Fifteen Minutes Magazine: April 2023

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what is goi ng on with e ffective altruism?

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F M C HA I R S Io Y. Gilman ’25 Amber H. Levis ’25 E D I T O R S - AT- L A R G E Michal Goldstein ’25 Kaitlyn Tsai ’25 A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R S Maya M. F. Wilson ’24 Mila G. Barry ’25 Hewson Duffy ’25 Sammy Duggasani ’25 Jade Lozada ’25 Benjy Wall-Feng ’25 Graham R. Weber ’25 Jem K. Williams ’25 Dina R. Zeldin ’25 WRITERS Ellyssa J. Jeong ’26, Elias J. Schisgall ’25, Maeve T. Brennan ’25, Ciana J. King ’25, Allison K. Moon ’25, Sophia C. Scott ’25, Benjy Wall-Feng ’25, Yasmeen A. Khan ’26, Sazi T. Bongwe ’26, Jeffrey Q. Yang ’26, John G. Harrington ’24 G L O S S Y L AYO U T Sophia Salamanca ’25 Sophia C. Scott ’25 Max H. Schermer ’24 Sami E. Turner ’25 F M M U LT I M E D I A Julian J. Giordino ’25 Joey Huang ’24 Marina Qu ’25 GLOSSY PHOTOGRAPHERS Ben Y. Cammarata ’25, Saffron R. Agrawal ’25, Marina Qu ’25, Zadoc I.N. Gee ’24 DESIGNERS Pema Choedon ’25, Grace V. Lang ’26, Samanta A. Mendoza-Lagunas ’23, Sophia C. Scott ’25, Monica Zheng ’26 PRESIDENT Cara J. Chang ’24 A S S O C I AT E M A N A G I N G E D I T O R Meimei Xu ’24 M A NAG I N G E DI TOR Brandon L. Kingdollar ’24

EDITOR’S NOTE Dear Reader, As we deliver another shiny glossy to your doorstep, or rather, local dhall newsstand, we ask: is this the most effective way to be using 28,800 pages, the majority of our budget, and countless hours of writing, editing, proofing, and designing? We’ll leave that to you to judge (for what it’s worth, we think so).

In this cover story, BWF and SCS follow one of Harvard’s effective altruism groups, a student organization dedicated to “doing good better,” or maximizing social impact via a highly-optimized model of philanthropy which has most recently been scrutinized for its most infamous (purported) proponent, Sam Bankman-Fried. Despite the bad press, many — including members of Harvard EA — have stuck with the movement. Read on to find out what all the hype is about, what exactly “longtermism” is, and why this group of college students has so much money…

In other news, Anna Sorokin — better known by her pseudonym “Anna Delvey” (yes, the one from “Inventing Anna”) — has something to say: “It was never that deep.” In a thoroughly enjoyable profile, EJJ and EJS examine Delvey’s public persona, the implications of her visit to a Harvard Business School class, and the nature of white-collar crime.

MTB and CJK visit the Northwest Building to report on the life-size 140-year-old papier-mâché octopus hanging in the lobby. It was restored this year thanks to a team of restorers led by Terry Chase, an expert in exhibit design of natural history. (The octopus also has BYC to thank for its revival — his pictures make the model truly look alive). AKM writes a touching profile on a beloved Leverett security guard, Mike Grant, and his philosophy on the importance of kindness and the brevity of life.

YAK profiles Lena Chen ’09 (it’s profiles galore!) on her performance art, which examines the intersections between the internet, sex work, and intimacy. She shares how she got her start as the writer of Sex and the Ivy, a blog that documented her sex life while at Harvard.

STB writes about the role that Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard government professor, played in constructing apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s. JQY recounts getting lost on a run at the beginning of freshman year, an experience that forced him to confront his new autonomy as a college student, faced with the excitement, fear, and confusion of calling a new place “home” — after he finds it, that is. And to close, cruciverbalist superstar JGH provides us with his crossword “New and Improved.”

So, dear reader, we won’t pretend we have a compelling philosophical framework to reorient your priorities to make you set aside time to read this, but we hope you’ll give us a chance. Maybe you’ll learn a thing or two. Or, at the very least, you can skim the pretty pictures.

Sincerely Yours, AHL & IYG

FIFTEEN Minutes 03 ANNA DELVEY IS OVER IT Ellyssa J. Jeong and Elias J. Schisgall

05 AN OCTOPUS SWIMS NORTHWEST Maeve T. Brennan and Ciana J. King

07 MIKE GRANT ON LEVERETT, LOSS, AND LIFE Allison K. Moon

09 WHAT IS GOING ON WITH EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM? Sophia C. Scott and Benjy Wall-Feng

17 LENA CHEN’S INTIMATE INTERNET Yasmeen A. Khan

21 THE HARVARD PROFESSOR IN APARTHEID’S CORNER Sazi T. Bongwe

23 LOST ON A RUN AND FINDING HOME Jeffrey Q. Yang

30 CROSSWORD: NEW AND IMPROVED John G. Harrington

AN NA DE LVEY I E LLYSSA J. JEONG & E LIAS J. SCH ISGALL

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ometimes, it seems like all eyes are on Anna Delvey.

The 32-year-old would-be art philanthropist — whose legal name is Anna Sorokin, though she still goes by the pseudonym of Delvey — was arrested and later convicted in 2019 of stealing more than $200,000 from banks, hotels, and restaurants. Since then, she has been the subject of two magazine exposes, lampooned on Saturday Night Live, dramatized in Netflix’s “Inventing Anna,” and interviewed by countless media outlets — all seeking to understand the story of her fraud and deception of New York’s art and fashion elite.

The fixation has extended to Harvard’s campus, where Delvey’s story has been studied in at least four classes; depending on who you ask, she’s a deft con woman, a study in performance, a self-taught mimic of the upper class. Most recently, at the Harvard Business School, she took questions via Zoom last week from students in the course HBS 1377: “Borderline,” a class taught by professor Eugene F. Soltes ’04 on white-collar crime and the “murky side of the business world.”

Everybody wants to make sense of the Anna Delvey phenomenon — everybody, it seems, except for Anna Delvey.

“It feels like people kind of assign too much meaning,” Delvey says in an interview. “They just project a lot.”

“It was never that deep,” she adds.

Delvey is speaking to us over Zoom from an apartment in New York City’s East Village, where she is on house arrest as she fights deportation for overstaying her visa. Delvey was born in Russia and raised in Germany. As per her publicists’ stipulations, she can interview only through audio: She is a black box on our laptop screen.

However, during her lecture to the HBS class the prior day, which was closed to the media, she appeared on camera wearing a full face of makeup, deliberately lit. She sported a crimson sweatshirt emblazoned with the Harvard Undergraduate Beekeepers logo.

Delvey’s behavior suggested a sort of performed indifference, according to multiple HBS students in the class. Delvey, the students say, was aloof and gave short, evasive answers — an evaluation Delvey says is understandable. At one point, she was filing her nails; at another, the students say, she told the class she was bored. A publicist for Delvey later clarifies that she said she finds house arrest boring.

Delvey tells us that she felt the talk was no different than the speaking invitations she gets “all the time.”

Nevertheless, she says, she found the reaction on

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social media to the news of her talk at Harvard “really funny.”

“It’s just another opportunity to see how stupid mainstream media is, and people on Twitter,” she says. “That’s all it is.”

Delvey gets frustrated by people — particularly, the media — trying to rehash her contentious past.

They seem to want her to show some sign of remorse, she says, but she’s “not really interested.”

“Even though I’ve said it so many times, over and over, in my prior interviews, people just want to hear you say it to them,” Delvey says. “I’m just saying, regret is looking back and not accepting who you are today. I don’t know. You didn’t get a choice to go back and fix your mistakes.”

“So, what’s the point?” she says. “Just learn from it and move on.”

Soltes, the Business School professor, won’t speak about Anna Delvey because he has a longstanding policy to not publicly comment on guests in his course, he says.

But he does have thoughts about white-collar crime more generally; for years, Soltes corresponded with dozens of white-collar offenders, from Bernie Madoff to former staff at Enron. He is open about grappling with the ethics of inviting criminals to Harvard, even in an academic context, without legitimizing their behavior.

Nevertheless, he says the work has given him a “deeper sense of humility” and an intimate understanding of the ethical and legal gray areas of business.

“I think we have a tendency to see the world as very black and white,” he says. “That simple dichotomy of good and bad oversimplifies things.”

“We all tell white lies. Luckily, most of those lies are pretty innocent, or we could say, exaggerations,” Soltes continues. “But obviously, in different contexts, like for example, if you’re raising funding, those exaggerations can actually turn into fraud, and we want to understand those distinctions.”

He finds that white-collar criminals tend to not be remorseful about their crimes. White-collar offenses aren’t necessarily rooted in wishing harm upon others, but rather in seeking success in personal endeavors; the harm registers as “an externality associated with some other goal,” Soltes says. But, Soltes is careful to mention, the harm is still very real.

“The people sitting in a boardroom or sitting in a conference room, the distance between them — both physically, temporally, psychologically — and the ultimate victims are fairly far removed. You’re not having to go up to someone to take their wallet,”

S OVE R IT Soltes says. “No one that I’ve ever invited to class has been what we call a ‘pickpocket,’ but many of them have actually created dramatically more harm on many more people — in the same way that the world’s most effective pickpocket could — by literally stealing people’s money.”

Soltes says that through his research, he has found the most effective white-collar criminals don’t consider themselves to be criminals at all. He likens this view to someone driving 65 miles per hour in a 55 lane — though technically illegal, the driver would likely never second-guess themself — until they’re pulled over by the cops.

“The best way of being a great fraudster is if you believe the story you’re telling yourself,” Soltes explains. “Because you actually believe what you’re doing is actually justifiable or rational, you’ll be able to rationalize it. You don’t have to trick yourself.”

We ask if this analysis applies to Delvey. Soltes pauses, then laughs.

“I’m going to choose not to answer that one,” he says.

Delvey’s return to the public eye has been swift and immediate. She’s taken several interviews with highprofile media outlets, spoke at the Columbia School of Journalism, and says she’s been invited to Oxford and New York Universities.

She has an array of new projects she’s working on from house arrest: a podcast, a reality show called “Delvey’s Dinner Club,” a book, and an NFT collection called “Reinventing Anna,” named after the TV show.

She has also ventured into the art world, selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of sketches drawn during her stint in prison: “I feel like I was way more creative when I was in jail,” she says.

