Crimson staff writer

Elyse D. Pham

Latest Content


To Revel in An Asian Body

As I reflected on my own relationship to racial fetishization, I discovered that it was overwhelmingly forged through ambiguity: ambiguous interactions, ambiguous responses, and ambiguous feelings. The instances that prompted my immediate, visceral disgust felt secondary to the instances that left me uncertain, on the precipice of being shoved into a tired cultural script but clinging to the hope that I’d hold my ground.


A Summer Soaked in Nostalgia

I always loved who I was in LA; the city seemed to mark clear periods of growth, the backdrop of the coming-of-age movie that I believed to structure my life. But this time around, endless days alone replaced collective effervescence.


A Night With ASS (Adams Seance Society)

A voice pierces the silence, inquiring if there are spirits there with them. They wait with eager ears. Suddenly, it comes — a tap on the walls — faint and indistinct, but enough to send the room into an uproar.


The Sky's the Limit for Asa Akira

Whether porn reflects existing racial stereotypes or creates a monster of its own is a classic chicken-or-the-egg question. Porn and racism, most likely, engender a mutually reinforcing cycle. But Akira’s individual responsibility within this cycle is, at most, ambiguous.


A Diversified Debauchery

Final clubs were made for white men. Now, people of color — who were never supposed to step through their gates at all — are carving out communities inside them. They’re drinking their alcohol and smoking their cigars. They’re reveling in these spaces, instrumentalizing the white men’s mansions for pure fun.


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.


The Power and Powerlessness of Remote Activism During COVID-19

“You’re scattered all over the country, all over the world. You’re literally taken away from the community that you’re trying to organize in,” says Zoe L. Hopkins ’22, incoming president of the Harvard Organization for Prison Education and Advocacy. “The meaning of community organizing just changes completely.”


Research at the Intersections of COVID-19 Crisis Response

The AAPI COVID-19 Project, housed at Harvard’s Department of Sociology, comprises a team of eight researchers from multiple universities. Under Shaw’s leadership, they seek to investigate how COVID-19 — as both a virus and a social construction — is impacting Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander (AAPI) individuals and communities.