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Power, it turns out, is in the eye of the beholder.

As we approached Harvard-Harvard pairs for the Power Couples feature in this issue, some were initially hesitant. “I should warn you that when I went downstairs to tell my husband about your story, he had fallen asleep on his recliner. Do we still count as a power couple if one of us naps in his chair on a lazy Tuesday afternoon?” one half of one of our couples wrote. Others suggested more powerful Harvard friends they thought might be a better fit.

But after hearing their stories, we knew we’d found the right group.

These eight diverse, brilliant, and, yes, powerful couples tackle familiar challenges: balancing success with the demands of family, slipping the occasional touch of romance into every-day partnerships, learning to handle the down moments with humor. We’ve picked up a few relationship tips along the way (Eliot Spitzer and Silda Wall call each other pet names on their BlackBerrys)—and a few insights into handling dual ambitions (Ian Smith and Triste Lieteau spent over a decade together getting their careers on track before they moved on to parenthood). We hope you’ll see some of your own lives in theirs.

Back in Cambridge, one half of a power couple, Harvard’s president-again Derek Bok, is shaking things up in a way that few anticipated from an interim leader. Richard Bradley delves into his background (p. 80) to provide a nuanced portrait of the president’s strengths and shortcomings. (Hint: His wife, Sissela Bok, has something to do with it.)

Elsewhere in these pages, John Sedgwick explores rabble-rouser Peter Woit’s crusade against string theory and what some say is its cult-like establishment in the scientific community, and Orville Schell looks at a changing China through Mark Leong’s prescient lens.

Other voices take center stage in our regular sections. In Smarts, where we probe some of Harvard’s most forward-thinking minds, Steven Pinker suggests that it is the Darwinists, not the creationists, who have lost the high ground in the debate over evolution. In Square, our town-hall forum, Alan Dershowitz warns Harvard against inadvertently supporting anti-Israel bias, and Lauren Slater takes on a test developed by a team of Harvard psychologists that seeks to expose our hidden prejudices. The pages of Passions move from high-society New York to the historical ruins of Afghanistan, stopping along the way to meet a pair of brothers carrying a country-smoked ham across America. As for power: Our last list, of the 100 most influential Harvard alums, piled controversy into 02138’s mailbags, real and virtual. We hope you’ll continue to weigh in—online, at 02138mag.com, by mail to our Boston offices, and, above all, through your conversations with each other.

Maybe you can block off some time after your Tuesday afternoon nap.