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6 Degrees of Harvard
By CHARLES McGRATH
HARVARD University spends somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million every year to protect its brand name — to keep other institutions from billing themselves as, say, the Harvard of Dog Training Schools or the Harvard of Pilates Teacher Training Programs. This is one of many interesting facts to be gleaned from a perusal of a new magazine called 02138.
The magazine takes its name from Harvard’s ZIP code, though its own offices are actually across the Charles River, in 02114. It celebrated its first issue with a party in New York last week — in ZIP code 10022, to be precise. This is not as confusing as it seems, because in the minds of the editors 02138 is apparently a state of mind, a sensibility — a Harvard sensibility — more than an actual ZIP code.
“The collective consciousness we aim to tap stretches across not just ZIP codes but continents,” the editors write. In other words, you automatically belong to 02138 if you went to Harvard, wish you did or just like reading about the kinds of famous people who went there.
The magazine is not an alumni magazine, exactly. Harvard already has one of those. It’s more nearly a celebrity magazine, about well-known people who happen to have spent some quality time in 02138 — not at Harvard College necessarily but perhaps at the law, business or medical school (even though, strictly speaking, neither the business school nor the med school is in 02138), the graduate school or the Kennedy School of Government.
Generations of Harvard types used to think that their degrees alone conferred on them a certain degree of celebrity, but 02138 suggests that even among Harvard alums there is a caste system. There are the ordinary grads, who pass through Harvard Yard by the thousands every year, and then there are what the promotional material for 02138 calls “Harvard influentials,” who deserve a magazine of their own.
The first issue includes a section devoted to Harvard’s 100 most important alumni, and the list includes not just wonks but hotties like Natalie Portman (Class of 2003) and Matt Damon (Class of 1992). The No. 1 alumnus is Bill Gates, even though he, like Mr. Damon, didn’t actually graduate, and No. 100 is William R. Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions, who is therefore de facto gatekeeper of the 02138 preserve.
The television actress Rashida Jones (Class of 1997) doesn’t quite make this list, but no doubt endeared herself to the editors by agreeing to appear on the cover wearing a suit jacket and tie but no shirt.
There is also a briefer list of embarrassing alumni — not, as it turns out, red-faced rah-rah types who have been photographed drinking too much at the Yale game but, rather, big-time crooks like Jeffrey Skilling, the former chief executive of Enron, who have fleeced people in grand, noteworthy style.
And in a feature apparently borrowed from celebrity book publishing, the magazine has an index listing the name of every Harvard grad mentioned in the issue, so that second-string alums, like, say, Abdullah Binladin, half-brother to Osama bin Laden and holder of two law degrees, don’t have to read every word just to see if they rate a notice.
IN the magazine trade, 02138, which receives financing from Atlantic Media, the parent company of The Atlantic Monthly, is what is known as a luxury lifestyle book. Luxury lifestyle books, like Hamptons Magazine, Palm Beach Illustrated and the subtly titled Rich Guy, are magazines that are essentially about the people who subscribe to them (or, in many cases, who are given complimentary subscriptions) and are easily identifiable by their thick, glossy paper and ads for Polo, Prada and the kind of diamond jewelry that is usually called “encrusted.”
In this context, the first issue of 02138 is a little disappointing, paper-wise (it’s matte finish, rather than glossy), but it does display in the first three pages a diamond ad, one for Polo and one for an outfit called Marquee Concierge, a “global network of luxury lifestyle specialists.”
Unlike some of the other magazines in this category, 02138 also contains actual articles, including one about the unfortunate effects of consumer culture on young American girls. In fact, 02138 is sufficiently literate (despite a few dangling participles) that if it wouldn’t bring on a lawsuit, one could call it the Harvard of the luxury lifestyle magazines.
Like all luxury lifestyle magazines, it excites feelings of envy and inferiority while also sending out a lifeline of reassurance to those fortunate and discerning enough to be reading the magazine in the first place. Henry Adams (Class of 1858) famously wrote that “the chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.” Harvard, he added, “taught little, and that little ill,” and its great virtue was that it didn’t leave a real stamp on graduates, only a “water-mark.” And a ZIP code, he might have added, if only ZIP codes had been invented then.
