In the pages of last year’s Love Issue in The Harvard Independent, Layla Chaaraoui ’26 argued that the frenetic flurry of semesterdom—the “Harvard bubble”—serves for too many students as a shield against the myriad of crises, tragedies, and catastrophes happening everywhere in the world. She asserted that we ought to leverage the power of our […]
To an outsider, Harvard might seem like the kind of place where student activism blooms. Just this summer, Harvard students congregated both in Harvard Yard and Washington D.C. to dispute the Supreme Court’s rejection of Affirmative Action. In January, more than 100 students walked out of John Comarroff’s classroom due to allegations of sexual assault. […]
BY: KATE KADYAN ’26 Clarence Thomas, arguably one of the Supreme Court’s most esteemed conservative members, used to pledge allegiance to a much more radical left group, the Black Panthers. Now he strikes down affirmative action as “racial discrimination” and holds that abortion “has no basis in the constitution.” What triggered this shift from the […]
Happiness is an elusive concept. Although it is studied by many, we are no closer to unlocking its mystery. Why is this? Can humans even define happiness well enough to chart a concrete path to its achievement? Though seemingly impossible, humans have continued in their attempt to outline and define what exactly happiness is, and […]
College is, for most people, your first time out in the world as an adult. You’re independent, living without parents and the rules and supervision that come with them. And you simply can’t fly the nest if you’ve still got one wing caught in the twigs. That’s what your high school sweetheart does. They hold […]
It is safe to say that the majority of Harvard’s students are fueled by their ambitions for great academic and career success. This drive to overachieve remains unbridled by many of the “distractions” associated with college life. From pulling all nighters instead of finally meeting up with that friend we swore we “had to catch […]
Are you sick of people telling you to take CS50 with David Malan? Upset that you did not win the lottery for “Meritocracy and Its Critics” with Michael Sandel? Tired of perusing the course catalog during your DIY shopping week trying to find the perfect 4th class? Harvard students commonly have three classes per semester […]
EATING & WORKING: Don’t Go To Blackbird Doughnuts, Go To Flour Bakery + Cafe Before people get upset, we’re not saying that the Smith Center is not a good place to get some work done. We love the Smith Center. However, we think that Blackbird Doughnuts is forgettable and should be replaced. Blackbird Doughnuts has […]
This past July, Maya Bodnick ’26 wrote an article titled “ChatGPT Goes to Harvard” for former Indy member Matthew Yglesias’s ’03 Substack SlowBoring. Bodnick feed ChatGPT essay prompts from all eight of her classes and asked her professors and TAs to grade the resulting writing as they would any other student. At the end of […]
“We’d have issues that had the [Students for a Democratic Society] in one article and the Young Republicans in another,” said James Vaseff, 1984 Harvard Graduate School of Design LOEB Fellow and early contributor to the Harvard Independent. Vaseff used photojournalism to further one of the Indy’s foremost missions: to deliberately provoke university-wide commentary and […]