Harvard Magazine

Construction on Pritzker Hall, a new nine-story building funded with a lead gift of $100 million from Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Penny S. Pritzker ’81, has been underway for a year, and is expected to be complete by December 2027.

The new building is rising behind the Littauer Center for Public Administration, the Department of Economics’ current home on Cambridge Street.

Construction Proceeds on Harvard’s New Economics Building | Harvard Magazine Pritzker Hall, designed for collaboration, should be complete in 2027.

Long before it was common for psychiatrists to listen closely to children, Robert Coles insisted that their voices mattered. Through thousands of conversations with young people, he helped bring children's moral, political, and spiritual lives into public view—and transformed how generations understood childhood.

Cole, who was the Agee professor of social ethics at Harvard Graduate School of Education and professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the Harvard Medical School, passed away on June 4 at the age of 97.

In this piece, photographer and editor Alex Harris remembers Coles’s remarkable life and legacy. Harris, professor emeritus of public policy and documentary studies at Duke University, shared a long creative partnership with Coles, cofounding DoubleTake magazine in 1995 and collaborating on three books.

Robert Coles Was Most at Home on the Playground | Harvard Magazine A colleague remembers the late Harvard professor and child psychiatrist, who died this month.

Our July-August 2026 issue is now LIVE on site!

Inside: rabbit speed dating, octopus mating habits, evidence that humans are still evolving, a movement to reclaim the night sky from light pollution, highlights from Harvard University's 375th Commencement, and so much more.

🔗 Read free (and with a free accessible pdf) here: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2026/07

🎨: Cover illustration by Wesley Merritt