Editor's Note

Dear FM, This issue brings us FM’s first-ever double feature: one piece on the vitality of academia, and another on its constraints. In this week’s scrut, TCW and VWR take a look at Harvard’s humanities survey courses, studying how qualitative disciplines market themselves to students amid the never-ending discourse surrounding their decline. ASM and JL talk to the people who teach many of these introductory courses: the non-tenure-track History & Literature lecturers, Social Studies tutorial leaders, and Expos preceptors now fighting for the removal of time caps. Continuing our exploration of capital-G Great Books, HWD attends the English department’s talk with literary critic Merve Emre and wonders why we falter in our defense of the humanities. KJK chats with Martin Puchner, who has a clear vision for the future of the humanities: AI-generated discussions with Socrates and online writing courses. In a colorful profile, CES talks to Aidan M. Fitzsimons about his hitch-hiking, occasionally death-defying quest to write the next great American novel. MEL takes us back to the labor beat, with a retrospection on Women Employed at Harvard — an advocacy group that protested the University’s slow progress producing a non-discriminatory hiring plan in the 1970s. AS moves us over the sea to Puerto Rico with an inquiry about how we listen to Bad Bunny. Finally, we end with double endpapers: KJK’s ode to thunderstorms and NSK’s love letter to comfort food. There are so many people to thank for this issue, but some special shoutouts go to JHC and MTW for their patience and photographs, to ESKS for level-headed and brilliant scrut editing, and to VC, OWZ, XCZ, IJP, and SFL, for wonderful graphics and multi. And, as always, to the brilliant YAK — I owe so much to you. FMLove, MTB + YAK