hefty, crystal chandelier hangs from the ceiling, casting dim light around the room. Plant-patterned wallpaper covers every nook and cranny of the space, interrupted only for plush, floor-to-ceiling emerald curtains. It’s called the “Green Room,” Julia Allison says — a deceivingly simple name for such a decadent space.

On Sept. 15, I sat down with Allison — a woman, whose mid-2000s career as a dating columnist and early internet personality led Rolling Stone to publish a book excerpt crediting her with having “invented being an influencer” — and her husband, Harvard Law professor Noah R. Feldman ’92, at their sprawling Cambridge mansion.

The two view themselves as coming from drastically different worlds, and thus appear to revel in the way they combine the intensity and serious rigor of academia with unabashed whimsy. A little more than a year ago, they read their vows at a two-part wedding: a ceremony held in Harvard’s Widener Library in June 2025 and a five-day celebration in Bali that August.

I sat down with them at the home, which they’ve affectionately dubbed the “Bohemian Embassy,” to better understand the ways they’ve merged the lives they say the world sees as an oxymoron.

Like partners in an intricate dance, Allison and Feldman move in sync. She lets down the curtains, then lowers herself into her chair right as Feldman comes in, as if on cue, with a tray of Indian food ordered from Harvard Square. At each place, a gold-rimmed plate etched with leaves sits atop another matcha-colored plate.

The two are no strangers to the public eye; after all, this is the Harvard couple whose relationship was profiled in the New York Times in 2023, and whose wedding photos were splashed across the cover of Town and Country Magazine.

“I always say,” Allison tells me, “if you don’t tell your stories, someone else will.”

***

The story of Allison and Feldman begins with the divine. In early 2020, Allison, then 39, was floating in a hot spring near Joshua Tree National Park, thinking about her purpose under the California sun. Then she heard something speaking to her.

“I got this intuition, almost like a voice from the divine saying, ‘Call Noah Feldman and ask him what the meaning of life is,’” she says. Allison picked up her phone and dialed Feldman, a law professor who had been single for nine years. The two had only met briefly through a mutual friend and had never spoken on the phone, but when he picked up, at 11 p.m. his time, she asked him about the meaning of life.

“This phone call so lit me up, so inspired me, so energized me,” Allison says, with Feldman nodding along next to her. “I just thought, who is this man? And I felt a tractor beam.”

Allison grew up within a Balinese Hindu background, while Feldman was raised Modern Orthodox. Allison is flamboyant, a “pioneer of internet fame,” and frequenter of Burning Man, while Feldman is the author of the award winning book The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State and helped advise the drafting of the interim constitution in Iraq in 2003.

As we eat in the Bohemian Embassy, Allison wears a vibrant emerald dress that matches the room around us, while Feldman sits beside her in a tan suit and a striped blue tie. The couple says the crux of their relationship is their willingness to enter each other’s worlds.

“It’s been a beautiful, expansive experience to be in a relationship with him,” she says.

Feldman says they both enjoy trying out “different kinds of worlds,” rising to the challenge of adapting to a new situation, and spending time with eccentric people. The ability to grow and accommodate one another, to become more than a sum of two parts, is what they say has allowed them to enrich each other’s lives.

Yet, this process of expansion has come with its challenges.

Early on in their relationship, Allison made it clear to Feldman that a non-negotiable condition was that he must attend Burning Man, a weeklong gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert that celebrates, among other things, radical self-expression and requires attendees to bring all their own food and supplies to camp in extreme conditions.

Feldman arrived in a straw hat and a linen shirt, trying to stick as close to his comfort zone as possible. By his own account, he was tense and out of place. He eventually agreed to wear a pair of purple Paul Smith short shorts to fit in, but he didn’t feel like himself and couldn’t fall into the festival’s rhythm.

“I was thinking to myself, ‘Oh my god, oh my god, how can I go out in public?,’” Feldman says.

Then he ran into a former Harvard classmate — someone Feldman recalled as a fellow “preppy dresser,” whom you “never saw” without a tweed jacket — similarly attired in shorts and a hat. The two doubled over in laughter, the last of Feldman’s doubts melted away.

“I realized that the whole point of Burning Man was to not be yourself,” Feldman says. It opened him up to the idea that “dressing not like yourself is experimenting with a different identity,” and from that point forward, he says, he had a great time.