Nevertheless, she says she wants to move away from the art and entertainment industries, possibly

turning toward law or criminal justice reform — inspired by her experience in Rikers Island. When asked if she’d ever consider applying to Harvard, she’s dismissive: “I just don’t feel like it’s the best use of my time. I feel like you can just, like, read a book.”

Despite all the attention — and despite all her new, very publicized projects — Delvey maintains that she doesn’t see herself as capitalizing on her notoriety for fame or money.

“I never asked for any of this,” she says. “I never wanted to be famous.”

“I’m going to be written about regardless,” she adds. All she can do, she says, is tell her own story about how she “flipped it around” without “glorifying” her past.

“I wouldn’t want to be seen as an example, ‘Oh yeah, go commit crimes, or fraud, and be famous,’” she adds.

“Hopefully people will take it the right way.”

But the speculation, the media frenzies, the ravenous desire for scandal — these, Delvey says, aren’t going away. The real Anna Sorokin gets subsumed by Anna Delvey, the TV character, whose story will always be grist for the entertainment mill.

“I don’t think people are really interested i n

what the truth is. I think people just want to be entertained,” she says, calling it the ultimate “purpose” of “news and media.”

“Nobody wants to read about, ‘Oh, maybe Anna is not so crazy.

Maybe she’s not such a big criminal.’

Like, nobody cares,” she adds. “Why should people be bothered?”

In the short term, Delvey says, she’s “just trying to get out of house arrest.” We exchange pleasantries, and moments later, the Zoom black box — and the real Anna — disappear.

Photo Courtsey of Anna Delvey

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an octopus swi ms northwest MAEVE T. BRE N NAN AN D CIANA J. KI NG Photos by Ben Y. Cammarata

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fter decades of collecting dust in a Harvard Museum of Natural History classroom, a life-size papier-mâché model of an octopus has found a new home. With each of its looping tentacles stretching out about eight feet, it lies suspended above a grand staircase in the spacious, modern, glassy foyer of Harvard’s Northwest Building, home to labs, classrooms, and offices for Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

The model of the Pacific octopus, known as the Enteroctopus dofleini, has been in Harvard’s hands for the last 140 years. In the early 1880s, scientific artist and illustrator James H. Emerton created this object and one other with guidance from a zoologist from Yale and a modeler from the Smithsonian. The other object deteriorated completely after 90 years on display and in the care of Yale. Emerton never saw the animal in

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person, instead leaning on scientific literature and one scientist’s testimony about its size.

Harvard’s octopus was first displayed in a Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology gallery before being moved into a classroom in the Museum of Natural History, where it remained hidden from the general public and began to deteriorate.

“I went to multiple meetings in this classroom, and it was just kind of there, and we got used to it,” says Sylvie Laborde, a Senior Designer and Acting Exhibition Director for the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture.

But after a series of conversations and initial measurements, the octopus’ second life began as Terry Chase, an expert in the design of natural history exhibits, led a painstaking, careful restoration process. In a room in the basement of the Northwest Building, the restoration team repaired cracks and rebuilt the tips of the arms.

“From a conservation perspective, the MCZ was very interested in restoring the object with the same materials that were used to build it originally,”

Laborde says. Preservation of the octopus’ historic and artistic value, rather than precise scientific accuracy, guided the team’s effort.

This made for a harder restoration process, Laborde explains, as the team needed to work with papier-mâché instead of more modern model-making materials like epoxy, a type of resin. They also tested out a variety of painting techniques, trying to match the octopus’ original color and texture.

The team ultimately hoisted the octopus up using an elaborate cable system, and the eight-armed artifact now hangs above the staircase, which guides passersby into a cavernous basement.

“Having it at Northwest kind of gives it a second life,” Laborde says.

The octopus hangs next to two other creatures: the skeletons of a northern bottlenose whale and an orca, which were collected in the 1880s and ultimately acquired by Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.

The skeletons spent nearly 80 years in the attic of the MCZ mammalogy department before their restoration and relocation to the space above Northwest’s main staircase in 2009, just a year after the building’s construction.

Other preserved sea creatures dot Harvard’s campus, including delicate and detailed

glass models of jellyfish, anemones, sea slugs, and other invertebrates housed in the MCZ, which restored those models over an eight-year period.

The MCZ expected to find about 60 models in their collections. Instead, they found 430 invertebrates across a variety of Harvard departments, with disparate pieces sometimes stored away in envelopes and boxes.

The glass sea creatures, created by artists Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, are predecessors of Harvard’s “Glass Flowers,” a collection of 4,300 glass botanical models originally used to help undergraduates study.

“The nature of their restoration was based on the fact that they are beautiful objects,” Laborde says of the glass invertebrates exhibit. “They may not carry the same scientific value today as the day they were created, but the craftsmanship and the beauty of the object make it become a different value.”

Harvard students pass by their own sea creature display whenever they walk by

the Northwest Building stairs.

This constant stream of visitors can engage with the whale skeletons and, now, the octopus model — a possibility that went unrealized when the objects were stashed away in hidden corners of campus.

“I think appreciation may come with having a little knowledge about the history of an object.

Decoration might mean it’s nice to look at, but there’s nothing really beyond that,” says Breda M. Zimkus, the director of collections operations at MCZ. “Appreciating something means you can make a connection in some sort of way.”

The octopus is currently accompanied by a small graphic panel entitled “An Ocean Giant” that supplies curious students with a brief history of the octopus. The MZC and HMSC are also hoping to add lights to the octopus, which would illuminate it in the Northwest Building at night.

“I do think people may pass by and miss it,” Laborde says. “People will get used to it. But the beauty of where it is now is that new students come every year.”

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M i ke G rant on Loss, an d Li fe ALLISON K. MOON Photo by Saffron R. Agrawal.

W

hat does it mean to be a people person? You would be wise to turn to Michael A. Grant, a Harvard Leverett House guard, for guidance. Mike, who has held his post since 2015, has watched legions of sophomores enter Leverett House still trying to find their footing at the College and come out on the other side three years later as newly minted Harvard graduates. He has also bonded with the tutors and their families, describing Leverett as a very “familyoriented” place. “I’ve watched a lot of kids from belly to five years old,” he says.

His guard office, where he works from 4 p.m. to

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midnight Monday through Friday, overlooks Leverett’s grassy courtyard. It’s a perfect spot for catching the evening traffic of students as they come in and out of the house. Over the course of the interview, more than a dozen students stop by to greet Mike. Their conversations are familiar and easy as they update each other on their days and riff on inside jokes.

Beyond these daily encounters, he’s formed a slew of close connections with Leverett students and has heard many of their stories. “They would cry in here,” he says. “It made me feel special that some people trusted me to come and share these types of stories.”

Indeed, Leverett residents attest to the compassion he brings to his role in the community. “Mike stands out. And he stands out because he’s a great guy,” says Jack R. Walker ’24, who has spent time talking with Mike about ROTC and Mike’s car detailing business, among other topics. “I have met few people at Harvard as willing to be vulnerable, as insistent on nurturing genuine relationships as Mike,” Malachi S. Robinson ’23 says. “My conversations with him have stretched my heart, and made me more human.”

Mike is aware of his special position as a figure in an undergrad residential house, a place where many students are “away from home, away from their comfort zone.” In this role, he is frequently a listener. “Sometimes people just need an ear.

n Leve rett, e People don’t always want your advice,” he explains. “They’ve got people telling them stuff. I’m not their parent or anything like that,” he says, “But some people just want to express themselves and not feel like they’re being judged.”

Mike’s kindness towards students has extended beyond just conversation. Mike remembers one winter when he noticed that two Leverett students never seemed to be wearing jackets.

Only sweaters, sometimes “a little hat,” Mike says. Deciding to take matters into his own hands, he purchased one student a jacket.

“She was a sophomore at the time, so I wanted her to have a jacket that I knew would last,” he explains. “A North Face jacket with inserts.” The student cried upon receiving it, he says. “She couldn’t even talk.”

As for the other student, Mike recalls: “One day, I was sitting there talking to him, and I was like ‘Bro, you need to get a coat.’

He was like, ‘I’m working on it, I’m working on it. I just don’t have the money right now.’ So I went and got him a coat.”

But Mike’s relationship with students hasn’t been one-sided.

Robinson says his friendship with Mike began with assisting him after learning of an unexpected loss at the end of one of their conversations. “Right when I planned to leave, Mike chose to make a tearful confession to me: His brother had just been killed by a stray bullet in Atlanta while riding into a gas station with his girlfriend and their child,” Robinson says. “This was not a

revelation I was expecting at the time, and, I believe, not one which Mike had planned to make.”

Mike says he had received the news shortly before his interaction with Robinson. “Malachi went and walked out, came back and said, ‘You know, what? Can I take your hand in prayer? Can we pray together?’” he recalls. “That meant a lot. I was trying so hard not to cry. Because I was like, damn, for somebody to care that much, to come back and pray with me — I was just like, wow, this dude right here. And since then, it’s nothing but love.”

“I don’t remember what I said, but I know that it was a profound moment for the two of us,” Robinson says.

Mike used to spend hours talking to his brother on the phone every day. “There were times students would even come by and say, ‘Oh, Mike, I haven’t seen you in a while. Every time I was going to stop in I’d see you on the phone.’ I was on the phone with my brother,” Mike says. “Now I’m never on the phone.”

The brevity of life comes up repeatedly in our conversation.

“I never like to refer to life as a game,” Mike tells me. “But, you know, somebody told me, ‘Life is a game man, and you gotta learn how to play the game.’ It was right at a time when my brother passed.

So I said, ‘Well, you know, in this game of life, there’s no scoreboard that tells you how much time you got left on your clock. You don’t know when the whistle blows.

There is no scoreboard to tell you that it’s the fourth quarter, that

there are two minutes left. So you’ve just got to live your life how you want to live it.”

Mike currently owns and operates an auto detailing business, which “blew up a lot bigger than expected” in recent years. He mentions that he might not be able to keep up with the demand if he keeps working for the business part-time. Mike often thinks about leaving the guard position to work full-time, which he had planned on doing with his brother.

Still, he remains at Leverett.

His days often begin at 5:30 a.m.; sometimes, he works a double shift, working 16 hours straight, and does detailing work after he gets off. “Sometimes I’m like, okay, you know what? I’m gonna quit, but then I’m like, ‘I’ll wait until this one graduates.’” And for all the challenges this decision entails, he remains “grateful for everything I get, good and bad,” he says.

