Fair Harvard May 7, 2025 But first . . . Trump meme coin: 764,000 crypto wallets lost money . . . but 58 made about $1.1 billion. Lawmakers are now formally investigating whether the $TRUMP meme coin — and a related crypto venture called World Liberty Financial, which sends 75% of revenue to the Trump family — constitute a direct conflict of interest for the president. Ya think? And now . . . Linda Greenhouse, Harvard ’68, the Pulitzer-prize winning journalist whose Supreme Court reporting you may have read, has produced The Closer You Look, The More You See. (Yours, free.) Here, she briefly describes her early encounter with worms, concluding: I recount this long-ago educational adventure for two reasons. One is to make it obvious why the title Peter Coonradt chose for this film project, “The Closer You Look, the More You See,” speaks to me directly. The other is to explain why I place such value on the film’s achievement: to place viewers in the presence of scientists who have never lost their sense of wonder at the natural world and who, unlike me, have devoted their professional lives to answering my 18-year-old’s questions of how and why. Peter writes: Dear ’68 classmates, . . . [J]ust as I was finishing editing and getting ready to send my love child out into the world, Trump landed on Harvard like a mean elephant doing a cannonball into a kid’s wading pool. That changed the meaning of the film for me. It’s still about a subject some may find esoteric but now, because of Trump, the series is also for me an act of defiance. In microcosm, it’s a film that embodies Harvard. The real Harvard. The Harvard we share and which will always be part of us. The Harvard Trump is trying to strangle. I was struggling to explain what I meant by that when our classmate Harry Lewis said it better than I ever could: << I have just watched the 12 episodes, several more than once. They are beautiful and moving. And yes, the series makes me proud to be part of an institution that can foster such ideas and the tangible materials that can make the ideas real. When people ask me what Harvard is “like,” I explain that what everyone at Harvard shares is that there is not one Harvard; there are a thousand Harvards. The trick to becoming one with the place is to visit several and find a Harvard where you feel at home. I myself kicked around among quite a few before landing in a little computer lab—I had stops in the Math Department, the lacrosse team, the Loeb Drama Center, and the Physics Department, among others. What Peter has portrayed here, with wonderful cinematography, narrative, character studies, poetry, and biography, is one of those great, precious, lovable Harvards, where most of us can only dream of feeling so at home, and yet belongs to all of us. Thank you, Peter and Linda! Harry Harry Lewis Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science emeritus >> Harvard’s new president clearly accords the anti-Semitism problem high priority. You have only to read this and the lengthy reports it links to to see that this is true. There is neither need nor justification for Trump — and Worldwide Wrestling billionaire Education Secretary Linda McMahon — to punish the world by defunding important research. But combatting anti-Semitism is not what this is about. If he can fire the FBI director and the inspectors general and the prosecutors . . . cow Congress and the law firms, the press the CEOs and the oligarchs — and the universities — he clears the way to becoming America’s Putin. America’s Orban. America’s Mussolini. That’s why I believe we should join Indivisible and support the opposition. If you find time to watch Peter Coonradt’s film, I hope you enjoy it.