A friend recently tried explaining the difference between singing in French and in English.

My grandmother recalls a long-ago trip and an afternoon café, where she and her husband were caught up in a mass of students protesting in the streets. There's no college football in Paris, said their expat friend and tour guide—this is what the students do instead.

The students affiliated with PSLM had hosted rallies; they had passed around petitions; they had lobbied for over four years, since the organization’s founding in 1997, in support of a “living wage” for Harvard’s workers. “A sit-in,” Elfenbein acknowledges, “is a pretty major scaling-up of tactics.” The Mass. Hall sit-in would last 21 days, garner the attention of CNN and The New York Times, and spark campus-wide debate: centered, at least among the students, more on the methods of radical activism than on its goals.

Street performers must work among the surprises and hazards of the urban outdoors.

It’s Monday night of the last week in October, and I am at a poetry reading.

Today, near the end of an administration, doubts have appeared about Obama in his supporters, necessitating a new way of negotiating the divide between Obama and us.

A moment’s mishearing made the national news last week.

Hopes were high for Abbot Lawrence Lowell in 1909, as he stood poised to replace Charles W. Eliot, class of 1853, as president of Harvard.

We seem to take it for granted that graduation speeches should be personal, even intimate.