The Future Issue | Magazine | The Harvard Crimson

Levity

The FM Files: Harvard 2029

“You wouldn’t have come if I’d just asked you to,” the chief shrugged. I lingered. “Come on, don’t be an asshole. I’ve got an assignment from the President themself.” I sat. The President? That was big. It had been a tumultuous and scandalous 10 years, after Faust had given the reins to—wait, you know the story. I’ll stop boring you. The chief poured us both a whiskey. “Son of one of our major donors, and I mean major, just failed a class.”

FM Imagines: FM 1997 Imagining FM 2017

"Gwyneth is looking great these days—I wish I knew what she eats, and how she takes care of her skin and body."

Fifteen Jobs That Will Still Be Around Once the Robots Take Over

Will you be out of a job once the robot apocalypse hits? Probably, unless you're Coach Brady.

Around Town

Will You Still Have a Job When the Robots Arrive?

Earlier this fall, the organization hosted a panel discussion that hoped to answer a foreboding question: Will you still have a job when the robots arrive?

Coordinates: Amazon@Boston

There is only one other customer in the store, who seems to be waiting for an Amazon staff member to appear behind the counter. He turns, we make eye contact, and he looks back at his phone. Neither of us went to an Amazon pick-up location to interact with other people.

Conversation

It Takes Two: The Future of Tattoos

People want to be able to understand themselves by just looking at their bodies, rather than stabbing a needle somewhere or having to wear a device all the time.

Fifteen Minutes with Rupi Kaur

Indeed, Kaur has established herself as a very political figure. She often writes about the immigrant experience and current events, but has also stirred controversy writing about experiences that are not entirely her own.

Robo-Roaming at the Harvard Biorobotics Lab

Founded in 1990 by engineering professor Robert D. Howe, the Biorobotics Lab develops robots that can both sense and operate in dynamic, unpredictable environments.

Hey Professor: Science Fictional Future

We need ways to imagine a future that is different from the present, because the present isn't really working out all that well and because we would like the future to be different.

Bring Back The Mammoth

I didn’t really expect that this project, which is honestly one percent of my lab, would get more attention than the rest put together, which is fine. You want to engage the public on whatever aspect of science they won’t deny.

Retrospection

Apocalypse Then: Surviving Y2K at Harvard

“We were sitting there, stroke of midnight, watching it progress across the world."

Introspection

Dear Michael

You stayed at work too long. You always left the toilet seat up. You paid more attention to the TV than to me.

Editors’ Note

Some futures are scarier than others. The future of print magazine journalism? Scary. The future of American politics? Scary. The future of this fragile global ecosystem upon which our lives and those of every being who is and ever will be alive depend? Scary. Oh heck.

But the future is also wonderful. The future is full of color changing tattoos. The future is full of friendly heart-fixing nanobots. In the future, regenerated mammoths roam the tundra, science fiction is queer, and Instagram is mostly poetry.

This week, we’re thinking a lot about what the future might hold, and where FM fits into that shiny chrome-colored vision. It’s hard to imagine what our plucky handmade little mag will look like in The Age of the Robots. Then again, could the first FM editors writing the first editors’ note twenty-five years ago possibly have imagined this weird, terrifying, beautiful 2017 cyber-reality?

No matter what comes next, we’ve resolved to celebrate what has come before. After all, this is more than just The Future Issue™. It’s also our birthday. Forty years ago in 1977, two intrepid reporters decided to milk the cash cow that was print media and start a pop culture rag called, incredibly, “What Is To Be Done?” Twenty-five years ago, in 1992, a cabal of far less intrepid newspaper administrators decided to crack down on fun, murdering The What and replacing it with Fifteen Minutes Magazine, a similar but less Communist weekly supplement. Small, angry, and overwhelmingly analog, FM was born.

So let’s blow out the candles, crack open another issue, and wait for the robots to come.

Yours until Technogeddon do us part,

LEH & EKT