Columns
The Cult of the Gram
We shouldn’t let mere snapshots dictate our self worth or expectations. Believe it or not, Instagram won’t grant us salvation.
The Pandemic-Era Allure of Productivity YouTube
This is how, in the early phases of the pandemic, I stumble upon the productivity side of YouTube. Over the last seven months, I have somehow found myself spending more time watching videos that tell me how to optimize my life — how to take notes, stack habits, sleep better, focus on work — than ever before.
Selling Out: A Qualified Defense
Everyone has the opportunity to find service in their work, not just the small percentage who have jobs in the nonprofit sector.
Empathy, Religion, and the American Conscience
Interacting with a diverse set of people — interfaith, interracial, interethnic, and otherwise — normalizes and humanizes markers of difference without minimizing them, and it also makes them mutually relevant.
The Grind Never Stops: Two Centuries of Slang at Harvard
Each of us questioning just a little bit more, and acting on our doubts just a little more frequently, vastly increases the probability that we’ll be proud of the traditions we’ve preserved and proud of the ones we have not.
The Other Chan: Donation Sanitization at the School of Public Health
When Harvard received a donation to revamp and rename its School of Public Health in 2014, most press releases and public coverage focused on the more amicable face of the deal.
Pandemic, Purpose, and Viral Peptides
The coronavirus teaches us that life, whether it be on campus or at home or inside a cell membrane, isn’t inherently good or inherently bad or inherently out to get you. It just is, and there’s something freeing in that.
A New Kind of Porn is Coming
In audio porn, there’s something symbolic about being directly addressed as you, specifically, are guided to your climax. For all intents and purposes, you’re the main character — regardless of the dynamics in the story.
What the Presidential Candidates Can Learn from Student Debaters
Debates must prioritize the integrity of truth. If we limit politicians’ opportunities to fall back on ad hominem attacks and well-timed emotional stories, the voters watching won’t be as embarrassed for their country.
Beethoven Dead at 250
With classical music in such decline, especially in America, we desperately need to try something new. More Beethoven is just more of the same.
Why You Can Have Your Vote and Protest it Too
We should move towards a vision of political engagement that includes the ballot box and calls for revolution and abolition, a recognition of short term gains that does not abandon long term imagination.
Falling Short: SEIU Negotiations in Precarious Times
I need the University to put its money where its mouth is, to teach me about justice by demonstrating that it is possible, to show that it values the health and well-being of all of its community members equally — to stop falling short of this.
The Plague According to Camus
Life might never feel completely fair. All we can do, then, is take heart in knowing it’s the struggle that counts, and if we fight for life, just maybe this will be relief enough from any plague.
Hidden In Plain Sight
How on earth can our society, advanced in so many respects, so flagrantly fail to care for its elderly? What does it say about us, that we find their situation so easy to forget?
If We Hadn’t: Grief and Hypothetical Realities in the Mahabharata
The “Mahabharata” isn’t exactly describing a pandemic, or national political upheaval, but it does speak to a reality we experience this year: widespread death, injustice, confusion, and uncertainty about the future in a peculiarly fatalistic way.
Queasy Q Reviews: Our Cue to Fix Technical Teaching at Harvard
It is great that we have a mechanism for providing feedback to professors and TFs, but too often the effort students put into their responses is wasted.
Silence in Xinjiang
Harvard’s response to the Uyghur crisis epitomizes Harvard’s more general, and deeply misguided, approach to engaging with political issues.
Solitude and Serotonin
If “Walden” redefined solitude, then we can redefine loneliness ourselves, here, now. It’s an imbalance; it’s a shock; it’s the breaking down and patching together of the microenvironment we knew.
The Paradoxical Friendship Between Justices Ginsburg and Scalia
As we witness increased politicization from the presidential debate stage to the Supreme Court bench, I look to the two justices as a source of hope.
The Music School’s Dilemma
If there’s a time for colleges — both liberal arts institutions and conservatories — to support their music students with new course offerings and career preparation for a changing music industry, it’s now.
Ranked-Choice Voting from 30,000 Feet
The strongest case for ranked-choice voting is not that it offers interesting advantages. Rather, we must understand that the current plurality system is untenable and unsustainable.
Confessions Without Absolution
We need to cultivate a culture of acceptance in which we can be competitive and eager to succeed, but receptive to the reality that we might not. Rejection is not necessarily a fall from grace.
The Cost of a Harvard Education
If the primary expense is coursework, and the payoff credentials, extracurriculars, and networking, one wonders if there’s a way to give Americans the latter without the cost of the former.
You, Me, and the Spaces Between Us
Perhaps the next time there is a Zoom glitch, or a scheduling conflict, or even a loud silence in the house, I can peel away my tendency to objectify, grasp, or seek attention, and know that people far away from me are very much still present.