On my quest to find self-love, I found that painting myself nude rid me of my body dysmorphia. I could not deny that there was beauty in the art, just far enough removed from my physical body that I could not distort it. Painting nude portraits of my friends who also struggled with these issues […]
“It’s like bread and butter, like ham and eggs,” says David Ritz, ghost-writer of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.” He isn’t talking about breakfast foods. He’s talking about music and sex. Making music is an act of bringing people together, just like having sex, Ritz claims. “Yearning for union is what I think underlies the sexiest […]
Last Valentine’s Day, I started to read All About Love by Gloria Jean Watkins better known as ‘bell hooks’. My first response was to write the Indy article Loving Yourself When No One Else is Around and advocate for “remembering love in a time of social isolation, self-care, and wellness days.”I didn’t realise that this […]
The Harvard Art Museums—comprising the Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Sackler museums—are one of Harvard University’s great prides, housed under the same glorious glass pyramidal roof at 32 Quincy Street. After a two year hiatus, the Harvard Art Museums are back in business. In their second exhibit since reopening, the museums featured Prints from the Brandywine Workshop […]
“If you can’t love yourself how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?” This quote is repeated at the end of most episodes of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, a show responsible for making drag mainstream. The show starts with a dozen queens strutting on a runway, and they then compete against each other […]
The closing number of 52! A Statistics Cabaret concludes an hour of music charting the life story of statistics-lover Lotus. The musical follows Lotus from conception to the age of 52, including a job in quantitative trading, a PhD, and one insane night in Vegas along the way. A different actor portrays Lotus at every […]
Pop idol Dua Lipa brought screaming color and breathtaking sensuality to Boston’s TD Garden last Friday, after her tour was previously postponed due to the pandemic. Street vendors waved around t-shirts bearing her face as brightly-dressed fans lined up, vaccine cards and masks in hand. We piled into the dimly lit arena with a sea […]
Love is everlasting joy and never-ending pain and everything in between. Love is kindness and cruelty, jealousy and faith. Love has raised and ruined civilizations (citation needed, probably). It’s no wonder they dedicated a holiday to it. Specially curated by the Independent, this playlist will be your partner if you don’t have one and your […]
Dr. Julia P. Kielstra, D.Phil., Oxon., has degrees in English Literature from Bryn Mawr and Oxford and years of experience evaluating student writing for Cambridge International Examinations. I showed her the best—or worst—love poetry Harvard students could produce. The following responses are more or less verbatim, and completely unscripted. (She also happens to be my […]