Chocolate and Love
Brownish cubes and romance are an old pair
If you’ve ever rushed to CVS to buy a box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day, you’re part of a generations-long, world-wide chocolate obsession. The impulse is not your fault: chocolate manufacturers massively marketed chocolate into a household staple and transformed the way people expressed love. To help unravel this history, the Independent spoke to a […]
Loving Yourself When No One Else is Around
Remembering love in a time of social isolation, self-care, and wellness days
It’s hard to exist in this semi-digital reality without hearing of “strategies to avoid Zoom fatigue” and “the importance of daily walks.” The self-care suggestions come from our family and the news, and they are all over the internet—even TikTok recommends you take a break and get some fresh air when you’ve been scrolling for […]
FaceTime Love
Navigating long-distance relationships during a global pandemic
The trials and tribulations of long-distance relationships are nothing new, but what do you get when you mix them with a global pandemic? COVID-19 has tested couples in unforeseen ways, causing a sort of “make or break” mentality for their relationships this past year. Couples have been forced to either quarantine together or remain distanced […]
Competing with Covid
How Harvard’s varsity athletes found the silver lining in modified seasons.
Practice social distancing. Limit in-person contact. Zoom as much as you can. For the past year, health experts have advised us to fly solo. But for those who have spent the greater part of their lives on a team—such as Harvard’s varsity athletes—the concept of self-isolation has proven exceptionally difficult. In the fall, the College […]
A Professor Professes Love
Harvard English Professor Elisa New reflects on meeting her husband, Larry Summers
Professor Elisa New and Larry Summers are very different people. “Larry is an extrovert and I’m an introvert; he likes sports and competition and I do not,” New tells the Independent. “We are in many ways a dramatic illustration of how opposites attract.” Summers was President of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. He served […]
Talking Bouquets
The love language of flowers
In the Victorian era people often used flowers to communicate. Meanings were assigned to flowers. They were used to send secret messages that could not be said aloud in the culture. “Floriography” allowed rules to be broken in an alluring, lusciously enigmatic way. A woman would know a man “fancied” her through a particular flower […]
Love?
Answered directly by you.
The Independent asked you, Harvard students, to start off your week by answering the over-simplified question: what is love? There was, however, a caveat: your response could only be one word. To answer this question, respondents had to ask themselves a multitude of other questions first: what does it feel like to be loved? What […]
Issue No. 02 of 2021: LOVE
By YOU: An Unconditional, Warm, Painful, Weighted, Slap-In-The-Face Realization
Why Educate Generally?
A petition reveals a disagreement over the purpose of the Gen Ed program
Harvard’s General Education (Gen Ed) program’s website invites its students to “Explore new ideas. Expand your horizons. Engage with the world.” It instructs faculty that their proposals for course claims should be “geared toward non-specialists” and “not an introduction to a scholarly discipline.” In short, Gen Eds are orthogonal to the main thrust of anyone’s […]