A group of incoming Leverett students (he calls them “rising rabbits”) shows up outside Mike’s office at one point in our conversation, all donning LED green rabbit ears from Housing Day. “Are you Mike?” one asks.

“We’ve heard so much about you,” says another. He learns all of their names immediately and is soon bantering with them.

Mike admits that his younger self couldn’t have anticipated his role today. “I always said I wanted a job in the back of the warehouse where I didn’t have to talk to no one,” he says, but “my happiness comes from helping other people.”

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WHAT IS GOI NG ON WITH E FFECTIVE ALTRUISM? SOPH IA C. SCOTT AN D BE NJY WALL-FE NG

Photos by Marina Qu & Zadoc I.N. Gee

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hen we meet Nikola Jurkovic ’25 on Zoom, he’s sitting in front of a whiteboard covered with equations. We chat about his interest in folk punk music; his headphones push his hair back into a kind of emo swoop. Jurkovic comes across as friendly, but also guarded: He seems to want to make a good impression.

Jurkovic tells us he first learned about the philosophical movement called effective altruism from the comments section of a YouTube video about veganism during his gap year.

When he moved from Croatia to Harvard, he joined the Harvard Undergraduate EA group and eventually became its president. “I think I’ve been looking for ways to make the world better for a really long time,” he says, “I think as far back as I can remember.”

EA, its proponents will tell you, is aimed at “doing good better.” It starts with the problem that the

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ways that we approach charity, aid, and other kinds of good-doing are clouded by human biases, and tries to find the best solution using statistical tools. For example, an effective altruist might argue that donating money to foundations that provide malaria treatments maximizes your lives saved per dollar spent.

The movement began in the early 2010s as the brainchild of the philosopher Will MacAskill.

In the years since, it has flourished in both in-person spaces, like conferences, as well as blogs and forums. Users map out their worldviews in long, technical posts, debating what exactly different EA principles look like in practice, the merits of various criticisms of the movement, how to adapt to the more meritorious criticisms, and how to counter the less meritorious ones.

EA has also garnered support from a number of high-profile acolytes.

“This is a close match for my

philosophy,” Elon Musk tweeted last August about MacAskill’s new book.

“Effective altruism — efforts that actually help people rather than making you feel good or helping you show off — is one of the great new ideas of the 21st century,” celebrity academic and Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker wrote.

One of the highest-profile effective altruists was the former billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, whose commitment to donate much of his wealth to EA causes turned out to be impossible after his cryptocurrency company, FTX, collapsed due to alleged fraud. His commitment also turned out to be disingenuous: In a postmortem interview with Vox, he described his apparent embrace of ethics as “this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”

Nevertheless, EA’s profile has continued to rise. Even at Harvard,

University, including at the College, law school, and GSAS, as well as in the Boston area. (In this article, “Harvard EA” refers to the undergraduate group unless otherwise specified.)

Jurkovic guesses there are “between 20 and 50” students involved in Harvard EA’s regular programming; there are dozens more in its introductory fellowships and hundreds more Nikola Jurkovic ’25 is the president of Harvard on the mailing Undergraduate Effective Altruism. lists. some students find the pull Harvard markets itself inescapable: “Effective altruism is as “developing leaders who make a huge trend on campus, seeping a difference globally,” and pop into everything,” Henry Haimo culture spins this principle into ’24 told the New Yorker in March, myth: Here is a university whose in an article ostensibly about the students will go on to save the decline of the humanities. world. EA is a movement that When Harvard’s claims to know how to do it, from undergraduate EA group started shifts in diet — a lot of the people on campus a decade ago, though, we meet are vegan, in recognition EA was not so widespread. At of the statistically unmatched first, getting students to join was suffering that factory farming a challenge. “I realized that the inflicts on chickens — to shifts in idea of HEA seemed crazy: ‘join career, like the students who have us and we’ll try to figure out how devoted their futures to trying to to maximize the good we do in prevent human extinction by AI. the world!’” Ben S. Kuhn ’15, the “Most of us want to improve co-president at the time, wrote the world,” the Harvard EA in a 2014 blog post. “But my website says. “But figuring out mistake was letting other people what that ‘something’ is, let alone know that I knew HEA seemed actually doing it, can be a difficult crazy. As soon as they realized and disheartening challenge. that I myself felt goofy, it was Effective altruism is a response to game over for convincing them this challenge.” Can it live up to to get involved.” He described that goal? expanding the group’s influence through a combination of savvy advertising tactics and a slate Counterfactual Impact of famous speakers such as the f you are not already a philosopher Peter Singer, one of committed effective altruist the most prominent intellectuals — and if you are interested associated with the movement. in a discussion group Today, there are several that zigzags from deworming different EA groups across the

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methodology to Bayesian statistics to the number of animals killed for food in the U.S. in the last 30 seconds — your first involvement with EA at Harvard might come through the introductory Arete Fellowship, a seven-week program that explores different effective altruism topics every week.

Daniela R. Shuman ’24, a Computer Science and Statistics concentrator interested in urban development, is one of the Arete chairs. She did the fellowship herself a year ago and “fell in love with the whole concept,” she says.

She guesses there were around 40 fellows last fall.

We ask Will A. Nickols ’24, the other chair, if we can sit in on one of the sections. After some back-and-forth, Nickols suggests we attend the second week of the fellowship, which focuses on global health.

We get there before the meeting room opens. The discussion leaders, Nick C. Gabrieli ’24 and Jorge O. Guerra Jr. ’24, a former Crimson News editor, are sitting in near-darkness on the stairs outside the Adams House Upper Common Room, chatting: “What else are you up to this semester?”

“What do you see as the limits of randomized control trials?” The vaulted blue ceiling looks like the night sky.

Claire Guo ’24, one of the Arete fellows and a former Crimson News editor, wanders up wearing two baseball caps; she wants to know if the leaders are participating in the junior classwide game of Assassins.

No, Gabrieli tells her, adding, “I feel like I’m in the market for developing more hobbies.”

At 6 p.m., we file into the meeting room and assign ourselves to armchairs. There are 10

three fellows in attendance, and another will show up halfway through. Gabrieli and Guerra walk us through the vocabulary terms from the readings — two blog posts, a lecture by an Oxford Professor, a TED talk, and several charts about life expectancy in different countries — asking the group to define and react to them.

This week, the discussion involves identifying your “problem”: So you’ve already decided you want to do good.

How do you figure out what to do?

EA takes cues from rationalism, a commitment to logic rather than feelings as a basis for decision-making. For the Arete fellows, this requires learning a lot of terminology.

For example, the “counterfactual impact” of an action is the result of doing that action, relative to the result of not doing it. Say you want to volunteer in a soup kitchen — a lot of EA readings use this example — but there are plenty of other volunteers; if you don’t do it, someone else will. Unless you are extremely good at serving soup, the amount of soup served in a world where you are a server is probably not that different from the amount of soup served in a world where you are not, and you might want to focus your altruistic intentions elsewhere.

At the discussion leaders’ prompting, the fellows — Guo; Nathanael Tjandra ’26; and Kai C. Hostin ’25 — talk among themselves, trying to recall concepts from the readings. More than anything, it feels like a class section.

Gabrieli asks, “What is ‘importance?’”

Guo and Hostin look at each other with uncertainty. “It should be able to be inferred, I think, from the word 11

itself,” he continues. “What is the absolute magnitude of the thing we’re interested in?”

There are a lot of math terms, too. One of the readings constructs a complicated-looking product of derivatives to make the conceptual point that importance, tractability, and neglectedness are all vital considerations.

Importance is how important a problem is; tractability is how much good can be done relative to effort; neglectedness is how much other people are already working in that area.

Still, the fellows have questions, and Gabrieli and Guerra are happy to discuss them. Should your personal interests play a role

“What is the absolute magnitude of the thing we’re interested in?” in what you decide to focus on?

What about problems that require immediate responses, rather than careful calculation of impact?

They talk but don’t come to any singular answer.

Near the end of the hour, Guerra brings up GiveWell, a well-known EA organization that maintains a ranked list of recommended charities. He asks the group: Of the top four causes on the website, which one would

you donate to, and why?

First on the list is Malaria Consortium, which provides a kind of medicine called seasonal malaria chemoprevention.

Malaria treatments are highimportance, and tractable because they are relatively cheap; GiveWell estimates that it costs $7 to protect a child from malaria. Second on the list is the Against Malaria Foundation, which provides malaria nets for about $5 each.

Ultimately, Tjandra, a Crimson Multimedia editor, chooses the fourth-ranked charity, which provides cash incentives to caregivers in Nigeria who vaccinate their babies. Unlike malaria treatments, he reasons, vaccines are “more generalizable to poor people everywhere.”

Guo asks if instead of providing Vitamin A supplements to areas in sub-Saharan Africa, as the third-ranked charity does, we could try to integrate vegetables rich in Vitamin A into those communities. “‘Eat some yams,’” she says, laughing.

Hostin concurs: “I don’t want to be like ‘Oh, here’s a fish’ rather than teach them how to fish, in a way.”

A One in 10 Risk of Extinction

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t the end of the Arete fellowship, you are given a $10 gift card to the charity donation site Every.org. If you donate $10 of your own money, you receive another gift card. But what happens next is up to you: Since Harvard EA has no centralized meetings or agenda, continued membership means “joining the various side groups that we

The Arete Fellowship discussion section takes place in the Adams House Upper Common Room. The Arete Fellows learn a lot of terminology to help them think about how they can do the most good.

have, depending on what you’re interested in,” Shuman says.

Donating large parts of your income to charity — or earning to give, in the style of BankmanFried — are largely out of reach for college students, Jurkovic tells us. Instead, we find out, undergrad EA groups tend to focus on research and recruitment.

Still, the issues Harvard EA focuses on don’t always line up with the picture of EA suggested by the Arete fellowship. Zazie Huml ’25, Harvard EA’s Global Health Programming Lead and one of four people on its board, said when they joined Harvard EA there was “no major initiative” in global health or international development — two of the five major topics covered in the Arete fellowship — and there were only “a couple people” involved with animal rights, a third focus area.

“In Harvard EA we try not to present unfairly biased opinions towards any particular world problem,” Jurkovic says. “We aim to present the facts about the world problems and also give people useful decision-making

tools so that they can examine the facts themselves.”

