Crimson staff writer
Benjy Wall-Feng
Latest Content
What is Going On With Effective Altruism?
“Most of us want to improve the world. We see suffering, injustice, and death and feel moved to do something about it,” the Harvard EA website says. “But figuring out what that ‘something’ is, let alone actually doing it, can be a difficult and disheartening challenge. Effective altruism is a response to this challenge.” Can it live up to that goal?
Fifteen Questions: David Atherton on Japanese Literature, Creativity, and Remembering to Breathe
The literary scholar sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss Edo-period writing and his experience returning to Harvard as a professor. “How can we find and contribute and generate interesting humanistic questions and different ways of thinking about things like literature and culture,” he says, “that are not bound by region at all?”
Poptropicapitalist Realism, or Love at the End of the World
Poptropica was profoundly uninterested in explaining why your character could jump, barter, and wheedle their way into saving the world. For me, as a kid, this was the coolest thing ever.
Fifteen Questions: Morgan Ridgway on Urban Indigeneity, Solange, and Linear Time
The historian sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss the way their archival work, poetry, and performance art inform each other. “I think less about events happening sequentially, and more about these moments of aspiration,” they say.
Most House Spirit: Sam Woolf
Woolf — one of Dunster's intramural reps — talks about community, her screenwriting career, and the time she got injured at an IM soccer game.
Treeland: The High-Rises Harvard Never Built
In the 1970s, the University was primed to build an immense graduate student housing complex in the Riverside neighborhood — until grassroots resistance led it to scrap the project altogether. It was the last time Harvard tried to expand into Cambridge.
Molting Season
It was the ease with which the guy had done it. How simple it was for him to care for this animal, and even then, how unexpected it was that he would.
Disability Justice Advocates Raise Concerns over Mask Mandate Drop
For Shang and other immunocompromised students, campus policies have much higher stakes than just comfort. “The most frustrating part that I’ve had conversations about with people who don’t want the mask mandate has just been me being like, ‘I have this condition. I would basically die if I got Covid,’” Shang says. “And then people are like, ‘Yeah, but that’s your issue, not ours.’”
Beth Huang’s Vision of Civic Engagement
Massachusetts Voter Table is a coalition of organizations focused on civic engagement and voter participation among working- class voters and people of color. In the past decade it has been involved in many efforts to achieve these ends: Before last year’s redistricting push, a 2014 initiative gave employees of large employers up to five days of paid sick time per year. In 2018, Massachusetts established a $15 hourly minimum wage.
Fear and Loathing in 'Harvard's Front Door'
When construction wrapped on the Holyoke Center, the precursor to today's Smith Campus Center, in 1966, the hulking concrete mass was unlike anything the area had seen before.
With Monolog, Journaling Meets Artificial Intelligence
Monolog tries to differentiate itself from other mental health apps by using natural language processing, a technology which allows devices to understand text and spoken words like humans do. According to the app’s sleek, purple website, Monolog is meant to be quicker than traditional pen-on-paper journaling and more accessible than therapy. Its tagline reads: “Understand your Emotions. Understand your Trends. Understand your Story.”
