On the morning of April 15, 2013, I packed a bag of bagels, a Gatorade, a water bottle, five bananas, a few GU gels, my running watch, and my race bib, and I boarded a bus to Hopkinton, Mass. The drive took about an hour, and every minute on the bus carried with it the … Read more
As I type this I’m streaking down the highway in a Megabus-turned-Boltbus with the jagged skyline of my city, Philadelphia, in sights. Read any of the recent headlines from Philadelphia’s media outlets and you will almost prevailingly find them to be about some aspect of the Pope Francis’ recent sojourn in Philly. Now that the … Read more
The first set of articles to be published after Harper Lee’s new novel was released this summer were marked by the same sentiment: Atticus Finch, now a racist. Despite the huge hype surrounding the book, the New Yorker deemed Lee’s novel “a failed novel about race”. Critics reduced the novel to a “distressing narrative filled with … Read more
The first time I heard a PSY song was probably sometime in middle school, during a family gathering where my cousins and I were lounging around the couch. The oldest, two months my senior, pulled out his phone, and, as we waited for YouTube to finish buffering, promised us that it would be crazy—the kind … Read more
This week is one of my favorite of the year, and not just because of Memorial Day barbeques. It’s “Bee Week” 2015, the week of the National Spelling Bee, and the championship finals will be broadcast on ESPN tonight, May 28, at 8:00 PM (ET). As a former speller, I like to keep up with … Read more
[Spoiler Alert: Discusses numerous aspects of seasons one and two of House of Cards and key plot points of Breaking Bad.] “Some people say there’s too much pork in this town. I could not agree more.” So says Frank Underwolf, Sesame Street’s parody of Frank Underwood from Netflix’s wildly popular political drama House of Cards. … Read more
Jon Stewart was born in New York City and raised in suburban New Jersey. I was born in New York City and raised in suburban New Jersey. Maybe that’s why I have forgiven Stewart’s The Daily Show over the years for its many jabs at the Garden State (and for the record, there is fresh … Read more
The Harvard Political Review has long dealt in the currency of ideas. For the past 46 years, the HPR has consistently delivered incisive political analysis. We have dedicated ourselves to addressing and highlighting the ideas that underlie events across Harvard’s campus, the United States, and the world. With the third annual Literary Supplement, we take … Read more
Truth is a slippery thing. Truth, as it turns out, is not chiefly a matter of fact, but a deeply subjective endeavor. One need only delve into the matrices of the United States’ own obscured histories—Native American expulsion, African American slavery, Japanese internment, Vietnam, Iraq—to realize this. Abroad, a good number of Frenchmen still object … Read more
Instead of sinking into fearful paralysis after the machine gun murder of seven of its employees, Paris-based Charlie Hebdo printed another issue just a week after the attack. Its pages defiantly contain more of the material that supposedly motivated the killings: provocative drawings of the prophet Mohammed. Contrast the magazine’s decision with the behavior of … Read more