On (Transformative) Experience, Or: The Hot Take Column

William Faulkner theorized that every novelist is a failed short story writer, and every short story writer is a failed poet. Similarly, in the words of a respected historian, most books should be journal articles, and most journal articles should be footnotes. You get the point: Most columns should be tweets.

Indeed, for this column, which I’ve been writing off and on since Sept. 2016, I’ve found that the sub-headline usually captures 90 percent of an article’s point. The 1,000-odd words that follow dress it up in examples and statistics, wasting your time, dear reader, and mine. With so many topics to talk about at Harvard and beyond, why should we bother? If Michel de Montaigne could write one 60-page essay about death, doctors, defecating, and seemingly any other topic that occurred to him, extensively quoting classical writers and rarely bothering to segue, why can’t my own column be a series of loosely connected hot takes until I run out of space? Montaigne couldn’t even use hyperlinks. So let’s get started.

Asking the Right Questions

In early October, I accidentally turned my Social Studies thesis seminar into a personal therapy session. As the seminar leader reviewed the best-thesis-practices we had read about that week — start writing as soon as possible, write every day, build time for writing into your schedule — a strong sense of dread came over me: I did not want to write a thesis about my topic (modernism in mid-century American city planning).

In what might be called a controlled panic, I told my classmates about this dread, and the sense that I had squandered my summer and my academic opportunities at Harvard and any shot at an academic career. My classmates gave me the obvious advice: Change topics. But it was already October. I had spent much of the summer and the semester to date reading about New York’s highways. The thesis prospectus was due the following week. What would I even write about?

Telling the Story of the Migrant Caravan

Sometimes, in the face of so much propaganda from the White House and its allies, it can be self-defeating to address their narratives on their own terms. To repudiate each falsehood is also to repeat it for a new audience; identifying each dehumanizing detail is to legitimize it as simply one “side” in a partisan argument.

In order to see the depths of the corruption and evil that the “migrant caravan” episode has revealed in the Republican Party, you have to instead start at the beginning.

Take Harvard-Yale Back From the Puritans

Like many students at the College, I recently received an email from my (wonderful) resident dean letting my House know that selling our tickets to the Harvard-Yale football game to other students violates the Athletic Department’s policy. The Winthrop House resident dean reportedly threatened to refer to the Office of Academic Integrity and Student Conduct anyone who attempts to sell their ticket — an especially common practice this year, when “The Game” will be at relatively faraway Fenway Park, which, unlike Harvard Stadium, enforces strict seating rules.

The Endowment Tax and Myths of Democratic Accountability

When Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jay Gonzalez proposed a tax on large university endowments in a Harvard Square speech last month, he set off a dispute within this editorial section. The Editorial Board (of which I, a mere columnist, am not a member) voted to condemn the tax as a “new attack on Harvard [and] higher ed.” In a dissenting opinion, three board members argued that Harvard’s high revenues mean the tax would have “little effect” on Harvard. Never mind the math: At $500 million, the tax would have taken over 10 percent of the university’s operating expenses of $4.9 billion for 2017. (And if Harvard would barely notice $500 million, why would it better help Massachusetts, whose yearly expenditures approach $42 billion?)