decorators than scientists in the field, that scientific artifacts do not attract any significant number of scrupulous scholars.   --From an account of Harvard's collection of antique scientific instruments, with photographs in color, by Christopher S. Johnson.

Women's crew.

Problem: How do you coach eighty girls who have never rowed before and never seem to be free at the same time? Solution: Spend your evenings drawing up schedules and post them in the window of the Leavitt and Peirce Tobacco Shop. Spend eight hours a day on the water, coxing("In the beginning, all John saw was arms and legs doing the wrong thing," says Charlotte Crane). Then, listen to eighty girls complaining when the schedule runs late. On occasion, allow them to attack you with water pistols.   --From an account of the Radcliffe Varsity Crew's journey to Moscow.

Fashion in the making.

While I often discern in your pages good reasons for my antipathy to Harvard, I am also grateful for the faithfulness with which you convey a sense of the University in the diversity of its surface....It is good at times to get an intimate look at fashion in the making, even when fashion has no appeal.   --Robert S. Bart in a letter to the editor.