Victoria A. Baena
Mise-en-Seine
I felt that somehow it would mean something if I knew Paris so well, that if I internalized its streets and buildings I could get at the cartography of its soul.
A Family Affair
When we were younger it was the vacation we looked forward to all year. We crammed the car with suitcases, coolers, badminton sets, groceries, only a slot left for Mom to see out the back.
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Victoria A. Baena ’14, a Magazine staff writer, is a history and literature concentrator in Mather House. Elle écrit ce qu’elle n’arrive pas à dire.
Talking Points
A friend recently tried explaining the difference between singing in French and in English.
L'Étrangère
My grandmother recalls a long-ago trip and an afternoon café, where she and her husband were caught up in a mass of students protesting in the streets. There's no college football in Paris, said their expat friend and tour guide—this is what the students do instead.
A Decade Ago, Another Occupation
The students affiliated with PSLM had hosted rallies; they had passed around petitions; they had lobbied for over four years, since the organization’s founding in 1997, in support of a “living wage” for Harvard’s workers. “A sit-in,” Elfenbein acknowledges, “is a pretty major scaling-up of tactics.” The Mass. Hall sit-in would last 21 days, garner the attention of CNN and The New York Times, and spark campus-wide debate: centered, at least among the students, more on the methods of radical activism than on its goals.
Dancing in the Street
Street performers must work among the surprises and hazards of the urban outdoors.
In Silence, Sounding Out the Words
It’s Monday night of the last week in October, and I am at a poetry reading.
Obama and Us
Today, near the end of an administration, doubts have appeared about Obama in his supporters, necessitating a new way of negotiating the divide between Obama and us.
Making Out a President's Character
Hopes were high for Abbot Lawrence Lowell in 1909, as he stood poised to replace Charles W. Eliot, class of 1853, as president of Harvard.
The Inspirational, the Intimate, and the Inane
We seem to take it for granted that graduation speeches should be personal, even intimate.
Creaming the Competition: From Ice to Slice
To Toscanini’s founder Gus E. Rancatore, Cambridge was made for the ice cream shop. “College students eat enough ice cream to keep all these stores around,” he says.
'Ulysses' Speaks: Bloomsday and Oral Poetry
Bloomsday is an odd sort of holiday. Every June 16, people around the world gather to commemorate the single day—June 16, 1904—described in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
Speeches, Soundbites, and Shopping Week
The oratorical power of a professor, we believe, tell us much more than a mere syllabus or coursepack could.
