“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 […]
Why do we believe in soulmates? In his book, What If?, American author Randall Munroe asks us to imagine a world where each person was randomly assigned an exclusive partner who would complete them. Imagine a version of ChatRoulette, where people cycle through strangers, locking eyes for a few seconds before moving on—enough time to […]
In the 2010s, the discourse around slut shaming shifted in American culture. Through girl boss propaganda and Buzzfeed articles, feminists went from advocating for women’s sexual expression without societal punishment to pushing the idea that having sex with many men is a form of empowerment that should be celebrated. Women who questioned such advocacy were […]
I will never forget the day I figured out what lesbians were. At eight-years-old, I raced to my mother’s room after school, cuddling up next to her to join her in watching Modern Family. Two of the characters were discussing their friends who were lesbians, a word I had heard before but whose meaning I […]
When the National Hockey League announced it wasn’t sending any athletes to the Olympics this year, Sean Farrell ’24 and Nick Abruzzese ’23 of the Harvard men’s ice hockey team stepped up to the plate. Their student-filled team finished as the top seed from the qualifying round, although they eventually lost to Slovakia in a […]
2/22/22, otherwise known as “Two’s Day,” was more than just a lucky date—it marked the very first strokes back in the water for Harvard and Radcliffe rowers since the Charles River froze back in December. The states of the Charles River mark the seasons for rowing: icing over in winter and driving the oarsmen inside, […]
Direct democracy—that libertarian pipedream—has entered the political scene at Harvard College. Since 1982, the undergraduate student body has been led by a group of 54 elected representatives known as the Undergraduate Council (UC). The Council’s responsibilities include representing students from each of the College’s first-year dorms and upperclassmen residential houses and interfacing with University administrators […]
Months after starting to write for the Independent last spring, I learned from my mother that my father had once written for the publication. Searching for his work among the yellowed pages of the Independent’s archives, I found his article from 1979: “Take a Walk on the Wild Side,” a plea to his fellow students […]
In the late 1960s, Harvard was marked by the tumultuous political activity taking place across the country. Male students at Harvard were feigning high blood pressure to flunk their physicals and prevent being drafted into the Vietnam War, while final exams were canceled due to anti-war protests. In 1968, Coretta Scott King took the stage […]