Editor's Note

Dear FM, Not to say the world is ending, but the world is ending. There was an earthquake in New York; there’ll be a solar eclipse on Monday; it was raining, hailing, and snowing (??!?!?!) these past few days here; and I am writing this closeout on (gasp) a Sunday while The Crimson’s admin site is down. Is the apocalypse upon us? I’ll let the evidence speak for itself. With trying times often comes ~comedy~, and that is the subject of this week’s scrut by AC and TNR. Witty and incisive, it is an exploration of how students on campus engage in comedy and navigate the broader social forces that impact what they deem appropriate to joke about. As they write, “The audience has their dispositions, but the buck is then passed to the comic: what should you do with the tastes of this audience? And then there’s the more interesting question. What do you do?” As you read their scrut, think about those questions. It’ll be extremely illuminating of the various social tensions underlying what it means to engage with and do comedy. Going along with the apocalyptic theme, XSC strikes a double-whammy with an inquiry and a retrospection. In the former, she questions the extent to which privacy has, in some ways, become at odds with friendship through the common use of Find My to track others’ locations. In the latter, she explores the history of the Social Museum Collection, which was criticized for its categorizing of human beings. Still, not everything is doom and gloom. In fact, some things are even on the come-up, like my.harvard, whose makeover EDDPT outlines through her conversations with some students working with HUIT to revamp the website. If you want even more wins, IYG offers us advice for writing a strong grant application by writing one herself — for very posh, definitely not exorbitantly-priced research on the Royal Family. And keeping up our streak of strong profiles, YAK talks to Eva Shang ’17 on dropping out, being a hedge fund CEO, and storytelling. SSL sits down with Jazz Jennings ’25 to learn about how she navigates life at Harvard after being a public figure for so long. From abroad, SJ talks to Adam V. Aleksic ’23 about etymology, being an influencer, and Internet slang. Finally, wrapping our issue to a close, DH reflects on her Kurdish-Syrian identity through an endpaper on her relationship with her mother’s language and culture. It is as honest as it is tender, a nuanced and genuine exploration of heritage and family history. And with that, happy apocalypse-era reading! FMLove, HD + KT