05-23-2025

Brock Walsh talks to friend and classmate Sarah Crichton about what happens when your life is a song—as in writing songs for everyone from Aretha Franklin and Aaron Neville to the Pointer Sisters, Earth Wind and Fire, and Bette Midler. Not to mention co-producing the hit “Thank You For Being a Friend” for Andrew Gold, who wrote the song for Brock.

05-21-2025

When Brad Leithauser and Rick Lyon were classmates—and virtual strangers—at Harvard, neither had the slightest reason to imagine that for the next 50 years, they would share a bond like brothers.  How did that happen? Because of the fluke discovery, in 1978, of a heartbreaking Leithauser poem that Rick turned into an equally heartbreaking song.

05-15-2025

Freshman year, Sukie Taylor hitched a round-trip ride home to Chicago with classmate Jon Hall and his brother Steve, Class of ‘73.  Looking back, she and Jon are amazed that on those long drives, they never talked about their fathers’ work together on civil rights. Five decades later they finally have that conversation about their fathers’ dedication to social justice and how it influences them to this day.

05-09-2025

Amy Spies talks to Joy Horowitz about the importance of their friendship over time and the before-and-after of living through the devastation of the Palisades fire in January.

05-04-2025

Like many of us, when Sam Anderson arrived in Cambridge, he didn’t know what he wanted to do, beyond an interest in science and art.  He talks with Adams House roommate Mark Leib about friendships and experiences at Harvard and beyond that have shaped a life in architecture in his own design practice and teaching at his other alma mater Cooper Union.

04-25-2025

Elizabeth “Libby” Poyet and Margaret Ray Reynolds talk about their shared commitment to the environment, stemming from parents who believed in all things natural.

04-14-2025

Shu Yan Chan tells classmate Joy Horowitz the story of his family, who fled the Chinese Communist Revolution in the 1950s as political refugees. Though Shu’s father had earned a law degree from Beijing University and worked as secretary to the mayor of Chongqing, he immigrated with his young family to Chicago where he became a dishwasher before working his way up to chef and opening his own restaurant. “May you live in interesting times,” he often told his son, and Shu would come to understand that expression’s dark undertones.

04-10-2025

Brock Walsh interviews freshman roommate Kevin McCarthy about his life of crime—crime fighting, that is. After Harvard, Kevin became an esteemed prosecutor on the state and federal levels, going up against the famous and infamous, including attorney Roy Cohn and his infamous sneer.

04-03-2025

Jim Gammill, with his Kirkland House suitemates Tom Feran and Ted Allen, recalls an eventful 24 hours in which they were senior-year overnight hosts to a presidential candidate named Jimmy Carter.

03-15-2025

When Lowell House roommates Will Englund and David Amory used to debate the relative sanctity of Yankees versus Red Sox, they never imagined they would reunite in Moscow 25 years later.

02-20-2025

Vic Wulsin (aka Victoria Wells) has devoted her life to creating and championing public health programs, in the States and abroad.  Now her work is under assault.

01-28-2025

Corey Raffel talks to his old junior and senior high school friend and Harvard classmate Sarah Webster Goodwin about his thrilling — and sometimes harrowing — life as a pediatric brain surgeon.

01-06-2025

From Shirley Chisholm’s Brooklyn to Pennepacker Hall, Eric Garvanne arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1971 in his family’s yellow Ford Galaxy station wagon, the drivers’ door secured with a small brown extension cord. What Eric mostly remembers is his father lugging his heavy trunk on his shoulders, beaming with pride as he met Eric’s roommate and family.

11-27-2024

“My father used to wake me up when the Marx Brothers came on the late movie on TV, so I started dressing up as Groucho when I was 10, and I never really stopped,” psychiatrist David Goldbloom tells classmate Jeff Melvoin in this episode of PasstheMic.

11-18-2024

JoAnn Manson talks to former roommate and fellow physician Gloria Wu about her work on the Women’s Health Initiative — the largest study ever conducted on the effects of estrogen on post-menopausal women.

10-15-2024

In 1975, Crimson reporter Sarah Crichton gave a critical review to a play written by classmate Peter Lawson Jones. Nearly fifty years later, Peter gets his revenge—and see who’s laughing now.

10-07-2024

Psychiatrist and author Mark Epstein talks to classmate Amy Spies about how he stumbled into a lifelong fascination with Buddhism and meditation during his freshman year—thanks to a cool TA in purple bell-bottom cords and Karmu (né Edgar Warner), a local car mechanic and self-taught healer.

07-13-2024

In conversation with Catherine Puglisi, Kim Hays confesses all about how a lifetime of international travel led to murder—and literary fame.

06-29-2024

Cora Yamamoto and Gary Mathews have loved dance ever since Laurence Welk was ‘sacred time’ in both their households. These classmates talk about Cora’s love for tango and how this dance form ‘is like life.’

05-17-2024

Sarah Crichton talks to classmate Tom Yellin in a revealing two-part interview. In Part 1 she talks about her time at Harvard and her journey after college through the literary world in New York as a writer, editor and publisher. In Part 2 she returns to reveal something else, something crucial she left out of the first conversation, and that she has never talked about publicly before.