FM Front Feature
Harvard’s Funds Are Back. Can Its Scientists Trust the Government Again?
With funding at a constant risk of revocation, Harvard is not out of the clear — and researchers are still fighting for their futures.
What Was Lost in the SEAS Layoffs
The news of the layoffs came in a scheduled message from the dean. Around 7:40 or 8 a.m., Yoon received another email from his manager requesting a meeting — he took it as another bad sign. He’d been setting up equipment for his course when he had to step away for the Zoom call.
Where Does Harvard’s Orientation for Activists Fit In Now?
With the Trump administration cracking down on diversity initiatives and administrators showing less tolerance for campus activism, it is unclear whether the program — as decades of students knew it — has a place in Harvard College’s future.
The Unraveling of the New England Primate Research Center
For 50 years, the New England Primate Research Center pioneered research in HIV, Parkinson’s, and addiction. But as a series of animal misconduct allegations eroded the center’s legacy, Harvard, the Medical School, and the NEPRC itself struggled to control a slow collapse.
Hacking HUDS with Claire Saffitz
We can’t take full credit for the idea of asking Saffitz to zhuzh up some everyday fare.
Sanjna: Office Hours with The Crimson
Sanjna N. Rajagopalan ’26 — known professionally as Sanjna — kicks off the first installment of The Crimson’s newly launched concert series, Office Hours. Sanjna accompanies her smooth vocals with graceful piano through four original songs and a cover of “Hard Place” by H.E.R.
Harvard’s Taylor Swift Scholar on “The Life of a Showgirl”
For Harvard English professor Stephanie Burt, “The Life of a Showgirl” is not, as it was for me, a confusing, Travis Kelce-themed departure from the artist I’d known and loved most of my life. Rather, Burt says, it’s a retrospective.
Love and the Law: A Look at Polyamorous Camberville
In 2020, 11 Somerville city councilors drafted an ordinance for domestic partnerships, previously nonexistent in the municipal code. As they were finalizing the legislation that would define domestic partnerships between two people, city councilor J.T. Scott asked a modest but far-reaching question: why only two?
The BerryLine Line Lines the Street and It’s Berry, Berry Long.
The sheer length of the line has caused many to scratch their heads and wonder: what changed?
The Theory, Born at Harvard, That Could Remake Right-Wing Jurisprudence
Over the past five years, common good constitutionalism has taken tenuous root in elite legal academia. It’s now beginning to find its way into courtrooms. But scholars remain divided on its potential to reshape the legal landscape — and whose “common good” it seeks to advance.
Scientists and the Face of God
I believed in science, but I also believed in agency. To think of myself as a machine driven by chemical reactions beyond my control felt outrageous. I knew myself to be more than just a body. I wanted to believe that I was also a mind.
Fifteen Questions: Alfredo Gutierrez Ortiz Mena on Constitutional Backsliding, Counter-Majoritarian Courts, and Tenoch
The former justice of the Mexican Supreme Court sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss his return to Harvard Law School, recent changes in the Mexican judicial system, and his favorite historical court opinions.
Second Chance
She was taking commissions, she told me, off WeChat to fund her studies. I listened to stories about her strange clients, whom she called da laoban — in English, “big boss” — and her favorite artist exhibitions when she suddenly asked the terrible question: Have you drawn lately?
Fifteen Questions: Spencer Lee-Lenfield on Translation, Keats’s Odes, and HUDS Dumplings
The Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss the art of translation, returning to Harvard, and HUM 10.
Can Privilege Be Taught? Beacon Academy Thinks So.
Staff and alumni say Beacon changes the trajectory of its students’ lives. Some wonder what parts of their identity they may have to give up in the process.
Visiting your internet-free cafe won’t satiate my bottomless hunger for brainrot
I’m more certain than ever that memes are at the top of my food pyramid, and I’m disillusioned from any notion that matcha and mousse might sufficiently correct my diet.
Fifteen Questions: Curtis T. McMullen on Shared Truths, Unsolved Problems, and How to Illustrate Infinity
The Cabot Professor of Mathematics sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss life lessons from mathematics, the challenges of formulating good questions, and his work visualizing curved space.
The Man in the Middle
Yi-An Huang ’05 is Cambridge’s eleventh city manager, and he sits atop a bureaucratic machine that employs nearly 4,000 staff. Every pothole that gets fixed, every police call that is made, and nearly every city dollar that gets spent — all of it, eventually, can be traced to the man who sits in a corner office on the first floor of City Hall.
Ed Childs Didn’t Plan to Come to Harvard. After 50 Years, He’s Still Organizing Its Workers.
Over a half-century of organizing, he has seen the union through two strikes, participated in dozens of demonstrations, and traversed the globe in search of other workers’ stories.
The Weight of Lightweight Rowing
It is an open secret that lightweight rowing can promote disordered eating. But the category persists as a collegiate sport, and Harvard is one of the few schools that offers it.
‘Killing a Generation of Scientists’: Two HMS Researchers on the Toll of Funding Cuts
Harvard School of Public Health professor Nancy Krieger ’80 tells a similarly sudden story. At 5:45 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 28 — the evening that the first terminations began — Krieger received a letter from the NIH saying that her grant, which funded a study on ways to analyze the impacts of discrimination on health, had been canceled.
Fifteen Questions: Carissa J. Chen on Poetry, Harvard’s History of Slavery, and the Old Jefe’s Location
Carissa J. Chen ’21 talks to Fifteen Minutes about Harvard's legacy of slavery, pursuing a Ph.D., and creative writing workshops.
Can Fenway Health Meet the Moment?
For years, Fenway Health has faced down financial insolvency and prolonged union negotiations. Now, it must contend with a new challenge: a federal government hostile to its founding mission as a community-based LGBTQ health center.
Flipping the Script on @askharvardstudents
Sean Park’s Instagram success seems almost obvious in hindsight. His content sits at the intersection of short-form street interviews and online college advice — two genres that have exploded in popularity in recent years. Add in the allure of the Harvard brand, and it seems a bulletproof concept for virality.