Ideas to improve the everyday
For the third straight year, a procession of all-star Harvard faculty members dazzled and provoked their audience in 10-minute talks Thursday night that framed big questions about happiness, stem cell growth, runaway obesity, and the exploding American prison population. The student-organized event that aims “to bring big ideas back to the center,” according to co-founder Peter Davis ’12, took on the trappings of permanence with T-shirt sales, live-streaming online, a big-screen Tweet display, and on-stage interludes by The Nostalgics, a student band. Although students were not queued up in the cold like last year, thanks to a better ticketing process, members of the Harvard University Band played outside Sanders Theatre before the show, lending a festive air. The short-course format harks to the example of the TED talks, the online sensation created 28 years ago by a nonprofit to foster exchange of the latest thinking on technology, engineering, and design by cutting-edge...