“My entire experience with EA at Harvard last semester was, ‘Oh, this is not for me, this is not my community. They’re not interested in the same things as me,’” Huml says, until someone they met in the organization encouraged them to take another look. “If I was to take initiative within the system, there would be resources to support me,” they recall the person saying. Huml has since led several global health initiatives under the umbrella of Harvard EA, including a “comprehensive study on source apportionment of lead exposure” in lower-income countries in partnership with the Lead Exposure Elimination Project.

So what was Harvard EA doing? “It was only focused on longtermism and AI,” Huml remembers.

Longtermism — week five on the Arete syllabus — is the view that people who will be alive in the future warrant the same moral consideration as people alive today. “If we want to do the

most good, that means we want to help the most people,” Shuman says, “and the most people is not at the specific time that we’re living in.” Since future people will significantly outnumber today’s people, barring a mass extinction event, longtermists argue that we should devote more resources to preventing “existential risks” like nuclear warfare or engineered pandemics.

This is something of a departure from EA principles in other areas, which our interviewees explain are a refinement of natural human instincts: You already want to do good, and EA just teaches you how to be smart about it. For a longtermist, though, what is at stake is the future of human existence.

In recent years, longtermists have turned their attention to the field of AI safety. As AI models grow increasingly powerful, EA researchers have argued, the existential threat they pose may become insurmountable.

They call this the problem of “AI alignment”: ensuring that if or when a superhuman AI comes 12

into existence, its values align with our own, so that it does not kill everyone on Earth.

Some AI safety researchers have been sounding this alarm for decades — but this past year, thanks to the rise of shockingly powerful, publicly available AI models like ChatGPT, the issue has made it into the mainstream.

ChatGPT is already prone to spreading misinformation. A “sufficiently powerful” AI could

achieving superhuman AI by 2045 is 50 percent, and assume that the probability of death given superhuman AI is at least 10 percent. Then the probability of death by AI in the next few years might be comparable to around 1 in 6000, he wrote, explaining that this probability is similar to the two largest causes of death for “college-aged people in the US,” suicide and vehicle accidents, although he did not write out

a focus on machine learning research, Davies tells us on Zoom. He has curly hair and a black hoodie; the “L” in his name stands for Laser. Although he doesn’t believe that AI right now is poised to destroy humanity, he also doesn’t believe we have the tools to stop it. “I think how I look at it is, it’s currently impossible to get our AIs to not do things,” Davies says, referring to the ease with which users have bypassed

How do you quantify incalculable destruction? be much worse, researcher Elizier Yudkowsky argued in a recent Time magazine op-ed calling for an indefinite moratorium on AI development. “In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing,” he wrote.

How do you quantify incalculable destruction? “The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity,” a book

by Toby Ord about existential risk, for which Harvard EA runs a reading group, puts the risk of extinction in the next century from unaligned AI at 1 in 10, higher than any other source of risk. Last July, Jurkovic wrote in a comment on the EA forum that “existential risks are high up on the list of most probable causes of death for college aged-people”: Assume that the probability of 13

the calculations leading to this conclusion.

Jurkovic guesses that there are more people in Harvard EA working on AI than other problems, but points out the existence of organizations with other EA-related focuses, including Harvard College Animal Advocates.

Harvard EA doesn’t have an AI safety program itself, but there are several related organizations that do. One of these is the Harvard AI Safety Team, which was founded in 2022 by Xander L. Davies ’23 and Fiona E. Pollack ’25. Though HAIST is not an EA organization, many members of Harvard EA work with HAIST, and HAIST also receives funding from national EA philanthropy organizations.

HAIST and Harvard EA also share members with other local AI groups, including Cambridge Boston Alignment Initiative and MIT AI Alignment.

HAIST hosts reading groups and talks by professors, with

ChatGPT-like models’ built-in filters against violent speech and misinformation.

“Rapid progress in AI is becoming more and more economically useful, becoming more and more trusted, while at the same time this stark lack of progress on actually understanding how these systems work, on getting confidence that we actually know how to make these systems do what we want, is very startling to me,” Davies says.

“And I think it should be a core priority on the global stage.”

‘The Warm Fuzzy Feeling Just Doesn’t Matter as Much’

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n some respects, EA seems fairly intuitive: Who doesn’t want to minimize suffering as much as possible? In other respects, it pushes you to rethink your intuitions.

Take, for instance, a thought

experiment effective altruists often use to illustrate the unique way this philosophy navigates moral quandaries. It’s called “the drowning child scenario,” originally formulated by Peter Singer. Imagine you’re on your way to an important event, and you notice a child is drowning in a nearby pond. Do you jump in to save the child?

Barring circumstances like an inability to swim, most people answer yes. But then, you’re asked the question again and again. Each time, the stakes are higher: What if you will ruin your clothes and waterlog your phone by jumping in? What if you already saved a drowning child last week? What if this child was an undocumented immigrant? What if the pond was far enough away that you would have to spend gas money to get there?

As the hypotheticals escalate, generally, participants continue to decide to save the drowning child each time. But in the real world, when facing situations like determining healthcare access for immigrants or people in other countries, the increased distance leads some people to m a k e what

is in effect the opposite choice. EA wants to know: Why should you value those people’s lives less than those of people closer to you?

When we spoke to Marka F. X. Ellertson ’23, then the president of Harvard EA, last September, she told us that with EA efforts, “the warm fuzzy feeling just doesn’t matter as much to me as the rational thought that I know that I’ve had a bigger impact.”

“And I actually still do want that warm fuzzy feeling,” Ellertson added, explaining that she donates to local causes that are particularly meaningful to her.

Joshua D. Greene ’97, Harvard EA’s faculty advisor, disputes the idea that EA strips away the warmth of charity work.

Utilitarianism might make you think of “the things that kind of serve a function but don’t nurture our souls or to speak to our heart’s greatest desires, right? And utilitarianism is not just about cold functionality,” he says. “It’s about everything that makes life good or bad, everything that makes life worth living, everything that makes life meaningful.”

Harold H. Klapper ’25, who participated in a Harvard EA fellowship last year, tells us that in some EA dialogues about utilitarianism “get really wild.”

At a Boston-area EA event, for instance, “I’ve had conversations arguing about whether we should kill all wild animals because they have negative lives,” Klapper says. “An ant colony must just have negative utility in the sense that they’re just not enjoying life, and so it’d be better if we

“When things are a movement, you kind of have to buy into the whole thing, and when you buy into the whole thing, you get really wacky and fucked up answers to problems.” just eliminated them.”

“When things are a movement, you kind of have to buy into the whole thing, and when you buy into the whole thing, you get really wacky and fucked up answers to problems,” Klapper adds.

Effective altruists seek to apply EA principles to personal decisions: what to study, where to work. If you are a college student interested in building EA communities, you might “consider not going to Harvard, as there are a bunch of people there doing great things,” Jurkovic wrote on the EA forum in December, suggesting that going to other colleges without strong EA movements could be better. (Was this something Jurkovic himself considered when applying to Harvard? “No,” he says, laughing.)

A lot of EA discourse revolves around career choice: You will probably work for around 80,000 hours in your lifetime — several of the people we talk to cite this estimate — and you should spend them doing things that count, even if they may not be things you enjoy.

Harvard EA, Shuman says, focuses mainly on “getting highpotential individuals into careers

Jōsh P. Mysoré ’26 completed the Arete fellowship last fall and is considering becoming a discussion leader at some point in the future. Mysoré loves poetry, but is planning on concentrating in Computer Science and Linguistics.

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“Will I be going into poetry? No. Because I don’t think it will actually do good for people.” where they can spend their 80,000 hours of their career on solving these issues.”

To get them to that point, EA might also influence Harvard students’ concentration decisions.

One such student is Jōsh P. Mysoré ’26; when we meet him outside of Blackbird, he’s reading Giovanni Boccaccio’s “The Decameron” for class. Mysoré completed the Arete fellowship last fall and is considering becoming a discussion leader at some point in the future.

“I love poetry. I loooove poetry,” he tells us. “Will I be going into poetry? No. Because I don’t think it will actually do good for people.” At the moment, Mysoré plans to concentrate in Computer

Science and Linguistics.

Computer Science, as well as Statistics and Applied Mathematics, are fairly common concentration choices among the people we meet. Klapper tells us he knows someone in Harvard EA who studies Computer Science and dislikes it, but continues in the field because they believe it’s the most effective use of their time.

Mysoré “was given a certain amount of privilege in my life to even get to this point,” he tells us.

“I do think I owe something to the greater good of humanity to do something that impacts more people in a tangible way.”

Does he think anyone should go into poetry, we ask.

“I don’t think it’s a contradiction to say that I can hold two opposing viewpoints at the same time,” Mysoré says. “Like in my heart, I’m a humanist, and I’m very romantic.” He tells us that he joined EA specifically to challenge these humanist viewpoints, but his perspective might flip again.

“Honestly, I do think there should be poets,” he says.

Mysoré tells us he still believes that EA has a noble mission, even

The proposed EA office was at 5 Brattle Street.

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if he disagrees with some of its particular approaches. “I think at the baseline, EA is creating dialogue,” he says. “That is really what counts.”

‘Not To Create a Club, But Rather to Create a World’

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n Saturdays, Harvard EA throws socials in a house near campus where Jurkovic lives with four of his friends. Half the time, the socials are just for Harvard affiliates; every other week, they are open to students from other Boston-area schools.

Of course, the socials are designed to be fun, but they have a functional purpose as well.

“One important part of having a community is that the people talk to each other and have time spent together so that they can collaborate and talk about their projects,” Jurkovic says.

Though Jurkovic declined our request to attend a social on the record, we can try to reconstruct the vibe from a guide that he posted on the EA forum called “How to Organize a Social.”

Indeed, in the post, he records every step of preparing for a social in granular detail, providing recommendations for everything from grocery lists — CLIF Bars, Diet Coke, several varieties of Vitaminwater — to music, such as the Spotify-curated playlist “my life is a movie.” Jurkovic suggests you make it easy for guests to find answers to anticipated questions: “The shoes on/off policy? Where the bathroom is? Where one can get water? What the wi-fi password is?”

Last year, Trevor J. Levin ’19, who is currently on leave as the co-president of the universitywide EA group, also created a list of recommendations for effective retreats: They should happen at the beginning of the semester, when people are less busy; include lots of time for one-on-one interactions and a “structured vulnerable/emotional thing”; and include a healthy mix of new recruits and “moderately charismatic people for whom EA is a major consideration in how they make decisions.” These suggestions were embedded in a long post, which, citing feedback from Ellertson, Davies, Jurkovic, and others, argues that college EA groups should focus more on retreats as a method of bonding.

