Editor's Note

Dear reader, The pandemic ceased not only printing but also in-person reporting. If we’ve been slowly working our way back, then this issue announces an emphatic return: JSA and HRTW, two of our executives, took the Amtrak from Boston to New York City to interview West, accompanied by SJL, who took original photographs for the piece. Their conversation lasted for over three hours and lays the foundation for an incisive and fastidiously-reported story that investigates why Harvard would not even consider a towering Black intellectual figure and activist for tenure when West already held that status nearly 30 years ago. The story asks what and who, exactly, constitute the “True Harvard”: prestige, endowment returns, a sprawling administration — or those who seek earnest dialogue and speak truth to power, the so-called “undisciplines”? (And their story is the cover of the first physical issue of Fifteen Minutes in nearly two years — last time we printed West was still at Harvard — coming to dining halls next week!) The issue contains a plethora of other content: in this week’s endpaper HNL gives us a moving, beautifully-written endpaper, one we both needed some time to sit with after reading, about hypochondria, blood tests, disease, and collective and individual responses to them. AHL and ASG go behind the scenes of the labs making Harvard’s Covid-19 high-frequency testing regimen possible. BWF reports on a march on Indigenous People’s day this past week. SWF and AKM tell us about the Harvard Project on the Socialist System, a project during the Cold War to interview Soviet refugees. Other stories explore different types and levels of access at Harvard’s campus, to physical space and community and spirituality; different student entrepreneurial endeavors and social media apps; and more. Read on, and if you’re lucky enough to be on Harvard’s campus (lucky not because being near Harvard is inherently good so much as because you’ll get to hold a physical copy of FM soon), look out for our October 2021 glossy in your dining hall! Love OGO and MNW