Editor's Note

Dear reader, We wish you well and hope you and your loved ones are taking care in ways that don’t involve ancestors or orientalist tea ceremonies (unfortunately a very real reference, not an April Fool’s joke). This week we have a strong slate of content (as always): Three conversations this week: MX profiles Kelly Yang, HLS alum and author of “Parachutes,” about her experiences with sexual assault and Title IX at the Law School and how those have changed her conceptions of law and justice. AL and HNL talk to the brilliant and controversial George Church and his attempts to revive the woolly mammoth. And GJP and EHS profile Regina Schouten, a philosopher whose work focuses on the gendered division of labor. We also bring you not one, but two much-needed levities: A lambasting of Harvard’s (un?)wellness day scheme from CSB and a brilliant poem about one of our lesser-known presidents, Chester A. Arthur from SWF. And two hard-hitting scrutinies! First up, AVM and SSI (or should we say MVP, coming out with her second scrut in three weeks?!) profile the experiences of Harvard graduate students, often believed to belong to an academic privileged elite, with acute food insecurity both before and during the pandemic, asking how we can balance short term mutual aid with longer term transformations to housing and food systems. Meanwhile, JSA goes “into the weeds” of the budding recreational cannabis industry in Cambridge, mapping a complex web of dynamics between large and small businesses and various government actors to probe questions about how to locate equity in a competition and scarcity driven market in gorgeous structure and style that would make the New Yorker jealous. And, in the wake of the shootings in Atlanta and sharp rise in anti-Asian hatred of the past several months, SSL explores her own and other students’ relationships to the coronavirus pandemic, the ungraspable notion of “Asian America,” racial hatred, and how one can even begin to consider, let alone tell or unravel, these stories. It is required reading. Finally, check out the next episode of MNW and OGO’s podcast, about the 1980 Study of Race Relations at Harvard College — one of the first Harvard diversity reviews — which MNW has been pitching as a story for over two years. Until next week, and with love, MNW + OGO