For Levin, a former Crimson editor, this kind of immersive social situation is vital to capturing those who might be interested in EA but don’t prioritize it.

“While most of the important cognition that happens is social/ emotional, this is not the same thing as tricking or manipulating people into being EAs,” he wrote on the forum. Instead, retreats are meant to appeal to those who may agree with EA on some level but have not yet acted on it, and giving them time to “move closer to the values they previously already wanted to live by.”

“At a certain point you have to ask yourself: What is effective about that?”

Since EA was born, it has been very deliberate about the image it projects. The name “effective altruism” was itself the product of a long debate: “This has been such an obstacle in the utilitarianesque community — ‘dogooder’ is the current term, and it sucks,” MacAskill, the philosopher, wrote in a 2011 email chain. What followed Daniela R. Shuman ’24, a Computer Science was a period of and Statistics concentrator interested in urban brainstorming — fusing development, is one of the chairs of the Arete terms like “utilitarian” fellowship. and philanthropist” with most good, and EA just has a set “alliance” and “institute” — and a of tools that it thinks are probably series of votes to establish a name the most good,” Shuman says. “We for both “the type of person we want everybody to think in these wanted to refer to, and for the terms.” name of the organization we were setting up.”

Now, countless blogs and forum posts are dedicated Daedalus House to determining how best to ’m gonna talk from a recruit new members to the EA removed, omniscient community. In December 2021, perspective,” Mysoré for instance, Jurkovic wrote a says, kicking his chair post on the EA forum describing back and folding his arms behind an “organic” way to pitch EA to his head.

EA spends a lot of money students. on space, food, and socials, he tells “Person: What do you want to us.

“At a certain point you have study? Me: Not sure, I’m trying to to ask yourself: What is effective find what to study so I can have as good of an impact as possible,” about that?”

Most of Harvard EA’s he wrote in an example dialogue. money comes from larger “If their level of enthusiasm stays high or grows, pitch an intro EA organizations like Open fellowship or a reading group to Philanthropy, a grantmaking foundation largely financed by them.”

Even if some people choose Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, not to become effective altruists, the latter of whom co-founded Shuman tells us, they could still Facebook. Open Philanthropy take away valuable ideas from the distributes money to a range of EA-related causes. Put simply, it is movement.

“The point is not to create a an organization that “cares about club, but rather to create a world making the world better,” Jurkovic of people that want to do the says.

“I

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We a s k him how Harvard EA uses its grant money.

“It’s not my area of expertise,” Jurkovic says. “But ...”

He pauses for 15 seconds. “Yeah, just sometimes we get funding for club activities.”

In 2022, we later find out, part of an Open Philanthropy grant was used to send Arete fellows and the University-wide EA group on a weekend trip to Essex Woods, a serene, Thoreauesque venue an hour north of campus that charges about $5,000 per night. According

the post says, from “Is it possible for me, specifically, to have a meaningful impact on existential risk” to “I need to secure $250,000 in seed funding for my startup” to “I’m expected to speak at my father’s funeral and I have nothing but scathing, bitter, angry things to say.”

Open Philanthropy also issued a $250,000 grant for the Centre for Effective Altruism to “rent and refurbish” an office for the Harvard AI Safety Team in Harvard Square for one year.

Davies, the HAIST co-founder, tells us that the HAIST office is “pretty research-y.”

“People are often at whiteboards, talking about problems with each other,” he says. “I think it feels like people

been unaffiliated with Harvard EA, a forum post announcing the office promised that part of it would contain “meeting spaces for students at Harvard and other Boston-area schools,” and thanked Levin and Jurkovic for their help in developing the project.

Forum members, including Levin and Jurkovic, threw out potential names for the space.

Some of the suggestions were mythological — “Daedalus,” who advised Icarus not to fly too close to the sun — some cosmological — “Supercluster,” “Earthrise” — and some silly, like “Aardvark,” from a user who argued the name sounded similar to “Harvard” and would show up first in alphabetical lists.

“Don’t like including the

“I think that they are an incredible platform and have a lot of resources ­– and those resources are financial, they are access to experts in very specific fields.” to GiveWell, donating $10,000 to the nonprofit Malaria Consortium could save the lives of five people.

The schedule was similar to that of a corporate retreat: workshops, games, dinner, hot tub, Hamming circles. Well, maybe not the last one. Hamming circles are an activity where three to five participants sit down together and talk through one problem facing each member in 20-minute chunks. It’s “similar to what happens in a pair debug,” a post on an EA-related forum explains.

These problems might vary, 17

are really trying to make progress on this technical problem, which I find exciting. It’s maybe a little startup-y in vibe.” In a post on the EA forum in December, Davies wrote that “investing effort into making the space fun and convenient to use helped improve programming, social events, and sense of community.”

In August, Open Philanthropy recommended an $8.9 million grant for the Center for Effective Altruism to lease an EA office space for five years in Harvard Square.

While the space would have

actual words EA in the name of the space,” Levin (who, for his part, liked “Apollo”) wrote in the comments. “It increases the chances of hypocrisy charges (from people who haven’t thought much about the effects of nice offices on productivity) for getting a nice central office space while ostensibly being altruistic.”

But the Apollo House — or Aardvark House, or Supercluster — never materialized. According to Levin, after CEA signed the lease and began preparing the space, Open Philanthropy notified

them that the grant was under review. As a result, Levin tells us, CEA is now trying to sublease the space to get the money back.

CEA and Open Philanthropy did not respond to questions about the current status of the Harvard Square office grant.

In addition to money for spaces and retreats, Open Philanthropy has an open request form for university group funding and regularly recommends grants to undergraduate organizers. Other EA-affiliated organizations also fund events and projects. Huml, the Global Health Programming Lead, tells us that this is part of what makes EA a valuable community in which to pursue global health work.

“To be totally transparent, I don’t 100 percent align with the values,” Huml tells us. “I think that they are an incredible platform and have a lot of resources — and those resources are financial, they are access to experts in very specific fields.”

Three Harvard students, including Davies and Gabrieli, were recipients of Open Philanthropy’s fall 2022 University Organizer Fellowship, for which the organization recommended a total of $3.1 million across 116 recipients. Gabrieli declined to be interviewed for this article. Davies says he doesn’t know if he’s allowed to disclose how much money he actually got, but that he considers the grant to be “an hourly wage,” since he quit previous jobs to focus on developing HAIST. In February 2022, Open Philanthropy recommended a $75,000 grant to Pollack, the other HAIST co-founder, “to support her work organizing the effective altruism community at Harvard University.”

When we reach out to Pollack, she tells us over email that she is “no longer organizing for the Harvard Effective Altruism group,” but has spent about $14,000 of the grant on HAIST expenses with Open Philanthropy’s approval: $7,200 to monthly software costs like Airtable and Squarespace, and most of the rest to accommodations for a workshop that HAIST hosted with the MIT AI safety group in Arlington, Virginia.

Harvard EA is aware that this allocation of money can appear at odds with its stated mission.

After the Essex Woods retreat, organizers sent out a feedback form. “How much did the spending of money at this retreat make you feel uncomfortable?” one question asked.

We talk to Levin, the University EA co-president, and he likens it to the way that companies spend money on recruitment. “The idea is that there are problems that are much more talent-constrained than money-constrained,” he tells us. AI safety, a problem that relatively few people are working on, is an extreme example of this, he says. “The question then becomes, ‘Okay, well, if we have money and not people, how do we convert between the two?’”

Levin pauses and corrects himself: “My train of thought there sounded kind of like I was saying, well, if you have a bunch of money, what do you do with it, right?

That is not what I think.” What he does believe is that physical environments like retreats can rapidly accelerate the rate — by up to 100 times, he writes on the

forums — at which people get on board with EA principles.

Several people in EA, Levin guesses, joined because of their experiences on a retreat. “That is absolutely something that we would have paid this money for,” he says.

Shuman believes that this outreach is particularly effective in Cambridge because of its highly motivated, change-driven student body. “Harvard and MIT have done the vast majority of vetting for people who are highly ambitious,” she says.

Shuman tells us that the international EA community places a lot of importance on this kind of community building. “If they can invest $1,000 in getting five high-potential individuals to, instead of doing AI research, do AI safety research, that’s a pretty good use of money,” she says. “It could save a lot of lives, potentially.”

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‘A Skewed Pipeline’

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n a 2020 survey of EA Forum members, 76 percent of respondents were white and 71 percent were male.

Though there is an imbalance, the Centre for Effective Altruism argues that diversity is important for several reasons.

“If an EA-aligned newcomer concludes that effective altruism is not for ‘people like me,’ they may not get involved, and the EA community may be less effective,” its website reads. “We don’t want to miss important perspectives.”

We ask Jurkovic if he’s aware of demographic imbalances within EA groups at Harvard.

He pauses. “I think it is quite important to have a community which is welcoming to everyone,” he says. “EA sometimes shares a problem with the cause areas that it tackles” — meaning STEM fields — “which is that many of them have more males in them than average.”

Shuman — “the only she/her” leading an Arete section, she tells us — echoes this sentiment, saying that these numbers reflect existing disparities in STEM and

philanthropic fields.

“It’s just a skewed pipeline,” she says, “which is a problem.”

“I can say from personal experience that we’ve had quite diverse groups,” Nickols says.

“In terms of gender, it does tend to be more male-skewed, and that’s something that we’re continually working on.” He acknowledges that Harvard EA “is probably predominantly white and Asian, but not more so to Harvard’s general population.”

(The organization does not keep demographic records of its members, so we can’t verify this.)

Nickols says that the applicants for Harvard EA’s fellowships also tend to skew male. “Given that word of mouth is our biggest kind of spreader, it might just be possible that guys who have done it in the past are friends with more guys and tell them about it,” he adds.

In recent months, the EA movement has been embroiled in controversies related to race and gender in its communities.

One of these controversies revolved around Nick Bostrom, a philosopher whose ideas led to the development of longtermism; four of his works are cited in the syllabus for Harvard EA’s Precipice Fellowship.

In January, Bostrom posted a letter to his website apologizing for a comment he wrote on a forum in the mid90s, which claims that Black people “are more stupid than whites” and contains the n-word. In the letter, Bostrom castigates his past self for using the slur and writes that the comment “does

Will A. Nickols ’24 is an Arete Fellowship chair.

