New Magazine Celebrates ‘the Harvard Brand'

Hundreds of "bright young things" and some of their older counterparts last night raised their glasses in honor of a new magazine celebrating Harvard University — America's pre-presidential playground, a cocoon for future billionaires, and the crown jewel of the Ivy League.

Guests sipped pomegranate martinis and nibbled on foie gras hors d'oeuvres at the Core Club in Midtown to fete the launch of 02138. A feature in the magazine's premiere issue identifies "The Harvard 100" — the school's most influential living alumni — and a number of the "100" were in attendance, including Fox News's Bill O'Reilly, constitutional scholar and New York University law professor Noah Feldman, and physicist Lisa Randall.

"I'll have to try harder next year," one partygoer, Oliver D. Cromwell, joked about not making the cut. An investment banker, Mr. Cromwell graduated from Harvard Business School in 1976.

An editorially independent magazine, each issue of which will celebrate "the Harvard brand," as one 02138 staffer put it, strikes a delicate balance between navel-gazing and Harvard-related current events coverage. Named for Harvard Square's zip code, the magazine includes a feature called "The Z-List is the New A-List," which describes the current Harvard admissions process as "an embarrassment of riches."The Harvard Corporation, what the magazine calls "a powerful, secretive governing board," gets a dramatic eight-page treatment, including an ominous illustration of seven darkened faces behind college windows.

There's also a piece about an alumna who photographs self-conscious adolescents, a back-of-the-book feature called "6 Degrees of Harvard," which this month links Katie Couric to Osama bin Laden via Harvard graduates, and a write-up about actor and producer Rashida Jones, whose photo also graces the magazine's cover.

"It runs against the expectation of what you'd expect to see in a magazine about Harvard," a co-founding editor, Daniel Loss, said. Mr. Loss, a 27-year-old graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, founded the magazine with an undergraduate classmate, Bom Kim. The magazine has been in the works for two years.

The Boston-based publication, which has an editorial office in New York, has received $4 million from Atlantic Media, the parent company of Atlantic Monthly magazine, according to the New York Observer. The first two issues of the magazine will be distributed to some 50,000 alumni of the Cambridge, Mass.-based school. Editors said they have also be been fielding some subscription requests from those who have no affiliation with the school.

"There is a sensibility that many people in the Harvard community share, but that people outside the community might have as well," Mr. Loss, said. "There's an element of intellectual curiosity, of social impact, and personal ambition."