Editor's Note

Dear FM, This weekend, it has felt like winter might already be over. But the new year of Fifteen Minutes is only just beginning, and we are brimming with joy to be bringing you its first issue. In this week’s cover story, AEP and first-time scrut writer CNS investigate the high school creative writing competition circuit. Contests like YoungArts and the Scholastic Awards offer students a chance to showcase their literary talent and can open pathways to prestigious colleges, but they can also incentivize students to commodify their identity or write about painful experiences. The jury’s still out on the competitions, but you don’t need a judge to tell you how hard our two brilliant reporters worked to put together such a sharp story — I’m so proud of them. Leading us into the issue is a trio of 15Qs: JL chats with the newly-minted Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin about economics and Barbie; JKW talks to HLS professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, who has incisive answers on everything from free speech to fast fashion; and ESK receives insights and book recommendations from Sarah Richardson, a historian who founded an interdisciplinary gender science lab. This rest of this issue takes us far from home — in time, in place, and in magnitude. JKW uncovers the strange history of Harvard’s 17th-century ferry monopoly and the Supreme Court case it eventually inspired. MAT reflects on what fossil fuels and their precarious future mean to his community in Texas’s Permian Basin, which produces most of the country’s oil and gas. Finally, in a delicate and beautiful endpaper, EMK questions her relationship to science, poetry, and approximation. Thank you to SET, LPE, JJG, AYL — and everyone else from Multi and Design who held our hands through this issue — and to our trio of guiding lights: MJH, EJS, and CY. Thank you to our execs, especially SEW for extremely efficient scrut-proofing, to our new Editors-At-Large YAK and JL for top-tier themes on their pitch emails, and of course to my co-chair KT for being on top of everything, always. A special thank you to IYG and AHL, for tutorials that make adminning feel like Mario Kart, for banana slug plushies, and for making sure we were as prepared for this role as possible. We can only hope to be as steadfast and strong for this coming year as you were in your leadership. And what a year we have ahead of us. FMLove, HD & KT