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not accurately represent my views, then or now,” but does not reject the possibility of genetic cognitive differences between races. He leaves this question to “others, who have more relevant knowledge.” The letter continues with a section about bioethics that opens: “What about eugenics? Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood.”

In March, Time magazine interviewed seven women who said they had been sexually harassed, coerced, or assaulted within EA spaces, particularly in the Bay Area. The scene’s overwhelming maleness, tech-bro culture, and impulse to quantify and rationalize messy real-world dynamics created a deeply unsafe environment, the women said.

One described having dinner with a prominent researcher nearly twice her age who told her that “pedophilic relationships between very young women and older men was a good way to transfer knowledge.”

“We were of course upset by both of these issues,” Jurkovic wrote in an email to us about the Bostrom letter and Time investigation, “and have spent time figuring out how we can improve our diversity and make sure we’re a welcoming community to women and people of color.”

Although some of EA’s focus areas deal with global health and economic growth in underdeveloped countries, its frameworks generally do not foreground race or gender. A version of the spring 2023 Arete syllabus posted on the Harvard EA website only mentions race in the overview of Week Four: Animal Welfare.

“One of the most important ways we can fail to identify the

most important moral issues of our time is by unfairly shrinking our moral circle: the set of beings we deem worthy of our moral concern,” the syllabus reads. “For example, many whites in the US failed to identify that slavery was the moral issue of their age by excluding Blacks from their moral circle. To truly make the world better, we must look beyond the traditional moral horizon for those who are unfairly neglected by mainstream society. This week, we discuss one such group of beings: nonhuman animals.”

We ask Nickols, the Arete cochair, about this framing. He tells

direction here. And more generally, the idea is that as time goes on, it is quite possible that the circle will continue to increase.”

Paper Clips

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ne thought experiment designed to demonstrate the danger of misaligned AI goes like this: Say the owner of a paper clip factory obtains an ultrapowerful AI and instructs it to maximize paper clip output.

Although the AI is programmed to pursue a seemingly harmless goal,

As a taxonomy, though, it is less an observation about AI than it is about systems. Existential risks like climate change might first destroy the people who did the least to create them; any movement created by people is, in a sense, only human.

This point came up in the wake of the FTX collapse — what did it mean that a group seeking to fundamentally change the world relied so heavily on existing distributions of power? — and it has come up again in the months since, in the course of writing this article. Can you optimize your life? What if the thing we

Can you optimize your life? What if the thing we construct in our idealized image turns out not to look so different from us after all?

us that it is important to keep the quote “in the context of where it was originally formulated.”

“Obviously the idea here is not to equate certain racial groups with animals or anything like that,” Nickols says. “Over time, though, the expanding moral circle idea is that white people who, before, held these extremely racist and terrible views — as the generations went on, and as culture shifted — began to see people, regardless of their race, as all morally equal.”

“We have not reached a point where racism is totally gone,” Nickols says, “but there is definitely a shift in the right

it might — if its understanding of values is not quite the same as ours — turn everything in the world into paper clips. That this scenario seems kind of silly is part of the point. Researchers are not concerned that AI will be “evil” per se, but that its pursuit of any objective, including “good” ones, might have unintended consequences.

“AI systems don’t always do what their developers intend,” the Arete syllabus reads. “They replicate human biases, achieve their goals in surprising and destructive ways, and are vulnerable to external manipulation.” As a call to action, this is a compelling place to start.

construct in our idealized image turns out not to look so different from us after all?

For Andrew N. Garber ’23, a former Arete leader, considering questions is the point of EA. There is a common misconception that effective altruism is a destination, when really it’s more of a framework, he tells us: “It is more concerned about the question than any one specific answer.”

In any event, when we ask Jurkovic what he hopes EA will look like in the future, his response is straightforward. “The goal is to help people make the world better,” he says, half smiling.

“As much as possible.”

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O

nlyBans’ hot pink homepage illuminates the dark square of my dorm room.

Smooth techno music streams out of my laptop speakers: sort of sci-fi, sort of catwalk. I navigate to the sidebar menu, where I click a link that brings me to the game’s instructions.

The words on the webpage are white and tiny like bleached teeth. It reads: “Make money by: • Posting photos that attract new paying fans • Earning tips Avoid: • Having your identity stolen or revealed • Having your account shut down • Stalkers and harassment” Although I have the option to choose my own screen name, I opt for the alias assigned to me: @QTPieslice. A text pop-up explains that my goal is to make $200 in six weeks to pay my gas and water bills. I earn $10 per fan, plus extra from tips.

From there, I am brought to a grid of nine photos and asked to choose one to post on my page. There are some models posing in miniskirts and thigh-highs, others lifting their muscle tanks and pulling at their boxers, faceless bodies in bright bikini underwear. I go for a photo of a topless figure with a Teletubby in their lap. In the sidebar menu, my balance climbs.

As I move through the game — posting pictures, dodging censors, and connecting with other sex workers — I notice a recurring figure. Behind my pop-ups and chat logs, I see short, looped clips of the same woman: rifling through her wallet, applying sparkly lipgloss, posing in front of her webcam.

This is Lena Chen ’09: the performance artist who spearheaded the creation of OnlyBans.

According to Chen’s website, the purpose of the project is to “empathetically teach people about digital surveillance and discrimination faced by sex workers.”

Chen argues that sex workers helped popularize the internet through chatrooms and pornography.

Once the internet went mainstream, however, tech corporations turned on them. But despite facing policing and censorship, sex workers continue to play an integral role in the internet’s development.

As Chen put it in an interview, “the internet was essentially built by sex and desire.”

The complicated, ever-changing relationship between sex and the internet has been one of the most influential forces in Chen’s career. She first came to national attention in 2006 through her blog Sex and

21

the Ivy, which documented her sex life as a Harvard undergraduate. In 2007, an ex-boyfriend leaked Chen’s nudes, leading to years of stalking, doxxing, and online harassment. Struggling to cope with the trauma of the incident, Chen moved to Berlin in 2012. There, she worked as a nude model and began exploring performance art. Now, Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and her artwork continues to engage with the nexus of desire and the digital world.

I am 19 years old: the same age as Chen when she started Sex and the Ivy. I know that my online experience — characterized by curated Instagram carousels and choppy thoughts on Twitter — is different from Chen’s late-2000s landscape of longform blogs.

Still, I can’t help but feel that Chen’s work is

Le na Ch I nti ma I nte r quasi-prophetic. In the candid, conversational tone of Sex and the Ivy, I see early traces of the casually confessional behavior that pervades social media today. In the intimacy of Chen’s performance art, I see the nascent question of what desire, care, and closeness can look like in an increasingly online world. Chen is an artist who speaks into the future: the future of sex, the future of technology, the future that implicates everyone interacting on the internet.

‘Intimate Yet Inflammatory’

A

fter its inception, Sex and the Ivy quickly gained attention from the media. In an op-ed published in The Crimson, Lucy M. Caldwell ’09 decried Chen’s lifestyle

as “morally reprehensible.”

Gawker included Chen on a list of “compulsive oversharers.” The Boston Phoenix described Chen as an “intellectualized Carrie Bradshaw,” while Newsweek preferred to think of her as the poster girl for “brainy girls gone wild.”

Despite the controversy she garnered, Chen does not think of Sex and the Ivy as something that was particularly novel. Instead, she thinks of her blog as one work in an extensive canon of confessional writing.

“This specific style of women’s

he n’s ate rn et Yasm e e n A. Khan

memoir has been around for a really long time,” she says. “I think perhaps because it is speaking about women’s experiences, it’s often not taken very seriously. It’s not considered a source of literary merit or cultural value.”

She admits that not many confessional blogs discussed sex as openly as hers, but she insists that she was not alone; at the time, she says, many other young women were writing about sex in college paper columns, or, like Chen, on their own online platforms.

“It was exciting to see other women writing about very personal experiences and very

taboo topics,” she says.

Although I was too young to read the blogs of Chen and her contemporaries when they were active, personal essays by women were some of the first writings that I connected with as a preteen. I remember poring over the “Live Through This” section of Rookie Magazine, bookmarking pieces about first periods, secret boyfriends, and burgeoning sexuality. At that age, my changing body felt frightening and uncontrollable, and the vulnerability I found in those essays reminded me that I was not alone.

For all of the empathy inspired by confessional essays, some argue that the popularity of personal writing profits off of women’s pain.

“There is a danger of veering into the area of trauma porn, right?

Where it’s like, ‘What is the worst thing that ever happened to you?

Write about that, commodify it,’” Chen says.

She mentions xoJane, the now-defunct women’s magazine from the early 2010s that was known for its revealing firstperson narratives. The infamous “It Happened to Me” section included essays like “My Friend Joined ISIS,” “My Former Friend’s Death Was a Blessing,” and “My Gynecologist Found a Ball of Cat Hair in My Vagina.” xoJane was often accused of running intimate yet inflammatory articles for the sake of clicks and page views.

Chen had to weigh the costs and benefits of writing about her story in magazines in the aftermath of her experience with revenge porn.

“On one hand, it was good that I was able to have a chance to represent my own point of view because so much had

been said about me without my involvement,” Chen says. “But on the other hand, I was making maybe a few hundred dollars. If you write one of the most popular articles for some site, and you’re getting paid a few hundred dollars, is that really a fair amount when you’re also having to deal with a lot of emotional stuff?”

“What else are you doing to take care of yourself? Because that can’t be it,” she adds.

Chen’s confessional writing speaks to the way we present ourselves on social media today.

The content of Sex and the Ivy, which was considered scandalous in the late 2000s, now strikes me as commonplace. Chen’s comments on her sex life and struggles with depression seem like lengthier versions of the candid one-liners that punctuate my Twitter feed. On Instagram, I scroll past thirsty selfies and unhinged captions without pause.

Private and public life commingle on my touchscreen: the “morally reprehensible” has become the mundane.

“At the time, it wasn’t common for people to have a social media presence the way that we do now, right? It was very weird for a lot of my friends to see that I could get recognized on the street because I was writing a blog,” Chen explains.

“A really common criticism at the time was also like, ‘Lena, or these women, are just doing this for attention. Why are you putting so much of your life online?’”

Chen says. “You wouldn’t hear those criticisms today, because it’s so ubiquitous, the way that people document their lives. And also what was considered oversharing back then — you know, the standards have changed.”

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‘Paradox of Vulnerability’

A

fter graduating from Harvard, Chen settled in Boston, writing and organizing around the issues of sex education and feminist activism. During this time, she was approached by several literary agents for her work on Sex and the Ivy. “There were opportunities that were open to me,” she recalls.

