A traditional tea ceremony. “…moist with the wealth of the Earth, blessed with the sweet spirit of Heaven… Chaste and true like new frost, pure like the Void, harmonizing the spirit, blending within, languidly free, effortlessly Empty.” Such was the reverence of ancient China’s poets and authors for tea, now the world’s most widely consumed … Read more
The African-American Monument in Savannah, Georgia features a family of slaves; memorials like this one can serve as a form of reparations. In the early months of 2008, my grandmother Inge — then in her late seventies — petitioned the City of Vienna, Austria, for restitutions. Her paternal grandmother’s property, Inge’s childhood home, had been … Read more
Shoppers browse the various food stalls inside Boston Public Market. The Boston Public Market, a bustling marketplace in the heart of Boston, Massachusetts, can feel overwhelming. Brightly lit, well-designed booths pack the five aisles of the market, offering everything from organic soaps to self-serve apple ciders. Food vendors, scattered throughout these aisles, represent cultures from … Read more
A striking 36 percent of Harvard graduates in the Class of 2017 who entered the workforce went into the consulting or finance industries, according to survey data gathered by the Harvard Crimson. This is intriguing in light of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which states that the management consulting and financial sectors … Read more
As Harvard College accepts its most diverse class yet for the second time running, pressure is on for the rest of the university to match the demographics of its students. Harvard’s efforts to diversify the student population, which began relatively recently, have been widely successful. For example, the majority of current students were born before … Read more
Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Arizona. Reading How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, I felt like I was a freshman at Harvard again, sitting front-row in Levitsky’s Introduction to Comparative Politics course, scribbling down notes on political dynamics in East Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East while acquiring the … Read more
The LaBarberia Institute of Hair sits between a T.G.I. Friday’s and a small tailor shop in Mayfield, Ohio. The barber school trains students to take the Ohio state mandated licensure exam, but founder and owner Laura Clemente has created an environment that does so much more. LaBarberia is a community fixture, known for offering free … Read more
Fred Hochberg is a veteran business leader and LGBT rights advocate. He is the most recent chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States and former co-chair of the Human Rights Campaign. Before beginning his career in public service, he served as the president and chief operating officer of the Lillian Vernon Corporation for … Read more
In the fall of 2013, one of the only semi-coherent criteria I had for choosing colleges to apply to was geographic location. I was set on leaving the South, where I had spent the first 18 years of my life, for bigger and better places — namely, New England. I had seen pictures of the … Read more
Blockchain has been the technology of the past year. Bitcoin, the most well-known blockchain-based cryptocurrency, saw its trading price skyrocket to more than $19,000 in late 2017. Since then, investors have poured money into cryptocurrencies and anything remotely related to blockchain technology — an optimistic choice, especially since the price of Bitcoin had dropped to … Read more