Crimson staff writer

Kelsey S. O'Connor

Latest Content


The Word: Final

​When I was 5 years old, my parents took me to a Fourth of July fireworks show, and I asked whether every third explosion was the grand finale. I wanted to show off my new vocabulary words, but I didn’t realize that it would mean the end of the show. As we stood in a field in upstate New York, necks straining backwards to watch the colored explosions, vibrations travelled from my feet to my eardrums. They lingered there in the car on the way home.


Ben Lerner & Geoffrey O'Brien

The second reader dresses the way one might imagine a thirty-something professor and MacArthur Fellow would: He wears a collared shirt peeking out of a charcoal sweater, with black jeans tucked into boots. Unmistakably arched eyebrows confirm that this is Ben Lerner.


Halloween Organ Recital

As I walked across a quiet Harvard Yard, I looked up to see the lit Memorial Church steeple and a waning moon behind it. With Halloweekend looming in the temporal distance and having missed my annual viewing of “It’s a Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” I was in desperate need of some ghoulish festivity. As I entered the dark and crowded church, the audience was already enraptured by the haunting sound of a powerful organ.


Retrospection: Professor Eugene Rochow

Before Powerpoint and Keynote appropriated the term “slide” to the flashy, digital rectangles that we dread in Monday morning lecture, slides were actual panes made out of plastic and glass. Professors would insert them into a slide projector and give their lectures.