Still, the fallout from Chen’s experience with revenge porn followed her into her new life.

“I was still super traumatized. I didn’t know how to handle being a public figure. And I was still being continually stalked by all these crazy people on the internet, who were not just making my life difficult, but making it difficult for my friends and my partner at the time to live their lives,” Chen says. “I never felt physically endangered, but I certainly didn’t feel safe.”

“I was in a constant state of being worried that I was going to be attacked,” remembers Chen. “I had horrible sleep hygiene. I never felt like I could truly rest or let my guard down. When that happens over a longer period of time, like years, you start to break down.

You’re just not able to function anymore.”

Chen discovered a means of escape when she visited Berlin in the summer of 2010. “I loved it. It felt like a really open city — like, creatively open,” she says.

“I don’t want to make Berlin into some ideal utopia, because I think a lot of people end up there and then fall into a ketamine hole from which they never recover,” Chen says. “It can be a dark place with a lot of lost souls. But, you know, me at the time, being a lost soul at the time, I felt this kind of kinship.”

Three years later, Chen and her partner moved to the city. There, Chen adopted the identity of

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“Elle Peril.” On one hand, Chen’s decision to abandon her identity was spurred by desperation. “It was very much an escape from the life that I was living,” she says.

At the same time, living as Elle Peril was an exercise in agency.

After her experience with revenge porn, Chen felt powerless. “I didn’t have any control over how the other images had been distributed,” she says.

Nowadays, revenge porn is more commonly recognized as a deeply violating practice, especially in the context of a series of celebrity nude leaks and highprofile suicides. However, when Chen’s nudes were exposed in 2008, she lacked the language to describe the way she had been harmed. Elle Peril was her way of coming to terms with what had happened to her, her way of recovering from a heinous, nameless crime.

Nude modeling as Elle Peril provided a structured environment in which Chen could face her fears. “That was my way of creating a scenario, a very defined scenario in which I could interact with men, be super vulnerable in a certain way, and then leave,” she says.

I saw this paradox of vulnerability and autonomy play out in “The Life and Death of Elle Peril” — a performative reading based on Chen’s experiences as a nude model. In the video recording, Chen wears a black mini-dress, standing before a small audience on a quiet, treelined street. She reads from a stack of copy paper, chronicling her flight from the United States and her years spent in Berlin. Every few minutes, Chen pauses to remove a piece of clothing. By the end of the video, she is completely naked.

“The Life and Death of Elle Peril” isn’t just confessional: it’s creative. Each line is carefully crafted, and Chen delivers them in a clear, commanding tone. I am watching a woman strip as

she tells her life story. I am also watching an artist take control of her work.

Vulnerability continues to play an important role in Chen’s performance art. “I’m interested in how the framework of performance art can actually act as a way for us to access something very real, something that’s very hidden. Sometimes, something

hidden just beneath the surface for which we don’t access in our everyday lives,” she says.

In one piece, entitled “Nurture,” Chen breastfed members of the public while inviting them to talk about their experiences with motherhood. One man confessed that he had not been held by anyone since the death of his grandmother. One woman

— a mother herself — admitted that she never felt cared for, even though she was constantly taking care of other people.

“These moments are taking place in the context of a performance, right?” Chen says.

“But there’s still very real emotions that are surfacing.”

As she developed her artistic practice, Chen found a way to deal with the dizzying bursts of intimacy inspired by her performances.

“To prevent yourself from taking on other people’s trauma, and let’s say emotional residue, you kind of have to be another person when you’re performing than who you are in real life,” she says.

She separates Performance Lena from Real Lena: her detachment facilitates closeness.

Intimacy and Inscrutability

C

hen says that the use of personas — of alternate names, alternate identities — is something that performance art and sex work have in common.

“Every sex worker I know has a different professional alias,” she says.

She acknowledges that many sex workers use aliases because of the stigma and criminalization of their profession. At the same time, Chen argues that an alias can help both artists and sex workers find agency. “By taking on this other persona, it can give you power, I think,” Chen says. “It’s not that you’re a different person, because it’s still you. We all contain multitudes, right? We are just drawing upon a different aspect of ourselves, a different archetype.

An image of who we want to be or could be. And we’re using that to empower ourselves.”

I think about @QTPieslice and OnlyBans, about the contradiction of posting intimate photos under a made-up name. In

Graphic by Monica Zheng and Grace Leng

a way, this contradiction underlies my online life. In middle school, I posted angsty short stories to online forums under a cheesy screen name. Bored out of my mind during quarantine, I drifted into anonymous chatrooms, making up an identity for the men that tried to talk to me, listening to their perverted fantasies and leaving when they asked me to play along. Some of my friends indulge in r/AmItheAsshole, a subreddit where users admit their sins under usernames like u/jimothyisyouruncle and u/ AnonymousMeese. Others run inscrutable spam accounts with celebrity profile pictures. In this way, the internet acts almost as a confessional: your identity is obscured, but your personal revelations ring clear.

This paradoxical nature of online intimacy has informed Chen’s work as well as her personal life. Revenge porn, at least in its current form, would not exist without technology. Yet Chen first found her audience through blogs and online magazines. Healing and harm coexist with one another, forming the double helix of Chen’s digital world.

Through OnlyBans and her upcoming projects, Chen will continue to make art “about how all of us experience intimacy in this particular technological age.”

In the process of developing OnlyBans, Chen ran workshops where she asked people to conceptualize an internet where “your presence on the internet was welcomed, and it felt like a safe place for you, and you had control over the ways in which you express yourself.”

Chen tells me that her utopian internet is a value-neutral space.

“For me, the ideal internet is less about the internet itself. It’s about how we use it,” she says.

“How can we be more present in the moment itself? And how can technology facilitate that presence, rather than distract us from it?”

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TH E HARVARD PROFESSOR I N APARTH E I D SOUTH AFRICA'S CORN E R SAZI BONGWE Graphic by Sophia C. Scott

G

rowing up in South Africa, I learned about my nation’s heroes: We knew the stories of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu like the backs of our hands; we were closely familiar even with our nation’s villains — from Cecil John Rhodes with one foot in Cape Town and one in Cairo, to Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, to P.W. Botha, who defended apartheid in its hour of need.

It was only once I came to Harvard and dug through its archives that I learned about Samuel P. Huntington, the Harvard Government professor who was the strategist from across

25

the equator.

It is easy to miss Huntington’s contribution to the effort to resuscitate apartheid in the 1980s.

At the time, the question of divestment from pro-apartheid groups was a concern for thenPresident Derek C. Bok, and found its way onto the front page of many publications.

It wouldn’t quite be right to say that apartheid South Africa was on its knees in 1976. It would be more accurate to say that the system was growing more and more out of breath each day, its pulse rising, its limbs weakening, but by no means giving out. On June 16 of that year, as many as 20,000 students took to the streets in protest in Soweto,

176 of whom were shot and killed by the state police — gunshots that were heard around the world.

By 1978, mounting international pressure coupled with a growing internal resistance movement made it clear to apartheid South Africa’s new Prime Minister P.W. Botha that, in his words, white South Africans would have to “adapt or die.”

For Harvard, it was something closer to divest or suffer the consequences of a tarnished reputation. In an open letter written that same year, Bok wrote, “no responsible person can fail to deplore the reprehensible nature of apartheid.” Still, it took eight more years for Bok to act on the

moral strength of these words and finally cut investments.

According to the University’s policies on accessing archival material, to know the thoughts of those working from the inside, one would have to return to Pusey Library 50 years after the creation of any administrative document from the time, around the year 2040. In a library collection 20 million volumes deep, any attempt to paint a fuller picture of Harvard in the time of apartheid seems to be in vain.

My attempt might have ended there; with resignation, towards a history that, at least for the time being, appeared unknowable.

Yet, had I done so, I might never have known that one of the most extensive sets of archival materials to do with apartheid would be found in Huntington’s personal archives.

During the ’80s, a decade of deadly state-sanctioned violence, Huntington visited South Africa as an unofficial adviser to Botha’s government.

In his keynote address to the Political Science Association of South Africa in Johannesburg on Sept. 17, 1981, Huntington introduced a twin policy he called “repression and ‘reform.’” Reform, Huntington said, was necessary because, “It seems likely that a minority-dominated hierarchical ethnic system in South Africa will become increasingly difficult to maintain.” These policies marked the start of a decade of blood.

He later added, “Perhaps the hardest lesson to learn for governments sensitive to the needs of reform is the importance of introducing reforms from a position of strength.” Otherwise, Huntington said, reforms would “weaken the regime” and “provoke a counter-revolutionary backlash.” One can only wonder what Botha took “a position of strength” to mean. The ’80s was the decade of national States of Emergency, of tanks and army

apparatus stationed in the townships, of regular detention without trial, of assassinations and extrajudicial killings that, even today, long to be answered for.

Huntington was a proponent of consociationalism, one of the political structures proposed to end the conflict. He described the structure as “an elite conspiracy to restrain political competition within and among communal groups,” essentially arguing that the “elites” who represent each political group, which were to be divided along ethnic lines, control the decisions of the group.

To Huntington, it was simply a

Few remnants of apartheid are more apparent today than the long and stubborn legacy of spatial apartheid, the segregationist geographical planning which Huntington helped create. theory, one he would just as easily write in a textbook as in a brief to Botha’s government. Today, it is what keeps the prospects of a child born in affluent Sandton a world apart from those of a child born in the impoverished township of Alexandra, just 18 minutes away.

Few remnants of apartheid are more apparent today than the long and stubborn legacy of spatial apartheid, the segregationist geographical planning which Huntington helped create. This form of apartheid forcefully relocated Black South Africans to the “homelands,” territories designated to divert Black people from cities. Residents of the “homelands” were barred from South African citizenship and, with

it, constitutional protections. In his 1981 address, Huntington said, “Continued adherence by the South African government to the homelands policy, for instance, may make it easier for the government to introduce some form of political representation for the coloureds and Asians.” (It’s important to note that, in South Africa, “coloured” is a non-derogatory term which refers to individuals who would be called “mixed-race” in the U.S.) Indeed, in Botha’s “reforms” of the ’80s, coloured, Asian and white South Africans were included in parliament, while Black South Africans were made to remain in the townships they had been condemned to.

“Huntington’s reform strategy quite definitely informed the South African government’s efforts,” a 1987 Crimson article stated. “His 1981 paper helped provide the intellectual justification for, and is cited extensively in, proposals for the 1984 constitution, cornerstone of State President P.W. Botha’s socalled reforms.”