The moment is also emblematic of a larger lesson Feldman says he has learned through his relationship with Allison: many of the boundaries he had assumed were fixed were actually self-imposed.

***

In 2021, Feldman asked Allison to move in with him in Cambridge.

Allison, who had lived in California for about a decade, was hesitant to return to the cold winters she knew from her childhood on the shore of Lake Michigan. So she did what she had learned to do throughout her life: She found a story that made the transition make sense.

Allison imagined herself as an ambassador traveling to a foreign outpost with a mission in mind. Feldman offhandedly supplied the name, joking that she could become “the ambassadress from the Kingdom of Bohemia to the People’s Republic of Cambridge.”

The joke stuck.

They began calling their home “The Bohemian Embassy,” and the moniker grew into a narrative framework for the life they aimed to build together.

“It’s a fantasy, but it’s a story that we invented for ourselves to talk about how we’re going to try to be open and how we’re going to try to bring people together and how we’re going to try to connect different worlds,” Feldman says.

In the Green Room of their home, Allison hosts gatherings with that mission in mind. Once, she invited their friends — many of them academics — to discuss love at a Jeffersonian dinner party. Although the couple was nervous about approaching non-academic topics, especially one as provocative as love, they were pleasantly surprised to find that guests were relieved to explore a different side of their friendships.

The couple has since turned the idea into a broader cultural initiative, also called the Bohemian Embassy. Its motto describes it as a space “where academia meets bohemia,” and its goal is to encourage people from both worlds — those more spiritually-inclined and those that write lawsuits — to engage with one another. .

That spirit was perhaps most visible at their wedding. The couple had two elaborate weddings last year: a ceremony on campus at Widener Library, and, two months later, a five-day affair in Bali that their invitation billed as “Where Academia meets Bohemia, Burning Man meets Black Tie, Bougie Luxury meets Balinese Rain Forest, Mystical Spiritual Vortex meets Rainbow Disco Ball Camp.”

At Widener, Allison wore a Jimmy Choo gown. This ceremony was co-officiated by U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who became friends with Feldman when both were Rhodes Scholars at Oxford, and Rabbi Jessica Kate Meyer. The reception dinner that followed was held at their home in the Green Room.

Allison gushes about Booker’s remarks, in which he described “a love that is oriented towards growth and expansion.” The couple jokes that their wedding might have inspired Booker — who got married himself only a few months later.

At the rehearsal dinner in Bali, Feldman wore a pink linen suit with a six-foot python draped around his neck, while Allison held a black masquerade mask to her face. The guests included Yale’s Whiffenpoofs, and synchronized swimmers flown in from Jakarta performed.

Feldman says Allison has taught him that a story is not simply a way to describe one’s life.

“People make the mistake of thinking the story is the end in itself,” he says. “It’s not. The story is about how it makes you feel in yourself by seeing your life and your possibilities in a particular way.”

For Allison, those possibilities are never fixed.

“There is no such thing as a static human life,” she says. “We are dynamic beings, ever evolving.”

She believes different stages of life require different narrative frameworks. What should remain constant, she says, are the values underneath them — for her, love, health, spirituality, freedom, sisterhood, and nature.

***

Throughout the interview, I watched as Allison gestured with her hands wildly, her curls, which were done in her signature side part, bouncing as she spoke. Feldman smiles softly alongside her. He chews and speaks more slowly, his attention on Allison, content to listen and chime in when needed.

Eventually, the doorbell rings, and I follow them out of the dining room.

A Crimson photographer stands on the doorstep, a camera dangling from her neck. Allison perches on the couch in their home library, posing, while Feldman springs into action. assembling a ring light that keeps flopping over. Allison tells him to put the light right in front of her.

As she directs Feldman and the photographer, I’m reminded once again of Allison’s past — how she drew intense scrutiny and backlash from the internet as she heralded a new age of influencer-stardom and infamy in the early 2000s, and learned how to live under the enormity of the public eye.

Allison is comfortable in front of the camera, yet highly deliberate: She poses meticulously, hands flowing and angles changing, as if on a red carpet, the next shot always meant to be better than the last.

— Magazine writer Anne Sun can be reached at [email protected]