James Oliver Goldsborough’s The Paris Herald narrates the workings of a newspaper as the sum of its human parts. The historical novel shows snapshots of the lives of different figures related to the eponymous historic English-language newspaper for Americans in Europe. Set during Charles de Gaulle’s tenure as President of France, the novel focuses on … Read more
At Harvard, we rarely indulge in reading for leisure or writing for its own sake. The stress of the academic environment can leave students feeling sapped of the time, energy, and inspiration needed to engage in forms of creative expression. Given that these same students have also become accustomed to operating within a system that … Read more
“When you’re 20,” Margaret Atwood tells me, “you think you’re going to die at 30. You don’t know the plot yet.” A world-famous writer renowned for her dark tales and acerbic wit, Atwood is wonderfully warm in person. The most recent addition to her many awards is the Harvard Arts Medal, granted on May 1 … Read more
Arcade Fire’s recently released video for single “We Exist,” has achieved significant buzz for Andrew Garfield’s portrayal of a “young person’s struggle with gender identity.” Win Butler has said in several statements that the lyrics of the song describe a gay son’s attempts to come out to his father, and here they are repurposed … Read more
“You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.” This is nation-state building according to Frank Zappa. It could well be that he was right: what … Read more
On June 8, 1966, the American Football League and the National Football League announced that they intended to merge. Five months later, on November 8, 1966, an act to “suspend investment credit” on some types of real property was amended to confirm the tax-exempt status of large football leagues: “[anti-trust laws] shall not apply to … Read more
In an increasingly digitized world, technology has made it easier than ever to connect with like-minded individuals and tailor online experiences to personal preferences. From Hulu’s persistent quest to learn “which ad experience would you prefer?” to Facebook’s relentless attempts to promote textbook rentals on students’ news feeds, it’s clear that advertisements are now, more … Read more
Wife, mother, and grandmother, a teacher, advocate, and senator, Elizabeth Warren has adopted all of these labels and more over the years, as documented in her autobiography A Fighting Chance. At times funny, and at others somber, A Fighting Chance tells Warren’s story against a backdrop of current events and a heavy dose of economic … Read more
The social books website Goodreads has an incredibly handy user-generated list of The New York Times’s best-selling fiction and nonfiction books of 2013. Most notable was just how many of 2013’s nonfiction bestsellers were written by conservative television and radio personalities. Bill O’Reilly was most prolific: three books of his, Killing Kennedy, Killing Lincoln, and Killing … Read more
[ZUNYI, CHINA] It was the start to another sweltering day in the little Chinese town of Zunyi. I ambled to a nearby food stall for breakfast, where a vintage TV buzzed lazily in the background. A reporter was reciting updates from the Korean Asiana Airlines crash at San Francisco. Suddenly, the clink of chopsticks and … Read more