Huntington ultimately assessed that by “concocting the proper mixture of reform, reassurance, and repression,” a government would be successful in ensuring its continuation. He believed that if South Africa “played on fear and employed deception,” the country’s opponents would back down. Yet, the prevailing story of apartheid is the story of the opposition to it, both within South Africa and beyond it, even as far as places like Harvard. Students at the University mobilized against apartheid time and time again.

The legacy of apartheid is still apparent in South Africa; it’s a legacy that has perpetuated the conditions of racism and poverty.

Part of that legacy traces all the way to Cambridge, Massachusetts — to Samuel Huntington. I wonder if he anticipated how far his ideas would spread.

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Lost on fi n di ng

n a run an d H om e Je ffrey Q. Yang Graphic by Samanta A. Mendoza-Lagunas

I

kept peering down the river, hoping that at some bend in the trail, I would see the red dome of Dunster House poking out from above the treeline. With the Charles River to my left side, I knew that regardless of how lost I was, I could follow the water back home — Home? At what point had the humble white walls and twin XL bed become home? It was only one month ago that I had moved into the 18th-century rectangular prism known as Massachusetts Hall. I could remember the details of move-in day — the faces, the weather, the goodbyes — to a degree that now has faded into a speck of emotional parting.

After my parents left, I remember sitting on my freshly wiped-down chair, staring at the window on the other side of the room, a slight August breeze circulating the Clorox-infused air. I remember feeling like a snail robbed of its shell, bare and exposed to the whims of social anxiety. Yet some miracle of adrenaline carried me through those first few days.

Roaming around the square with strangers past the wee hours of the night, hiking miles in the Appalachians on the FirstYear Outdoor Program, only

adrenaline drove me forward. In the beginning, I felt that I had entered a new world, the past 18 years and shelter of a familiar life thrown away. I was drifting through the start of college faster than I could catch how it was shaping me.

In an effort to root myself, to find security in my new surroundings, I returned to a familiar form of meditation: running. Running has always been my break from the bubbles that trap me in the other 23 hours of the day.

On this day, I found myself determined to run alone. Perhaps my desire for security led me to feel more confident, perhaps the adrenaline made me rash, but I also decided I would do so without my phone. At home, I always ran without my phone. I liked to hear my footsteps on the gravel, a rhythm just as calming as listening to my heartbeat, a testament to my body’s strength, yet also its fragile intricacy. *** And so, as the temperature cooled with the setting sun, past Winthrop’s gate, I turned right.

I took a route that I had taken with the running club just twice

before. As the cars rolled by on the adjacent road, I remember taking notice of the geese on the path that honked — but never moved, even as bikes zoomed by.

For the first time in a long time — since move-in day, since staring at the peaks of the White Mountains on FOP — I found myself appreciating the world outside of the internal trance I had fallen into with orientation, Annenberg’s conversation roulette, and the start of college classes.

I passed bridge after bridge until I came upon the one that I needed to cross — this turn I maneuvered correctly. Yet across the bridge, I found an intersection for which my memory had no direction to guide me. I took a right. Now, I recognize how perhaps a little logic would have led me in the direction back to campus: A mental map of a U-turned on its side would have told me to turn left.

Still, I ran for about 10 minutes in the wrong direction.

Yes, I realized that something was off when the landmarks I remembered never reappeared.

But emboldened by my false confidence, my self-assured security in this new environment, I remained convinced that 28

Harvard’s brick buildings would appear at some point — as if I could will them into existence.

Then I passed by the athletic fields of a different university and a boathouse completely foreign to me. I realized that I was lost. No one was there to help me. I couldn’t rely on my friends to know the area. I couldn’t rely on the knowledge my parents had imparted to me about my local home roads. I was alone.

I realized, in what felt like the middle of nowhere, on this expedition to prove to myself that I could find security in my new environment, that I was alone in being responsible for myself, in staying safe, for waking up at the right time, for making time for meals, for taking care of my mental health.

I yearned so deeply, facing a completely foreign

who I assumed were locals on their pre-dinner bike excursion, and asked for help. I felt at that moment like an elementary school child, asking for directions back home.

It reminded me of my first-grade teacher, who made us all memorize our house addresses and parents’ phone numbers in case we were in an emergency. I never needed to ask for directions home in my suburban childhood. Yet here, as a college student, I found myself facing an unknown world, more reflective of the life ahead of me. The fear that I would never see my dorm room again, that I would never befriend the strangers I had started to spend time with, made me promise to myself that I needed to take better care of myself.

Following the flow of the river back to campus, as

In this fluster to return back to campus, my dorm appeared to me as the shell I was missing, something I longed to crawl into. stretch of the river, for any familiarity. I yearned to be back in the Yard that I had first seen just weeks ago. Though they were still not much more familiar than the streets of Watertown, the centuries-old brick structures provided me with warmth. The Yard had become a hearth I could return to in this entirely new city, amid an entirely foreign experience. It had become my place of rest in the exhausting adventure of navigating freshman fall.

In this fluster to return to campus, my dorm appeared to me as the shell I was missing, something I longed to crawl into. *** The sky had descended into darker shades of pink and purple. I retraced my recent steps, finding that intersection once again. Eventually, I found a couple,

29

I became once again familiar with the paths leading me back and I saw the tower of Memorial Hall in the distance, I could return to meditating to the sound of gravel.

The comfort of seeing campus softened my anxiety to understand this new world. In seeing this place as a new home, I realized I could take all the time I needed to slowly unravel the unfamiliar. It wasn’t like I would be going anywhere anytime soon.

This would also not be the last time I would be lost in this new place. Yet, knowing that I could make it back — even if it required asking for the help of some strangers along the way — I still felt equipped with the energy to explore some unfamiliar paths, to make wrong turns at forks along the way, but find a route back to safety, if needed. All these experiences could be a part of the process of finding my shell and refining the home I will construct for myself here.

N ew an d I m prove d Joh n G. Harri ngton

awkwardly alone in the “Pitch Perfect” riff-off) 40 Petunia and Polly, for two literary examples 41 Upgraded pre-Easter commemoration?

44 Old-timey pensive face emoji 45 “No Scrubs” and “Waterfalls” group 46 “Dunder Mifflin, this is ___” (“The Office” catchphrase) 49 “Carthago delenda ___” (Third Punic War catchphrase; remember your third person singular “to be” conjugation ;; ) 51 West African trickster god who not-so-mysteriously goes by “Mr. Nancy” in Gaiman’s “American

ACROSS

1 Competes in cross country 6 AFC North “rival” of CIN and BAL 9 Amazed 13 Romantic interest of Poehler in “Parks and Rec” 14 Certain pol. designation that applies to all members of MA’s Cong. delegation 15 Early morning driving annoyance 16 Upgraded helpful stranger from a parable?

19 Old-timey pensive face emoji 20 Kind of basic metals comprising Group 1A of the periodic table 21 One hour behind Cambridge in the summer 22 Percentage of lifetime earnings EA encourages one to donate to charity 23 California airport code where you sadly can’t say “I hopped off the plane at LAX” 24 Another name for the funky-looking moonfish 26 Upgraded Scorcese mafia movie?

31 “Little ___ Everywhere” (novel and Hulu series) 33 Tennis rule that rhymes with the apparatus that the served ball contacts 34 Kind of fluid of two of the four bodily humors 35 Seth’s costar in “The Interview,” but Seth also has credits for direction, story, and production 36 Append 37 “Ideal” forms of matter for which PV=nRT 38 Opera word that’s not AIDA, but it’s not far, either...

39 “Tell me who could stop when ___ making moves” (“No Diggity” lyric sung by Beca

Gods” 54 Sonic’s videogame company 55 Overarching Effective Altruism tenet... or, taken differently, method of revamping familiar phrases, as in three entries here 58 Particularly sumptuous word for particularly sumptuous lumps of food 59 Word in Barcelona’s stadium name meaning “new,” as in “new field,” because apparently the “Camp” in the name does not actually refer to a camp. And the stadium also seems to be named after Spotify, now, too 60 Writer of the books “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “Around the World in 80 Days” 61 “No capes!” (need the clue say more?)

62 Barely survive, with “out” 63 Data, perhaps by which effective altruists identify where to direct their altruism effectively

DOWN

1 Capital of Morocco (not Fez, or Casablanca, or even Marrakesh or Tangier, which seems like a lot of relatively well-known cities for a relatively small country) 2 “Weekends with ___” (Vegas residency whose set includes “Oh My God” and “Rumour Has It”) 3 “Trade Build Settle” board game 4 What many premeds are certified as 5 165 degrees on a compass, which is a little to the right of straight down, because apparently the degrees in a compass go in the opposite direction as in the unit circle; but 0 degrees at north

makes sense, at least 6 Obsolete musical input point 7 Spill some official tea 8 Juicily meddlesome Jane Austen title character 9 Sportsman of the last century, according to Sports Illustrated 10 Catalog of series or movies that you really want to get around to, before just going with “The Office” again 11 Distinctive portions of Taylor Swift’s career, as in the title of her 2023 tour 12 Respectable amount of progress in a big assignment 15 Old person’s complaint 17 Boats in which one can float through the Grand Canyon 18 Up in the air 23 Witnesses 25 Oldest continuous settlement in the original 13 English colonies (Jamestown was abandoned, and St. Augustine is conveniently outside the parameters) 26 “Every ___ You Take” (very creepy song by The Police) 27 More agèd 28 Taylor’s career portion between “Speak Now” and “1989” 29 Types of beer alliteratively brewed in abbeys 30 French plural possessive 31 Typical foodstuffs 32 The “sincerest form of flattery,” as per Dwight Schrute and Oscar Wilde 35 Poke aggressively 36 Dog sound, supposedly 37 Tortilla chip dip, casually 39 Danish word for “boy” 40 Improv a line 42 Virtual periodicals, casually 43 “Submit now.”

46 Archeological site in Jordan that appeared in an Indiana Jones movie 47 What Tony Stark thought Phil Coulson’s first name was in “The Avengers” 48 Female horses 49 Border, perhaps “of Glory” or “of Tomorrow” 50 Definitive word at an auction 52 First-class 53 Kindle competitor from Barnes and Noble 54 “my b, ignore that edit mark,” but in Latin 56 Celtics’ org.

57 Ioniq 5 and Polestar 2, e.g. (there’s more than just Teslas)

Solutions: