Berry Chantillyification

Must a birthday cake be unique?

Scooting in Circles

Scooters were not always villains.

What of Duty?

In these intimate salons we spoke of art, politics, history, war, and family, but it was this most grandiose of topics that so eluded me. What of duty?

Making Its Mark

What compelled me, in the herculean mass of things, was a wooden stamp: smaller than the size of my palm, with a knobbed, black lacquered handle and a cherry-red stained body.

The Educated Stay-at-Home Mom: Ssonia Ong, Womanhood, and Balancing Career

Young women who hope to build careers and raise families often grapple with how to do both. For women pursuing higher education, those competing goals raise questions about what a degree is for.

Muscle Man and Me

“Embarrassment,” Austin Butler says, “is an under-explored emotion.” What does it mean to explore it for ourselves — and for others?

Literary Criticism for an AI Age

In my humanities-dominated circles, I risk being labeled a heretic by admitting that I think AI prose can be quite skillful, often better than what most college students are capable of.

Trust the Ultra-Process

We Americans love to talk the talk, but we keep chomping on burgers, guzzling sodas filled with corn syrup or aspartame, and munching on fries. At this country-wide drive-through, my car is first in line.

Chucking Out HOLLIS: Harvard Library's New AI Tool and the Mess of the Research Process

Undoubtedly, the Collections Explorer exposes me to the nooks and crannies of Harvard Library’s vast collection in ways that would have taken me hours to uncover on my own. Yet there is something troubling about how the tool smooths over the entire research process. Not only does it surface sources for you, it interprets them with tidy AI summaries that make it dangerously easy to accept, skim, or skip over a source entirely.

MAHA’s Milk and Other Melodramas

From gold toilets and red hats to Versailles-adjacent ballrooms, MAGA is recognizable as much through its imagery as through its politics. And for MAHA, one symbol rises above all others: whole milk.

We’re All Chinamaxxing

Sometimes the mask feels like it fits, and other times it doesn’t.

The Universal(ly Replicable) Mind of Bill Evans

The notion that one could make a generative AI model that sounds like Bill Evans, that an act of such unique human creativity might be automized, is unnerving. To make an AI music generator “play like Bill Evans” is actually a rather strange thing to say, because how exactly does Bill Evans play?

The Stories We Tell About Food

One hopes that as we reach adulthood, these just-so stories about food become fuzzy — more nuances, spectra, and uncertainty. The world is complicated.

To Substack Or Not to Substack

What brings all of these people to this platform for writing? Are we witnessing the emergence of a new public forum? A newly accessible location for language? What does the popularity of Substack as a less established, institutional space for writing, even at so established an institution as Harvard, mean?

The first step of signing up for a Substack account is to select 3 topics from a set list, so the algorithm can recommend Substacks that fit your interests.

The first step of signing up for a Substack account is to select 3 topics from a set list, so the algorithm can recommend Substacks that fit your interests. Clicking on most of these options expands them into subcategories—if you’re interested in “Literature,” for example, you can choose whether you are more interested in “Book Clubs” or “Literary Criticism.”

The Great Leveling

Advanced AI models pose unprecedented challenges to Harvard’s meritocracy. What comes next?

The Meme-ification of News

Humor as a coping mechanism is nothing new, but only now has this copium infiltrated our media ecosystem to such a radical extent.

An Ode to Beli

Reviews as means to memorialize an experience are older than history.

Lamonster Aesthetics

Beyond the aesthetic of the library itself, the very concept of a “Lamonster” suggests a culture of studiousness that can become obsessive.

You Are the Internet Observing Itself

John Green and the meme diet of cyborgs.

The Core of Corecore

Jonathan Larson and the Difficulty of Meaning-Making in an Online World

Corecore Graphic

Cringe Is Sooo Cringe

Timothée Chalamet and the Coming-of-Age of the Internet

Outsourcing Our Humanity

Though artificial intelligence is advertised as an extension of our capabilities, it is, in reality, the amputation of our minds.

Why Break Up?

Everyone tells you to break up with your high school sweetheart. But as this advice is handed down, it carries an air of absolutism.