FM Front Feature
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
