FM Front Feature
The Electronic Instrument Design Lab Says Goodbye to Jim MacArthur
Jim MacArthur manages Harvard’s Electronic Instrument Design Lab, fulfilling specific instrumentation requests across departments as what he calls a “short-order engineer.” After 25 years, he’s announced his retirement with a year’s notice, but he doesn’t know if a replacement will be hired.
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?
Eight International Students at Harvard, Watching America Close Its Doors
A freshman debate champion wakes up to news of his peers marching the streets of Nepal. A trio of friends become high-profile activists. A sophomore from Jakarta searches for the America she idealized as a child.
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.
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.
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: 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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
‘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.
Fifteen Questions: Glenda Carpio on Humor, Hum 10, and the Failure of “Success” Stories
The Chair of the English Department sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss rethinking the literary canon and immigrant narratives. “I was the lucky one, I survived,” she says. “What happens to those who are undone by the violence of having to be uprooted?"
With Roe in Peril, Revisiting the History of Abortion Activism at Harvard
In comparison to historical waves of activism at Harvard, today’s campus culture surrounding abortion-related issues is relatively quiet — leaving a vacuum all the more striking in the face of looming national threats to abortion access.
Fifteen Randomly Generated Seniors
From Fifteen Minutes Magazine: We always told ourselves that anyone is “interesting” if you ask the right questions. This year, we’re putting that hypothesis to the test.